Best Startup
At Best Startup US we track over 1,000,000 US startups and over 3 million people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top California based CTO’ operating in the Software space. If you think a CTO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.us.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Abhay Parasnis
CTO & EVP of Adobe
Abhay Parasnis is the chief technology officer and executive vice president of [Adobe](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/adobe-systems#/entity), a software company that provides digital marketing and media solutions. Previously, he was the senior vice president of the same company. Parasnis served as the president and chief operating officer of Kony before he joined Adobe. Parasnis holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunications from College of Engineering, Pune. He resides in San Francisco, California, United States.
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About Adobe: Adobe is a software company that provides its users with digital marketing and media solutions.
Daniel Griffin
Co-Founder and CTO of MainStreet
Daniel Griffin is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of MainStreet. Prior to that, he was the Founder of Peak Podcasting.
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About MainStreet: MainStreet is a financial platform that helps startups and small businesses discover and claim tax credits and government incentives.
Laurent Perrin
CTO and Co-Founder of Front
Laurent Perrin is the CTO and co-founder at Front.
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About Front: Front is the leader in customer communication that brings teams together to offer tailor-made service at scale
Conrad Irwin
Co-Founder & CTO of Superhuman
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About Superhuman: Superhuman is a software platform that weaves social insights into a workflow.
Reid Williams
Co-Founder & CTO of TravelBank
Reid Williams is CTO at TravelBank. He is an entrepreneur and full stack technologist. Prior to joining TravelBank, Reid worked at Parature as senior software engineer. Reid Williams holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems specializing in systems integration from DeVry University and a master’s degree in Information Systems Technology from The George Washington University – School of Business.
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About TravelBank: TravelBank is the modern all-in-one business travel and expense management platform.
Mickey Alon
CTO and Founder of Gainsight PX of Gainsight
Mickey Alon is the founder and CTO of Gainsight PX (previously Aptrinsic), the Product Experience Platform. He is a serial entrepreneur focused on designing, building and launching innovative products that help drive business outcomes. Before joining Gainsight through the acquisition of Aptrinsic, Mickey was Global VP of Engineering where he led the global engineering and product management for their web personalization and predictive content solutions. He is also the CEO and Co-Founder of Insightera, a personalization and predictive analytics software, which was acquired by Marketo in 2013. He also co-authored Mastering Product Experience in SaaS – a book on delivering personalized product experiences with a product-led go-to-market strategy.
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About Aptrinsic, Gainsight: Gainsight is a technology company that offers a range of software for optimizing the customer experience and improving product analytics.
Steve Ellis
Chief Technology Officer of SmartContract
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About SmartContract: Smart Contracts verify an execute themselves by monitoring external data sources.
Kevin Scott
CTO of Microsoft
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About Microsoft, Sequoia Capital (SSF): Microsoft is a software corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells a range of software products and services.
Steven Tamm
CTO of Salesforce
CTO, salesforce.com, directing technical product strategy across all clouds and divisions. Previously CTO for CRM Appilcations and Technical Architect for Force.com Checkout at salesforce. Prior to salesforce, he worked at Open Text, SAP Markets, and Calico Commerce.
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About Salesforce: Salesforce is a global cloud computing company that develops CRM solutions and provides business software on a subscription basis.
John Bicket
CTO of Samsara
John is responsible for Samsara’s disruptive technology that makes operating thousands of sensors simple and secure. Prior to co-founding Samsara, John co-founded Meraki, where he was CTO and VP of Engineering.At Meraki, he built a cloud-based platform combining analytics, big data, and security that transformed how customers deployed and managed enterprise networks. Starting Meraki out of his Ph.D. research at MIT, John and his team built integrated hardware, software, and cloud-based infrastructure that fueled continued 100% annual sales growth. Meraki’s platform scaled to connect millions of network devices across over 140 countries. After Cisco acquired Meraki for $1.2 billion, John led Meraki as Cisco’s fastest-growing cloud product. John holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University and an S.M. in Computer Science from MIT.
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About Samsara: Samsara helps businesses in harnessing IoT data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations.
Ben Calderon
CTO Hardware, Operations and Support of Samsara
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About Samsara: Samsara helps businesses in harnessing IoT data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations.
Larry Ellison
Chief Technology Officer of Oracle
Larry Ellison is executive chairman of Oracle Corporation and chief technology officer. He founded the company in 1977 and served as CEO until September 2014. He also races sailboats, flies planes, and plays tennis and guitar.
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About Lawrence Investments, Oracle, Oracle Corporation Japan, Tako Ventures: Oracle is an integrated cloud application and platform services that sells a range of enterprise information technology solutions.
Robert Conrad
CTO of Crunchbase
Robert Conrad has been serving as Head of Engineering at Crunchbase since October 2015.
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About Crunchbase: Crunchbase provides intelligent prospecting software powered by live company data.
David Bill
CTO of Freestyle
David Bill is the CTO at Freestyle Capital.
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About Burning Man Project, First Round Capital, Freestyle: Freestyle is a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage technology companies.
