Award Categories

Adam Cheyer

Co-Founder @ Siri & Change.org

Adam helped start four successful companies: co-founder of Siri (sold to Apple to build the Siri assistant, with 1B users), co-founder of Viv Labs (sold to Samsung, technology available on hundreds of millions of devices), co-founder of Sentient (a machine learning company), and founding member of Change.org (the world's largest petition platform with 400M+ members). Adam has more than 60 publications and 38 patents to his name, and has degrees in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Brandeis University and UCLA.

Adam O'Donnell

Startups Partnerships @ Zendesk

Adam O'Donnell runs Startup Partnerships for North America at Zendesk. Previously he worked as an investment associate at a Silicon Valley VC (investors in Airbnb, Amplitude, etc.), where we reviewed 2000+ high-growth startups. Before investing, Adam founded 2x B2B SaaS companies (1 exit, 1 failed). Adam lives in San Francisco, and in his free time runs a podcast called TheTop.VC, where he has interviewed VCs from Mayfield, 500 Startups, Techstars, and more.

Ana Chaud

CEO & Startup Advisor @ Lodestar

Ana Chaud is CEO of Lodestar, a Bay Area based accelerator that helps startups scale, grow and raise capital effectively. She is also the Principal of Chaud &Co., where she helps founders become successful CEOs through leadership development and corporate strategy. Prior, she built a thriving management consulting practice in San Francisco, working with small and mid-sized companies to streamline Operations and Financial Management. In 2004, she started Garden Bar, the first fast casual salad concept in the NW. She grew, scaled and sold it, in a span of five years. Ana was a finalist for the OEN Tom Hulce Entrepreneurship Award, which recognizes the most influential entrepreneurs in Oregon.

Arylee McSweaney

Director of Engineering, Frontend Enablement & UX Foundation @ Etsy

Arylee McSweaney has an MBA in Information Systems from Baruch College. She is an experienced engineering leader with expertise in leading enablement and modernization efforts, software quality initiatives and transforming the dei landscape of an organization. Arylee believes that software and technology changes lives. For this reason, she is passionate about servant leadership and mentoring others on their leadership journey.

Benjamin David Novak

Angel Investor @ Delaware Crossing Investor Group

Benjamin David Novak’s corporate practice focuses on equity financings, debt financings, corporate governance, securities matters, and mergers and acquisitions. He represents emerging growth companies in the US and abroad in various industries including technology and life sciences, as well as, angel investors, private equity firms, and venture capital funds.

Denise Reed Lamoreaux

Worldwide Learning Director of Customer Success @ Microsoft

Dr. Anita Jindal

Senior Director of Engineering @ VMware

Dr. Anita Jindal is a Sr. Director at VMware, leading engineering for VMware Skyline product that provides proactive insights to drive intelligent customer actions. Prior to VMware, as Engineering leader at NetApp, she led strategy and execution of Active IQ product. Anita’s team developed data science, microservices, and API platforms using Big Data (Hadoop) and cloud technologies. Anita held various engineering leadership positions at Oracle and Sun. She worked as Resident Research Associate at Argonne National Lab, researching application of parallel computing to deduction systems, an area of AI. Anita has multiple software patents and publications. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Anita has been awarded IDG 2020 One’s to Watch, which honors rising technology leaders who have what it takes to become strategic, C-level business technology executives of tomorrow. She received the Bay Area Timmy Award 2019 for Best Technical Manager. Anita is a regular speaker and moderator to support STEM and Women in Technology (WIT) goals globally. She serves as a Board Member for STEMentors Silicon Valley (a California nonprofit) that promotes STEM for underrepresented children in Bay Area.

Erin Liao

Vice President, E2E 5G Systems @ Ericsson

Erin has twenty years of global R&D leadership and program management expertise in mobile communication industry. She is passionate about accelerating 5G innovation with strategic vision and flawless execution.

Helen Liu

Venture Capitalist @ Seven Industries

Helen Liu is a co-founder of Seven Industries Capital, a deep tech-focused venture fund. Ms. Liu is also a partner at Third Wave Ventures, where she has been responsible for investor relations, capital raising, and deal flow generation across technology sectors. Based in Los Angeles, Third Wave manages venture investments focused on deep tech companies in semiconductors, solid state display and lighting, solar energy and other clean energy, machine vision and AI, wireless communication and IoT. Helen has more than 20 years of combined experience in venture capital and large-scale software development. She is highly adept at sourcing/managing venture projects, recruiting/coaching top-talent and structuring strategic partnerships.

Jeremy Wight

VP, Engineering @ CareMessage

Jeremy Wight is an experienced Product and Engineering leader that is passionate about creating award-winning products that serve millions of users, and developing extremely high-functioning teams. Having spent the past 15+ years overseeing different stages of Engineering from early-to-mid-stage tech companies, Jeremy presently oversees Engineering at CareMessage, the leading patient engagement platform for underserved people groups. Having managed engineering organizations for many years, Jeremy is a passionate and sought after voice on the topics of leadership and management in the tech space.

