Author: Tullio Siragusa

Dan Gusz is a co-founder of Lloyd, a startup that supports working professionals advance towards meaningful, gainful careers. Prior to Lloyd, Dan was Head of Product at an early-stage digital health startup. Originally from the Midwest, Dan now lives in NYC with his wife and son.

Basil Elotol is the cofounder and CEO of Triphop, a leading Online Travel company, which gives travelers the freedom to reward themselves by providing a simple, immediate, and extremely generous cash rewards program. Triphop has grown to become the most rewarding online travel website in the hotel booking marketplace.

With over 15 years in the Travel and Technology industry, Basil has become a leading expert in the space. Prior to founding Triphop, Basil was part of the executive team of a Travel and Roaming Technology startup and played an instrumental role in successfully growing the company until it’s successful acquisition. Basil started his career working for Fortune 500 companies such as Accenture and SAP.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His new book for Viking/Penguin is called The Inevitable, which is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller.

He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news.

Matthew Bellows is Founder and Board Chair of Yesware. He was CEO for the first eight years of the company’s life. Yesware is the leader in sales productivity, serving over 60,000 salespeople at companies like Box, Salesforce.com, Twilio and Yelp.

Prior to Yesware, Matthew was the Vice President of Sales at Vivox. Before that, he served as General Manager at Floodgate (acquired by Zynga), as Founder/CEO of WGR Media (acquired by CNET Networks), and as VP Sales and Marketing of Interstep (acquired by Flycast/CMGI). He earned his B.A from Naropa University and his M.B.A. magna cum laude from The Olin School for Business at Babson College.

Simon Peyton Jones is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, where he started in Sept 1998. He is also an Honorary Professor of the Computing Science Department at Glasgow University.

He is a chair of Computing at School, the group at the epicentre of the reform of the national curriculum for Computing in England. Simon is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the ACM, and of BCS.

KP Naidu is the SVP of Engineering and CTO at Amava. KP is an accomplished Technology Leader, highly recognized for his technology vision, engineering and execution and has over 30 years of experience in technology.

KP, is an Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics expert from The University of Edinburgh, UK and rose early in his career to very high ranks at Sun Microsystems, where he was a VP responsible for their global Data Center Practice.

Ravi N. Raj is the CEO and Co-founder of Passage.AI. In this role, he leads a team of AI and deep learning engineers that have created the industry-leading AI platform that businesses can use to create a conversational interface for their websites.

Before co-founding Passage.AI, he led product for @WalmartLabs, Walmart’s hub for innovation around social, mobile and retail. Raj came to Walmart through the acquisition of Kosmix, where he served as the VP and GM of Kosmix’s sites, which included Kosmix.com, Tweetbeat.com, and RightHealth.com, then the second largest health site on the Web.

Raj has also played leadership roles at Yahoo, AltaVista, and Elance (now Upwork) and hold patents in search, social media, and retail.

Swish Goswami, 24, is the CEO of Surf, a tech company providing brands a better way to engage and understand consumers while compensating consumers for their data. Surf’s revolutionary browser extension passively rewards people for their everyday browsing and helps them save when shopping with their favorite brands. Surf’s brand division provides high fidelity data and commerce enablement opportunities to some of the world’s biggest brands like Netflix, NBA, Sony Music, L’Oreal, Electronic Arts, etc. Surf’s vision is to build an equitable data economy and the company has made two acquisitions and raised over $5M to date (from several NBA players, unicorn founders and venture firms).

Swish has given three TEDx talks, secured a publishing deal with Kogan Page and a sneaker deal with K-Swiss, and set up an angel fund called AGEX Capital. Through AGEX, he is an advisor/investor in popular social companies like FaZe Clan, Wombo, and Upstream. Swish has a personal following of over 200,000 and enjoys speaking around the world under North America’s prestigious bureau Speakers Spotlight. For his entrepreneurial and philanthropic achievements, Swish was inducted into Plan Canada’s Top 20 under 20 and Bay Street Bull’s 30 under 30, recognized as LinkedIn’s Top Voice and Startup Canada’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year and awarded the United Nation’s Outstanding Youth Leadership award.

Anshu Sharma is the Co-founder and CEO of Skyflow besides being a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He co-founded Clearedin where he serves as Executive Chairman, and Suki, a digital assistant for doctors. Prior, he served as venture partner at Storm Ventures and was vice president of platform at Salesforce.

Anshu has invested in over 25 startups including Nutanix, Algolia, Workato, and RazorPay.

Laurence Cooke is the founder and CEO of nanopay Corporation, a technology company that offers business-to-business payments and liquidity management solutions to businesses and financial institutions. Active in the payments community, Laurence is a member of the Payments Canada Stakeholder Advisory Committee, FinPay and the US Federal Reserve Faster Payments Task Force.  Previously, he was VP of Wireless at Shaw Communications and COO of Bell Mobility.

Prior to starting nanopay, Laurence worked with WIND Canada and was Vice President of Wireless at Shaw Communications Inc. He was also Chief Operating Officer of Bell Mobility and Bell Distribution Inc (BDI), where he was responsible for all of Bell Mobility’s operations and led a team of 9,000 employees. At BDI, Laurence was responsible for all retail for Bell Canada.  Prior to joining Bell, Laurence was a senior executive in Accenture’s London Strategy Practice. Laurence co-founded two wireless data businesses in Europe, Melodeo, Inc. and Xtempus.

Tyler Baldwin is Chief Executive Officer at Reali, a real estate and fintech company streamlining the homeownership journey. A strategic go-to-market leader with extensive experience successfully launching global products at scale, Tyler is an operation and tech veteran who brings a unique skill set and perspective to Reali.

With a strong background in blending sales, operations, and corporate strategy, Baldwin joined Reali as Chief Revenue Officer and was promoted to COO before becoming CEO. Prior to joining Reali, Baldwin was an executive at LinkedIn and led Elevate’s Mid-Market and Enterprise sales team, an employee advocacy solution that helps companies build their brand.

Gary York is a serial entrepreneur with four successful software and services exits: three private sales and one IPO. He has spent his career at the boundary of what is possible and what is practical. He has held technical and executive positions with leading technology companies in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Alabama. Not only is Gary a winner of the Smithsonian Innovation Award and the EDPA Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation, he also serves on the Boards of TechBirmingham, the McWane Science Center and Urban Avenues.

He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon and was a visiting fellow at UC Berkeley. Gary and his wife Cathy have two children. He is an avid runner.