Rob Shilkin is Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google, overseeing one of the world's most complex corporate communications functions. A former antitrust lawyer from Australia who trained at Clayton Utz and Mallesons Stephen Jaques, Shilkin brings rare legal-policy fluency to Google's communications challenges - including antitrust litigation, AI debates, content moderation, and online advertising policy. His team handles approximately 2,000 issues per year. He took overall leadership of Google's communications in 2023, reporting to Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill, and has been recognized in Provoke Media's Influence 100 2025 rankings.
Tania Brown is an ACCA-qualified executive and entrepreneur who serves as Area Vice President of APAC Strategic Customer Engagements (Elevate) at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company. A digital and accounting leader with roots in venture capital, tech startups, and real estate, she has built a career spanning Brisbane, London, Melbourne, Singapore, and Sydney. Alongside her corporate career, she co-founded Jacq Leigh, a women's leather laptop bag brand launched in 2019 after noticing a gap in the market for functional, stylish bags designed for corporate women.
Anita Batho is the Co-Founder and Principal at Torch (torch.com.au), a boutique brand strategy and innovation consultancy based in Sydney, Australia that has illuminated brand futures for blue-chip clients since 1999. Drawing on a career spanning consumer goods giants Unilever (Best Foods) and ICI Paints, and senior roles at Kantar, Anita built Torch into a respected agency known for immersive consumer research, bespoke brand workshops, and commercially grounded innovation work for clients including Arnott's, Telstra, PepsiCo, A2 Milk, Mercedes-Benz, and Moët Hennessy.
Jon 'Irish' Hawkins is an Australian Defence Force veteran of 25 years, SAS-trained officer, and the founder of Omni Executive - one of Australia's fastest-growing sovereign defence companies. Starting from an idea at his kitchen table in 2012, he built Omni into a 400+ person operation spanning aerospace, consulting, security, maritime and vetting, with around $100 million in annual turnover. A fierce advocate for truly Australian-owned defence capability, he stepped back from the CEO role in February 2026 to serve as Chair of Omni's Board.
Josiah Ong is a Senior Deal Desk Analyst at Mixpanel, the San Francisco-based product analytics platform. A National University of Singapore graduate with First Class Honours in Business Administration, he brings over five years of deal desk and sales strategy expertise - spanning LinkedIn's Asia-Pacific channel partner network and Mixpanel's global commercial operations. Known for his advocacy around inclusion and awareness, Josiah combines analytical rigour with a genuine commitment to people and community.
Raef Sully is the CEO of Lilac Solutions, an Oakland-based company pioneering direct lithium extraction (DLE) technology using ceramic ion exchange beads. A structural engineer turned management consultant turned industrial executive, Sully brings 30+ years spanning tall buildings, the Australian Army Reserve, Bain & Company, and a decade running Nutrien's $10 billion nitrogen and phosphate division. He joined Lilac as COO in mid-2023 and ascended to CEO in February 2024 - the same month the company closed a $145 million Series C. Under his leadership, Lilac has achieved 87% lithium recovery at the Great Salt Lake, unveiled Gen 5 technology with 20x higher production rates, and signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement with Traxys North America targeting 50,000 tonnes of lithium product.
Peter Barrett is the Founder and General Partner of Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep tech venture firm managing over $1.2 billion across three funds. An Australian-born engineer turned investor, Barrett holds 100+ patents, gave Elon Musk one of his first jobs in the 1990s, and built the world's most popular IPTV platform at Microsoft before pivoting to backing founders working on problems that sit 'somewhere between improbable and impossible.' Playground Global's portfolio spans quantum computing, robotics, synthetic biology, and energy transition — representing Barrett's conviction that the computing and industrial revolutions are still ahead of us.
John McHutchison, AO, MD is the CEO and Chairman of Tune Therapeutics, a pioneering epigenome editing company based in Durham, NC. An internationally acclaimed hepatologist and drug developer, McHutchison spent nearly a decade at Gilead Sciences as Chief Scientific Officer, where he led the development of transformative hepatitis C cures used by over 3.2 million people worldwide, including Sovaldi and Harvoni. Now at Tune, he is steering the company's TEMPO epigenome editing platform toward a new era of precision medicine for chronic and complex diseases.
Kevin Gounden is the Chief Executive Officer of Buildkite, the CI/CD platform trusted by Airbnb, Uber, Shopify, Slack, and Canva to ship software at scale. Appointed in August 2025, he brings over two decades of experience founding and scaling SaaS ventures, most recently as Chief Product Officer at Lightcast and Randstad where he drove product strategy across 70+ countries. His mandate at Buildkite: lead the platform's next chapter at the intersection of AI and software delivery.
