Speakers
General Partner Andreessen Horowitz
Co-Founder, President, and Partner Sapphire Ventures
CEO and Co-Founder Databricks
Managing Director Zetta Venture Partners
General Partner Canaan Partners
Co-Founder & CEO Box
Co-founder & General Partner Canvas Ventures
Advisory CISO Cisco Secure
Co-founder & CEO Forethought
EVP & Chief Learning Officer SAP
Editor
Contributor
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $1.25 billion infrastructure practice. He first joined the firm in 2016 and currently serves on the boards of ActionIQ, Ambient.ai, Astranis, Coactive, Convex, dbt Labs, DeepMap.ai, Defined Networking, Distributional, Fivetran, Ideogram, Imply, Isovalent, Kong, Material Security, Metronome, Netlify, Orbit, Parsec Gaming, Pindrop Security, Preset, Rasa, Tabular, Tackle, Tecton, and Truffle. Martin was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin was a fellow and served as a senior vice president and general manager of the networking and security business unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016. Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also cofounded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006. For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Jai is President, Partner and Co-Founder at Sapphire Ventures. He invests in startups that he believes are developing ground-breaking products and are on their way to becoming Companies of Consequence. He has more than 15 years of investment experience and has helped multiple companies innovate their product and marketing strategies in order to become market leaders. Jai’s current investments include Glean, Netskope, Cohesity, Huntress, ThoughtSpot, Defense Unicorns, Clari, CircleCI, DataRobot, JumpCloud, Simpplr, Blockdaemon, and UJET. Fifteen of his investments have IPO’ed, including MuleSoft, Jfrog, Five9, Nutanix, Alteryx, Square, ExactTarget, Apigee, Box, and SumoLogic, while twenty-four of his investments have been acquired.
Ali Ghodsi is the President, CEO and co-founder of Databricks, the Data and AI company. Under Ali’s leadership, Databricks has pioneered the Data Intelligence Platform built on a Lakehouse architecture to simplify and scale analytics and AI for thousands of global organizations. Ali’s experience as a data and AI leader spans more than 20 years, with deep roots in AI research and open source software. He was one of the creators of open source project, Apache Spark. Ideas from his academic research in the areas of resource management and scheduling and data caching have been applied to Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop. Before being named CEO in 2016, he served as the VP of Engineering and Product Management. Ali also sits on the Databricks Board of Directors. In addition to his role at Databricks, Ali continues to be involved in academia. He is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focuses on research in the areas of computer systems and AI, and is on the board of UC Berkeley’s RiseLab. Originally from Iran and Sweden, Ali resides in Berkeley, CA with his family. Ali received his MBA from Mid-Sweden University in 2003 and PhD from KTH/Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2006 in the area of Distributed Computing.
Jocelyn Goldfein is a managing director at Zetta Venture Partners.
General Partner at Canaan Partners. Board Member of Deckers Brands, Lily AI & Forte.
Aaron Levie is Chief Executive Officer, Cofounder at Box, which he launched in 2005 with CFO and cofounder Dylan Smith. He is the visionary behind the Box product and platform strategy, incorporating the best of secure content collaboration with an intuitive user experience suited to the way people work today. Aaron leads the company in its mission to transform the way people and businesses work so they can achieve their greatest ambitions. He has served on the Board of Directors since April 2005. Aaron attended the University of Southern California from 2003 to 2005 before leaving to found Box.
Rebecca Lynn is co-founder and general partner of Canvas Ventures.
Wendy Nather leads the Advisory CISO team at Cisco. She was previously Research Director at the Retail Information Sharing and Analysis Center, where she was responsible for advancing the state of resources and knowledge to help organizations defend their infrastructure from attackers. Wendy was also Research Director of the Information Security Practice at independent analyst firm 451 Research, covering the security industry in areas such as application security, threat intelligence, security services, and other emerging technologies. Wendy has served as a CISO in both the private and public sectors. She led IT security for the EMEA region of the investment banking division of Swiss Bank Corporation (now UBS), as well as for the Texas Education Agency. Wendy is co-author of The Cloud Security Rules, and was listed as one of SC Magazine’s Women in IT Security “Power Players” in 2014, as well as an “Influencer” in the Reboot Leadership Awards in 2018; she was inducted into the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame in 2021. She is an advisory board member for the RSA Conference, and serves on the advisory board for Sightline Security, an organization that helps provide free security assessment services to nonprofit groups. Wendy is a Senior Cybersecurity Fellow at the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She is based in Austin, Texas, and you can follow her on Twitter as @wendynather. She speaks regularly on topics ranging from threat intelligence to identity and access management, risk analysis, incident response, data security, and societal and privacy issues. Wendy is co-author of The Cloud Security Rules, and was listed as one of SC Magazine’s Women in IT Security “Power Players” in 2014.
Deon Nicholas is the CEO and Co-Founder of Forethought, the Generative AI for Customer Support company. Forethought has raised $90M+ in venture capital, was recognized as one of G2’s Best Software Products for 2023, was named to CNBC’s 25 Top Startups for the Enterprise in 2022, and won TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018. Before starting Forethought, Deon built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage.
Max Wessel leads the SAP Learning organization, where he is responsible for SAP’s efforts to create opportunity through learning and development for employees, customers, and partners. In this capacity he leads SAP’s learning, early talent, leadership development, training, and developer relations teams. Max previously served as SAP’s Chief Innovation Officer, pioneering emerging technologies and product incubation across SAP. Outside of SAP, he lectures at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is a venture partner with Nextgen Venture Partners. Max began his career in new product development at BCG, was an early employee or founder at multiple VC-backed startups, and invested as a software VC at Sapphire Ventures. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar and Rock Fellow, and a BA from Northwestern University where he graduated with distinction in Philosophy and Economics.
Frederic was with TechCrunch from 2012 through 2025. He also founded SiliconFilter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite). Frederic covers enterprise, cloud, developer tools, Google, Microsoft, gadgets, transportation and anything else he finds interesting.
Frederic's Sessions
Pancake & Podcast with The New Stack | The Forum
Join The New Stack founder and Publisher Alex Williams and TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois for a special Pancake & Podcast session with live Q&A featuring, you guessed it, delicious pancakes and awesome panelists!
Alex Williams is the founder and publisher of The New Stack, which publishes explanations and analysis of at-scale, distributed technologies for developers, DevOps and other IT professionals.
Alex's Sessions
Pancake & Podcast with The New Stack | The Forum
Join The New Stack founder and Publisher Alex Williams and TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois for a special Pancake & Podcast session with live Q&A featuring, you guessed it, delicious pancakes and awesome panelists!
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