Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Twitch is the world's largest live-streaming platform, where creators broadcast video games, IRL content, music, and talk shows to a real-time audience that talks back in chat. Founded as a gaming-focused spin-off of Justin.tv in 2011 and acquired by Amazon in 2014, Twitch turned watching someone play a game into a social, participatory medium, building a creator economy powered by subscriptions, Bits, ads, and a culture of emotes and live community.
Cortney Lusignan is a seasoned communications and public relations executive currently serving as Senior Program Manager, AWS Communications, supporting the AWS Global Communications Vice President at Amazon Web Services. With a career spanning major PR agencies including Weber Shandwick and Edelman, and deep industry expertise in financial services, healthcare, and technology PR, Lusignan has built a reputation as a trusted operator at the intersection of enterprise cloud and strategic communications.
Jennifer Hartford is a senior marketing executive at Amazon Web Services, currently serving as VP of Events, Advertising, and Strategic Partnerships. With over a decade at AWS, she has led some of the biggest moments in enterprise tech — including serving as Event Lead for AWS re:Invent 2014 and 2015, and overseeing marquee partnerships such as the AWS-Formula 1 collaboration. Based in Bend, Oregon, she has grown from event marketing manager to one of AWS's top integrated marketing leaders, shaping how the world's largest cloud platform shows up at scale.
Jesse Dougherty is Vice President of Global Networking and Network Edge Services at Amazon Web Services (AWS), based in Vancouver, British Columbia. He leads AWS's global network backbone including CloudFront, Elemental, and Perimeter Protection services, while also serving as the Vancouver site lead overseeing an office of 1,000+ software engineers. With 20+ years in software engineering and leadership, he previously spent nine years at Microsoft as a Group Program Manager for Exchange Server and Office 365, and held technical leadership roles at Sophos, ActiveState Software, and Mindquake Software. A champion of the Vancouver tech ecosystem, he has been instrumental in Amazon's expansion in Western Canada and serves as a mentor in the BC Tech Association's Dragons 1-on-1 Mentorship program.
Jonathan Vlock is Vice President of Marketing, Demand Generation and Enablement at Amazon Web Services (AWS), bringing over two decades of B2B marketing leadership across cloud, cybersecurity, ESG, and enterprise technology. Before AWS, he held senior marketing roles at PwC, S&P Global, NetApp, and Wipro, and earlier co-founded Cooking Planit, a patented personal cooking assistant app. A Cornell MBA, Jeet Kune Do practitioner, and self-styled 'mad scientist' of integrated marketing, Vlock blends data-driven pipeline strategy with a restless entrepreneurial streak.
Liza Magee is the Chief of Staff for the Consumer Chief Marketing Officer & Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where she sits at the intersection of billion-dollar marketing strategy and cross-functional execution. With a career built at the nexus of tech and consumer behavior, she has led marketing across Microsoft's education division, Bing, MSN, and now the company's global consumer marketing apparatus. Before Microsoft, she honed product instincts at Amazon as a Senior Product Manager in Merchandising. Based in Seattle, Magee is a strategic operator whose career tracks the evolution of digital marketing from keyword portfolios to AI-powered consumer experiences.
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Fang Cheng is a serial founder who builds AI that actually answers the question. She co-founded Touchco (acquired by Amazon, became the Kindle), founded Linc (acquired by Capacity in 2024), served as SVP & GM of Retail CX Automation at Capacity, and is now building a stealth venture focused on agentic commerce for restricted wallets.
Susan Cubillos is the Senior Executive Business Partner to the CEO and CTO at Twitch, the live streaming giant headquartered in San Francisco. She operates at the hinge of the company, where calendar physics meets strategy, translating intent into motion for the people running one of the world's largest interactive video platforms.
CommerceIQ is a Mountain View-based AI platform that helps the world's largest consumer brands - Nestle, Colgate, Whirlpool, Kellogg's, Bayer - grow profitably on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart and 450+ other retailers by automating retail media, digital shelf, supply chain and sales operations with AI agents.
