Rob Thomas is Senior Vice President Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. He leads IBM’s software business, including product management and design, product development and business development. In addition, Rob has global responsibility for IBM revenue and profit, including worldwide sales, strategic partnerships and ecosystem.

In his over 20 years in IBM, Rob has held roles in Consulting, Microelectronics and Software, including two years leading teams in Tokyo, Japan. In 2007, Rob joined IBM’s software business, focused on data and analytics. He has held a variety of roles including product engineering and business development, leading IBM’s transition from databases to delivering broader analytical capabilities, investing in open source, and eventually artificial intelligence. Rob has also overseen numerous transformational acquisitions, representing over $20 billion in transaction value.

Rob is also the author of four books on technology and innovation. His most recent book, AI Value Creators, was released in 2025 and shares practical ways to plan your generative AI journey to take maximum advantage of this new innovation while transforming your business. Rob’s other books – Big Data Revolution, The End of Tech Companies and The AI Ladder: Accelerate Your Journey to AI – provide essential advice for business leaders on how to navigate the technological transformations that have defined the past decade. Rob also publishes ‘The Mentor’ on Substack (robdthomas.substack.com), sharing monthly lessons on leadership, life and personal development.

Rob graduated from Vanderbilt University and earned a graduate degree at The University of Florida. Rob serves on the board of Domus, a non-profit organization that assists underprivileged youth in Fairfield County, Connecticut. He is also an active volunteer at Filling in the Blanks, an organization focused on fighting childhood hunger by providing meals to children in need. He lives in New Canaan, CT, with his wife and three children.

Pat Casey, Chief Technology Officer and EVP, Dev Ops Pat Casey joined ServiceNow in 2006 and is one of the company’s founders. He currently serves as Chief Technology Officer and EVP of Dev Ops. In this executive leadership role, Pat oversees the company’s developer productivity, quality engineering, cloud operations, advanced technologies, product operations, customer service and support, and product and apps engineering. His global organization includes more than 9,000 employees who are driving innovations and products that are transforming customer outcomes. Pat has held several executive leadership roles at ServiceNow, including Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering and Principal Architect. Prior to joining ServiceNow, Pat previously worked at Peregrine Systems, Inc. as the Product Author of the application suite, as well as Adobe Systems.

Jae Evans is Oracle’s global chief information officer and executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Platform Services. She’s responsible for accelerating Oracle IT’s cloud transformation across thousands of environments, and her team provides IT services to Oracle’s 160,000 employees and developers worldwide.

Jae also leads OCI’s platform services consisting of multi-cloud services and commercial systems including billing, subscription management, and cost management, as well as other core platforms such as console services and marketplace. In addition, her organization is responsible for ensuring the highest level of security, compliance, operations and support for OCI.

She has more than 20 years of experience building and leading global teams and managing mission-critical production services across various industries, including ecommerce, enterprise cloud, online gaming, retail, and telecommunications. Jae is passionate about bringing diversity and inclusion (D&I) into the workplace. She’s the executive sponsor of D&I for OCI, a member of Oracle’s Executive D&I Council, and an active participant in and champion of various Oracle Professional Asian Leadership and Women in Tech events.

Alex Konrad is the founder and editor of Upstarts Media, a new tech media publication founded in February 2025 to focus on the startup ecosystem. He writes the twice-weekly Upstarts newsletter, hosts the Upstarts Live interview series and will launch an Upstarts podcast later this year. Previously, Alex was a senior editor at Forbes, where he edited the Midas and Cloud 100 lists and wrote 15+ cover stories on subjects including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and many others. For his coverage of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and the generative AI boom, he received SABEW's Honorable Mention for 'Best Body of Work' for 2023. He served as lead reporter for Forbes on the Emmy-award winning documentary ‘WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn.’ Subscribe to Upstarts at upstartsmedia.com and follow Alex on X at @alexrkonrad.

Eric Sager is the COO of Plaid, a network that powers much of online finance today. At Plaid, Eric leads the company’s business strategy and operations as well as the go-to-market teams. Prior to Plaid, Eric served as CRO of BlueVine, where he led all revenue-related teams across the company to ensure a consistent and positive end-to-end client experience. Before BlueVine, Eric held multiple positions at Square, including Head of Sales, helping sellers of all sizes leverage Square's products and services to improve their businesses. He also led Square’s efforts to optimize the end-to-end customer lifecycle experience as the Head of Growth and Retention.

Prior to Square, Eric was a Principal at Bain & Company. He began his career in financial services as a business analyst at Capital One.

Eric holds an MBA from Harvard University and a BA from Mississippi College.

