Women In Product is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and global community of more than 30,000 women and non-binary product professionals. Founded in 2016 out of a casual networking event in Silicon Valley, it equips members to thrive as builders, leaders, and changemakers through an annual conference, local chapters, leadership programs, peer mentorship, and online resources - with a particular focus on closing the gender gap at the mid-career, senior, and executive levels where it is widest.
Justine Davis is the VP of Developer Marketing, Community, and Developer Relations at ServiceNow, where she oversees a developer community of more than one million members and shapes the narrative of ServiceNow as a global developer platform. With roots in digital marketing and a career arc that ran through Hotwire, Atlassian (over nine years), and Postman, she has built a reputation for translating complex technical products into language that resonates with developers and enterprise buyers alike. Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, she is known for her candid takes on developer marketing, her emphasis on showing rather than telling, and her belief that DevRel and Developer Marketing are two sides of the same coin.
Jim Hori is President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley, one of the largest YMCA associations in the United States. He took the helm in June 2022 after 22 years at Silicon Valley Bank, where he served as Managing Director and led the SVB Foundation for 19 years. A Fresno native and Fresno State graduate, Hori spent more than a decade on the YMCA board before being asked to run the place.
John T. Ehrbar is a career YMCA leader who, starting January 26, 2026, takes the helm as President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley after six years running YMCA Buffalo Niagara. He has spent over two decades inside the Y movement, climbing from a high school Leaders Club kid in northeast Ohio to running an 80-million-dollar nonprofit serving 2,300 staff across the Bay Area.
Arena is a San Francisco-based audience engagement platform that turns publishers' and brands' own websites into social-network-like communities. Through live blogs, group chats, comments, AI-powered content feeds and audience analytics, Arena helps over 20,000 organizations - including Fox Sports - keep readers on-site, collect first-party data and monetize attention they used to give away to social platforms.
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.
Kindred is a members-only home-swapping network that turns primary residences into a credit-based travel platform. Founded in 2021 by Opendoor alums Justine Palefsky and Tasneem Amina, the San Francisco company has grown to nearly 300,000 members across 150+ cities and raised $125M in combined Series B/C in February 2026 to scale a 'third way' alternative to hotels and short-term rentals.
Make: is the media and events company that gave the maker movement its name. Founded in 2005 by Dale Dougherty inside O'Reilly Media, it publishes Make: magazine, runs Maker Faire events around the world, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. After a 2019 shutdown, Dougherty restructured the business as Make: Community LLC and kept it going.
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Sherman Ye is the Founder and CEO of NebulaGraph (vesoft Inc.), the company behind one of the world's most scalable open-source distributed graph databases. After engineering stints at Facebook and Ant Financial — where he worked directly on graph database infrastructure — Ye founded vesoft in 2018 to bring enterprise-grade graph database technology to a market hungry for connected-data insights. NebulaGraph can handle trillions of edges with millisecond latency, and counts Tencent, Meituan, and JD Digits among its users. Ye led the company through a $8M pre-A round in 2020 and a Series A in 2022 led by Jeneration Capital, while pioneering the GraphRAG concept that merges knowledge graphs with large language models.
Tasneem Amina is the Co-Founder and President of Kindred, a members-only home-swapping platform that lets people exchange homes without exchanging money. Born in South India and immigrated to the US at 14, she studied Biology at the University of Chicago before pivoting into finance and tech. After stints at Goldman Sachs, Yik Yak, and Stitch Fix, she became a product leader at Opendoor - where she grew a business line from $0 to ~$300M in annual volume. She co-founded Kindred in 2021 with fellow Opendoor alum Justine Palefsky after a week locked in a cabin whiteboarding ideas. Kindred has since grown to 300,000+ members and 300,000+ homes across 150+ cities, raising $148M total with a $125M round in February 2026 led by Index Ventures.
Manara is a Silicon Valley-backed edtech company training and placing software engineers, AI and cloud talent across the Middle East and North Africa. Through cohort-based learning, mentorship from senior engineers at companies like Google and Meta, and partnerships with AWS, Manara has trained over 300,000 learners and helped hundreds land jobs at global tech firms.