Arie Trouw
CEO & CTO & Founder of XYO
Ten years before Elon Musk wrote his first line of computer code, another young prodigy from South Africa was busy writing software on his TRS-80 Model I. In 1978, at the age of 10, Arie Trouw started developing software on the TRS-80 Model I, moving on to Atari, Apple, and PC. He then ran a series of bulletin boards centering on game-theory modification. Arie is an accomplished serial entrepreneur with a rich history of technological breakthroughs and business successes involving multiple 8-figure exit events. He is a strong believer in decentralization and the creation of the integrated owner/user model. Arie founded XY in 2012 (incorporated as Ength Degree, LLC before it was converted to a C Corporation in 2016). He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Prior to starting XY-The Findables Company, Arie was CEO and Chairman of Pike Holdings Inc and Chief Technology Officer of Tight Line Technologies LLC. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the New York Institute of Technology. Fun Fact: He is a member of one of the first Afrikaans speaking families to emigrate to the US from South Africa in 1976.
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About XY Labs, XY – The Persistent Company, XYO: XYO is a decentralized crypto-location oracle network aiming to provide accurate location data from cars to smartphones.
Alex DeNeui
Co-founder and CTO of Coda
Before founding DocVerse, Alex spent 3 years at Microsoft where he drove SQL Server’s web strategy. His efforts led to the creation and shipping of several technologies including services like SQL Server Data Services. Prior to Microsoft, he founded a Kleiner Perkins-backed enterprise software company delivering IT automation services. He graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science.
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About Coda: Coda is a document collaboration platform that brings data and teams together.
Michael Egorov
Co-founder & CTO of NuCypher
Michael Egorov is the Founder & CEO at Curve Finance.Michael is a physicist and scientist from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. A bronze medalist in the 2003 International Physics Olympiad, he studied ultra-cold atoms as a post-doc.
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About Curve Finance, LoanCoin, NuCypher: NuCypher is a cryptography company that builds privacy-preserving infrastructure and protocols.
Jon Brelig
Co-Founder, CTO of Cascade
Jon Brelig is the Co-Founder and CTO at Cascade.
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About Cascade: Cascade helps operations teams automate their data workflows.
Kevin Cho
CTO/Co-founder of AWAIR
Kevin Cho is a Founder & CTO at Bitfinder.
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About AWAIR: Awair’s mission is to empower people worldwide to breathe safely through cutting-edge indoor air quaity monitoring.
Jessica McKellar
Founder and CTO of Pilot
Jessica McKellar is a founder and the CTO of Pilot, a bookkeeping firm powered by software. Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle. Jessica is also a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America’s Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2013.
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About Pilot: Pilot is a platform that offers bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing businesses.
Ankur Bulsara
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Scopely
Ankur Bulsara co-founded Scopely, Inc. in 2011 and serves as its Chief Technical Officer. Ankur Bulsara oversees all aspects of technology and engineering at Scopely. He has experience in building large-scale and robust systems used by millions of people across multiple platforms. Ankur Bulsara has over 10 years of experience in technology, development, and architecture. He was the Founder of Brainwave Software Inc. While consulting, he held several different positions with his clients, including Architect of Revenue and Inventory Optimization at uSamp, Architect/Lead Developer at Internships LLC, and Architect at Freedom Speaks. Since 2007, he was the Lead Software Developer on Myspace’s Developer Platform, where he was responsible for the developer website and the portal dashboard for developers to create and managed Myspace apps. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Cornell University.
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About Scopely: Scopely is a global leader in interactive entertainment and mobile-first video games.
Vlad Vendrow
CTO of RingCentral
Vlad Vendrow is the co-founder and chief technology officer of RingCentral, where he is the key architect of the RingCentral cloud phone solution. In this position, he is responsible for enabling RingCentral’s innovation while maintaining overall design to ensure the scalability and availability of the RingCentral solution. Prior to RingCentral, Vendrow served as the director of engineering at Ring Zero Systems and Motorola. His accomplishments include leading the development of the Ring Zero phone and fax communications software that shipped over 25 million copies worldwide. Vendrow has been granted more than a dozen patents in the areas of unified communications, fixed-mobile convergence and cloud services. He holds a master’s degree in computer science and applied mathematics from Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
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About RingCentral: RingCentral, a global distributor of cloud-unified communications and collaboration solutions, offers its users with technology services.
Chris Smoak
Co-founder, CTO of Atrium LTS
Chris Smoak is the Co-founder and CTO at Atrium LTS.
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About Atrium LTS, Volume11 Media: Atrium builds products and services to help automate legal workflows, innovate new processes, and help firms identify new clients.
Adam Perry-Pelletier
Co-founder & CTO of Housecall Pro
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About Housecall Pro: Housecall Pro is a developer of a mobile software platform used to connect back-end business operations and homeowners.
Aditya Jami
Chief Technology Officer of Meltwater
Aditya Jami is the Chief Technology Officer of Meltwater, responsible for overall technical strategy and overseeing the company’s AI & Data science initiatives across all product lines. He works very closely with the CEO on acquisitions, and leads their architectural integration. During Aditya’s tenure, he has been responsible for leading the transformation of underlying media intelligence technology into an expanded, data science platform – Fairhair.ai – which powers Meltwater’s products across multiple business lines. Prior to joining Meltwater in 2016 as Senior Director of Engineering, Aditya has created and led several efforts to translate his expertise in the fields of artificial intelligence and Big Data for end-to-end products and platform offerings, including: Yahoo, Netflix, Stanford, Cornell and a startup he co-founded, Predict Effect.
