Kevin H. Johnson is the CEO of Focal Systems, an AI-powered retail operations company deploying shelf-scanning cameras across brick-and-mortar stores worldwide. A 30-year veteran of building and scaling tech businesses, he grew Ebates forty-fold before selling it to Rakuten for $1 billion, then led Udemy as a publicly-traded company, and now applies that commercial track record to the frontier problem of putting real-time AI intelligence into every grocery aisle.
Gagan Biyani is a three-time startup founder and serial entrepreneur best known for co-founding Udemy (now a multi-billion dollar public edtech company) and Maven, a cohort-based online learning platform backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Born and raised in Fremont, California, Biyani studied Economics at UC Berkeley before co-founding Udemy in 2009, which he built to 400,000 students before being fired as president in 2012. He then founded Sprig, a food-delivery startup that raised $57M before shutting down in 2017. He co-founded Maven in 2020 with Wes Kao and Shreyans Bhansali, raising $30M to build the leading platform for live cohort-based expert courses. Biyani is widely known for his radical transparency about startup failures, his viral 2020 Twitter thread about being fired from Udemy, and his philosophy that most startup ideas come from living normally rather than deliberate analysis.
Taimur Ijlal is a cloud and AI security leader with 20+ years of international experience, currently serving as a Senior Security Consultant at AWS. Known as 'Cloud Security Guy,' he runs a popular Substack newsletter, YouTube channel, and Udemy courses reaching 80,000+ professionals. A CISO of the Year 2019 winner in the UAE, LinkedIn Top Voice in Cybersecurity, and UK Global Talent Visa 'Exceptional Talent' recipient, Taimur has authored multiple books on cybersecurity careers, certifications, and AI governance. He is recognized for making complex cloud and AI security topics accessible through practical, real-world teaching.