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.
Netlify is the platform that taught the modern web to ship fast. Founded in 2014 by Mathias Biilmann and Christian Bach, it pioneered the Jamstack architecture and a Git-driven workflow that turned every push into a production deploy. Today, more than five million developers and companies like Twilio, Unilever, and Peloton run on Netlify's global edge network - and the company is reinventing itself again around AI agents that ship code on behalf of humans.
Mathias (Matt) Biilmann Christensen is a Danish-born entrepreneur who went from music journalist to Silicon Valley CEO. He co-founded Netlify in 2014, coined the term 'Jamstack' that reshaped modern web development, and most recently introduced 'Agent Experience (AX)' — the idea that software must be designed not just for humans but for the AI agents that increasingly act on their behalf. Netlify now serves 35 million+ websites and raised $212M total including a $105M Series D in 2021.
Qwilt builds the Open Edge Cloud - a federated CDN embedded inside service provider networks (Verizon, BT, Vodafone, Comcast, Telecom Italia and dozens more) that pushes video, software, and real-time applications closer to the end user than any traditional cloud. Founded in 2010 by ex-Cisco and ex-Juniper engineers, it operates 2,196 edge nodes across 38 countries on 6 continents with 150+ Tbps of edge capacity, and is the leading commercial champion of the Open Caching standard inside the Streaming Video Technology Alliance.
Rafael Umann is the Founder and CEO of Azion Technologies, a global edge computing platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. A serial entrepreneur who founded his first company - an ISP - at age 13, he went on to build and exit multiple startups before founding Azion in 2011. Under his leadership, Azion has grown into a recognized leader in edge computing, serving 45 of the top 50 Latin American e-commerces, processing over 10 billion monthly financial transactions, and winning awards from Santander X, Frost & Sullivan, and GigaOm. A Forbes Technology Council member and open-source contributor whose Linux kernel work powered the world's largest point-to-point wireless network, Umann is one of the most prominent voices on edge computing's role in the future of the internet.
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that powers roughly 20% of all web traffic worldwide. A recovering lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, Prince built Cloudflare from a Harvard Business School business plan competition entry into a publicly traded company with a market cap in the tens of billions. Equally at home discussing BGP routing and content moderation philosophy, he is widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures shaping how the internet actually works - for better or for worse, depending on who you ask.