Our History
Speakers featured in the past
Past Event Highlights
All Our Past Speakers
Ilya Bukshteyn
Ilya Bukshteyn is an accomplished executive Product and Program Management Leader. He is the Head of Product (Partner Director), Microsoft Teams Devices at Microsoft.
Ilya possesses a unique combination of skills and experience in technology products, business and product ownership, and product strategy, matching technology to enterprise needs and translating objectives into inspirational and actionable product launches.
With polished communication skills and natural authority, Ilya builds, leads and empowers multi-cultural, multi-disciplined teams to achieve goals, creating shared vision to ensure delivery of next generation technology products through complex software and hardware projects.
Ilya is energetic, determined and innovative. He is strategic thinker who enjoys challenging the status quo, drawing on strong personal values of integrity and transparency to develop mutually beneficial partner ecosystems with external and internal stakeholders
Brian Robertson
Brian Robertson is the world’s foremost expert on Holacracy., a revolutionary framework for self-managing organizations. After years as CEO of an award-winning software company, he co-founded HolacracyOne to share this innovative method with other organizations.
The Holacracy framework integrates the collective wisdom of individuals throughout an organization and offers a toolset for each person to enact meaningful change at any level of work. The result is increased transparency, greater accountability, constant innovation, and agility across the company. Holacracy is used by over 1000 companies today – in healthcare, insurance, banking, retail, technology, nonprofit and government sectors and in places as diverse as Dubai, Shanghai, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, New York, Bangalore, Las Vegas and rural Africa. Brian is thrilled to see this method take root and grow with such force.
Brian is the author of the book Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World. He speaks at conferences, holds trainings and consults for organizations across the globe.
Introduction to Holacracy (video): http://bit.ly/2uZXkYk
Holacracy Blog Collection: www.holacracy.org/blog
Nathan Latka
Nathan Latka is the principal of private equity firm Latka Capital; executive producer and host of “The Top Entrepreneurs” podcast; and CEO at two companies he’s recently purchased.
Nathan is also the star of the hit FB Watch show “Latka’s Money” (more than one million viewers tune in every episode).
He is the founder of the software company Heyo.
How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital is his first book.
Talia Goldberg
Talia Goldberg is a partner in Bessemer Venture Partner’s San Francisco office and invests across early and growth stage software and internet.
Talia joined Bessemer in 2013 and has since become the youngest elected partner in firm history. She has partnered with ServiceTitan, Shippo, Papaya Global, Discord, Dashlane, Toss (Viva Republica), Newfront Insurance, Pinterest, and Stubhub/Viagogo among others. She was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital and recognized on Business Insider’s Rising Stars list.
Prior to joining Bessemer, Talia worked at Foursquare and Simple Finance. Talia graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in Portland, Oregon and will forever be a Blazers fan.
Karen Mangia
Karen Mangia is an internationally-recognized thought leader whose TEDx appearance, keynotes, blogs and books reach hundreds of thousands of business leaders each year. She is the author of Working from Home: Making the New Normal Work for You (Wiley), Listen Up! How to Tune in to Customers and Turn Down the Noise (Wiley) and also Success With Less (Marie Street Press). A prolific blogger and sought-after media interview, she has been featured in Forbes and regularly contributes to Thrive Global and ZDNet.
As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she engages current and future customers around the world to discover new ways of creating success and growth together. She serves on the company’s Work from Home Taskforce, where she is helping the company’s 50,000+ worldwide employees to better adapt to a work-from-home environment. Passionate about diversity and inclusion, she also serves on the company’s Racial Equality and Justice Taskforce.
Prior to Salesforce, she spearheaded Customer Satisfaction and Experience at Cisco Systems.
Chris Herd
Chris Herd is the founder and CEO of Firstbase, an all-in-one provisioning platform that lets companies provide all the practical equipment remote workers need at the touch of a button.
He believes that replicating office working styles remotely rather than leveraging the advantages of remote will lead to bad outcomes. The synchronous-first instantaneous gratification that adult kids club offices encourage destroys productivity, while remote empowers workers to do deep focused work without distraction. The latter is what he passionately believes needs to emerge for remote to deliver on its promise.
Previously Chris founded a remote-first FinTech startup and installed physical equipment in the most remote environments on the planet. He regularly shares his thoughts on remote through twitter, his blog, and speaking engagements.
John Eckman
John Eckman is the Chief Executive Officer at 10up, a distributed digital agency with a focus on building great web publishing experiences on open source platforms, primarily WordPress.
10up has been 100% distributed from day one. John has lots of experience with the operational, cultural, and practical opportunities and challenges at our scale. Today 10up employs 175 full time remote staff.
Previously John was a Managing Director at ISITE Design, a Senior Director at Optaros, Director of Application Development at PixelMEDIA, and held a number of different roles (across front-end development, software engineering, and user experience) at Molecular. (Actually I joined TVisions, which became Molecular – and was later acquired by Isobar).
