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.
Assaf Resnick is the co-founder and CEO of BigPanda, an AI-powered IT operations platform valued at $1.2 billion. Born in Israel and raised in Silicon Valley, he spent six years as a principal investor at Sequoia Capital Israel before leaving to build BigPanda in 2012. After pivoting from ad-tech and surviving years of near-silence in the market, BigPanda found product-market fit with large enterprises and has raised over $330 million in total funding. Today the company leads the emerging category of agentic IT operations, helping enterprise teams automate the detection, investigation, and resolution of IT incidents.
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.
JT Giri is the CEO and Founder of nOps, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cloud cost optimization platform that helps companies manage and reduce their AWS spend. After discovering Amazon EC2 in beta in 2006 and spending years as a hands-on DevOps consultant, he co-founded nClouds in 2012 - which grew into an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. In 2017 he spun out nOps to productize the cloud management tooling he'd built internally. In August 2024, nOps secured a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners, with the platform now managing over $1.5 billion in AWS spend across a customer base that grew 450% in 18 months.
Nina Kuruvilla is co-founder of Daily.co, a San Francisco-based enterprise WebRTC platform that powers real-time voice and video for thousands of developers and enterprises. After co-founding Daily in 2016 through Y Combinator, she guided the company through 30x revenue growth during the pandemic and championed the open-sourcing of Pipecat - a vendor-neutral Python framework for building real-time voice and multimodal AI agents now used by NVIDIA, AWS, and thousands of startups worldwide. Her strategic bet: the infrastructure built for human-to-human video calls turns out to be exactly what voice AI agents need.
Venkat Thiruvengadam is the founder and CEO of DuploCloud, a no-code/low-code DevSecOps platform headquartered in San Jose, California. A founding member of Microsoft Azure's networking team, he wrote core parts of Azure's compute and network controller stack before building DuploCloud to bring hyperscale cloud automation - previously available only to giants like AWS and Microsoft - to mainstream enterprises. Under his leadership, DuploCloud has raised $52M in total funding (including a $32M Series B in 2023), grown ARR by 700% since 2021, and serves 100+ customers across healthcare, fintech, and enterprise software.
Florian Leibert is a German-born software engineer turned venture capitalist who co-founded 468 Capital, a Berlin-based VC firm managing $1.3 billion across 100+ technology companies. Before VC, he co-founded Mesosphere (later D2iQ), which raised $252M and built the infrastructure layer for companies like Apple, Netflix, and SAP - and before that, he was the engineer at Twitter who helped slay the Fail Whale by architecting the distributed systems that kept the platform from collapsing under its own weight.
Rob Whiteley is the CEO of Coder, an Austin-based enterprise platform for cloud development environments (CDEs) that lets engineering teams spin up fully-configured, browser-based dev environments in minutes. Appointed in May 2023, Whiteley drove 2x revenue growth in his first year, secured a $90M Series C led by KKR in April 2026, and has positioned Coder as the infrastructure layer for agentic AI coding workflows. Before Coder, he spent a decade at F5/NGINX as VP/GM of the NGINX product group and CMO, and earlier held executive marketing roles at Hedvig, Riverbed, and Forrester Research.
Bogomil Balkansky is a Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on investments in cloud infrastructure, developer tools, DevOps, observability, and enterprise SaaS. Born in Bulgaria after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he studied mathematics at Cornell University before earning an MBA from Stanford GSB. He spent eight years at VMware growing server virtualization revenue 10x and expanding the customer base from 5,000 to 300,000, was an early employee at Bebop (acquired by Google for $397M), then led go-to-market for Google Cloud's Recruiting Solutions. He joined Sequoia in 2020 and has backed companies including Vanta, Wiz, Temporal, Chainguard, Pydantic, and Mutiny. Known for his intuition-driven investment style and deep connections across the Bulgarian and Silicon Valley tech ecosystems.
Devdutt Yellurkar is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and Co-founding Partner at Propeller VC, a $100M ocean-climate tech fund. A former early Infosys employee who helped sell the offshore software model, and co-founder/CEO of Yantra Corporation (acquired by Sterling Commerce/IBM), Yellurkar has spent 15+ years as a venture investor backing iconic companies including Zendesk (first institutional investor), Airtable, and Postman. He was named to the Forbes Midas List in 2020, 2021, and 2022. His investing style blends deep operator empathy with a team-first philosophy forged on cricket pitches in India.
Amy Hurlbut is Executive Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where she leads the Hyperforce initiative - the company's next-generation public cloud infrastructure platform handling tens of billions of transactions daily. A Harvard and Stanford-trained engineer with over 35 years in tech, she spent 23 years at Echelon Corporation before joining Salesforce in 2013, rising steadily from Senior Director to EVP. Recognized by Girl Geek X as one of '60 Engineering Leaders to Watch in 2020,' she is a quiet force behind some of the most consequential infrastructure work in enterprise software.
Nicola Ballotta is an Italian engineering leader with 25+ years of internet industry experience, currently serving as Director of Cloud at Namecheap where he built EasyWP — one of the world's most affordable managed WordPress hosting platforms — from prototype to production. He is best known as the creator of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter that grew from zero to 30,000 subscribers in 18 months before being acquired by Refactoring in June 2024. The combined publication now reaches 120,000+ readers and serves a 900+ member private community of engineering leaders.
Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io, renowned SRE practitioner, co-author of 'Observability Engineering' (O'Reilly), and one of the most influential voices in the observability and platform engineering space. With 18+ years in software engineering spanning Google (11 years) and Honeycomb, she bridges deep technical expertise with fierce advocacy for labor rights, trans inclusion, and workplace equity. She led the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018, founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, and sits on the OpenTelemetry governance committee - all while speaking at every major SRE and DevOps conference on Earth.
Roy Rapoport is a veteran engineering leader and writer whose work has quietly reshaped how tech companies think about people, reliability, and operational culture. Best known for his two stints at Netflix (where he built Insight Engineering and its operational platform) and a stint at Slack, Roy popularized the Manager README format and authored influential frameworks on feedback, trust, and performance improvement. He writes on Medium about the subtler mechanics of leadership, raises goats in California, and insists he will never retire.