Andrew Lacy is the Founder & CEO at Prenuvo. Andrew has over 10 years of experience in the mobile industry. Prior to Prenuvo, they were the Chief Product Officer at Lebara Limited. Andrew has also held management positions at Disney and Tapulous.

Andrew Lacy received their MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, with a focus on leadership and entrepreneurship. Prior to that, they completed their law degree (with honors) at the University of Melbourne, where they specialized in intellectual property and patent law, as well as international law. Andrew also holds a degree in economics from the University of Melbourne, where they focused on finance and econometrics. Andrew began their educational career at Melbourne High School, where they graduated at the top of their class.

As a Managing Partner and founding member of Felicis, Sundeep led Felicis’ investments in several companies such as Coalition, Plaid, and Komodo Health, as well as the following companies that have gone public: Ginkgo Bioworks, Matterport, Recursion Pharma, and Wish. Before joining Felicis in 2010, Sundeep joined Intel through the acquisition of Sarvega, where he was an early employee responsible for the security infrastructure design. Sundeep holds degrees in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from Stanford.

I grew up in the Bay Area during the Moneyball era and fell in love with statistics at an early age. I was obsessed with the idea that statistics could help find inefficiencies in baseball. When I went to Stanford, I studied math as an undergrad and statistics as a grad student, which also provided my introduction to statistical and machine learning.

That love of stats has stuck with me in my work as an investor. I think in terms of probabilities when I’m working through outcomes. And I see my job as doing everything I can to shift the distribution to increase a founder’s odds of success. When you’re starting a company, you’re going against these large behemoths, which can be very intimidating. But if you look at the inefficiencies and try to capitalize on them, then you have the potential for a promising startup.

I saw the impact AI could have on society early in my career, both in terms of problems that humans can’t solve (like real-time fraud detection or recommendation systems) and in automating some human tasks within larger workflows. I joined an AI-focused incubator in 2018 following the deep learning wave and saw this impact first-hand by applying AI to traditional industries like agriculture and logistics. Over the past few years, we saw a dip in enterprise adoption of AI, followed by a massive surge after the launch of ChatGPT. I believe the new wave of AI startups will fulfill the promise I originally saw in the technology. Over the next decade, AI will become central to the development of new software. I want to stay on the front lines and partner with companies that are finding new ways of building offerings around foundational models.

I invest in cyber for similar reasons. Cybersecurity presents a critical battleground, not only for enterprises but geopolitically as well. And increasingly sophisticated AI-powered offensive cyber from nation states and other bad actors makes continued defensive development all the more important.

Great technical or product chops are essential for founders. But so is the ability to recruit and inspire others. To get a sense of that, I prefer to meet several times, in person, with founders to see if we’re a good mutual match. Seeing how their ideas evolve over time gives me a good sense of their velocity and how strong of a leader they could be.

Aviv from Kodem is a great example of this. He worked at a large cybersecurity company for six years as a security researcher. He felt like he had an ability to build game-changing technology that could help governments and enterprises protect themselves from cyberthreats. In our conversations, I got the sense that he was passionate about Kodem and saw the big picture impact it could have. Because that passion was infectious, I knew he’d make a strong recruiter and inspirational leader.

Jerry from LlamaIndex is another example – meeting him as he built a leading open-source project and before he started a company convinced me he would be a great community builder and sharp commercial thinker.

Ty Sbano brings over two decades of expertise in information security, technology, and security culture development, with a proven track record of driving transformational change across startups in the fintech and tech industries. His work is characterized by a thoughtful, right-sized approach to integrating security into organizational processes and workflows.

Ty's guiding principle is to empower developers by seamlessly embedding security into the software development lifecycle, enabling businesses to innovate and move at full velocity. This philosophy is realized through the application of Agile methodologies, DevOps practices, strategic adoption of open-source tools, and the deployment of real-time dashboards that facilitate rapid iteration and informed decision-making. Ty's leadership spans the spectrum from Fortune 500 enterprises to dynamic startups, where he has successfully guided companies through critical growth phases—from Series B to late-stage scaling.

A passionate advocate for aligning security strategies with business goals, Ty leverages comprehensive threat modeling to address complex challenges while fostering an adaptive security culture. His ability to evolve security practices in tandem with organizational growth has consistently driven measurable outcomes.

Further, Ty is a firm believer in the power of storytelling to inspire and educate. He actively shares his experiences and insights through diverse channels, including presentations, podcasts, interviews, blogs, and authentic relationship-building rooted in practice. His dedication to open dialogue and knowledge sharing amplifies his influence across the security and technology communities.

Beyond his professional endeavors, Ty is deeply invested in the startup ecosystem, contributing as an angel investor, advisor, and mentor to visionary founders shaping the future of the industry. His commitment to enabling innovation and empowering others underscores his enduring impact on the technology and security landscapes.

