Ben Brook is the co-founder and CEO of Transcend, the data-privacy infrastructure company he started in 2017 with Harvard classmate Mike Farrell. He flew to San Francisco the day after graduation to build software that lets the world's largest companies find, delete, and control personal data at machine speed. Under his lead Transcend has delivered actionable data rights to over a billion people and raised nearly $90M, including a $40M Series B in 2024. A Toronto-born, award-winning filmmaker turned privacy engineer, Brook argues that privacy only works when it is encoded directly into the systems that touch personal data.
Samantha Mah is VP of Strategic Partnerships and Growth at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company headquartered in Santa Clara. Based in Toronto, she leads the charge on unlocking organizational potential by eliminating manual, repetitive work through intelligent digital workflows. With a Six Sigma Master Black Belt background and a career that spans Xerox and ServiceNow, she brings process-excellence discipline to the art of enterprise partnerships. She also serves in the Office of the CDIO as Senior Director, Customer Advocate - bridging the gap between technology capability and human impact.
Mark Walker is the CEO and co-founder of Nue.io, a San Francisco-based revenue lifecycle management platform that modernizes CPQ, billing, and order management natively on Salesforce. A serial entrepreneur with 30+ years of business experience, Walker previously founded Strongpoint (acquired by Netwrix in 2021) and held executive roles at ScribbleLive and Skyytek. Under his leadership, Nue raised a $20M Series A in January 2025, achieved $10M ARR, and counts OpenAI among its customers.
Piyush Rajput is the Co-Founder and SVP of Engineering at Simpplr, the AI-powered employee experience platform he helped build from the ground up in 2014. A civil engineering graduate from IIT Delhi, he pivoted to software and has spent 15+ years at the intersection of engineering and product - now overseeing the technology behind a platform serving 2 million+ employees at companies like Moderna, Penske, and the NHS. Simpplr has raised $139M+ in total funding and reached a Series D under his technical leadership.
Super.com is a savings super app that helps everyday Americans save, earn, and build credit. Born in 2016 as SnapTravel - a chatbot that sold hotel rooms over SMS and Facebook Messenger - it rebranded to Snapcommerce in 2020 and then Super.com in late 2022, expanding from travel deals into fintech with SuperCash (a credit-building charge card), SuperTravel, SuperShop, and the Super+ membership.
Peter McKinnon is a Toronto-based photographer, cinematographer, and YouTube creator with nearly 6 million subscribers, known for his cinematic visual style and fast-paced, coffee-fueled tutorials. A former magician and Ellusionist Production Manager turned self-taught filmmaker, he built one of YouTube's most distinctive photography channels from a spare bedroom, won the 2019 Shorty Award for Breakout YouTuber of the Year and the 2020 Streamy Award for Cinematography, and had his landscape photography minted on official Canadian currency by the Royal Canadian Mint. Beyond tutorials, he has launched his own multi-tool for photographers, multiple Lightroom preset packs, a signature coffee blend with James Coffee Co., and the 'Pete's Pirate Life' EDC brand.
Richy Nelson is the co-founder and CEO of Roofr, the cloud-based operating system for roofing contractors. A third-generation roofer who first climbed a roof at twelve years old, Nelson transformed decades of hands-on industry experience into a platform trusted by over 12,000 roofing companies across North America. After selling his house to fund the company, surviving Y Combinator in 2017, and raising a Series B from TCV and ABC Supply in January 2025, he leads a 150-person remote team on a mission to build the most trusted roofing platform in the world.
Andrew Miklas co-founded PagerDuty with two Amazon colleagues in 2009, built the original high-availability architecture as founding CTO, and shepherded the company from a Hacker News beta post to a $1.8B NYSE IPO. After a stint as an early-stage investor at s28 Capital, he returned to Y Combinator - where PagerDuty got its start in the Summer 2010 batch - as a General Partner in May 2025, fifteen years after first walking through YC's doors as a founder.
