Pierre-Olivier Lepage is the CEO and co-founder of Cruisebound, a New York-based digital-first cruise booking platform he launched in 2022 after struggling to book his own first cruise online. A Polytechnique Montréal engineering graduate who earned dual MIT master's degrees in Transportation and Operations Research, Lepage previously built operations at Rocket Travel (a Booking Holdings company) and consulted at McKinsey before betting that the $66B cruise industry — where 80% of bookings still flow through travel agents — was ripe for a tech-native overhaul. Cruisebound has since raised $37.8M in total funding, serves customers averaging nine years younger than typical cruisers, and routes 42% of support queries through AI, positioning itself as the fastest-growing national online cruise agency.
Mohammad Danish Siddiqui is a senior frontend engineer at Intuit in Milton, Ontario, who has spent more than a decade shipping web and mobile products across Pakistan, the UAE, and Canada. He calls himself a software engineer by career, an aspiring data scientist by education, and a game developer by passion. He built travel platforms at Seera Group, joined Wave HQ after crossing the world from Dubai, open-sourced a NativeScript toast library used by other developers, and writes book notes and career advice for engineers on the side.
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.
Samantha Mah is VP of Strategic Partnerships and Growth at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company headquartered in Santa Clara. Based in Toronto, she leads the charge on unlocking organizational potential by eliminating manual, repetitive work through intelligent digital workflows. With a Six Sigma Master Black Belt background and a career that spans Xerox and ServiceNow, she brings process-excellence discipline to the art of enterprise partnerships. She also serves in the Office of the CDIO as Senior Director, Customer Advocate - bridging the gap between technology capability and human impact.
Stacie Owen is Vice President of Corporate Relations at Microsoft, based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. With a legal background from her time as a lawyer at Kronis, Rotszain, Margles & Cappel in Toronto, she has transitioned into a senior executive role at one of the world's most influential technology companies - overseeing corporate relations functions for the tech giant that employs over 228,000 people and generates over $281 billion in annual revenue.
Hussein Fazal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Super.com, a financial super app serving everyday Americans with savings, credit building, travel bookings, and cashback rewards. Previously, he co-founded AdParlor, a Facebook ad optimization platform acquired by AdKnowledge in 2011 after scaling to $100M+ in revenue. At Super.com (formerly SnapTravel), he has grown the platform to 30+ million users and $200M+ ARR, raising over $261M in total venture funding, with backing from Steph Curry, Harley Finkelstein, and institutional investors including iNovia Capital and Lion Capital.
Jeremy Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that connects corporate retail strategy to the frontline store employees executing it. A self-taught developer who skipped university to build a web design company at 16, he previously co-founded MightyHive (acquired by S4 Capital for $150M) and spent five years as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo. Based in West Vancouver, BC, he built Zipline alongside CEO Melissa Wong to serve over 170,000 retail employees across brands like Gap, LUSH, Sephora, and LEGO.
May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack enterprise generative AI platform valued at $1.9 billion. Born in rural Lebanon and raised in Canada after her family immigrated when she was eight, she studied Economics and Near Eastern Languages at Harvard before stints at Lehman Brothers and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. She co-founded Writer in 2020 with Waseem AlShikh - making a contrarian bet to build proprietary LLMs (the Palmyra family) 18 months before ChatGPT - and has grown it into a platform serving 250+ enterprise clients including Uber, Salesforce, L'Oreal, and Intuit, raising $326M in total funding.
Piyush Rajput is the Co-Founder and SVP of Engineering at Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform he helped build from the ground up in 2014. A civil engineering graduate from IIT Delhi, he pivoted to software and has spent 15+ years at the intersection of engineering and product - now overseeing the technology behind a platform serving 2 million+ employees at companies like Moderna, Penske, and the NHS. Simpplr has raised $139M+ in total funding and reached a Series D under his technical leadership.
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, and one of the most widely read and debated public intellectuals of his generation. Known for his books '12 Rules for Life' and 'Beyond Order' - which together sold over 7 million copies - and a YouTube channel with over 8.8 million subscribers, he blends Jungian psychology, evolutionary biology, and Biblical narrative into a framework for personal responsibility and meaning. He co-founded Peterson Academy in 2024, an online education platform with 72,000 students, and hosts 'The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast,' which has surpassed 150 million downloads.
Noel Miller is a Canadian-American comedian, YouTuber, podcaster, rapper, and studio founder who built a media empire from a web development day job. Best known as co-founder of the Tiny Meat Gang (TMG) comedy-rap duo with Cody Ko, Miller now runs TMG Studios solo as its sole owner — a podcast network boasting 300M+ YouTube views and 175M+ audio downloads. With 3.8 million combined YouTube subscribers, a sold-out stand-up career, and a debut comedy special on YouTube, Miller has carved out a lane where internet culture commentary meets genuine artistic ambition.
