Lydia Smyers is Vice President of Customer and Partner Solutions for U.S. Telco, Media, and Gaming at Microsoft, leading a team of more than 400 professionals serving the top 200 enterprises in those sectors. Based in Massachusetts, she has spent over a decade at Microsoft in roles spanning U.S. Education, Americas Northeast, and now the converging industries of telco, media, and gaming. Before Microsoft she held senior executive roles at Oracle, Red Hat, and Ernst & Young, building a career defined by large-scale partnerships, channel strategy, and technology-driven transformation. She was named to CRN's Top 100 Women of the Channel five consecutive years and spoke at MWC Barcelona 2026 on AI and its societal implications.
Jed Ayres is the CEO of ControlUp, the $1B+ autonomous IT platform that executes over 14 million automated remediations per week across 6 million enterprise endpoints. A 20-year veteran of the end-user computing industry, Ayres has an unusual track record: he's joined companies in transformation, then handed them to acquirers. He turned IGEL from a hardware vendor into a software-first powerhouse that sold to TA Associates, scaled AppSense to an Thoma Bravo acquisition, and helped MCPc grow to $300M+ before it was acquired by Logicalis. At ControlUp since August 2023, he's steering the company's evolution from Digital Employee Experience (DEX) to what he calls a generational shift in IT - self-healing, AI-driven autonomous endpoint management. Off the clock, he completes Ironman triathlons and ultramarathons, which explains a lot about his leadership style.
Alyson Watson is the CEO and Chair of the Board of Woodard & Curran, a Portland, Maine-based integrated science, engineering, design-build, and operations firm specializing in water and environmental challenges. A Stanford-trained chemical engineer and licensed PE, she became the firm's third CEO in 2021 — and its first woman to hold that title — after more than 20 years leading water resources projects and building environmental consulting teams across the western United States. A self-described 'water brat' with roots in the industry, Watson is a passionate advocate for clean water access, outcome-based contracting, and employee ownership, guiding a firm of 1,300 people across 27 offices nationwide.
Lucian Todea is a Romanian-born serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor who built Soft32 from a $3/month passion project into one of the world's largest software distribution platforms, co-founded MultiversX (formerly Elrond) - a pioneering layer-1 blockchain - and now serves as Partner at 2048 Ventures in New York, where he has invested in 200+ companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Chainalysis, Suno, and Kraken. An Ironman finisher and relentless builder, Todea embodies the conviction that technology exists not for its own sake, but to improve and enrich human lives.
David Fialkow is the co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst, a $40+ billion venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beyond building one of America's most influential VC firms, he has produced over 20 documentary films - including two Academy Award winners (Icarus and Navalny) - making him a rare figure who operates with equal conviction in finance and storytelling. Known for backing bold ideas from Airbnb to Anduril, Fialkow brings the same instinct for truth-telling to the board room that drives his work on screen.