Michael Reid is the CEO and Executive Director of Megaport, a global Network-as-a-Service platform operating across roughly 1,000 data centers in 26 countries. A Brisbane-born aerospace engineer turned tech sales leader, Reid spent 15 years at Cisco - most recently as CRO of ThousandEyes, where he grew ARR by 2.4x and scaled the team from 150 to nearly 400 people. Since taking Megaport's helm in May 2023, he has led the company to its first-ever profit after tax (FY24), grown Customer Lifetime Value 50% year-on-year to $2.1 billion, and repositioned Megaport as the backbone for AI-era enterprise connectivity.
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Jeremy Liew is a legendary consumer venture capitalist and Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, best known as the first institutional investor in Snapchat — turning an $8.1M bet into nearly $2 billion at the 2017 IPO. Born in Singapore and raised in Perth, Australia, Liew competed at the International Math Olympiad alongside future Fields Medalist Terence Tao before pivoting to business. After stints at McKinsey, IAC, and AOL, he joined Lightspeed in 2006 as its first consumer specialist, backing Affirm, Bonobos, GIPHY, and Epic Games along the way. A 9-time Forbes Midas List honoree, he stepped back from new investments in 2021 — just before turning 50 — to preserve the family time COVID had unexpectedly given him.
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, the Australian graphic design platform that grew from a school yearbook tool built in her mother's living room to a US$42 billion company used by 220 million people across 190 countries. She survived 100+ investor rejections, learned kite-surfing purely to network with Silicon Valley VCs, and wore a $30 engagement ring while becoming one of the wealthiest women in tech - then pledged to give most of it away.
Peter Renton is one of fintech's original chroniclers - an Australian-born entrepreneur who turned a P2P lending hobby blog into LendIt, the world's largest fintech conference, and Fintech Nexus, a media empire reaching 225,000+ banking and fintech executives. After Fintech Nexus filed for Chapter 7 in 2024, he launched Renton & Co and continues hosting the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the longest-running one-on-one interview show in fintech, now past 628 episodes and 1 million downloads.
Rosé (Park Chae-young) is a New Zealand-born, Australian-raised South Korean singer-songwriter and main vocalist of BLACKPINK, one of the world's best-selling girl groups. Her 2024 collaboration 'APT.' with Bruno Mars became the best-selling global single of 2025 per IFPI, making her the first K-pop artist nominated for Grammy Record of the Year and Song of the Year, the first to win a Brit Award, and the first female K-pop act to crack the US Billboard Hot 100 top 3. Signed to The Black Label and Atlantic Records for her solo career, Rosé is simultaneously the most-followed K-pop solo artist on Instagram and a global fashion icon as YSL's first-ever global brand ambassador.
Sofia Isella is a Los Angeles-born, 21-year-old indie-pop musician crafting sharp, cinematic dark pop about womanhood, rage, and the absurdity of modern life. Classically trained on violin from age two and daughter of Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda, she grew up between Taiwan, Australia, and New Mexico before channeling her itinerant childhood into ferociously literary songwriting. Her 2023 viral breakout 'Hot Gum' (16M+ streams) led to opening for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium before 90,000 fans in August 2024, where Swift personally sent her a handwritten letter praising 'Everybody Supports Women.' By April 2026, Isella has released four EPs and surpassed 150 million worldwide streams, headlining sold-out shows across Europe and the US on her 'Her Desire, The Nemesis' tour.
Daniel Bourke is an Australian machine learning engineer, educator, and content creator who teaches over 230,000 students worldwide through the Zero to Mastery Academy. Operating under the brand 'mrdbourke', he built a self-designed AI education path from a film degree and zero coding experience, and now creates courses on PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Hugging Face. He co-founded Nutrify, an AI-powered food tracking app, with his brother Joshua, and published his debut novel 'Charlie Walks' in 2024. His newsletter 'Eat, Move, Learn, Make' blends personal philosophy with technical insight.
Huzaifa Zahoor is a Pakistani-Australian software engineer and co-founder of Meyka AI, an AI-powered stock research platform serving 3,000+ monthly users. With over 4 years of experience building financial technology systems, he bridges data engineering, machine learning, and product development to democratize access to sophisticated financial analysis tools for retail investors and traders worldwide.