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About Meltwater: Meltwater is a media Intelligence & social listening tools for measuring, managing and magnifying corporate reputation.
Shabd Vaid
Co-Founder, CTO of Strikedeck
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About Strikedeck: Strikedeck is building a revolutionary Customer Success automation solution to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
Jakob Ehrensvard
CTO & Co-Founder of Yubico
Built his first computer at the age of 15, self-employed software and hardware engineer since 19, designed the security system for Sweden’s largest nuclear plant at 25. Leading inventor of the YubiKey and FIDO/WebAuthn standards.
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About Yubico: Yubico offers USB and wireless authentication solutions.
Mark Wheeler
CTO of DeepMap
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About DeepMap: DeepMap is accelerating safe autonomy by providing the world’s best autonomous mapping and localization solutions.
Lincoln Wallen
CTO of Improbable
Lincoln is chief technology officer for DreamWorks Animation, the global family entertainment company, a position he has held since 2012, having joined the company as head of research and development in 2008. Prior to this, Lincoln served as chief technology officer for the mobile business of Electronic Arts, Inc., a leading interactive entertainment software company. He has held senior positions at Criterion Software, MathEngine plc and is a non-executive director of the Smith Institute for Industrial Mathematics & System Engineering. Lincoln is also an advisory board member of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and a member of the STEM Advisory Committee of the National Academy foundation. Lincoln was formerly a lecturer and reader in computation at the University of Oxford.
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About Caltech, Improbable: Improbable is a UK-based games technology company that is dedicated to building powerful technology designed to help problems.
Jeff Kowalski
SVP, CTO & VP; Senior Director, Worldwide Subscription Programs & Engineering of Autodesk
As a member of the senior executive team, Jeff Kowalski is responsible for shaping Autodesk’s long-term technology vision and driving innovation across the company. He and his team are responsible for shaping Autodesk’s technology and innovation strategies, developing emerging technologies into customer capabilities, and exploring and enhancing the big ideas that are important to Autodesk. A seasoned entrepreneur, he has earned a reputation for facilitating a rich diversity of technical, business, and entrepreneurial ideas from diverse sources, including engineers, technologists, marketers, policy experts, and others. The Office of the CTO includes Autodesk Research, dedicated to innovation and discovery to help solve some of the world’s most complex design problems. The team openly collaborates with researchers at leading universities around the world though exploration of areas critical to Autodesk’s future. Corporate Strategy and Engagement, which develops Autodesk’s corporate strategy and creates thought leadership content and conversations at the intersection of design, technology, business, and societal issues. Autodesk Labs, which connects the latest Autodesk technology with early-adopter customers. Prior to being named CTO in 2006, Kowalski served as Senior Director of Autodesk’s Worldwide Subscription Programs, and directed product development within Autodesk’s Collaboration Services Division. He also served as Software Architect, directing the development of 3D Studio MAX, HEIDI, and the AutoCAD graphics system. Kowalski joined Autodesk in 1993. Kowalski holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and a Master’s degree in computer science, both from Cornell University. When not CTO-ing, Jeff enjoys playing music and spending time with his family in Berkeley, California.
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About Autodesk, Singularity University, Tempo Automation: Autodesk develops 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, and media industries.
Roy Feintuch
Cloud CTO of Check Point Software Technologies
Roy Feintuch is the Cloud CTO @ Check Point.
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About Check Point Software Technologies: Check Point Software Technologies provides and protects customers from cyberattacks.
Stephen Belair
Co-Founder & CTO of Xockets
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About Xockets: Xockets builds hardware and software acceleration into appliances for Big Data processing.
Kenneth Duda
Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Software Engineering of Arista Networks
Kenneth Duda is a pioneer in high-performance networking software and lead architect of Arista Networks EOS, a stateful modular operating system for all Arista Networks products. He is also the co-author of network virtualization specifications including VXLAN with VMware and NVGRE with Microsoft. From 2005 to 2008, Ken was also the Acting President of Arista Networks. Prior to joining Arista Networks, Ken was the CTO at There.com, where he played a lead role in designing a real-time 3-D distributed system that scaled to thousands of simultaneous users. Ken was also the first employee of Granite Systems and led the software development effort for the Catalyst 4000 product line after the acquisition by Cisco. Ken has 3 simultaneous engineering degrees from MIT and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
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About Arista Networks: Arista Networks is a computer networking firm delivering cloud networking solutions for large data center and computer environments.
Vic Cekvenich
CTO – COO of Apakau
I am a seasoned tech executive and entrepreneur with a proven track record of success. I have over thirty years experience combining a strong technical background and business leadership. I believe that technology must be developed solely to achieve business objectives and to satisfy market demands. I believe innovation happens with small and elite teams of superstars rather than with armies of mediocre players. I also believe that creating an environment of high innovation requires a culture of high-output based on merit; a place where people are rewarded for taking good risks.
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About Apakau: Apakau’s Cloud Proxy is an intelligent, edge-based networking solution that stops (DDoS) attacks against dynamic data.