Peter McKinnon is a Toronto-based photographer, cinematographer, and YouTube creator with nearly 6 million subscribers, known for his cinematic visual style and fast-paced, coffee-fueled tutorials. A former magician and Ellusionist Production Manager turned self-taught filmmaker, he built one of YouTube's most distinctive photography channels from a spare bedroom, won the 2019 Shorty Award for Breakout YouTuber of the Year and the 2020 Streamy Award for Cinematography, and had his landscape photography minted on official Canadian currency by the Royal Canadian Mint. Beyond tutorials, he has launched his own multi-tool for photographers, multiple Lightroom preset packs, a signature coffee blend with James Coffee Co., and the 'Pete's Pirate Life' EDC brand.
Imane Anys, known globally as Pokimane, is a Moroccan-Canadian content creator who turned a $250 secondhand PC and a Platinum-rank League of Legends account into one of the largest streaming presences on the internet. With over 9.4 million Twitch followers, 6.6 million YouTube subscribers, and a growing portfolio spanning snack brands, talent management, and podcasting, she has spent more than a decade redefining what it means to be a professional gamer - on her own terms.
Verdi is a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, retrofit-ready irrigation automation systems for orchards, vineyards, and specialty crop farms. Founded in 2020 by UBC Engineering Physics graduates Arthur Chen and Roman Kozak, the company makes wireless IoT controllers and soil moisture sensors that install in minutes on existing irrigation infrastructure. Its AI-powered platform gives farmers real-time monitoring, leak detection, variable rate irrigation, and fertigation control from a mobile app - delivering documented results of up to 70% water savings, 90% labor reduction, and 10-20% yield increases. Backed by $9.5M total funding including a $6.5M CAD seed round in May 2025, Verdi counts E&J Gallo, Arterra Wines, and UC Davis among its customers, with 16,000+ acres automated across North America.
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Joe Zarrehparvar is the President and CEO of Fresche Solutions, a Montreal-based IT advisory and modernization company specializing in IBM i (AS/400) systems serving 22,000+ global clients. A 30-year technology veteran who built his career at Microsoft, Juniper Networks, and Wicresoft, Zarrehparvar took the helm at Fresche in May 2023 and has since driven a wave of AI-powered modernization tools, strategic partnerships with IBM, and a transition to subscription-based service models - all while championing a platform-neutral approach that lets clients modernize on their own terms.
Rowan Trollope is the CEO of Redis, the ubiquitous in-memory data platform powering real-time applications worldwide. A self-taught programmer who started coding on a Commodore 64 at age 11, he brings over 30 years of technology leadership across consumer products, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and collaboration software. Before Redis, he quadrupled revenue at Five9 and spent years at Cisco reinventing its collaboration business. At Redis, he has repositioned the company from a beloved developer caching tool into a critical AI infrastructure layer, launching semantic caching (LangCache), acquiring real-time data platform Decodable, and steering a controversial but successful licensing pivot that he says has produced record growth.
Arthur Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Verdi, a Vancouver-based agtech company building affordable, wireless precision irrigation automation for specialty crop farmers. A first-generation Taiwanese-Canadian engineer, Chen studied Engineering Physics at UBC on a Schulich Leader Scholarship before launching Verdi from an academic capstone project in 2020. By 2025, Verdi's IoT platform operates on over 5,000 acres across North America, has saved more than 100 million liters of water, and raised $9.5 million in venture funding - making farm automation accessible to the 95% of growers who've never been able to afford it.
Seth Rosenberg is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, where he leads investments in fintech and AI from the firm's New York office. Before venture capital, he spent three years at Facebook as a product manager on Messenger - helping scale it from 200 million to over one billion monthly active users and launching its AI bot platform. Before that, he worked in tech and media investment banking at Goldman Sachs. At Greylock, he has championed an influential 'Product-Led AI' investing framework and backed companies including Ramp, Tome (now Lightfield), Wisetack, PayJoy, and Roblox.
Neha Khera is a veteran early-stage investor with 13+ years in venture capital, known for co-founding 500 Startups Canada and generating a personal 20x track record. As General Partner at 2048 Ventures, she has led investments in 60+ companies including unicorns Applyboard and Mejuri. A self-described technologist, she holds an Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from Ivey, and has been a tireless advocate for women in STEM through initiatives like Girls in Tech Toronto and a TEDx Women conference.
