Our History
Speakers featured in the past
Past Event Highlights
All Our Past Speakers
Tim Minahan
Tim Minahan is the executive vice president, business strategy and chief marketing officer (CMO) at Citrix, where he has a proactive role in helping to drive focused strategic initiatives and the company’s overall business strategy. In addition, he leads global marketing strategy and operations for the company’s vision of securely delivering the world’s most important apps and data to enable people and businesses to work better.
A technology industry veteran who specializes in defining new markets and positioning companies to own them, Minahan has served in a broad range of business leadership roles at enterprise software, cloud, and services firms, including SAP, Ariba, and Procuri. Also he was chief services and research officer at Aberdeen Group.
Minahan is on the board of Made in a Free World, a non-profit technology company that is using the power of networks and big data to detect and mitigate forced labor from global supply chains. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Boston College and completed the CMO Program at Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management.
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Winning the Talent War with Remote Working
Remote work is the new normal. Ongoing operations and future competitive advantage will go to those companies that leverage technology to enable flexible and remote work models. This can not only attract hard-to-find talent, but increase employee engagement and boost their productivity. Companies can dip into untapped pools of talent such as workers in remote locales, retirees, gig workers, and stay-at-home parents.
In this talk, Tim Minahan explains how to strategically create a world-class business model to offer and enable remote work, make employees happier and more productive, and attract and retain the talent you need to move your business forward. He’ll also share insights on evolving remote work practices for the future, based on the experience of the COVID-19 crisis, including engagement, communications, security, leadership, and work/life balance.
Claire Lew
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
David Heinemeier Hansson, popularly known as DHH, needs no introduction.
He is the CTO of Basecamp, co-author of 4 books, and the creator of the open-source Ruby on Rails framework.
If you haven’t noticed, David has a thing for taking things out of obscurity and making them popular.
- In an age when PHP was the de-facto standard of web development, David created Ruby on Rails.
- When everyone was running after VC money, David along with co-founder Jason Fried, bootstrapped Basecamp (previously 37signals ).
- And years before people thought of remote work, David co-authored “Remote – Office not required”.
David is a rare kind of programmer. He cares deeply about both — writing beautiful code and building software that makes an impact. Something you can clearly see in Basecamp and Ruby on Rails.
David is a best-selling author. He has co-authored 4 books on making work-life better. His most popular book — Rework — is a New York times, Wall Street Journal, and Sunday Times bestseller, with half a million+ copies sold worldwide. And his latest book — It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work — is about making running a business calm and enjoyable.
We love it when he says –
Nobody is an overnight success. Most overnight successes you see have been working at it for ten years.
Here is everything about him in his own words on his personal site — dhh.dk. He has also been contributing to the blog Signal v Noise for the past two decades.
For someone who enjoys growing things slowly, it’s almost ironic that David is also into racing cars.
Reema Batnagar
Reema Batnagar joined Pixar Animation Studios in February 2019 as Vice President, Human Resources. In her role, Batnagar is responsible for leading Pixar’s human resources department, which includes talent acquisition, leadership/organizational development, total rewards, and employee relations.
Batnagar brings over 20 years of HR experience to the job. Prior to Pixar, Batnagar worked at Sony Interactive Entertainment as Head of HR for Sales & Marketing, where she led learning and development and talent management. She has also held a variety of senior HR leadership and organizational development roles at VMware, Adobe, and Intuit.
Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Batnagar holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and psychology from St. Olaf College and a master’s degree in human resources and organizational development from University of Minnesota.
Tracy Hawkins
Tracy Hawkins has been active in all aspects of corporate real estate and facilities management for over 15 years – her skills encompass project management, design and construction, leasing & transactions, workplace operations and the remote experience.
With international experience leading corporate real estate teams in the film, fashion and the technology sectors, notably previously at Yahoo! for 7 years and now at Twitter as their VP of Workplace Transformation. She has been at Twitter for the last 8 years joining them to lead their EMEA and APAC Real Estate & Workplace teams in 2013 moving from Dublin, Ireland to San Francisco in 2014 to head up their Design & Construction team during a period of explosive growth which ultimately led to her returning from maternity leave to assume leadership of their global Real Estate & Workplace team in March of 2016. Tracy is responsible for all workplaces at Twitter, be that in an office or remote, her goal is to ensure their employees have the choice and agility to do their very best work regardless of geography.
