freemium
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Timur Valishev and the office that could wait
A server under his desk. A customer list drawn from his phonebook. How JivoChat co-founder Timur Valishev turned a modest start into a business that could choose its buyer.
Derek Ting
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.
Tugce Erten
Tugce Erten is a Partner on the Growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads pricing and packaging strategy for portfolio companies. Drawing on a career spent inside high-growth tech companies - Atlassian, PagerDuty, and Freshworks - she has become one of Silicon Valley's go-to voices on B2B SaaS monetization, generative AI pricing, and the art of bundling. Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, she brings an economist's rigor (NERA Economic Consulting, Edgeworth Economics) to the distinctly human problem of what something is worth.
Sean Ellis
Sean Ellis coined the term 'growth hacking' in 2010, invented the 40% product/market fit test, and served as the first marketer at Dropbox and Eventbrite. Founder of GrowthHackers.com (1.8M members) and co-author of 'Hacking Growth' (750,000+ copies, 16 languages), he is arguably the single most influential figure in the modern growth discipline - the person who gave the industry its name, its frameworks, and its operating system.
Elena Verna
Elena Verna is one of Silicon Valley's most respected growth operators - a former SVP of Growth at SurveyMonkey, interim CMO at Miro, and current Head of Growth at Lovable (the AI app-builder that hit $200M ARR in under a year). Known for popularizing Product-Led Growth frameworks, she runs 'Elena's Growth Scoop' newsletter with 89,000+ subscribers and a 40% open rate, and is a Partner at Reforge. She immigrated from Russia at 14 with $100 and no English, and has built a career on the principle: 'I will figure it out.'
Wes Bush
Wes Bush is the founder and CEO of ProductLed, the world's leading education company for product-led growth (PLG). Author of two foundational PLG books - 'Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself' (2019) and 'The Product-Led Playbook' (2024) - Bush has helped 400+ SaaS companies collectively generate over $1 billion in self-serve revenue. After being fired from Vidyard for advocating product-led strategies over sales-led ones, he turned that conviction into a global movement, building a 15,000+ member community and coaching SaaS founders to scale from $100K ARR to 8+ figures.