Ted Chiang Award-winning sci-fi writer

Ted Chiang’s fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and six Locus Awards, and has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories. His first collection Stories of Your Life and Others has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. His second collection Exhalation was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019.

Bridget Frey Chief Technology Officer at Redfin

As Redfin’s Chief Technology Officer, Bridget leads the software engineering and analytics teams. Her mission is to build technology that makes the process of buying and selling a home less complicated and less stressful. She is a leader on issues facing traditionally underrepresented people in technology, and 34% of Redfin’s technology team are women while 10% are Black or Latinx.

Prior to Redfin, Frey was the director of analytics and business applications at Lithium Technologies. In addition, she has held management positions at IntrinsiQ Research, IMlogic and Plumtree Software. Since 2019, she has served on the board of directors for Premera Blue Cross. Bridget holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude. She was recently recognized as a Seattle CIO of The Year award winner.

Eric Heisserer Oscar-nominated writer & filmmaker

Inbal Shani Chief Product Officer at GitHub

Inbal Shani is committed to empowering individual and enterprise developers by offering products and services that elevate their experience and productivity. Having led engineering and product teams at Amazon and Microsoft and serving as a General Manager for most of her career, she specializes in crafting solutions that maximize customers’ most business-critical outcomes.

Inbal’s development experience has spanned the entire tech stack. She was among the pioneering technologists who applied AI in the lab during her Master’s in mechanical engineering. Immersed in the rapid evolution of LLMs and AI models, she has always prioritized tools to enhance efficiency and accelerate production. That’s why she’s deeply passionate about optimizing the developer experience (DevEx), a mission that drives her role as GitHub’s Chief Product Officer.

David Shim Co-founder & CEO at Read AI

David Shim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Read AI, which makes meetings more effective and efficient with AI. After every meeting, Read automatically generates a meeting summary, transcript, highlights, recommendations, and trends across topics and meetings.  Prior to Read AI, David was the CEO of Foursquare, and Founder and CEO of Placed (acquired by Snapchat in 2017).

Charlotte Yarkoni President, Commerce + Ecosystems, Cloud + AI, at Microsoft

As President of Commerce + Ecosystems (C+E), Charlotte Yarkoni is responsible for driving accelerated cloud adoption and customer success for startups, enterprises, partners, and students. Her team supports all commerce experiences across Microsoft to help customers better discover, use, and pay for Microsoft’s offerings on Azure marketplace, AppSource marketplace, and all other commerce platforms. C+E is also focused on engaging partners and field sellers and her team consists of pre-sales and sales systems as well as Microsoft finance systems. Additionally, her team has responsibility for the services and experiences that power Marketing, Microsoft Stores, Consulting Services and Customer Support for the company.  

Finally, Yarkoni’s team runs ecosystems for Microsoft. They build the programs and platforms that support creators, makers, and innovators to help them gain proficiency by delivering free content and resources to build digital skills including Founders Hub to help anyone with an idea get started, free training & world-class documentation on Microsoft Learn, or the Imagine Cup annual student competition that gives a global stage to young innovators, making the team a strategic part of the company’s all-important drive to advocate for developers and founders of all stripes.

Yarkoni earned her bachelor’s degree in management science from Georgia Institute of Technology and currently serves as a member of Fiserv’s board of directors, a leading innovator of payments and financial services solutions, where she helps advance the company’s vision from innovation to investment in partnership with the senior leadership team. She has previously served as Vice Chairman at Ooyala and Board Director of the Seattle Humane Society. 

Byron Boots Co-founder & CEO at Overland AI

Byron Boots is Co-Founder and CEO of Overland AI and the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning in the Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Byron has authored over 150 technical publications and received several awards for his work in machine learning and robotics including the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Robotics: Science and Systems Early Career Award, the Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award at Georgia Tech, and nine “Best Paper” awards for his academic research.

Before founding Overland AI, Byron was a principle research scientist at NVIDIA and visiting faculty at Google Brain, and worked with the U.S. Army and DARPA developing off-road ground vehicle autonomy. Byron received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Keith McCall Founder & CEO at Pollen Systems

Keith has been exploring Artificial Intelligence technologies since working in 1994 at IBM.  Since then, he spent 15 years at IBM, Lotus, and Microsoft, founded and sold two Seattle-based companies, and is currently focused on the AgTech space with two companies: Pollen Systems and Everyvine, both of which are using AI technologies to create solutions to respectively feed the world and to create more available and accessible wines.

Diego Oppenheimer Managing Partner at Factory

Diego Oppenheimer is a serial entrepreneur, product developer and investor with an extensive background in all things data. Currently, he is a Managing Partner at Factory a venture fund specialized in AI investments as well as interim head of product at two LLM startups. Previously he was an executive vice president at DataRobot, Founder and CEO at Algorithmia (acquired by DataRobot) and shipped some of Microsoft’s most used data analysis products including Excel, PowerBI and SQL Server. Diego is active in AI/ML communities as a founding member and strategic advisor for the AI Infrastructure Alliance and MLops.Community and works with leaders to define ML industry standards and best practices. Diego holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems and a Masters degree in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Gaurav Oberoi Co-founder & CEO at Lexion

Gaurav Oberoi is the CEO and co-founder of Lexion. He started his career as an engineer at Amazon, before moving on to found and sell two startups (BillMonk, and Precision Polling), and build a $20M+ ARR business from $0 as a VP of Product at SurveyMonkey. Gaurav co-founded Lexion as the first EIR at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He thrives on building products that customers love, with diverse teams that enjoy working together.

Scott Lambridis Vice President of Design at Blink UX

Scott Lambridis is Vice President of Design at Blink. He helps ensure a high standard of excellence in all UX work in the SF studio, manages and mentors a small team of designers, and guides design strategy on key accounts. He also helps support and grow the studio’s UX practice, defining the processes, tools, and best-practices to maintain a strong design culture.

Prior to Blink, Scott built a UX team and practice at Eveo, where he helped design and deliver dozens of mobile and desktop applications for doctors, patients, and healthcare reps. Scott grew up in New York and earned a degree in neurobiology from the University of Virginia, and has extensive experience applying design thinking to healthcare, including work with Kaiser Permanente, Humana, Genentech, and many more. He loves complex problems, and has worked in a wide range of creative industries, providing leadership on projects through cooperation, communication, organization, judgment and imagination. This has consistently resulted in award-winning solutions, and long-term relationships.

Outside of Blink, Scott is also an award-winning novelist and short-story writer, with an MFA from San Francisco State University, and has published stories in Amazon’s Day One, the Chicago Review, and other journals. He also owns a farm with his wife and daughter in the Tahoe foothills with 400 olive trees, and would be delighted to share some fresh-pressed extra virgin olive oil with anyone who wants!