Tom Hadfield is the British entrepreneur and CEO of Mio, an Austin-based company that makes enterprise chat tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat talk to each other. He is the kid who built Soccernet with his dad at 12 and sold it to ESPN for $40 million at 17, attended Harvard, ran a biotech, then went through Y Combinator to attack the problem of messaging interoperability with backing from Khosla Ventures, Cisco and Zoom.
Advith Chelikani is the co-founder and CTO of Pylon, an AI-powered B2B customer support platform based in San Francisco. A Caltech computer science graduate and former Samsara engineer, Advith co-founded Pylon in November 2022 alongside Marty Kausas and Robert Eng. In under three years, the company raised $51.2M in total funding - including a $17M Series A from a16z in 2024 and a $31M Series B in 2025 - scaled to 750+ customers, and grew revenue 5x year-over-year for two consecutive years. Pylon replaces legacy platforms like Zendesk by meeting enterprise support teams where their customers already are: Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord.
Spin.AI is an AI-powered SaaS security and data-protection company based in Palo Alto. Its SpinOne platform unifies SaaS Security Posture Management, ransomware defense, automated backup and recovery, and browser extension risk control for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Slack - serving more than 1,500 organizations across 100+ countries.
Fareed Mosavat is a Visiting Partner at a16z Speedrun, a 12-week founder accelerator at the intersection of technology and entertainment. He came to venture capital after a career arc that started in physics simulation at Pixar and wound through product and growth leadership at Zynga, RunKeeper, Instacart, and Slack, before he ran product education for thousands of PMs as Chief Development Officer at Reforge. Today he backs AI-native B2B startups, co-hosts the Unsolicited Feedback podcast with Brian Balfour, and writes about what it actually takes to build products people love.
Glen Evans is Partner of Core Talent at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. A veteran recruiter who built Facebook's engineering recruiting team from scratch and served as Slack's first Head of Global Recruiting, Evans now helps Greylock's portfolio companies build world-class teams. He advises founders on hiring strategy, recruiting operations, compensation benchmarks, and talent pipelines - translating the hard-won lessons of hyper-growth into practical playbooks for startups.
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he invests in early and growth-stage companies reshaping enterprise software, infrastructure, financial services, and AI. Before VC, he was a senior product leader at Dropbox (employee #75) and a General Partner at Index Ventures. A trained physicist with a Stanford PhD and a Nature paper on quantum computing, Fushman brings rare scientific depth to the investment table - having backed transformative companies including Slack, Robinhood, Rippling, Harvey, and Loom.
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm he helped resurrect from near-irrelevance after joining in 2017. A Pakistani-born, Frankfurt-raised engineer turned investor, he was the first outside investor in Slack, wrote the first Kleiner check into Figma (his first deal at the firm, before it had revenue), and led the Series A into Rippling - the largest early-stage check KP had ever written. His quiet, measured style belies an extraordinary track record: under his tenure, Kleiner has returned approximately $13 billion to LPs and raised over $6 billion in fresh capital, including a $3.5B fund announced in March 2026.
Ananth Packkildurai is a principal engineer, newsletter editor, angel investor, and advisor at the intersection of data engineering and community building. He founded Data Engineering Weekly, a Substack newsletter with 50,000+ subscribers covering vendor-neutral data engineering topics across 267+ issues. He built data pipeline observability at Slack during its hyper-growth years, shaped next-generation analytical platforms at Zendesk, and created Schemata - one of the earliest open-source data contract frameworks. He currently serves as Principal Engineer at Mural, while his newsletter and podcast continue to inform tens of thousands of data professionals worldwide.
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded Flickr (2004) and Slack (2013) — two landmark products that emerged as accidental pivots from failed multiplayer games. A self-taught coder with a Cambridge philosophy degree, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo for ~$25 million in 2005 and Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. His 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' memo became a canonical document in Silicon Valley product thinking. Since departing Slack in January 2023, he has been active as an angel investor with 32+ portfolio companies.
Laura Nolan is a Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, a veteran Site Reliability Engineer, and one of tech's most credible voices on autonomous weapons ethics. After five years at Google - where she contributed to the seminal O'Reilly SRE book and resigned over Project Maven - and seven years at Slack as Senior Staff Engineer, she brings deep technical authority to both the reliability engineering world and the global debate over killer robots. Based in rural Ireland, she speaks at SREcon, QCon, and TED stages alike, writes the Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack, and holds seats on the USENIX Board and the SREcon Steering Committee.
Roy Rapoport is a veteran engineering leader and writer whose work has quietly reshaped how tech companies think about people, reliability, and operational culture. Best known for his two stints at Netflix (where he built Insight Engineering and its operational platform) and a stint at Slack, Roy popularized the Manager README format and authored influential frameworks on feedback, trust, and performance improvement. He writes on Medium about the subtler mechanics of leadership, raises goats in California, and insists he will never retire.