SOLD OUT
Sara Beykpour is the co-founder and CEO of Particle. She has held key product and engineering leadership roles at major companies, including Twitter, Vine, Periscope, and Secret.
James Cham is a Partner at Bloomberg Beta, a firm focused on investing in the future of work. James invests in companies working on applying machine intelligence to businesses and society. He’s currently invested in companies like Weights and Biases, Lambda Labs, and Yurts AI. James speaks and writes on the implications of AI for companies, including a landscape of machine intelligence companies. Business Insider recognized James as one of the best seed investors in their 2024 Seed 100 list (he made #3, for the second year in a row). He’s been involved in investments with companies like Streamlit, LinkedIn, and Twilio. James was previously an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, a management consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, and a software developer. He lives in Palo Alto.
Jessica Chan, a former manager at LinkedIn and Meta, joined Perplexity in September 2024 as the two-year-old startup’s first head of publisher partnerships.
Dave Davis is the GM of Protege Media, the media vertical of Protege, a platform for AI training. Dave is a senior entertainment and media executive with experience on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Before joining Protege in December 2024, Dave co-founded Calliope Networks (acquired recently by Protege). He was Chief Commercial Officer at the Motion Picture Licensing Corporation, a company that collects royalties from thousands of licensors on behalf of TV and film producers. Pror to MPLC, Dave served in senior roles at NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, and 20th Century Fox. Dave began his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and was a corporate lawyer in Silicon Valley at Gunderson Dettmer. Dave has a BA from Wesleyan University and a JD from the University of Michigan School of Law.
David works on media partnerships at OpenAI where he is responsible for building long-term sustainable value between companies in the media ecosystem and OpenAI. Prior to OpenAI, David worked at The Chernin Group (TCG), a media and consumer investment fund. Before TCG, David worked at Google, where he worked on strategy, business operations, and partnerships at YouTube. He is based in Los Angeles, California.
Julia Enthoven is the co-founder and CEO of Kapwing. A Stanford graduate, she previously worked at Google.
Griffin Gaffney is the CEO and Co-Founder of The San Francisco Standard since January 2021. Prior to this, Gaffney was a Community Organizer at TogetherSF from March 2020 to June 2021. Gaffney also served as the Head of Account Management at Humu from May 2018 to March 2020. Gaffney’s earlier experience includes being a founding sales team member at Stripe from June 2014 to May 2018, where they initially focused on partnering with venture capital firms and startups in London before transitioning to the marketing team in San Francisco. Before that, Gaffney worked as an Associate at LinkedIn from September 2013 to May 2014. Additionally, Gaffney had a brief role in product management at Nutmeg in 2012.
Emilio Garcia-Ruiz is the Editor in Chief of the San Francisco Chronicle, the leading news source in the Bay Area. The Chronicle focuses its coverage on the issues critical to its readers, including health, homelessness, the post-pandemic future of the city, climate change and its deadly consequences and the area’s world-class food and wine scene. Garcia-Ruiz joined the Chronicle in September 2020 after spending the previous 19 years at The Washington Post. His final role at The Post was as Managing Editor for Digital, where he oversaw the development and execution of digital strategy, supervising more than 350 journalists. He edited the 2000 Pulitzer prize-winning investigation by the St. Paul Pioneer Press that uncovered academic fraud in the University of Minnesota men’s basketball program. His career includes editing at the Orange County Register and Los Angeles Times.
Shelby Golan is a Director at Mayfield and helps to drive corporate innovation as part of the business development function, focusing specifically on accelerating product-market fit and early customer adoption for Mayfield’s early-stage investments. Mayfield has built a global network of CXOs and business leaders from across all industries, who need access to new ideas to compete in their own markets. This is a highly engaged global network whose members join CXO Insight forums, CXO of the Future Podcasts, and provide their own top of mind priorities in formal reports. Prior to Mayfield, Shelby worked at Plug & Play – a startup accelerator and corporate innovation hub, where she helped manage their early-stage investment program and retail + fintech verticals. Shelby graduated with a BA from Williams College in 2012.