Thor Muller
Cofounder & CTO of Origin.al
Thor is a technologist and serial entrepreneur, having founded five start-ups, including Get Satisfaction, a pioneering social platform connecting customers to products and brands. Prior to Off Grid Electric, he served as Get Satisfaction’s original CEO and later as its CTO, growing the business to serve over 70,000 customer communities. In 2012, he published a New York Times bestselling book, “Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business.” Thor is an alumnus of the University of Iowa.
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About Department of Reckless Abandon, MyVillage, Origin.al: Origin.al is a new way to represent a user’s work—projects and examples in real time.
Anirudh Pandit
Head of Americas Communication, Media and Technology Solution Engineering| Office of CTO of MuleSoft
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About MuleSoft: MuleSoft provides an integration and API platform that makes it easy to connect data from any system to create connected experiences.
Rupesh Ramachandran
Regional Executive – Office of the CTO of MuleSoft
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About MuleSoft, MuleSoft: MuleSoft provides an integration and API platform that makes it easy to connect data from any system to create connected experiences.
Dan Miller
CTO of hiQ Labs
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About hiQ Labs: hiQ Labs is a data science company, informed by public data sources, applied to human capital.
Amine Anoun
Co-Founder & CTO of Evisort
Amine Anoun is the co-founder and CTO of Evisort. Prior to that, he served as a data scientist at Uber.
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About Evisort: Evisort is an AI-powered contract management platform that provides visibility into any document.
Pere Monclus
VP & CTO Network and Security BU of VMware
Pere Monclus is the VP & CTO of Network and Security BU at VMware. Additionally, Pere Monclus has had 1 past job as the Founder and CTO at PLUMgrid.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Andrew Babakian
Principal Engineer, Networking & Security – Office of the CTO, Global Field of VMware
Andrew Babakian is a principal engineer at VMware.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Jason Hsieh
IT CTO of VMware
Jason Hsieh is the IT CTO at VMware.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Constantine Polychronopoulos
VP and CTO, Telco/NFV of VMware
Constantine Polychronopoulos is Vice President and CTO of the Telco/NFV business unit at VMware driving the company’s innovations in the NFV, SDN and telco cloud infrastructure domains. Previously, he served as Vice President and CTO, at Citrix Systems responsible for the Bytemobile product line, the SDN/NFV strategy, and for the expansion of the Netscaler ADC, into the service provider markets. In 2000 he founded Bytemobile, Inc., the global leader in wireless network optimization and data services, which he grew to about 350 employees and over 160 mobile network operator customers, before it was acquired by Citrix Systems in 2012. At Bytemobile he served on the BOD and was the CTO, responsible for all products (establishing and leading development teams in four sites), expansion strategy, M&A, go-to-market planning and led sales in several strategic accounts. Among his many innovations were the first streaming video optimization platform, deployed in more than 100 operator networks world-wide, novel analytics solutions, and a framework that enabled Bytemobile to optimize encrypted traffic. Before founding Bytemobile he was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and director of the Center for Supercomputing R&D, where he directed the research of more than 70 PhD and MS students, and conducted research that produced novel solutions for compilers, operating systems and networking protocols, including the first cloud computing platform in 1999, the Computational Network Federations. Dr. Polychronopoulos’ research results have been used in commercial software and hardware systems by Intel, Cray, Silicon Graphics, Convex, HP, and other high performance software and networking system vendors. He holds 10 patents and has published more than 160 research papers on multithreading compilers, OS, distributed and cloud computing, wireless networks and mobile computing. Seven of his publications have received “Best Paper” awards at ACM and IEEE conferences. He has consulted extensively for many software and hardware companies including Intel, IBM, Silicon Graphics, HP, Kubota, NKK etc. Dr. Polychronopoulos has received various awards and recognitions including the 1989 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award by President George Bush, the 1998 Bodossaki Foundation Award in Engineering, and was named a Pascal Chair at the University of Leiden in 2000 and a Fijitsu Endowed Professor at the University of Tokyo in 1992. In 2015 he was named one of the 50 innovators of the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Illinois, and in 2010 was named among the “Power 50” in wireless industry by Wireless Today magazine in the UK. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, his MS in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and his BSc in Math/CS from the University of Athens.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Nicola Acutt
Vice President, Sustainability Strategy – Office of the CTO of VMware
Nicola Acutt, vice president of sustainability strategy, office of the chief technology officer, at VMware.
