Hubert Palan is the Czech-born founder and CEO of Productboard, the AI-powered product management platform used by 5,400+ companies including Salesforce, Zoom, and Microsoft. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and spending nearly four years as VP of Product at GoodData, he founded Productboard in 2014 with co-founder Daniel Hejl to solve a problem he'd lived firsthand: the disconnect between customer feedback, product strategy, and what actually gets built. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 with a $1.725B valuation following a $125M Series D, and Palan has since led a bold AI-first transformation of the platform with products like Productboard Spark and Productboard Pulse.
Steve Blank is the father of modern entrepreneurship - a Silicon Valley serial founder who retired the day before his company E.piphany's 1999 IPO, then spent the next two decades teaching the world that startups aren't small versions of big companies. His Customer Development methodology and Lean LaunchPad curriculum, adopted by the NSF as I-Corps, have trained 9,300+ scientists, launched ~1,400 startups, and raised over $3 billion. A Vietnam-era Air Force veteran who never finished college, Blank now teaches at Stanford, advises the U.S. Navy, and co-directs Stanford's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation - applying startup thinking to national defense.
Dan Olsen is a Silicon Valley-based product management consultant, author, and speaker best known for writing The Lean Product Playbook (Wiley, 2015) - a practical, framework-driven guide to achieving product-market fit. His Product-Market Fit Pyramid and six-step Lean Product Process have become foundational tools used by product teams at Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and hundreds of other companies worldwide. Through his consulting firm Olsen Solutions (founded 2005), he serves as an Interim VP of Product and strategic advisor. He also runs the Lean Product & Lean UX Meetup, which has hosted 181+ events with over 12,700 members in Mountain View, California.