Justin Michela

Vice President, Architecture @ Fidelity Investments

As a technical and business operations leader, Justin offers a substantive background in small to large team management, budget and vendor management, effective use of resources, project direction and management, and global infrastructure and enterprise software experience. His stellar management record is augmented by comprehensive Project Management using Agile methodologies; along with dual degrees in Computer Science and Engineering Management. His driving passion is to ensure significant improvement in all processes followed by expert implementation and execution. Being an astute senior director with the ability to analyze processes, increase efficiencies, and resolve customer issues, he revels in the challenges of accomplishing goals where others have failed. He understands the importance of results and effective team management. During his career, Justin has sought opportunities to accomplish cost-reduction goals, meet and exceed production targets, and motivate co-workers to perform at a high level. He has successfully worked with stakeholders across a diverse array of platforms in challenging environments while earning a reputation as a strong, empowering technology leader.

Kapil Agarwal

Engineering Director @ Salesforce

Kapil Agarwal is an Engineering Director in Salesforce and leading the Service Cloud Voice product that integrates intelligent telephony into Salesforce for a seamless agent experience. The v1 launch of Service Cloud brings voice calls and digital channels together helping agents better help customers. He takes great pride in building a culture where people are constantly learning, growing and innovating. He empowers teams with operational excellence and processes that scale. Prior to Salesforce Kapil worked in both consumer and enterprise products. He worked in Microsoft for hotmail.com(now outlook.live.com) and in IBM on the unstructured data. As a passionate and engineering leader, Kapil is focussed on building high performing teams and has a proven track record of delivering enterprise quality products.

Mukul Joshi

Vice President of Engineering @ Thomson Reuters

Mukul serves as Vice President, Head of Engineering for the Risk, Fraud & Compliance segment at Thomson Reuters overseeing the vision, strategy and execution of the Technology group in building out scalable, cloud optimized solutions that leverage machine learning and advanced analytics to investigate and prevent fraud in Government and Corporate markets. Much of his past-life was spent working at Disney/ESPN building digital property (web/mobile/API), followed by some time spent at a Big Data retail technology start-up in Toronto helping launch the first revenue generating product. He holds a BASc degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Mukul has a proven track record in delivering high performance consumer and enterprise products at scale, along with experience in product growth strategies and M&A activity.

Nirmal Srinivasan

Software Engineering Director @ PayPal

Nirmal is building high-performance engineering teams driven by the purpose of bringing great products to customers. Prior to PayPal she has spent close to two decades working in companies like Netflix and Apple. In her roles as an engineering leader she has led transformational initiatives such as migrating core products from on-prem to cloud, and create platforms enabling SAAS models. She takes great joy in building a culture where people are constantly learning, growing and innovating. She brings a mindset of simplifying process there by scaling remote teams with focus on diversity and work life balance.

Nitant Vaidya

Senior Director of Engineering @ Turing.com

Nitant is senior engineering leader with over 9 years of experience building Internet facing software products. Nitant has built and launched multiple AI, SaaS and Consumer products from scratch. In his current role as a Senior Director of Engineering at Turing.com, he leads a team of 40 software engineers and managers responsible for building the core AI product that matches customers with the most qualified pre-vetted software developers from Turing's 1.7 million-strong developer base. Turing was valued at 1.1 Billion dollars at its most recent funding round in 2021. At LinkedIn, he played multiple roles over 7 years starting in 2013. Notably, he led the engineering teams building LinkedIns global reverse-proxy infrastructure and server infrastructure. He also led the team responsible for the Search and Recommendations experience in Sales Navigator.

Pankaj Pilaniwala

Product Manager at Google

Pankaj Pilaniwala is a technology aficionado, tech entrepreneur, a coach and a product advisor. He has extensive experience in building data-driven, customer-centric, intelligent and aesthetic products, leveraging multidisciplinary perspectives in the work, bringing together an understanding of technology, a deep interest in people, a knack for managing complex projects, and a vision for creative and impactful product creation that can grow businesses and change lives. He is currently a Product Manager at Google. He is focussed on building great intuitive products and has a proven track record of delivering delightful product experiences. At a point in his career, he also had a startup where he built a novel ed-tech solution embedding concepts of Gamification.

Sandesh Achar

Director of Cloud Engineering @ Workday

Sandesh Achar is a Cloud distributed computing Architect and Technology leader with experience building, scaling, and managing a “world-class” Cloud Engineering team for leading Fortune 1000 organizations. He currently leads the Cloud Engineering ,Site Reliability Engineering , Program management and Database Engineering teams, spread globally, for the fastest growing, Multi Million revenue product line at “Workday Inc”( Director of Cloud Engineering). Sandesh in his past experience at “Intuit Inc”, has successfully led migration of 100+ enterprise systems to Multi-Cloud, while also responsible for building a global cloud engineering team from ground up. His most recent scholarly articles have been published in International Engineering journals, on Cloud Forensics, Greener Cloud, Cloud security, Artificial Intelligence and Observability.

Stacey Yudin

President @ NEP Services

Stacey Yudin is a driven entrepreneur & business consultant with experience in diverse markets including non-profits, fundraising, sales, international medicine, and small businesses. She currently works for New Equity Productions as President, as well as Cofounder of Yantra Beauty. Stacey's passion is solving problems. She finds enjoyment in inspiring even the most skeptical client to examine a new modus operandi. She is driven for professional success and has a track record to prove it. Stacey is the epitome of GRIT: A determined display of Passionate Perseverance that will lead her and others to success and fulfillment. Stacey is a leader and has a proven track record of success. Before leaving UCLA Department of Medicine to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams, she was a junior founding member of the Global Health Education Program (GHEP) at the DGSOM and was apart of the team that developed the Center for World Health at UCLA.