John received a BA from Boston University, an MA & PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, and an MIS from Northeastern University.
He also blogs at Open Parenthesis on many things related to work: open source, web design, and general internet culture stuff.
Davit Baghdasaryan
Morgan Smith-Lenyard
Shane Mac
Shane Mac is the CEO & Co-founder of Assist which was acquired by Conversocial in 2019. He is also the Senior Vice President at Conversocial.
He spent 7+ years at Assist building the future of AI and the talking internet with partners like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter. Assist powers Fortune 500 companies like T-Mobile, Fandango, 1-800-Flowers, Sephora, Best Buy, MGM hotels, and many more.
In 2017, he co-founded Squared Away to employ military spouses as executive assistants.
He worked on Gist.com, which was acquired by BlackBerry for over $40 million. Gist was one of the first social CRM companies and grew to over 100 million people by 2010.
Shane has been featured in the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, NPR’s All Things Considered, Forbes, USA Today, and more.
He likes spending time with people who are in the arena.
Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy
Kuppulakshmi Krishnamoorthy aka Kuppu is the Global Head—Zoho for Startups at Zoho Corporation.
She has been part of Zoho’s growth story for about a decade, and bridging the gap between businesses and technology has been her core area of work.
She is a sought-after keynote speaker on topics like future skills, emotional intelligence, and human element of technology.
Her extensive experience of being a softskills and communication trainer and a voice & accent specialist, strengthen her expertise in story telling, and she is a great fan of the “explain-it-like-I am-five” concept.
Kuppu believes that the best way to live life is to be useful to others, and she strives to find a balance between giving and taking. She is an active volunteer with various social-impact projects, and is a chief trainer and mentor for Project PUTHRI – that works to empower ten-thousand girl children from underprivileged backgrounds, every year.
She is an ambivert, reads a lot of non-fiction, writes, sings, paints, dances, practices sustainable living and is also a foodie who can cook. She is a hands-on mom to a super-active 7-year-old, and has plants for pets.
Aydin Y Mirzaee
Aydin Y Mirzaee is the CEO at Fellow.app — helping managers and their teams work better together.
He is a tech loving entrepreneur with a passion for building great products, leadership and people.
Previously , he was the co-founder and co-CEO of Fluidware, maker of FluidSurveys.com and FluidReview.com. With a team of incredibly talented people, they grew Fluidware (without external Angel/VC) into a very profitable and rapidly growing SaaS business with over $10M+ in annual recurring sales and over 75 people in staff. They subsequently had a very successful acquisition to the world’s largest survey company: SurveyMonkey.
After spending some time helping with the integration of FluidSurveys into SurveyMonkey, he served as General Manager of FluidReview and the Ottawa office.
Throughout his career, Aydin have had the opportunity to lead teams in Product Management, Product Marketing, Engineering Management, Outbound & Inbound Sales, Enterprise Sales, Customer Onboarding, Customer Services, Churn Management and Growth Marketing: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (paid acquisition), Lead Nurture, Content Marketing / Demand Generation, Conversion Optimization.
He is a big believer in fostering entrepreneurship and spends most of his time outside of work with organizations such as Fresh Founders, Invest Ottawa, SaaSNorth Conference, University of Ottawa Engineering and C100.
Andrew Jernigan
Andrew Jernigan is the CEO of Insured Nomads.
Andrew is justice driven and is passionate about protecting people, those from every country, and every type of work style. He is leading the first insurtech for global benefits and international insurance to provide expats, digital nomads, remote workers, travelers, world schoolers, and international citizens with a frictionless solution-set as required for the successful international lifestyle. He partnered with Not For Sale to support their work of providing intervention, rescue, protection and education – empowering vulnerable communities so that the exploitation of humans for trafficking is stopped.
Sahin Boydas
Sahin Boydas is the CEO and Founder of Remote Team.
He is a serial entrepreneur living in Silicon Valley. He co-founded movie marketing platform MovieLaLa and sold it to Gfycat. His second company is one of the most successful consumer-facing Augmented Reality apps: Leo AR. Sahin has built and managed 100% remote teams for over a decade.
As CEO and founder of RemoteTeam.com, he is working to solve HR and operational problems related to remote work.
Samar Singla
Samar Singla is a serial entrepreneur and a physicist by education.
He has previously worked as a researcher at IBM and CERN. He is one of the industry’s foremost speakers.
Samar founded Jugnoo in 2014 with the vision to transform the Indian auto-rickshaw sector.
Apart from Jugnoo, Samar also founded Click-Labs, a profitable SaaS technology solution provider of Business suit called ‘JungleWorks’.
He is an avid traveler and amateur photographer who likes to document the everyday world. Samar’s personal website calls him ‘Someone somewhere in a garage’ which clearly portrays his love and penchant for building new things.
