Andrew Conway is Vice President of Security Marketing at Microsoft, where he has spent over 20 years driving the go-to-market strategy for one of the world's largest security businesses. A prolific author on the Microsoft Security Blog and a regular media voice on cybersecurity workforce challenges and AI-powered defense, Conway has shepherded Microsoft's security marketing from the Enterprise Mobility + Security era through to today's AI-native Security Copilot and Defender Experts Suite. He is the senior-most marketing executive dedicated to Microsoft's $20B+ security business and an outspoken advocate for using AI as a force multiplier for overwhelmed security defenders.
Eric Faurot is the long-serving CEO of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), a B2B media company headquartered in Oakland, California that runs flagship sustainability conferences including VERGE, BLOOM, GreenFin, and Circularity. Over 14 years at the helm, he built GreenBiz into a leading platform for sustainability professionals - combining editorial media, peer networks, and live events - before transitioning to a Growth Leader role in July 2024 when Hana Kajimura succeeded him as CEO. His career traces an arc from tech media event production (COMDEX, INTEROP, Black Hat) to climate and sustainability, making him a rare figure who bridged Silicon Valley-era conference culture with the emerging sustainability economy.
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.
Patrick Morrissey is the CEO of Altify, a Salesforce-native Strategic Revenue Execution platform serving enterprise teams at companies like AWS, GE HealthCare, and Autodesk. He returned to lead Altify in March 2025 following Gallant Capital Partners' acquisition, having previously served as the company's CMO. A seasoned sales and marketing executive, Morrissey co-founded Simpplr (which raised $131M), led strategic alliances at Salesforce, and served as Chief Growth Officer at HireVue. He is known for championing empathy-driven leadership and a customer-first philosophy across product, sales, and marketing functions.
Shawn 'Swyx' Wang is a Singaporean-American developer, writer, and community builder who left a $350K hedge fund career to teach himself to code at 30 - then coined the term 'AI Engineer,' built one of tech's most influential AI podcasts (Latent Space), and launched the AI Engineer conference series that put 15,000 developers in rooms together to figure out what this job actually is.
Gaetano DiNardi is a B2B SaaS growth marketing consultant, former music producer, and one of the most distinctive voices in modern SEO. After spending years producing tracks for Fat Joe and Shaggy in NYC studios, he stumbled into SEO through a blog post about getting ghosted by Atlantic Records - and never looked back. He has scaled companies from Nextiva ($70M to $200M+ revenue) to Aura (0 to 1 million monthly visitors in 12 months), and now runs Marketing Advice, a boutique consultancy serving 50+ SaaS clients including Semrush, Gong, and Demandbase.
Mark W. Schaefer is a globally recognized marketing strategist, bestselling author of 12 books, keynote speaker, and Rutgers University professor who has spent 30+ years pioneering human-centered marketing. Known for writing the world's first book on influencer marketing and six #1 Amazon marketing bestsellers, he champions the idea that 'the most human company wins' — a philosophy that has taken on new urgency in the AI era. His latest book, Audacious (2025), features the world's first AI-activated augmented reality book cover.
Ross Simmonds is a Halifax-based content marketing strategist, agency founder, and author whose core thesis - create once, distribute forever - has reshaped how B2B brands think about content ROI. As CEO of Foundation Marketing (a ~$3.8M revenue agency serving Canva, Snowflake, and Bitly) and founder of Distribution.ai, he operates at the intersection of data-driven creativity and systematic amplification. Ranked #3 globally by BuzzSumo among content marketers, he has generated over $110M in new business for clients and built a following of 75,000+ newsletter subscribers.
Peter Renton is one of fintech's original chroniclers - an Australian-born entrepreneur who turned a P2P lending hobby blog into LendIt, the world's largest fintech conference, and Fintech Nexus, a media empire reaching 225,000+ banking and fintech executives. After Fintech Nexus filed for Chapter 7 in 2024, he launched Renton & Co and continues hosting the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the longest-running one-on-one interview show in fintech, now past 628 episodes and 1 million downloads.