Bio coming soon.

Wesley Chan is an early investor in five $10B+ Decacorns and 20+ $1B+ Unicorns, including Canva, Guild, Dialpad, & AngelList. He was first check into Flexport, Robinhood, Plaid, & Gusto. Founders want to work with Wesley given his product-led growth expertise that he developed when he founded Google Analytics and Google Voice during his 14 year career at Google. He also holds 17 patents for his work on building Google’s early Ads system.

Shuman Ghosemajumder is CEO of Reken, an artificial intelligence and cybersecurity startup in Silicon Valley, which he co-founded in 2024. Backed by leading venture capital firms, Reken is building a next-generation platform that uses AI to defend against AI-powered threats.

As an early Google employee, Shuman helped build and launch Gmail. As Global Head of Product for Trust & Safety, he founded Google's Trust & Safety product group, leading the development of AI, security, and privacy products that safeguarded more than one billion users. He was later CTO of Shape Security, which developed an AI platform that protected the largest banks, airlines, and federal agencies against sophisticated bots. He helped build Shape from a pre-product startup to its $1 billion acquisition by F5, where he was named Global Head of AI.

Shuman is also co-founder and chairman of TeachAids, an educational technology NGO spun out of Stanford University. Supported by Microsoft, Google, UNICEF, and governments around the world, TeachAids develops free research-based health education software and VR products used in 82 countries.

Born in Germany and raised in London, Ontario, Shuman holds degrees from Western University and MIT. He was recognized by The Boston Globe on its MIT150 list of the top MIT innovators of all time.

Pedro Canahuati is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Password. Before joining the company, Pedro spent 12 years at Facebook (now Meta), where he held a number of roles committed to scaling its global infrastructure and ensuring 24/7 availability by developing a new industry standard for operations at scale named Production Engineering.

In his role as Vice President of Engineering for Security and Privacy at Facebook, Pedro focused on protecting users and their data. Before Facebook, he led geographically dispersed teams, scaling complex web operations for companies like Buzz Media, Oloud, NameMedia, and Verio (NTT).

Pedro holds degrees in Computer Science and Information Systems from the University of Maryland and American InterContinental University.

At Password, Pedro applies his experience scaling teams and technology for one of the largest tech companies in the world, ensuring Password remains a leader in privacy and security. He drives product and infrastructure development for the company's production environments, client apps, data systems, and IT. He ensures Password is building robust, reliable products and services that serve families and businesses.

Priya Kutcherlapati is the Business Information Security Officer (BISO) for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Fixed Income Data Services (FIDS). She is responsible for aligning cybersecurity strategy with core business initiatives, ensuring NYSE & FIDS’s security posture supports operational priorities and regulatory demands. Priya works directly with regulators, subsidiary boards, and executive leadership to manage enterprise risk, strengthen compliance, and lead global security operations.

She brings over a decade of experience in cybersecurity, risk management, and governance. Her work focuses on building scalable security programs, integrating risk into decision-making, and driving cross-functional initiatives that support business resilience.

Previously, Priya built & led enterprise-wide security strategy and programs across all Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) entities—spanning physical and information security programs across a diverse global portfolio. Reporting directly to the CISO, she oversaw high-impact, high-visibility initiatives, including global regulatory programs, M&A integrations, and emerging technology proof of concepts. Her leadership was instrumental in shaping ICE’s overall security posture and embedding cybersecurity into business planning and decision-making.

Michael Cornwell serves as the Field CTO of the Americas at Pure Storage. He is a Founding Engineer of the company and has served in key management roles in the company's growth. Previously at Microsoft as the general manager of storage technologies for Azure Infrastructure and led the innovation and adoption of new memory and storage technologies across the Azure platform and services. He also led pioneering storage product development at Sun Microsystems and Apple, where he was instrumental in adopting new technologies in Apple products. Michael holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of California at Santa Cruz and has been awarded 68 U.S. patents.

Vijay Karunamurthy is the Field Chief Technology Officer at Scale AI, where he works to democratize the capabilities of Generative AI and Large Language Models, partnering with large model providers, governments, and Fortune 500 companies. Prior to Scale, Vijay was a Director of Engineering and Machine Learning at Apple and Google, where he worked on applications of AI for personalizing human interfaces. Vijay was an early employee at YouTube, and Head of Search and Discovery after the Google acquisition. He also cofounded a startup focused on ML for video with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, as part of Google Ventures. He holds a BA in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Taylor Brown is the Chief Operating Officer, co-founder, and a member of the board of directors at Fivetran.