Tim Craycroft is a veteran technology executive who spent over two decades building the plumbing behind digital advertising. After 14 years at Amazon - where he helped architect their multi-billion dollar ads business and opened the Boulder ad tech office - he joined Google in 2020 as VP & GM of Google Advertising, overseeing YouTube, apps, and display ads. In September 2025, he took center stage at the Google ad tech antitrust remedies trial, testifying about internal analyses (Project Sunday and Project Monday) that explored divesting AdX and DFP. He's now joined Flywheel as Senior VP of Engineering. An early cloud storage pioneer who co-founded i-drive.com in the late 1990s, Craycroft brings Dartmouth computer science roots and a Boulder, Colorado sensibility - equal parts algorithm and altitude.
Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Don Johnson is the CEO of Docker, Inc., the company behind the world's most widely used container platform. Appointed in February 2025, he brings decades of hyperscale cloud infrastructure experience from founding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and serving as a founding technical leader at Amazon Web Services. A builder at heart who spent years constructing the plumbing of the modern cloud, Johnson now leads Docker's mission to make software development frictionless, secure, and AI-ready for the world's 20 million developers.
Kurt Beidler is the Chief Executive Officer of Quizlet, the AI-powered learning platform used by hundreds of millions of students worldwide. Appointed in July 2024, he brings 17 years of Amazon experience scaling subscription businesses - most notably growing Amazon Kids+ into the world's largest youth-focused subscription service and launching Kindle into China. Under his leadership, Quizlet has grown revenue to $139M annually while aggressively integrating AI tools including a native ChatGPT app integration, lecture recording features, and an OpenAI partnership aimed at keeping students' entire study workflow on one platform.
Dr. Srinivasan 'KG' Ganapathi is the founder and CEO of Vimaan Robotics, a Silicon Valley AI company deploying computer vision and machine learning to bring 100% inventory accuracy to warehouses. A serial entrepreneur with nearly 50 patents spanning magnetic recording, MEMS sensors, and supply chain digitization, Ganapathi previously founded Fidelica Microsystems (acquired by Lenovo) and Verreon Inc. (acquired by Qualcomm). With Vimaan, he is transforming how the world's largest 3PLs, retailers, and Fortune 10 companies track goods from dock to shelf - and became the first computer vision startup to receive investment from Amazon's $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund.
Hubert Thieblot is a French-born entrepreneur and General Partner at Founders, Inc. (f.inc), a San Francisco-based venture fund and community campus occupying 42,000 sq ft at Fort Mason. He built Curse, Inc. - a gaming media empire with 30M+ monthly visitors - from a World of Warcraft fan site he started as a teenager in Paris, grew it into an Inc. 500 company, and sold it to Twitch (Amazon) in 2016. After serving as VP of Emerging Markets and Mobile at Twitch, he joined Founders, Inc. to back early-stage founders tackling hard problems in AI/ML, hardware, web3, AR/VR, and other frontier tech sectors.
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.
Libby Roin is the CEO of Goodreads, the world's largest social reading platform with over 150 million members. A Boston College English major turned MIT Sloan MBA, she spent nearly a decade building her way up through Goodreads product teams before taking the top job in January 2022. Along the way she founded Polk Street Press, a children's interactive app studio, and raised over $10 million for Teach for America. She grew up one of seven kids in Oklahoma - daughter of a police officer and a schoolteacher - and brings a pragmatic, community-first sensibility to one of the internet's most beloved book destinations.
Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Mike Sha is the CEO and co-founder of Tandems (formerly SigFig), a San Francisco-based fintech company that builds AI-native software for financial institutions. Starting as a contributor to Amazon Prime's invention and the Amazon Visa Card launch, Sha co-founded Wikinvest in 2006 with Parker Conrad, which evolved into SigFig and then Tandems - now powering over $60 billion in assets across 2 million client accounts at firms like Wells Fargo, UBS, Scotiabank, Citizens Financial, and New York Life.