Matt Harris is a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures and one of the most tenured fintech-focused venture investors in the world, with over 30 years dedicated exclusively to financial technology. Known for his 'Fintech: The Fourth Platform' thesis that predicted fintech would create $3.6 trillion in value, Harris backed breakout companies including OnDeck Capital (as first investor), Flywire, Justworks, and GoCardless. He serves on the Innovation Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and ranks #3 on Institutional Investor's Fintech Finance 40.
Simon Taylor is a fintech operator, writer, and speaker who built the #1 weekly fintech newsletter Fintech Brainfood to 45,000+ subscribers while holding senior roles at Barclays, co-founding 11:FS (UK's leading fintech consultancy), and most recently joining Tempo - the Stripe and Paradigm-incubated payments blockchain - as GTM Lead. His famous thesis 'Fintech is only 1% finished' captured an industry's imagination, and his independently-written weekend newsletter has become required reading for bankers, founders, and investors globally.
Darwin Salazar is Head of Growth at Monad and the founder of The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP), a weekly newsletter read by Fortune 500 CISOs, vendors, and investors. A practitioner-turned-product-leader, he has worked across cloud security, detection engineering, red teaming, and IoT security at Datadog, Accenture, Ford Motor Company, and Johnson & Johnson. With 20,000+ combined followers and 250,000+ newsletter visits, Darwin bridges the gap between hands-on security work and the business of cybersecurity - making complex industry shifts digestible for the people who build, buy, and fund security products.
David Perell is a writer, educator, and founder best known for Write of Passage, the online writing course that turned thousands of lurkers into published voices. Armed with 474,000+ Twitter followers and a newsletter empire, he spent six years teaching people to think and write better on the internet - then stopped cold in 2025 when AI upended his mental model of education. He is now figuring out what comes next, in public, as always.
Kieran Flanagan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zapier and one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. A former software engineer turned marketing leader, he spent nearly a decade at HubSpot building its international marketing engine - growing the Dublin office from 12 to 1,000+ employees. Today he co-hosts the 'Marketing Against the Grain' podcast with HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar, publishes 'The AI Marketing Generalist' newsletter on Substack, and invests as a Sequoia Scout. He is widely credited with pioneering the B2B creator approach to marketing and is an outspoken champion of AI-driven marketing transformation.
Peep Laja is an Estonian-born entrepreneur and marketing strategist who built three companies from scratch - CXL (marketing education), Speero (CRO consulting), and Wynter (B2B message testing) - all bootstrapped. Recognized as the world's most influential conversion rate optimization expert in 2016, he now focuses on B2B strategy and competitive positioning through his 'How to Win' podcast, biweekly newsletter, and daily LinkedIn presence with 69K+ followers.
Gregor Hohpe is a transformation architect, prolific author, and sought-after speaker who has spent decades helping organizations bridge the gap between boardroom strategy and engine-room engineering. Co-author of the canonical 'Enterprise Integration Patterns' (2003), he coined the concept of the 'Architect Elevator' - the idea that great architects must fluently move between executive suites and server racks. A former Google Cloud Technical Director, Singapore Smart Nation Fellow, and Chief Architect at Allianz SE, Hohpe now runs the Architect Elevator platform, writing, teaching, and consulting on IT strategy, cloud, and the art of making everyone else in the room smarter.
Ross Haleliuk is a Ukrainian-born, San Francisco-based cybersecurity entrepreneur, author, angel investor, and operator who built one of the industry's most influential newsletters, 'Venture in Security,' with 21,000+ subscribers. He authored the Amazon bestseller 'Cyber for Builders,' co-founded the world's first angel syndicate exclusively for security practitioners, and currently leads a stealth-mode cybersecurity startup as co-founder and CEO. With a background spanning history studies in Ukraine, product leadership in Canada, and a deep pivot into cybersecurity, he has become a leading voice on building, funding, and growing security companies.