Since co-founding Fivetran in 2012, Taylor has been instrumental in building the company into a global leader in automated data movement, now valued at over $5.6 billion. Under his leadership, Fivetran has grown from a startup to a company serving thousands of businesses worldwide, simplifying data connectivity with unprecedented ease and efficiency. He oversees the company’s operations and is passionate about creating innovative products that solve complex problems through simple, user-friendly design.

Before co-founding Fivetran, Taylor was a designer at North Social, where he led the development of Facebook applications for businesses and played a key role in the company’s acquisition by Vocus. He also participated in Y Combinator in 2013, helping shape Fivetran’s early growth.

Taylor draws inspiration from his liberal arts education at Amherst College, his experience as a designer, and his lifelong athletic pursuits. His passion for building, competing, and working with great people has been central to Fivetran's success. In addition to his work at Fivetran, Taylor is an active thought leader in the tech community, frequently sharing insights on data integration, automation, and the future of data-driven decision-making. Taylor holds a Bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.

Bill Tai has been funding startups as a Venture Capitalist since 1991 and has had 23 of his startups become listed companies. Personal Angel backer of 3 of the top 10 on "CNBC's 50 Top Disruptor List for 2022" (#3 Lineage Logistics, #4 Canva, #9 Dapper Labs). Companies he has been involved with at their starts surpassed $1 Trillion in aggregate market value in 2021.

Originally trained as a chip designer, he joined LSI Logic, a seminal Silicon Valley startup formed by the CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor after earning a BSEE with Honors from University of Illinois. After an MBA at Harvard he was issued Badge #A001 during the formation of TSMC (NYSE:TSM), now among the world’s 10 most valuable companies (~$1 Trillion USD market value as of 2024)).

He co-founded Treasure Data (acquired by ARM/Softbank) as Chairman and is among the first investors in Bitfury, Canva, Class.com, Color Health, Dapper Labs (originator of Cryptokitties and NBA Topshot), Dyad.net, Metagood, OneOf, Powerledger, Safety Culture, Tweetdeck/Twitter, Wish.com and Zoom Video, where he was the first backer to commit at the company's formation. He is Founding Board Chairman of Hut8 Mining (NASDAQ: HUT), a provider of Nvidia based GPU Data Center infrastructure and among North America's largest publicly listed Bitcoin mining operations.

He was Founding Chairman & CEO of iAsiaWorks (IPO via Goldman Sachs & Morgan Stanley) a builder / operator of data center infrastructure in 10 countries through Asia and Founding Chairman of IPinfusion (Tokyo:4813). He has served as Board Director of 8 publicly listed companies (AWRD EGHT HUT8 IAWK NPIX TMTA TUNE and IMGO) that grew from startups he funded at their formative stages.

He is founding Chairman of ACTAI Global 501(c)3, a community of Athletes Conservationists Technologists Artists & Innovators supporting 1) environmental conservation and 2) economic empowerment via entrepreneurship.

He is creator or cofounder of the worldwide startup competition www.ExtremeTechChallenge.org, the annual www.NeckerBlockchainSummit.org and the annual www.WestTechFest.com, a 5,000 person technology and innovation festival held annually in Perth Western Australia where he is an Adjunct Professor at Curtin University focused on “innovation and economic development”. As of 2023 he began serving on the Board of Advisors to the dean of Harvard Business School.

Dave Ward is Chief Technology and Product Officer for Lumen. In this role, he is responsible for the development, integration, and deployment of Lumen’s global network, as well as creating disruptive technologies through innovative product development.

Dave has more than 25 years of experience reinventing and expanding the capabilities of networks and the value they bring to customers. He previously was the CEO of PacketFabric where he oversaw its Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offering and led significant product expansions. Prior to that, he served as a Senior Vice President, CTO-Engineering and Chief Architect at Cisco Systems, and served as a Fellow at both Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.

Dave holds a bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University and graduate degrees from the University ofMinnesota.

Charles is a business and product leader with 20 years of experience building category-defining platform companies. He is the Chief Product Officer at Together AI, the leading cloud for accelerating AI models and applications.

Prior to Together AI, Charles served as Chief Operating Officer at Temporal Technologies, the leader in durable execution systems. He built the company’s go-to-market, product and customer engineering teams that created the durable execution category and grew Temporal’s user community by 30x in less than 3 years while delivering top quartile ARR growth.

Before Temporal, Charles spent 9 years building Cloudera as the product leader and subsequently as general manager for Cloudera’s 3 high growth businesses. As the longest serving member of the leadership team, Charles helped Cloudera grow from a pre-product startup with less than $10 million in funding to a multi-product $5B public company with nearly $800 million in ARR.

Charles also advises and invests in early-stage platform and autonomy technology companies including Airbyte, Corvus Robotics, Huggingface, LanceDB, Pave Robotics, SkipLabs and Streamsets.