Vanta is the leading automated trust management platform that helps companies earn and prove their security posture. Founded in 2018 by Christina Cacioppo after she experienced the manual nightmare of SOC 2 compliance at Dropbox, Vanta automates compliance across 37+ frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP. With 15,000+ customers, $504M raised, and a $4.15B valuation, Vanta has turned the famously tedious world of security audits into a continuous, automated process - and is now evolving into an agentic AI platform where a 24/7 AI GRC engineer does the heavy lifting.
Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the co-creators of Django, the Python web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, and thousands of other sites worldwide. After 25+ years building and leading software teams - from a Kansas newspaper where Django was born, to Heroku's security org, to 18F's government tech unit - he walked away from the tech industry in 2024, training as an EMT and volunteering with search and rescue. He remains a board member of the Django Software Foundation, publishes the 'jacobian' newsletter on engineering craft, and is known for his influential writing on hiring, documentation, and the 'programming talent myth'.
Russ Cox is a Distinguished Engineer at Google and the longtime technical lead of the Go programming language, the open-source language he helped shape for over a decade. Known for foundational work on RE2 (a safe, linear-time regex engine), Plan 9 from User Space, and Go's module system, he bridges deep computer science theory with production-grade engineering. After stepping down as Go tech lead in September 2024, he shifted focus to AI-powered open source tooling - building Gaby and Oscar, agent systems designed to help maintainers with the unglamorous but essential work of keeping software alive.
Sylvain Kerkour is a French software engineer, security researcher, and author best known for 'Black Hat Rust' - a hands-on book applying offensive security techniques with the Rust programming language. Self-described as a 'professional troublemaker', he writes about programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship at kerkour.com under the tagline '(Ab)using technology for fun & profit'. He is a vocal advocate for supply chain security in the Rust ecosystem and creator of the Bloom open-technology platform and the ChaCha20-BLAKE3 AEAD cipher implementation.