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About The Aspen Institute, VMware, VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Marc Fleischmann
CTO of VMware
Marc Fleischmann is the CTO at VMware.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Greg Lavender
SVP & CTO of Cloud Architecture of VMware
Greg Lavender serves as senior vice president and CTO of Cloud Architecture at VMware.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Simon Kofkin-Hansen
CTO, IBM Cloud of VMware
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About IBM, VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Ray O’Farrell
EVP & CTO of VMware
Ray O’Farrell joined VMware in April 2003 and leads engineering efforts companywide, bringing more than 20 years of software development and leadership experience. During his tenure at VMware, O’Farrell led the VMware ESX Storage teams during the early development of the ESX platform and has held a variety of engineering positions, including several months as acting general manager for the VMware vSphere product division. Prior to VMware, O’Farrell managed teams of up to 1,000+ that developed compilers, development tools and operating systems focused on real-time, embedded and DSP systems at a number of companies including Industrial and scientific Imaging (Ireland), Ashling Microsystems (Ireland), Improv systems (United States) and Microtec/Mentor-Graphics (United States), where he spent 10 years in various roles including principal engineer and senior director of engineering. O’Farrell holds a bachelor of engineering in electronics and a masters of engineering in computer science, both from the University of Limerick in Ireland.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Mitesh Pancholy
Principal Architect & CTO Ambassador of VMware
Mitesh Pancholy serves as principal architect at VMware.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Christos Karamanolis
Fellow, CTO Storage & Availability of VMware
Christos Karamanolis joined VMware in 2005. He was appointed as a VMware Fellow in 2016 for his overall contributions to storage virtualization. He currently serves as the chief technology officer of the Storage and Availability Business Unit where he is in charge of strategy and technical product roadmap. Christos was one of the original vSAN architects who envisioned and developed the product, currently the fastest growing business in VMware’s product portfolio. He is still actively involved in the architecture and development of the product. During his tenure with VMware, he has worked on the ESXi storage stack and led a number of projects including VMware’s vSphere Replication, Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy-Based Management. He also works with strategic industry partners to architect storage and data protection features and APIs that enable a rich product ecosystem for VMware customers.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Steve Tilkens
Staff Technical Account Manager, Lead & CTO Ambassador of VMware
Steve Tilkens serves as a staff technical account manager at VMware.
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About VMware: VMware is a software company providing cloud and virtualization services that powers complex digital infrastructure.
Ed Abbo
President and CTO of C3 AI
Ed Abbo is President and Chief Technology Officer at C3.ai, which provides an AI and IoT software platform-as-a-service to power enterprise digital transformations. Mr. Abbo leads C3.ai’s strategy and execution, including technology direction, innovation, and customer success. Prior to C3.ai, Mr. Abbo was Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation, where he was responsible for its application products. Prior to joining Oracle in 2006, he was Senior Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer for Siebel Systems.
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About C3 AI: C3 AI is a provider of Enterprise AI software for accelerating digital transformation.
Tim Olshansky
Chief Technology Officer of Aconex Limited
As CTO, Tim is responsible for the strategy, direction, and execution of technology at Aconex. He has more than 15 years’ experience, building high quality software products and scalable technology platforms. Tim founded Worksite in 2013, a technology start-up which developed the first cloud-based cost management solution for the capital project industry. Worksite was acquired by Aconex in 2015. Prior to Worksite, he was a founding partner of Topguest, a San Francisco based, customer analytics technology company which was sold to Switchfly, a B2B travel e-commerce platform. Tim began his professional career in law and derivatives trading. An early-stage technology advisor, he holds a Bachelor of Law degree with First Class Honours and a Bachelor of Science degree in advanced physics and computational mathematics from the University of Sydney.
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About Aconex Limited, Zenput: Aconex is a construction software developer that connects teams on construction and engineering projects through its online platform.
Dave Pickles
CTO of The Trade Desk
As Chief Technology Officer and founder, Dave Pickles oversees all engineering and technology at The Trade Desk. Pickles has spent his entire career building real-time Internet delivery systems. At the internet telephony startup CallWave, Inc, he was involved in building all back end components of the system: client session management services, telephone call handling services, customer registration services, B2B integrations with all major telephone carriers, and complex high performance database systems (including a custom billing and CRM system) In 2007, Pickles joined AdECN, Microsoft’s recent exchange acquisition at the time. He wrote code and led a team that in under seven months built the complete Federated Exchange, enabling real-time bidding. After release, Microsoft publishing assets slowly ramped production traffic while hardening the system, handling performance testing of 30B daily impressions. With the exchange complete and ready for prime time, Pickles left to help found The Trade Desk and build its platform.
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About The Trade Desk, Trade Desk Inc.: The Trade Desk is an online demand-side platform that provides buying tools for digital media buyers.
Tim Stonehocker
CTO of SoundHound
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About SoundHound: SoundHound is an innovator of invoice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies.
Curtis Liu
Co-Founder, CTO of Amplitude
Curtis is an MIT grad with degrees in EECS and Mathematics. After happy days working at Google, he decided to start Sonalight, an effort to improve how people use voice to interact with their mobile devices. He likes to balance work with a dose of movies and television, and strongly believes in video games as art.
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About Amplitude: Amplitude is a product intelligence platform that provides digital product tools that help teams run and grow their businesses.
Tray Lewin
Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer of Aikon
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About Aikon: Aikon provides API-based Blockchain as a Service for top public blockchains including EOS, Ethereum and Libra
Matt DeBergalis
Co-Founder and CTO of Apollo
Matt founded and ran ActBlue, the largest political fundraising platform in the world. ActBlue has raised over 700 million dollars for candidates and political groups nationwide. Before that, Matt was a kernel hacker. Some of his technical credits include the NeXT port of NetBSD and work on the NFSv4 and DAFS specifications while at Network Appliance. As an undergraduate at MIT, Matt built a phone system for his fraternity, fabricating the circuit boards and writing the operating system from scratch.
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About ActBlue, Apollo: Apollo helps engineering teams build unified graphs to accelerate application development and deliver better, more cohesive experiences.
