Dotwork is an AI-native strategy, portfolio, and product operations platform that connects goals, work, finance, and outcomes so enterprise leaders can align teams and steer decisions with confidence. Founded by Steve Elliott - who previously built AgileCraft and sold it to Atlassian, where it became Jira Align - the Georgetown, Texas company uses knowledge graphs, a no-code organizational ontology, and AI agents to turn strategy that is usually buried in slide decks and spreadsheets into a living, connected operating model. Dotwork raised a $12M Series A and counts product and portfolio leaders at companies like NVIDIA, GitHub, and SolarWinds among its early users.
HelloTeam is a Boston-based HR technology company that builds an all-in-one employee engagement and performance management platform aimed at improving employee retention. Founded in 2016 by Tanya Bakalov, the software combines performance reviews, goals and OKRs, recognition and rewards, surveys, learning, a dynamic org chart, and people analytics into a single system so managers and HR teams can keep employees connected, engaged, and productive.
Steve Elliott is the founder and CEO of Dotwork, an AI-driven platform that connects corporate strategy to execution. He previously founded AgileCraft, which Atlassian bought in 2019 for $166M and rebranded as Jira Align, after which he ran product for the tool inside Atlassian. He co-founded The Uncertainty Project, a community for product leaders, and wrote The Decisive Company, a #1 Amazon bestseller. Dotwork, founded in 2022 and based in the Austin area, raised a $12M Series A in November 2023 with backing that included Houston Astros owner Jim Crane.
Cascade is a strategy execution platform that pulls corporate strategy out of slide decks and boardrooms and turns it into a living, trackable system the whole organization can run on. It combines strategic planning, OKRs, projects, KPIs and outcome tracking - now layered with AI insights via its Tapestry suite - into one platform so leaders can see whether the plan is actually working. Founded in 2017 and used by thousands of teams across 100+ countries, from vaccine supply chains to Formula One teams.
Leapsome is an AI-powered people enablement platform that unifies the HR stack - performance reviews, goals and OKRs, engagement surveys, learning, compensation, and a core HRIS - in one place. Founded in Berlin in 2016 by Jenny von Podewils and Kajetan von Armansperg, it helps managers and HR teams run feedback, development, and alignment processes without juggling spreadsheets and disconnected tools. The company bootstrapped to profitability before raising a $60M Series A in 2022, and today serves more than 1,500 organizations including Spotify, Unity, and monday.com.
Charlie Newark-French is the CEO of Cascade, an AI-powered strategy execution platform used by roughly 400 enterprises including PepsiCo, Roche, St. Jude and the World Wildlife Fund. A four-time enterprise software CEO who previously ran Hyperscience and Sharpen, he started at McKinsey, holds a BA from Oxford and an MBA from Harvard, and argues that strategy should run like a live operating system rather than a PowerPoint deck. He hosts the executive podcast 'This Way Forward.'
Lattice is a San Francisco-based people-management software company that helps organizations run performance reviews, set goals, gather employee feedback, manage compensation, and track engagement in one connected platform. Founded in 2015 by Jack Altman and Eric Koslow, it now serves several thousand companies and has leaned hard into AI under CEO Sarah Franklin, who joined from Salesforce in 2024.
Bogdan Apostol is the co-founder and CEO of Nestor, a San Francisco-based AI-powered people intelligence platform that helps enterprises build skills-based organizations. A Romanian-born computer scientist with a PhD in Computer Vision from Gheorghe Asachi Technical University, he founded Nestor in 2018 after being accepted into Y Combinator's S18 batch. Before writing a single line of product code, he conducted over 400 customer discovery calls. Nestor has raised $6.07M in funding, serves 10,000+ employees worldwide across F500 companies, and has earned 67 G2 badges including a perfect 10/10 for quality of support.

John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists. The man who backed Google and Amazon with early checks, taught the world OKRs through his bestselling book 'Measure What Matters', and bet $1.1 billion on Stanford to build the Doerr School of Sustainability. A Rice-trained electrical engineer turned Intel salesman turned legendary VC, Doerr has spent 45+ years turning missionary founders into category-defining companies - and is now directing that same energy toward solving the climate crisis.

Ken Norton is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader turned executive coach. After co-founding Grand Central Communications (acquired by Google as Google Voice), spending 14 years at Google and GV shaping products used by over three billion people, he pivoted to running Bring the Donuts - a coaching practice for CPOs, VPs of Product, and Founder/CEOs. His 2005 essay 'How to Hire a Product Manager' is still considered the canonical PM career bible two decades on.

Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.