upwork
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Jason Chicola
Jason Chicola is the founder and CEO of Rev, the Austin-based speech-to-text company that pairs 50,000 freelance transcriptionists with best-in-class AI to turn spoken words into searchable text. An MIT-trained engineer who became the third employee at oDesk (now Upwork), he built Rev on a simple bet: people will pay for curated quality, and people everywhere want to work from home. Today Rev serves over 100,000 clients including 60% of the Fortune 500, and Chicola is steering the company toward AI tools for the legal system, where accuracy is not optional.
Adam Ozimek
Adam Ozimek is a labor economist and Chief Economist at the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), where he leads research on economic dynamism, demographics, remote work, and immigration. A former Chief Economist at Upwork and senior economist at Moody's Analytics, he became one of the most-cited voices on the future of work, repeatedly arguing that remote work is a 'general-purpose technology' that will reshape where and how Americans live and work. Known online as @ModeledBehavior, he pairs national policy influence with running a small entertainment business in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.
Thanh Tran
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.