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners with over 16 years backing enterprise AI, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS companies. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate and Wharton MBA, he has been the first institutional check behind companies like Netskope (Nasdaq: NTSK, IPO 2025) and Navan, and was on the Moveworks board from Day 1 through its $2.85B acquisition by ServiceNow in 2025. A Canadian with Ismaili-East African roots, fluent in French, and a self-taught ice hockey player, Arif blends deep technical fluency with a founder-first philosophy - often describing himself as part coach, part psychologist to the entrepreneurs he backs. As of early 2026, he is stepping back from day-to-day Lightspeed duties to launch a new early-stage investment firm.
Matt Gray is a Canadian-born serial entrepreneur and founder of Founder OS, a company teaching founders to build personal brands and scalable businesses through organic content and repeatable systems. He previously co-founded Bitmaker (Canada's first major coding bootcamp, acquired in an 8-figure deal) and Herb (world's largest cannabis community, 14M users, $14M revenue). Today he runs a $13M+/year portfolio working ~4 hours a day, has 2.5M+ followers across platforms, and is known as 'The Systems Guy' in the creator economy.
Justin Jackson is a Canadian entrepreneur and co-founder of Transistor.fm, a bootstrapped podcast hosting platform he built from $33 in first-month revenue to over $1M ARR with just his co-founder Jon Buda. He's a leading voice in the indie bootstrapping movement, author of 'Marketing for Developers', founder of the MegaMaker community, and an advocate for 'calm companies' that prioritize profit, freedom, and founder wellbeing over venture-scale growth.
Alex Danco is a Canadian writer, thinker, and now Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he shapes the firm's editorial voice. A former neuroscientist turned ska musician turned VC associate turned Shopify product director, Danco spent five years at Shopify leading merchant financing and blockchain initiatives before joining a16z in August 2025. He is best known for his newsletter Dancoland and foundational essays including 'Debt Is Coming,' 'The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class,' and the 'Emergent Layers' framework - works that apply Carlota Perez, René Girard, and Jane Jacobs to the inner workings of Silicon Valley. He writes approximately 5,000 words per week and is a descendant of Belgian polar explorer Émile Danco, after whom Danco Island in Antarctica is named.
Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copyhackers and the originator of conversion copywriting — a discipline she coined in 2011. Over nearly two decades, she has trained 70,000+ professionals and consulted for brands from bootstrapped startups to Fortune 100 enterprises including AWS, Canva, and Shopify. Her first traditionally published book, The Copyselling System, is set for release in July 2026 via BenBella/Simon & Schuster.
Niraj Dawar is a Professor Emeritus of Marketing at Ivey Business School (University of Western Ontario) and one of the most influential marketing strategists working today. Author of TILT: Shifting Your Strategy from Products to Customers (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) - a bestseller named Best Business Book of 2014 in Marketing by strategy+business - he built his reputation arguing that competitive advantage has permanently migrated downstream, from products to customer relationships. His 1994 Journal of Marketing paper on 'Marketing Universals' (with Philip Parker) has over 1,000 citations. After retiring to emeritus status, he pivoted to applying brand strategy to nations through GeoStrategix and the Nation Brand Research Initiative, publishing in the South China Morning Post as recently as March 2026 on US-China soft power competition in Southeast Asia.
Ross Simmonds is a Halifax-based content marketing strategist, agency founder, and author whose core thesis - create once, distribute forever - has reshaped how B2B brands think about content ROI. As CEO of Foundation Marketing (a ~$3.8M revenue agency serving Canva, Snowflake, and Bitly) and founder of Distribution.ai, he operates at the intersection of data-driven creativity and systematic amplification. Ranked #3 globally by BuzzSumo among content marketers, he has generated over $110M in new business for clients and built a following of 75,000+ newsletter subscribers.
Yasser Elsaid is an Egyptian-born software engineer and entrepreneur who bootstrapped Chatbase - an AI agent platform - from zero to $9M ARR with 18 people, all without raising a dollar of VC funding. He launched to 16 Twitter followers in February 2023, the tweet went viral, he failed two university classes, turned down a $1M acquisition offer for his source code three months in, and kept building. Now based in San Francisco on an O-1 'Alien of Extraordinary Ability' visa, he's declared 2026 the year Chatbase forgets it's bootstrapped.
Scott Vinkle is a Toronto-based Accessibility Specialist at Shopify with over 12 years of experience making digital products usable for everyone. Holding the IAAP CPWA certification - one of the highest credentials in web accessibility - he co-leads Shopify's accessibility guild, contributes to W3C ARIA standards, speaks at international conferences, and publishes practical accessibility guidance through his newsletter, blog, and Medium. He's the rare specialist who bridges the gap between compliance checkbox and genuine inclusive design.