Cal Henderson
Co-Founder and CTO of Slack
Cal Henderson is the co-founder and CTO of Slack. He is an experienced technology leader, having previously built and led the engineering team at Flickr, through its acquisition by Yahoo. As a popular speaker on engineering scalability, he authored the best-selling O’Reilly Media book “Building Scalable Websites”. He was a pioneer in the use of web APIs, and created the basis for oAuth and oEmbed, now used by YouTube, Twitter, and many others. Cal has a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Central England, and was involved in London’s early online community through his work with the early digital community B3ta and his personal blog iamcal.com, which he has ran for over 15 years. Cal now resides in San Francisco.
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About Slack: Slack is an enterprise software platform that allows teams and businesses of all sizes to communicate effectively.
Vikesh Khanna
CTO & Co-founder of Ambient.ai
CTO & co-founder
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About Ambient.ai: Ambient.ai integrates computer vision intelligence and camera infrastructure to sensor and prevent security incidents.
Clarence Chio
President, CTO, Co-Founder of Unit21
CTO and Co-Founder of Unit 21 and a Lecturer in UC Berkeley’s School of Information.
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About O’Reilly, Unit21, University of California Berkeley: Unit21 provides a customizable, no-code platform for risk & compliance operations teams to fight fraud, money laundering & financial crimes.
Maxime Gariel
Chief Technology Officer of XWING
Maxime joined Xwing from Rockwell Collins where he was a Principal GNC Engineer. He worked on autonomous aircraft projects including DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo autonomous helicopter. Before becoming Chief Engineer of the SW4 Solo’s flight control system, he was in charge of the system architecture, redundancy, and safety for the project. Prior to Rockwell, he worked on ADS-B based conflict detection as a Postdoc at MIT and on autoland systems for airliners at Thales. Maxime earned his MS and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and his BS from ISAE-Supaéro (France).
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About XWING: XWING develops the suite of technologies for pilotless commercial flight of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and fixed-wing aircraft.
Pranab Krishnan
CTO and Co-Founder of Zeal
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About Zeal: Zeal (formerly Puzzl) helps platforms to build custom payroll products.
Bryan Martin
CTO of 8×8
Bryan R. Martin is Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer at 8×8. With over two decades of service to the Company, including 11 years as Chief Executive Officer, Martin has been a key figure in 8×8’s growth, leading the company from its early days as a VoIP pioneer to becoming the leading provider of Unified Communications as a Service solutions. Prior to being named CEO in 2002, he held the positions of Chief Operating Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Senior Vice President, Engineering Operations. He has been a member of 8×8’s Board of Directors since 2001 and has served as Chairman of the Board since 2003. Martin holds 44 United States Patents in the fields of semiconductors, computer architecture, video processing algorithms, videophones and communications. In November 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him to the California Broadband Task Force for the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency and he later served as Chair of the task force’s Emerging Technologies and New Applications Working Group. In 2006, he was named one of the “Top 100 Voices of IP Communications” by Internet Telephony magazine. In addition to his technical knowledge and expertise, Martin is well versed in industry and business affairs and has spoken before numerous trade, financial and regulatory organizations including the FCC, California Public Utilities Commission, California State Senate Energy, Utilities & Communications Committee, IEEE, National Emergency Number Association, Association of Police Communication Officials, TechNet, Supercomm, VON, United States Telecom Association and NGN. He is a member of the IEEE and Tau Beta Pi and received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
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About 8×8: 8×8 offers secure and reliable cloud-based, enterprise-class business phone systems, unified communications, and contact center solutions.
Daniel Rasmuson
Co-founder & CTO of Labelbox
Dan Rasmuson is the Co-Founder and CTO of Labelbox, the leading training data management software company that is accelerating global access to artificial intelligence. He was previously an Engineering Manager at DroneDeploy where he started and grew their platform to more than 100 integrations. These integrations are now providing access to machine learning for aerial imagery all of the world. Dan is a technologist recognized in Forbes 30 under 30 and a youth national chess and ultimate frisbee champion.
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About Labelbox: Labelbox is a collaborative data training platform that creates and manages labeled data for machine learning applications.
Michael Kamprath
CTO of Tubular Labs
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About Claireware Software, Tubular Labs: Tubular Labs is the global leader in video intelligence for the cross-platform world.
Michael Wiemer
VP Eng / Co-Founder and CTO of Mojo Vision
Michael Wiemer is the Co-Founder and CTO at Mojo Vision.
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About Mojo Vision: Mojo Vision is developing Mojo Lens, the world’s first AR smart contact lens with a built-in display that delivers Invisible Computing
Shawn Lewis
Founder, CTO of Weights & Biases
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About Weights & Biases: Weights & Biases provides a developer-first MLOps platform that offers performance visualization tools for machine learning.
Maokai Lin
Co-Founder and CTO of Smarking
Maokai Lin, MIT PhD, specializes in mathematics and programming. He has extensive experience in data analytics when working for Facebook and Morgan Stanley. Maokai would like to use technology and data science to solve parking problems for the future of urban mobility!
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About Smarking: Smarking turns parking data into instant actionable insights.
Justin White
CTO and Co-Founder of Notable
Justine White is the Co-Founder & CTO at Notable.
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About Notable: Notable is an AI-powered health start-up that automates and digitizes every physician-patient interaction.
Marty Hu
Co-founder & CTO of Prodigy
Marty Hu is Co-Founder and CTO at Prodigy. Prior to this, he was a technical lead at Dropbox. He also co-founded and was the CEO of Predictive Edge from February to June, year 2014.