ZeeMee is a higher education technology platform that bridges the gap between college-bound students and institutions through authentic community and behavioral intelligence. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, ZeeMee gives students a social space to showcase their personalities beyond transcripts while giving colleges AI-powered insights that predict enrollment intent with up to 98% accuracy. With 2.6M+ active student users, 300+ institutional partners, and a 4.7-star app rating, ZeeMee has quietly become one of the most influential platforms in college enrollment - helping students find roommates, discover campus culture, and connect with admissions teams before ever setting foot on campus.
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Katy Keim is the Chief Executive Officer of LeanData, the leading revenue orchestration platform trusted by over 1,000 B2B companies. A marketing and go-to-market veteran with 20+ years across enterprise SaaS, she previously served as CMO of Lithium Technologies and CEO of LQ Digital before joining LeanData's board in 2021 and stepping into the CEO role in July 2025. Katy holds degrees from the University of Virginia (History) and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management (MBA, Marketing & Entrepreneurship), and has been recognized as an Inspirational Woman in Tech by We Are Tech Women.
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a French neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur who burned out at Google, taught herself to code, and built Ness Labs into a 100,000+ reader science-based learning community - all while completing a PhD at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) distills her philosophy: life is a series of experiments and you are the lead scientist. She is now a UKRI-funded postdoctoral researcher studying curiosity and ADHD at KCL, while publishing to 124,000+ Substack subscribers at Hypercurious.
Ashley Faus is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, a keynote speaker, Stanford instructor, and author of 'Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI' (Kogan Page, 2025). She's best known for the 'Content Playground' framework - rejecting the linear marketing funnel in favor of a non-linear, audience-driven content ecosystem. A former musical theater major turned B2B marketing strategist, she argues that trust is the one thing AI cannot automate, and has built a career proving it.
Rex Salisbury is the founder and solo general partner of Cambrian Ventures, a $20M early-stage fintech fund born out of one of the largest fintech founder communities in the US. A former Merrill Lynch banker turned bootcamp-trained software engineer turned a16z partner, Rex built his reputation by running grassroots fintech meetups for years before a single dollar of fund capital. His Cambrian newsletter reaches 20,000 subscribers, his founder-only Slack has 1,100+ members, and his Fund I achieved a ~50% seed-to-Series A graduation rate against a 15.4% industry average. Early backer of Deel, now a $10B+ decacorn.
Matt Ragland is a creator-economy builder, founder of HeyCreator, and host of The HeyCreator Show podcast. He went from camp counselor to ConvertKit employee #5, to full-time creator, building a 100,000+ audience across YouTube, newsletters, and social media. Through HeyCreator and Good People Digital, he helps creators turn their expertise into sustainable businesses via courses, communities, and newsletters. Known for radical transparency, outdoor adventures, and a systems-first approach to creative work.
Sophie Buonassisi is SVP of Marketing at GTMfund and GTMnow, where she leads a 58,000+ subscriber newsletter and media brand at the intersection of go-to-market strategy, venture capital, and B2B SaaS. A criminology graduate turned growth marketer, she spent 4.5 years as the first GTM hire at Spiralyze before standing out from 400+ applicants to join GTMfund. She transformed the GTM Newsletter into GTMnow - a full media brand that includes the reacquired Sales Hacker podcast (622+ episodes), a private Inner Circle community, and editorial content reaching 50,000+ founders, GTM leaders, and investors globally.
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and media creator who built The Hustle from zero to 1.5 million subscribers before selling it to HubSpot for ~$27 million. He co-hosts My First Million, a top-25 business podcast with Shaan Puri that pulls over 1 million downloads a month, and co-founded Hampton, a vetted peer community for high-revenue founders now generating ~$8M ARR. Equal parts hustler and storyteller, Parr turned a Nashville hot dog stand into an eight-figure media empire and keeps reinventing what it means to build in public.
Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and business philosopher who helps small business owners build sustainable, humane companies. Formerly known as Tara Gentile, she spent a decade building a formidable reputation before reclaiming her own name in 2018. She is the founder of What Works, a digital platform and podcast downloaded over 2 million times, co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, and author of books including 'What Works' (Wiley). Drawing on feminist theory, critical sociology, and media studies, she challenges conventional business wisdom with intellectual rigor and a sharp editorial voice.
Luna House is Cascais' most-loved coliving and coworking hub — a boutique B&B with nine private rooms in summer, a digital nomad village with community programming in winter. Founded in 2022 by Olena (Lena) Matveieva, it offers coworking for 25 people with 120mb/sec fibre, an event studio, team workation packages, and a resident dog named Luna who consistently out-reviews the human staff.