Azul is the largest independent Java vendor and a major contributor to OpenJDK. It builds production-grade Java runtimes - Azul Platform Core (certified OpenJDK builds) and Azul Platform Prime (a high-performance JVM) - plus the analytics-driven Intelligence Cloud. Companies use Azul to escape Oracle Java licensing costs, run lower-latency applications, and cut cloud spend.
Scott Sellers is the co-founder, President, and CEO of Azul, the Sunnyvale-based company that has spent two decades making Java run faster, cheaper, and freer from Oracle's licensing grip. Before Azul, he co-founded 3dfx Interactive, the graphics company that gave PCs real-time 3D before NVIDIA bought it. Eight patents, a Princeton EE degree (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), and a backup-quarterback origin story round out a quietly relentless career.
Hans Dockter is the founder and CEO of Gradle Technologies, the company behind the Gradle build tool - downloaded over 23 million times per month - and Develocity, an enterprise developer toolchain observability platform. A German-born physicist-turned-software-engineer, he co-created Gradle in 2008 out of personal frustration with existing build systems, transforming it into one of the most widely adopted build automation tools in software development. Under his leadership, Gradle Technologies has raised $53.2M in total funding and grown to 170+ employees, serving enterprises including Netflix, Google, LinkedIn, and Airbnb.
Jon Plax is a Vice President of Software Engineering (Customer Centric Engineering) at Salesforce, where he has spent the bulk of a 23+ year career building and leading globally distributed engineering teams. Known internally as a technically deep yet empathy-driven leader, he has tackled some of Salesforce's most complex scaling challenges - JVM tuning, database bottlenecks, and multi-continent team coordination. He spent five years in Salesforce's Dublin office, briefly detoured to Bumble, then returned to Salesforce. A photography hobbyist with a consistent 'spaceman1066' handle across the internet, he is married to Talia Bailey Plax, a product marketing leader at Atlassian.