Thomas Schiavone is a San Francisco startup operator who has spent his career on the bottoms-up, developer-first side of software. He was the first product manager at Twilio (around employee #15), went on to be COO at EasyPost and VP of Product at Sift, advised at Netlify, then founded and ran the SaaS CRM startup Calixa. He now leads Courier, the developer-first notifications platform that lets engineering teams design and deliver email, SMS, push, and chat through one API.
Caitlin Epstein is VP of Corporate Communications at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering customer engagement for businesses worldwide. Since joining in 2015, she helped navigate Twilio through its IPO and became one of tech PR's sharpest voices on human-centered storytelling - best known for turning a CEO's breakfast burrito delivery into a Forbes-covered $3 billion acquisition narrative.
Adam Morgan is VP of Brand at Twilio, where he led the company's 'Be a Builder' brand refresh in 2024 - repositioning Twilio from a developer platform to a movement for all builders. With 29 years in creativity, strategy, and storytelling, he previously served as Executive Creative Director at Adobe for 8.5 years and Senior Director of Brand + Creative at Splunk/Cisco. He is the author of 'Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business' (Morgan James Publishing), host of the Real Creative Leadership podcast, and was named to AdWeek's Creative 100 in 2020. He holds a Master's in Marketing Strategy from Northwestern University and lives in Lehi, Utah.
Disha Rustogi is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Twilio, where she leads global Product Marketing and Go-To-Market Enablement teams. With 15+ years of marketing leadership at household-name tech companies — Microsoft, Adobe, Atlassian — she has shaped how enterprise software gets positioned, launched, and sold to the world. Now at Twilio, she is at the forefront of the agentic AI communications era, helping define how companies build intelligent customer experiences using Twilio's platform.
Julie Poutre is Vice President of Americas Field Marketing at Twilio, the cloud communications platform behind a significant portion of the world's digital interactions. Based in San Francisco, she leads the regional field marketing operation that drives pipeline and revenue across the Americas. Over nearly a decade at Twilio, she has risen from Senior Manager through Director and Senior Director roles to her current VP position, building one of the most sophisticated field marketing engines in enterprise SaaS. Before Twilio, she spent nearly a decade at Infoblox — moving from global events coordinator to Sr. Channel Programs Manager — where she honed the craft of building partner programs and generating qualified sales leads at scale.
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Orisa Cherenfant is SVP of Industry Relations & Strategic Growth at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering billions of messages, calls, and interactions globally. A first-generation college graduate from Cape Verde who earned dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Boston College, she built her career through GE's leadership development programs before moving into tech. At Twilio, she leads industry partnerships and growth strategy, speaks at major conferences like MWC Barcelona and Twilio Signal, and was named a 2025 Entreprenista 100 Award winner. She is based in Los Angeles with her partner Eli and their twins, Margaux and Maverick.
Vanessa Thompson is the Vice President of Revenue and Growth Marketing at Twilio, where she leads a global team driving top-of-funnel growth across demand generation, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, competitive intelligence, and the developer network. A New Zealander who built her career through government tech, analyst research at IDC, and SaaS consulting at Bluewolf before joining Twilio in 2018, she has ascended from IoT marketing director to interim CMO and now oversees the full revenue marketing engine at one of the world's leading cloud communications platforms.
Mark Gilbert is the Co-Founder & CEO of Zocks, a privacy-first AI platform that automates administrative work for financial advisors - capturing meeting notes, filling forms, and drafting client emails so advisors can reclaim 10+ hours weekly. Before founding Zocks, he held VP of Product Management at Twilio and CTO at Hearsay Systems. In January 2026, Zocks closed a $45M Series B co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors, bringing total funding to $65M. The platform now serves 5,000+ financial firms.
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.
Michael Buckley is the Chairman and CEO of Be My Eyes, the world's largest digital volunteer organization connecting blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers via live video calls. A communications veteran who spent 12 years at Brunswick Group and three years as Facebook's VP of Global Business Communications, Buckley pivoted to mission-driven tech when he joined Be My Eyes in December 2022. Under his leadership, Be My Eyes launched Be My AI (powered by GPT-4), which TIME named one of the Best Inventions of 2023, and scaled the platform to over 1 million blind and low-vision users supported by 6.7 million volunteers worldwide. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ocean's Halo, a seaweed-based natural foods company, and an active angel investor.
Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Peter Reinhardt is CEO and co-founder of Charm Industrial, a San Francisco-based climate tech company that converts agricultural and forest biomass residues into bio-oil and permanently sequesters it underground - effectively putting carbon back where it came from. Before pivoting to saving the planet, he co-founded Segment, the customer data infrastructure platform, and scaled it from a MIT dorm-room idea to a $3.2 billion acquisition by Twilio in 2020. Now he runs Charm with a mission to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm, counting Stripe, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and Meta among customers.
Ilya Volodarsky co-founded Segment in 2011 with MIT dorm-mates, building it from a failed classroom tool into the definitive customer data platform before selling to Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. After nine years scaling Segment to 600 employees, he pivoted to the problem of catastrophic wildfires, co-founding Wildfires.org and joining Convective Capital as a partner to back early-stage climate and healthcare startups.
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the defining voices in cloud and SaaS investing over the past two decades. A former founder who built and sold Trigo Technologies to IBM, he brings hard-won operator empathy to backing companies like Twilio, DocuSign, Box, ServiceTitan, Canva, and Anthropic - with 26 unicorn investments and 13 IPOs to his name. A four-time NCAA rugby national champion and former Ironman triathlete, Deeter applies an athlete's discipline to both portfolio management and founder wellness, having created STRIVE, Bessemer's holistic health program for CEOs. He is also a minority owner of the San Francisco 49ers.
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.