Ksenia Onosov is a veteran talent acquisition leader and the Recruitment Lead at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading B2B SaaS venture studios. With over 12 years of recruiting experience spanning global tech giants and early-stage startups, she specializes in building teams from the ground up across Engineering, GTM, and Operations. Simultaneously running her own consultancy, Clever Fox, she brings a rare dual perspective as both an embedded operator and independent advisor to the startup hiring ecosystem.
Wael Jabir is Chief of Staff at Hustle Fund, where he serves as right hand to co-founder Brian Nichols. With an engineering degree from University of Calgary, Wael betrayed his technical roots to build businesses instead of bridges. He broke into VC without inside connections, previously working as a Venture Partner at Altra Venture Partners and in roles at Deloitte, ICChange, and AI Education Project. As an AI Product Builder and Advisor, he posts daily insights on AI trends and developments. At Hustle Fund, Wael helped launch Angel Squad, a community of 1,500+ angel investors who've deployed over $23M across 65+ companies. He's known for running founder events across North America, his near-death sea adventure, and being the global runner-up for most confusing name pronunciation.
Arvid Kahl is a German-Canadian bootstrapped entrepreneur, author, and content creator best known for co-founding FeedbackPanda - an ESL teacher productivity SaaS he built with his partner Danielle Simpson and sold to SureSwift Capital for a seven-figure sum in 2019. He now runs Podscan.fm (a podcast intelligence platform tracking 3.7M podcasts), writes the widely-read Bootstrapped Founder newsletter, hosts a podcast with 175,000+ downloads, and has authored two books - Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entrepreneur - that have become foundational texts for bootstrapped founders worldwide.
Alex Danco is a Canadian writer, thinker, and now Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he shapes the firm's editorial voice. A former neuroscientist turned ska musician turned VC associate turned Shopify product director, Danco spent five years at Shopify leading merchant financing and blockchain initiatives before joining a16z in August 2025. He is best known for his newsletter Dancoland and foundational essays including 'Debt Is Coming,' 'The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class,' and the 'Emergent Layers' framework - works that apply Carlota Perez, René Girard, and Jane Jacobs to the inner workings of Silicon Valley. He writes approximately 5,000 words per week and is a descendant of Belgian polar explorer Émile Danco, after whom Danco Island in Antarctica is named.
Scott Vinkle is a Toronto-based Accessibility Specialist at Shopify with over 12 years of experience making digital products usable for everyone. Holding the IAAP CPWA certification - one of the highest credentials in web accessibility - he co-leads Shopify's accessibility guild, contributes to W3C ARIA standards, speaks at international conferences, and publishes practical accessibility guidance through his newsletter, blog, and Medium. He's the rare specialist who bridges the gap between compliance checkbox and genuine inclusive design.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor who transformed R&B from the shadows of a Scarborough upbringing into a global phenomenon. With 75+ million records sold, a billion-dollar touring empire, and the most-streamed song in Spotify history, he is redefining what a career exit looks like — retiring the Weeknd persona after his 2025 album and film 'Hurry Up Tomorrow', the closing chapter of a dark pop trilogy, to begin again as Abel Tesfaye.
Florin Tatulea is a Toronto-based sales development leader, founder, and creator who built a 74,000+ follower LinkedIn audience by teaching SDRs and AEs how to actually hit quota. Currently Head of Sales Development at Common Room and GTM Engineer in Residence at ZoomInfo, he founded Sales Flo to run workshops and training for reps at Shopify, Zendesk, Clearbit, and others. His Substack newsletter 'Prospecting from the Trenches' reaches 12,000+ subscribers with tactical cold email and prospecting advice drawn from real-world experience scaling teams and generating $3M in pipeline.
Ahmad Ajmal is a Toronto-based fintech entrepreneur with an MBA and Master of Finance from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is a founder and operator at Upfinity Inc., an AI-driven platform that helps startup founders transform ideas into operating businesses. With roots in corporate banking and a strong foundation in programming, Ahmad bridges the gap between traditional finance and modern technology - his team at Rotman was recognized as one of the top 3 for solving the Financial Inclusion Problem using machine learning, and Upfinity has since grown to over 11,000 users through organic growth alone.