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About Prodigy, Upstart: Prodigy digitizes the process to save customers’ time while improving trust and satisfaction.
Brian Gaffney
Chief Technology Officer of Parsable
Brian Gaffney is the Chief Technology Officer of Parsable.
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About Parsable: Parsable offers a connected worker platform for industrial workers with modern digital tools to improve productivity, quality and safety.
Deepak Gupta
Co-founder, CTO/CISO & Board Member of LoginRadius
Co-founder/CTO @LoginRadius, Securing 1B+ IDs worldwide. CyberSecurity innovator and author. Developer at heart. Infrastructure Architect.
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About LoginRadius: LoginRadius is a SaaS based CIAM platform offering Customer Registration Services, Profile Data Storage, SSO, and more.
Sanjaya Wijeratne
Co-Founder & CTO of TrueNorth
Sanjaya Wijeratne is a Co-founder & CTO at TrueNorth.
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About TrueNorth: TrueNorth offers software that helps truckers manage insurance, fuel, and maintenance.
Michael Flynn
CTO & Co-founder of Recharge
Michael Flynn currently works as the CTO and co-founder for ReCharge. He previously worked at Sponsumo as the founder.
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About Recharge: Recharge offers subscription management software for e-commerce businesses.
Sam Udotong
Co-Founder & CTO of Fireflies.ai
Sam Udotong is the Co-Founder and CTO at Fireflies.ai.
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About Fireflies.ai: Fireflies.ai offers an AI Meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and makes searchable meeting notes.
Alex Yurkowski
Co-Founder & CTO of ClickUp
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About ClickUp: ClickUp offers a customizable workplace productivity platform that serves all departments across an organization.
Anton Gorin
Chief Technology Officer of ManyChat
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About Manybots, ManyChat: ManyChat helps businesses do marketing, sales and support through Facebook Messenger.
Jim Ostrowski
Chief Technology Officer of Blue River Technology
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About Blue River Technology: Blue River Technology employs computer vision and robotics technologies to build intelligent solutions for the agricultural industries.
Jonathan Chen
CTO & Co-Founder of Pathover
Co-Founder of FiscalNote, Inc., and Pathover. Inc. Specialized in AI & ML. Inc. 30 Under 30. D.C. 25 Under 25. Valedictorian University of Maryland, College Park.
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About FiscalNote, FiscalNote, Pathover: Pathover is an API-based intelligent optimization and logistics solution for the last mile.
Kelly Peng
Founder, CEO & CTO (Electrical / Optical / Software Engineer) of Kura Technologies
Kelly Peng is the CEO, CTO, and Founder of Kura Technologies.
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About Greylock, Kura Technologies, Particle House (AKA Inventor Lab), Radio Astronomy Lab, Stanford University, The AAT Project (American’s Amazing Teen): Kura Tech is a tech firm and platform that produces compact AR glasses, with customized displays, optics, ASICs, system.
Satish Raghunath
CTO / Co-Founder of Twin Prime
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About Twin Prime: Twin Prime, a company that came out of stealth this week
Yash Nelapati
Co-founder and CTO of MakersPlace
Yash Nelapati is the co-founder and CTO at MakersPlace.
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About MakersPlace: MakersPlace is an authentic and unique digital creation platform powered by blockchain technology for digital creators.
Raj Vaswani
Chief Technology Officer of Silver Spring Networks
Raj has been with Silver Spring since 2003, and brings more than 15 years of innovation, product development and product management experience in the Internet, software and networking industries to the Company. Prior to joining Silver Spring, Raj was an Entrepreneur in Residence with Foundation Capital. Prior to Foundation Capital, Raj served as Vice President of Engineering at Epinions.com (now shopping.com), a high-traffic consumer-oriented Web site. Previously, Raj was Senior Scientist and Director of Engineering for the @Home Network (later Excite @Home). Raj holds a MS in Computer Science from the University of Washington and a BS in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley. Raj’s commitment to the environment extends to having a large Oak tree in the center of his house, although he hugs it only sporadically.
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About Silver Spring Networks: Silver Spring Networks offers Smart Energy Platform™, enabling utilities to improve energy efficiencies, enhance services, and reduce costs.
Alex Plugaru
Co-Founder & CTO of Gorgias
Alex Plugaru is a Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Gorgias.
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About Gorgias: Gorgias is a multi-channel helpdesk integrated for online and e-commerce merchants.
Tudor Achim
CTO of Helm.ai
Tudor Achim is the Chief Technology Officer of Helm.ai.
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About Helm.ai: Helm.ai is a scalable artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicle.
Scott Royston
CTO of TRUINJECT
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About TRUINJECT: TRUINJECT™ is a software company focused on the innovation, development & commercialization of medical products for the injectable market.
David P. Mariani
Chief Technology Officer, Founder of AtScale
Dave Mariani is one of the co-founders of AtScale and is the VP of Technology. Prior to AtScale,he was VP of Engineering at Klout & at Yahoo! where he built the world’s largest multi-dimensional cube for BI on Hadoop. Mariani is a Big Data visionary & serial entrepreneur.
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About AtScale: AtScale is an intelligent data virtualization company that provides a single, secured, and governed workspace for distributed data.