Lucky Gunasekara is the Co-Founder and CEO of Miso.ai, where he collaborates with category leaders to create high-performance search and discovery experiences. He started their career as an Intellectual Property Analyst at Dube Technologies in 2000, where he worked on R&D and patent analysis. In 2009, Lucky co-founded and served as the Managing Director of Medic Mobile, a technology startup focused on healthcare. From 2010 to 2012, they worked as the CIO at Metabiota, where they led the initial research and development for an epidemic surveillance system. Lucky then joined the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as an Advisor from 2012 to 2014. In 2014, they joined Cornell Tech as a Technologist in Residence, working on small data projects. Lucky also worked at Tapstack as a Senior UX Researcher and Designer from 2015 to 2016. Lucky served as a Senior Advisor, Product at Peterson Center on Healthcare from 2015 to 2017, where they contributed to developing an evidence-based model for primary care transformation.
Annelies Jansen is a global digital strategist and leader of high-profile B2B and B2C businesses and has developed and implemented successful growth strategies for leading consumer and media companies. Amongst her various roles, she led the Times and the Daily Telegraph initiatives to expand from print-only newspaper circulation to digital. She has scaled several mobile-first consumer platforms, and she has built Instagram native shopping for and with partners, including major fashion brands. Annelies has a proven track record strategically and operationally across various industries and business models. Previous to her current role at Prorata.ai, she was in several senior roles at META, where she was VP of Global Commerce Partnerships, responsible for commerce partnerships globally across a family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Earlier, she held a series of senior leadership roles in the technology, digital media and media sectors, including CEO of Findmypast.com; CEO of SUP Media; MD of ITV Broadband; Director of New Media at The Telegraph; and had earlier roles with News International, Johnson&Johnson, Eli Lilly, and Baxter. She has also sat on several listed company, foundation and not-for-profit boards, including: TMG (Telegraaf Media Groep, AEX-listed); SOFI Health; PATH Community; NBTC, Culture Whisperer, and Trader Media East. Annelies graduated with an MSc in Business Organization and Administration from the University of Groningen.
Ahmed Malik is the co-founder and CEO of ScalePost.ai, a transformative platform empowering media publishers and content owners to control their content and unlock new revenue streams. ScalePost.ai facilitates licensing agreements, revenue-sharing models, and AI-powered tools by forging partnerships between content creators and GenAI companies. The platform also boasts an exclusive partnership with Perplexity.ai, allowing partner publishers to not only monetize their content, but also gain visibility into how their content is being surfaced on Perplexity. .Ahmed is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor with extensive experience in M&A, investing, and scaling multiple businesses. He has invested in over a dozen technology companies, and has 2 successful exits as a founder.
Bryan McCann is co-founder and CTO at you.com, advancing human and AI collaboration. He previously led AI research in Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP). His work has been cited thousands of times, and he has spoken about the cutting edge of AI and NLP around the world.You.com recently announced partnerships with the German news agency dpa.
Laura Mandaro is the managing editor of The Information, a leading tech business publication in the US. Known for breaking major stories, including OpenAI’s leadership crisis last year, The Information regularly delivers exclusive scoops. Mandaro joined the publication in 2020 as a senior editor, overseeing a team of reporters covering venture capital and start-ups. Before that, she served as Forbes’ San Francisco bureau chief and was a technology and national editor at USA TODAY in San Francisco.
Dave Nielsen represents IBM as the head of community at the AI Alliance, which brings together compute, data, tools, and talent to accelerate and advocate for open innovation in AI. Prior to IBM, Dave led community programs at companies like MongoDB, Harness, Redis and PayPal. Dave is known for creating community events, such as CloudCamp, and for writing the book PayPal Hacks.
Tim O’Rourke is Vice President, Content Strategy for Hearst Newspapers, where he leads the group’s DevHub editorial engineering and content strategy teams. Previously, O’Rourke was the director of product and strategy for The San Francisco Chronicle. He supervised the newsroom’s product, website+app, multimedia and audio staffs; directed data-driven coverage; and oversaw the development of interactive projects and journalist tools for Hearst Newspapers. O’Rourke’s former roles include being The Chronicle’s managing editor, digital; an assistant managing editor; and the executive producer of SFChronicle.com. He came to The Chronicle as the senior news editor, responsible for the print front page and news operations. He also served as the night breaking news editor and the department head for the copy and wire desks. He developed the yearlong Chronicle Covers front-page archive project and wrote the occasional craft beer story for the Food+Wine department. Before joining The Chronicle in 2013, O’Rourke worked as an editor and writer at the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Santa Barbara News-Press, Hartford Courant and Diablo Magazine. He has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and a bachelor’s degree from Saint Mary’s College of California.
