Dawn Klinghoffer is Vice President of HR Business Insights at Microsoft, where she leads people analytics for one of the world's largest technology companies. A mathematics major from Bucknell University who started as an actuary in Hartford, Connecticut, she joined Microsoft's fledgling people analytics team in 2003 and spent over 25 years turning HR data into strategic decisions. Her most recognized contribution: replacing the industry's standard 'employee engagement' metric with 'employee thriving' - a framework adopted by Microsoft in 2022 that has influenced HR practices globally and was published in Harvard Business Review.
Gusto is a cloud-based payroll, benefits, and HR platform built for small and medium-sized businesses. Founded in 2011 as ZenPayroll by Josh Reeves, Tomer London, and Edward Kim, the company has grown to serve over 500,000 businesses and recently crossed $1 billion in annual revenue. Gusto handles everything from payroll runs and tax filings to health insurance, 401(k) plans, and employee onboarding - replacing what used to require a patchwork of accountants, brokers, and spreadsheets with a single platform. The company also offers Gusto Embedded, a payroll API that lets other software platforms build payroll directly into their products. Valued at roughly $9.5 billion, Gusto remains private and is widely considered a leading IPO candidate in the HR tech space.
Joyce Salas is a Founder at Deel, the San Francisco-based global HR and payroll platform that has redefined how companies hire, pay, and manage international teams. Based in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, she brings a finance and accounting lens to one of the fastest-growing HR tech companies in the world - a company that has raised over $1.27 billion in funding, crossed $1 billion in annual revenue, and employs more than 8,400 people serving businesses in 150+ countries.
Every is an all-in-one back-office platform for startup founders, bundling free incorporation, business banking, corporate cards, treasury, payroll, HR, benefits, bookkeeping, and taxes into a single dashboard. Founded in 2021 by Rajeev Behera and Barry Peterson and headquartered in San Francisco, the company raised a $22.5M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2024 to keep replacing the patchwork of tools that consume founders' time.
Anne Foor is VP of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious deep-tech venture funds. She partners with founders across the portfolio to recruit exceptional talent for transformative companies - from AI labs to biotech startups. With stops at Uber, Afterpay/Square, Facebook, Apple, and Google, she has spent over a decade building the teams that build the future. She holds a B.A. in Intensive Psychology and Legal Studies from UC Santa Cruz and is known for operating at nearly twice the candidate volume of her peers.
Shali Peng is a Carried Interest Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. Operating within a16z's People Practices team, she specializes in carried interest administration - the complex machinery that translates fund returns into partner compensation. Her work sits at the intersection of finance, talent, and the internal architecture of a $39B+ AUM firm, making her a behind-the-scenes force in how a16z structures and retains its top talent. With an educational background from Teachers College at Columbia University, she brings an unusual blend of people-centered thinking to a rigorously quantitative domain.
Samson Wu is a Recruiting Operations Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. With roots in economics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and formative stints at AIESEC, Uber, and CloudKitchens, he has become a key architect of how a16z and its portfolio companies find and hire world-class talent. He supports the firm's New Media team as an HR Business Partner and brings operational rigor to recruiting functions that span early-stage startups to growth-stage companies across the a16z portfolio.
Sarah Altabet is the Early Career Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential VC firms. She builds the firm's university recruiting program and connects students and early-career candidates with opportunities across the KV portfolio. With a career spanning Western Digital, Rivian, and Sierra, she has become a go-to voice on how top-tier startups and venture-backed companies hire - and how students can break into the industry.
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Zahabiya Gabaji is a Compensation Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the world's most influential venture capital firms. Based in San Mateo, California, she leads compensation strategy and people operations for a16z's portfolio and internal teams. With roots in education and arts — she studied English and Education at UC Berkeley and worked at the Berkeley Art Museum — Gabaji made a deliberate pivot into tech HR, scaling compensation programs at Snowflake before joining a16z. At one of the most closely-watched firms in Silicon Valley, she architects the compensation frameworks that help a16z attract and retain world-class talent across its 950-person organization and advise portfolio companies on competitive pay structures.
Ksenia Onosov is a veteran talent acquisition leader and the Recruitment Lead at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading B2B SaaS venture studios. With over 12 years of recruiting experience spanning global tech giants and early-stage startups, she specializes in building teams from the ground up across Engineering, GTM, and Operations. Simultaneously running her own consultancy, Clever Fox, she brings a rare dual perspective as both an embedded operator and independent advisor to the startup hiring ecosystem.
Natalie Ledbetter is a 3x startup People Ops executive, TEDx speaker, and former Operating Partner & Head of People at Boldstart Ventures who scaled Stash from 27 to 350 employees in 2.5 years. A self-described 'third culture kid' who grew up attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia alongside students from 90 countries, she now runs Ledbetter Global Advisory, offering embedded fractional people operations leadership to Series A-B companies. She has partnered with 100+ founders across the startup ecosystem, blending strategic executive thinking with hands-on execution to build high-performance, psychologically safe teams.