Siddharth Sinha is the Co-founder and CEO of Dresma, an AI-powered visual content platform that helps ecommerce sellers create studio-quality product images and marketing content at scale. A fourth-generation entrepreneur from Bihar, India, with a Cornell BS and INSEAD MBA, he co-founded Dresma in 2019 alongside his wife Nishka and partner Abhishek Kirti. Dresma's flagship product DoMyShoot has processed over 9 million ecommerce photos for 50,000+ online brands - reducing content creation costs by 85% and cutting time-to-market by 90%. The company raised a $3M seed round in 2021 from SVQuad, Inventus Capital Partners, and Thinkuvate.
Shari Doherty is the Marketing Partner for Crypto at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads brand and marketing for one of the most influential crypto investment firms on the planet. With two decades of marketing and communications experience spanning Danger Inc., Google Android, Uber, Atomico, Essential, and Amazon Smart Home, she has helped define how some of tech's most iconic products tell their stories. At a16z crypto, she's doing it again - this time for the next internet.
Nick Weaver is the co-founder and CEO of eero, the company that reimagined home Wi-Fi with the world's first whole-home mesh networking system. A Stanford-trained engineer turned McKinsey consultant turned venture capitalist, Weaver quit Menlo Ventures in 2014 to fix the router - a problem he'd been wrestling with since he was a kid setting up networks for neighbors in Chicago. He sold $2.5 million of product in two weeks, landed in 600 Best Buy stores within two years, and delivered eero to Amazon in a $97 million acquisition in 2019. He now leads eero as VP of Devices & Services under Amazon, where the mission is unchanged: make the technology in homes just work.
John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists. The man who backed Google and Amazon with early checks, taught the world OKRs through his bestselling book 'Measure What Matters', and bet $1.1 billion on Stanford to build the Doerr School of Sustainability. A Rice-trained electrical engineer turned Intel salesman turned legendary VC, Doerr has spent 45+ years turning missionary founders into category-defining companies - and is now directing that same energy toward solving the climate crisis.
Emmett Shear co-founded Twitch in 2007 and spent 12 years as its CEO, growing it from a scrappy live-streaming experiment into the dominant gaming and creator platform that Amazon acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2014. After a surreal 72-hour stint as interim CEO of OpenAI during the Sam Altman board crisis in November 2023, he pivoted to founding Softmax, an a16z-backed AI alignment startup working on 'organic alignment' - a biology-inspired approach to making AI systems genuinely care about their communities rather than merely comply with rules.
Pieter Abbeel is one of the world's leading AI and robotics researchers, a professor at UC Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-founder of Covariant. His pioneering work in robot learning through apprenticeship learning and reinforcement learning has shaped modern robotics. His students have co-founded over a dozen AI companies including OpenAI, Perplexity, and Physical Intelligence. In 2024, he joined Amazon to lead frontier model research, and in December 2025 was appointed head of Amazon's LLM efforts within the AGI organization.
Bart Swanson is an advisor to Horizons Ventures and serves on the boards of Zoom, Impossible Foods, and numerous transformative technology companies. With more than fifteen years in tech as an entrepreneur, mentor, and executive, he helped lead Amazon's international expansion (1998-2001), served as COO of Badoo, and chaired Summly before its acquisition by Yahoo. A Wharton MBA and Lauder Institute Fellow, Swanson champions impact investing - every founder he backs signs a legally binding Impact Pact. His 2024 portfolio generated over $400 million in wealth creation, with $342 million going to BIPOC and women founders, while creating 436 jobs at a 48% compound annual growth rate.
Victoria Treyger is a Senior Venture Partner at Felicis Ventures who spent 17+ years as a hands-on operator before crossing over to VC. She scaled Kabbage from a startup to nearly $300M in revenue across six straight years of 100%+ growth before its $850M acquisition by American Express in 2020. At Felicis, she backs fintech, SMB software, and health tech founders with the tactical depth of someone who has actually done the job.