Djordje Padejski is a computational journalism scholar working at the intersection of journalism, digital technologies, and artificial intelligence, researching the impact of AI technologies on journalism and news media ecosystems, with an emphasis on both disruptive and transformational aspects, as well as how these shifts of how journalism is created and distributed have evolved. Padejski is currently the Associate Director at Stanford University’s John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships, where he mentors JSK fellows and alumni as they pursue innovative projects and technologies in journalism. He is also a lecturer and educator who teaches journalism classes at Stanford and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. Prior to Stanford, Padejski worked as an investigative/data reporter, editor, and director for a number of news organizations including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), The Center for Investigative Reporting (now Reveal), Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and The Center for Investigative Journalism in Serbia (CINS). Padejski was a core member of the Offshore Leaks investigation, the biggest collaborative team of journalists assembled to sift through 260 gigabytes of unstructured data – 2.5 million of secret records from 10 tax havens and offshore assets of people from more than 170 countries (documents, emails, spreadsheets); an award-winning project by ICIJ, which prompted high-profile resignations and criminal investigations. He developed journalism tools such as a public records platform for investigative journalists called FOIA Machine (now with Muckrock), and news organizations such as the non-profit investigative centre CINS in Serbia.
Cheryl Phillips is the faculty director of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab. She teaches data journalism at Stanford University and co-founded the Stanford Open Policing Project in 2017. She worked at The Seattle Times from 2002-14, focusing on data and investigations. In Seattle, she twice worked on breaking news stories which received a Pulitzer and was twice on teams that were Pulitzer finalists. She has worked at USA Today, and at newspapers in Michigan, Montana and Texas. She is a former board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors.
Saurabh Sharma is a product leader experienced with applied AI, search/discovery, monetization, trust & safety, machine learning, identity, web3, and social media. Experienced in building and leading collaborative / cross-functional PM teams and growing products from 0 to 100s of millions of users.
Varun leads media partnerships at OpenAI where he is responsible for building long-term sustainable value between companies in the media ecosystem and OpenAI. Prior to OpenAI, Varun worked at Meta where he led partnerships for WhatsApp and also led product marketing functions in the media space. He has worked on the Strategy and Development team at the New York Times, as well as worked in business development at a few startups including Foursquare. Prior to entering tech, Varun was an antitrust and competition lawyer.
Josh is an investor and advisor in 20+ companies across technology, media & CPG who has served in various leadership roles at Snap Inc., which he joined in 2013 as the 28th employee and 3rd business hire. Most recently Josh served as Head of Product Strategy, News & Publishers, overseeing product development and product marketing for creator tools, driving cost savings and innovation on behalf of 700+ creators. Josh and his team launched Dynamic Stories, an auto-generative video product for web publishers, and Creator Commerce, bringing native shopping to creator videos on Snapchat. During his time at Snap, Josh helped shape the strategic, operational, creative and revenue strategies across every aspect of the media and creator business and spearheaded many of Snap’s most important initiatives, including the launches of Snapchat Discover, Shows, Snap Kit, Story Studio, Creator Commerce and Dynamic Stories.
Patrick is based in San Francisco, where he co-founded the AI consulting lab Verso. He helps newsrooms, non-profits, and business leaders step into the AI age, drawing on deep journalistic and technical experience. Verso offers AI training, strategy consulting, product design, and implementation. Previously, he was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University, where he explored the impact of artificial intelligence on the information ecosystem, especially on media and journalism. Patrick prototyped AI tools for reporters and editors, designed newsroom strategies, learned to code (in Python), and built entrepreneurship and business development skills. From 2013 to 2023, he was Head of Social Media for news at the Austrian Public Broadcaster ORF. In this role, he built its social presence on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook from scratch and grew it to reach a daily audience of 2.4 million followers.
Zach Todd is founder of Beyond Labels and co-founder of ScalePost.AI.
Kavel built Verso with Patrick Swanson during their 2023–24 John S. Knight journalism and Human-Centered AI fellowship at Stanford University. He previously worked as an investigative journalist at Consumer Reports’ Digital Lab, a staff writer at Axios and The Atlantic, and a freelance reporter in Beirut, Lebanon.
Rocky Yu is the founding and CEO of AGI House, a factory designed to build AI startups. He founded several companies in Silicon Valley, including Piki Inc, a platform for AI/AR storytelling, and 35CFund. He launched most recently AGI House Ventures.