Tracy is married to Grant, they have a 5 year old daughter, she is on the Boards of Blue Bear School of Music and Twitter Foundation and has been an active member of Corenet for over 10 years both in London and the Bay Area.
Amir Salihefendić
Amir Salihefendić is the CEO and founder of Doist — the software company behind Todoist, one of the world’s most popular productivity tools used by over 25 million people, and Twist, a team communication app that helps remote-friendly teams cultivate a more organized, transparent, and balanced workplace.
Originally from Bosnia, Amir grew up in Denmark and studied computer science at Aarhus Univeristet in Aarhus, Denmark. Prior to Doist, Amir was part of the founding team of Plurk, a Twitter precursor used by millions of people that continues to be one of the most popular social networking sites in Asia. He created Todoist in 2007 while still a university student with two programming jobs on the side. At the time, it was one of the very first digital task managers available.
Currently based in Barcelona, Spain with his Chilean wife, Amir’s mission is to create a future in which anyone can work hard and without distractions from anywhere in the world. He believes everyone should be empowered to tackle the challenges they are passionate about, and then unplug at the end of the day with the reassuring peace-of-mind their work and team is accounted for.
Stacy Elliott
Stacy Elliott is the Sr Director of Executive Communications; Office of the Executive Vice President of Microsoft.
Stacy spent her early career in public relations with multi-national consumer brands as her clients, including Lever Brothers, Ralston-Purina, Carnation, Pepsi-Co, and American Airlines. In the mid-90s, Stacy was recruited to bring her experience to the consumer technology realm, helping Microsoft launch its early consumer-focused technology products including education and gaming software, and home
After eight years in Redmond, WA., she left Microsoft’s main campus to pioneer a remote job-share scenario from her home in Dallas, TX. Working remotely for the past 16 years, she’s held a variety of marketing and communication leadership roles, including launching the first executive speaker bureau and leading a global brand team for Microsoft’s advertising business. These days, she continues to use her communications skills at Microsoft for speechwriting, executive communications, and public relations in support of HR and Microsoft’s Chief People Officer.
Micha Kaufman
Micha Kaufman, is Fiverr‘s Founder, has served as our Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the board of directors since our inception. He is the visionary behind Fiverr’s product and platform strategy, leading the company in changing how the world works together and providing opportunities for anyone, anywhere to build their business, brand or dreams. Prior to co-founding Fiverr, Mr. Kaufman founded and led several technology ventures, including Keynesis Ltd., Invisia Ltd. and Spotback Ltd. Mr. Kaufman has served as a member of the Policy Board of Cerca Partners, a venture capital firm, since November 2016. Since August 2017, Mr.Kaufman has served as a member of the board of directors of Drove Network Ltd. Mr. Kaufman holds an LL.B degree from Haifa University in Israel.
Janelle Bieler
Janelle Bieler was appointed as Adecco Canada’s President in 2020, following her role as Senior Vice President for Adecco Staffing in the U.S. In that role, Janelle was responsible for Adecco USA’s retail organization, encompassing more than 150 branch locations and over 200 sales leaders. She led and helped to accelerate the focus and growth within this important area of business.
Janelle joined Adecco in 2014 as Regional Vice President, Los Angeles region. A passionate sales leader, Janelle developed and implemented new sales strategies to drive results. Prior to joining Adecco, Janelle worked in market leadership and sales with a large car rental company, a technology company and a large staffing firm. She earned her undergraduate degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Matthew Kepnes
Matthew Kepnes, popularly known as Nomadic Matt, is a New York Times best-selling author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day and Founder/CEO at Nomadic Matt.
He has traveled to close to 100 countries and territories, flown hundreds of thousands of miles, slept in all sorts of places, tried weird food (including fried maggots), made life long friends, learned multiple languages, and, most importantly, discovered that one doesn’t need to be rich to travel.
It’s his mission to help travelers to realize their travel dreams. He has helped millions of people to travel more with tested and proven tips and advice.
Matt Barrie
Matt Barrie is an award winning technology entrepreneur and Chief Executive of ASX listed Freelancer Limited. Twelve-time Webby award-winning Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and projects posted. Matt is also Chief Executive of Escrow.com, a world leader in secure online payments with over US$4.0b in transactions secured.
Matt was Adjunct Associate Professor in Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Sydney for 15 years. He is the co-author of over 20 US patent applications. Previously, he founded and was Chief Executive of Sensory Networks Inc., a vendor of high performance network security processors which sold to Intel Corporation in 2013 (NASDAQ: INTC).