Valentino Volonghi
CTO & Founding Team of NextRoll
He is the President and Founder of the Italian Python Association that runs PyCon Italy. Chief Technology Officer at NextRoll, Inc.
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About Italian Python Association, NextRoll: NextRoll is a marketing technology company delivering products ambitious companies rely on to grow their businesses.
Tushar Vaish
Co-Founder and CTO of Spinwheel
Tushar Vaish is the Co-Founder and CTO of Spinwheel.
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About Spinwheel: Transform how your business and your customers see, understand, and act on debt with our industry-leading debt APIs and drop-in modules.
Steven Tan
VP & CTO Cloud Solution of Huawei Technologies
Steven is the VP and CTO for Cloud Solution at Huawei, and is the TSC Chair of the Linux Foundation OpenSDS Project.
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About Huawei Technologies: Huawei Technologies provides infrastructure application software and devices with wireline, wireless, and IP technologies.
Frank Zou
Chief Technology Officer and VP, Enterprise Business, Huawei USA of Huawei Technologies
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About Huawei Technologies: Huawei Technologies provides infrastructure application software and devices with wireline, wireless, and IP technologies.
Robin Ducot
CTO of Momentive
Robin joined SurveyMonkey in October 2017. She leads the company’s engineering function and works closely with product, design, and data teams to help define our technical product vision. Previously, Robin spent five years as Senior Vice President of Product Engineering at DocuSign where she scaled the engineering team into a high-velocity streamlined organization using scaled agile framework, moved the product to a multi-product platform with a service-oriented architecture, and shifted the organization to a continuous integration delivery model. Prior to that, she was the Vice President of Engineering at Eventbrite responsible for delivery of their platform and building out a complete engineering organization with extremely high staffing standards. Robin earned her BS in Computer Science from University of Massachusetts, Boston.
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About Momentive: SurveyMonkey is an agile experience management company delivering solutions that help leaders make important decisions.
Joseph Macri
Vice President/CTO of AMD
Joseph Macri is Vice President at AMD.
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About AMD: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a semiconductor company that designs and develops graphics units, processors, and media solutions.
Dhruba Borthakur
Co-Founder & CTO of Rockset
Dhruba Borthakur is CTO and co-founder of Rockset, responsible for the company’s technical direction. He was an engineer on the database team at Facebook, where he was the founding engineer of the RocksDB data store. Earlier at Yahoo, he was one of the founding engineers of the Hadoop Distributed File System. He was also a contributor to the open source Apache HBase project. Dhruba previously held various roles at Veritas Software, founded an e-commerce startup, Oreceipt.com, and contributed to Andrew File System (AFS) at IBM-Transarc Labs.
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About Rockset: Rockset is a computer software company that offers a cloud data infrastructure.
Abraham Bachrach
Founder, CTO of Skydio
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About Skydio: Skydio uses artificial intelligence to create flying drones that are used by consumer, enterprise, and government customers.
Jason Mirra
Co-Founder & CTO of Ender
Jason Mirra Jason co-founded Addepar with Joe Lonsdale and drives its technology vision. He is recognized as one of the top technologists in Silicon Valley today, and has received accolades for his work from the Phenom list, where he was listed as a Top 5 Startup CTO and from Forbes where he was featured in their annual technology 30 under 30. Jason previously worked on Palantir’s financial analysis platform, helping to bring order and clarity to massive sets of disparate financial data. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University where he spent countless hours following his first major passion, online game development.
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About Ender: Ender is a real estate company that helps owners of rental homes to more efficiently handle day-to-day operations of property management.
David Holz
Co-Founder & CTO of Leap Motion
David Holz is the CTO & co-founder of Leap Motion. Prior to founding the company, David contracted for NASA’s Langley Research Center and conducted neuroscience research while at The Max Planck Institute. He studied Applied Math at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ultimately leaving his PhD program to co-found Leap Motion in 2010.
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About Leap Motion: Leap Motion is a software and hardware company that develops 3D motion-control technology for virtual reality and additional platforms.
Tony Cassanego
Co-founder & CTO of Dropbox DocSend
Tony has worked at companies big and small (Intuit, Increo Solutions, Greystripe). Most recently he built and managed Greystripe’s rich media mobile platforms team that was responsible for the iOS, Android, and mobile web SDKs. His technical expertise ranges from web to mobile technologies. Tony received his BS in Computer Science from Stanford.
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About Dropbox DocSend, Greystripe: Dropbox DocSend is a secure document sharing and tracking solution that helps companies share business-critical documents with ease.
Jacques Nadeau
Co-founder & CTO of Dremio
Jacques is currently co-founder and CTO of YapMap.com, a Visual Search & Discovery Engine for the social web. Jacques is an industry veteran with over 15 years of Internet technology experience. Prior to leading the technology efforts at YapMap, he was Director of Product with Quigo (acquired by AOL in 2007). Previously he led product development efforts at Offermatica (now part of Omniture/Adobe) and built the Avenue A | Razorfish analytics technology and services practice. Jacques has a B.A. from Pomona College.
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About Dremio: Dremio is a data lake engine that offers tools to help streamline and curate data.
Dima Soroka
CTO of OroCommerce
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About MageCore, OroCommerce: OroCommerce is the company behind OroCRM, OroCommerce and the OroPlatform.
