Michael is a Silicon Valley-based engineering leader who builds both people and product at companies such as Borland, Netscape, Palantir, and Apple. While he's not worrying about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, poker, and werewolves at the popular weblog, 'Rands in Repose'. He currently works as the VP of Engineering at Slack in San Francisco.

Marcy is an executive coach, as well as a seasoned technology professional, and a veteran of several successful startups. As a founder at Critical Path, she built the tech team that led to IPO. Forbes named CPTH the fastest growing high tech company in the world in 1999 (3 to 3000 in 4 years). Marcy is a co-founder & executive coach at Startup Happiness, where she helps entrepreneurs with everything from basic leadership skills to deep personal growth.

Nick is responsible for building and operating the 4th most visited site in the US. Prior to joining Reddit, he held various positions in engineering leadership at Microsoft across a 15 year career. He holds a degree in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, an MBA from U.C. Berkeley Haas, and holds 10 patents related to natural language processing. Nick is an active participant in /dev/color: a non-profit whose mission is to maximize the impact of Black software engineers, and founder of Color Code: a scholarship fund dedicated to future leaders of color in technology fields.

Katie is Director of Engineering at Buffer, a globally distributed team with no offices, and an O’Reilly author. At Buffer, she leads the engineering team and is focused on crafting productive, effective teams - delivering a world class software product. She previously worked as a software engineer before moving into leadership. Her writing has appeared in The Next Web, Inc Magazine and Fast Company.

Mekka currently serves as an Engineering Director Google Play, one of the largest digital marketplaces on earth. Mekka is passionate about building diverse and inclusive teams. His organization is one of the most inclusive engineering teams at Google and comprised of 10% black, 10% Latinx, half of the managers are women, and 30% of the software engineers are women. He is a frequent speaker, consultant, non-profit board member and mentor sharing his expertise with leaders on inclusivity in the workplace, diversity in tech, and successful team building.

In another reality, Kathryn designs race cars for a living. In this one, she's the Director of Engineering an for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Meta project, leveraging the power of ML to democratize scientific research. In her 20-plus year career, Kathryn has scaled and led engineering teams in ways that allow her inner process wonk to thrive. But she still finds the time to mentor new managers, bike, run, play soccer, embarrass her kids, and even sleep once in a while. Kathryn was formerly Sr. Director of Applications Engineering at Evernote and holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.

As CTO, Chris leads Creative Market's largest team, which includes product engineering, Web Ops, and Search & Discovery. Chris serves on Creative Market's board of directors and executive team, spends time mentoring and speaks about management, technology and growing companies.

Tia Caldwell is a Senior Engineering Manager on Slack’s Monetization. In the past 12 years, she’s led engineering teams at Netflix’s and managed a multitude of Microsoft products. Most recently, she’s serves as an active participant in /dev/color: a non-profit whose mission is to maximize the impact of Black software engineers, and is co-founder of Color Code: a scholarship fund dedicated to future leaders of color in technology fields. Tia studied computer science at Xavier University of Louisiana and spent her undergraduate years doing research for the Missile Defense Agency.

Christian McCarrick is the VP of Engineering for Auth0 where he manages a globally distributed team. He is dedicated to improving the craft of software engineering leadership. He volunteers his time to mentor through the Everwise and Plato networks and teaches engineering workshops for new engineering managers. He also hosts a popular podcast called SimpleLeadership where he interviews top technology leaders in order to help other managers grow and be successful.

For more than a decade, Poornima Vijayashanker has led and coached engineering and product teams through processes related to people and product; from idea to shipping product to successfully exiting. She is currently the founder of Femgineer, an education company dedicated to helping techies level up in their careers and build products and companies. Previously she was a lecturer at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, and the founding engineer at Mint.com. Poornima holds degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science from Duke University.

Hasan's current focus is next-generation products at Lab126. He leads efforts in microcontrollers, sensors, embedded algorithms, and diagnostics on the Platform Software team. Prior to joining Amazon, Hasan was an early employee in a number of startups in the Bay Area including Skycatch (drones), Mayfield Robotics (home robotics), and Drive.AI (autonomous cars), with his work often crossing the boundaries between software, electrical engineering and physics. He is passionate about bringing new technologies to market and mentoring early-career engineers.

Nidhi is SVP of Technology at Hired, a marketplace that matches tech talent with the world’s most innovative companies. She leads the company’s global engineering, developer operations and product teams. Nidhi is a skilled engineer and product executive who is passionate about building and growing thriving product and engineering organizations that deliver world-class products at scale. Prior to Hired, Nidhi was Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering at Tophatter and Upwork. Previously, she was instrumental in leading mobiTV and Ning through hyper-growth and expansion.