In 2014 he was named the most influential person in information technology in Australia by Smart Company. In 2015 he was named in the Top 100 Most Influential Engineers in Australia by Engineers Australia. In 2016 he was awarded Libertarian of the Year by the Australian Libertarian Society. In 2018 he was named Alumnus of the Year in Entrepreneurship by Macquarie University. In 2019 he won a Gold Stevie for Executive of the Year.
Matt holds first class honours in both Electrical Engineering and Science, a Masters in Applied Finance, and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia.
Andy Tryba
Andy is a technology optimist and the founder & CEO of Ionic Partners, an investment firm focusing on ‘2nd Chasm’ company acquisitions. Ionic Partners focus on providing companies with stalled revenues a ‘second life’, by pivoting and turning them 100% remote. More on the concept of the 2nd Chasm is described their blog post.
Andy is also the co-founder & CEO of RideAustin, and the CEO of a variety of technology companies including Sococo, Engine Yard, DNN Corp, Kayako, Bizness Apps, FogBugz, School Loop, Agemni & SLI Systems.
Andy is a proponent of remote work with distributed companies such as Crossover. Currently Andy manages 4,000 remote employees, with the number of growing as Think3 acquires more companies and equips them with remote working skills. He also has a blog focused on remote work at scale.
Siim Sikkut
Siim Sikkut currently serves as Government CIO of Estonia where his role is to set strategy and policies for the development of digital government and society in Estonia. Siim is also one of the founders of Estonia’s groundbreaking e-Residency programme that enables entrepreneurs to start and run a company from anywhere in the world. His team has also been instrumental in the launch of Estonia’s Digital Nomad Visa, the first of its kind in Europe.
Previously, he worked as Digital Policy Adviser in the Government Office of Estonia – serving in this role as adviser to three consecutive prime ministers. Siim graduated in 2005 from Princeton University, USA with a B.A. in public and international affairs. He also holds a M.Sc. degree in International Management from the University of London.
Jodi Rabinowitz
Jodi Rabinowitz is the head of talent and organization development at Zoom Video Communications.
She is responsible for driving all aspects of employee development and engagement by designing experiences that touch every single point of the employee life cycle from post-hire to exit. Once employees join the Zoom community, she takes it from there.
Jodi has had several in-house executive leadership positions in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors in organizational, talent, and learning management. Her most recent leadership role was at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as the Head of Talent Acquisition and Organizational Development where she joined to implement a five-year strategic plan focused on enhancing employees’ overall well-being.
Jodi’s nimble approach as a talent advisor stems from her time as an executive at The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) and her early career in social work. At CCL, she designed custom programs for Fortune 100 companies to help them build and enhance their leadership pipeline and achieve business outcomes.
Prior to this work, she tackled the behavioral aspects of leadership with the clinical skills she honed at a boutique Employee Assistance firm and New York’s famous, Bellevue Hospital’s Psychiatric Emergency Room and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
She lives in New York City with her husband and has two sons, one of which is in his final year at Penn and the other a senior in high school. She also lives with her chocolate brown Labrador, Bosco, who is a lover of sticks and is useless when it comes to proofreading her work.
Hassan Osman
Hassan Osman is currently a Program Management Office (PMO) Director at Cisco Systems, where he leads virtual teams on delivering large & complex programs for our strategic customers in the Americas region.
Previously, he was a PMO Area Leader at Cisco, where he was responsible for managing a team of 150+ remote project & program managers on delivering projects to Cisco’s clients in the U.S. Northeast theater.
As his former roll as a Senior Program Manager, he focused on scoping, negotiating, planning and executing multi-million dollar projects.
Before joining Cisco, Hassan was a management consultant at Ernst & Young (now EY).
During the past several years, Hassan hasworked closely with business executives and leaders at organizations such as General Motors, Pfizer, DELL, Bank of America, General Electric, Merck, Freddie Mac, JP Morgan Chase, and Cigna.
Hassan has also worked as a research assistant at Harvard University to study issues related to virtual teams.
He is also the author of several Amazon Best Selling books, including:
– Influencing Virtual Teams
– Don’t Reply All
– Effective Delegation of Authority
– Project Kickoff
– Write Your Book on the Side
– Fun Virtual Team-Building Activities
– Better Online Meetings
