Laura Gassner Otting helps people get “unstuck” — and achieve extraordinary results.

Through Limitless Possibility, Laura collaborates with change agents, entrepreneurs, investors, leaders, and donors to push past the doubt and indecision that consign great ideas to limbo. She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and catalytic perspective informed by decades of navigating change across the start-up, nonprofit, political, and philanthropic landscapes.

Laura’s 25-year resume is defined by her entrepreneurial edge. She served as a Presidential Appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, helping shape AmeriCorps; left a leadership role at respected nonprofit search firm, Isaacson, Miller, to found and run (and eventually sell) an internationally successful executive search firm which partnered with the full gamut of mission driven nonprofit executives, from start-up dreamers to scaling social entrepreneurs to global philanthropists. She is most recently the author Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life, which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list, right behind Michelle Obama.

Through her own commitment to give back, Laura has helped build a local Montessori school, co-founded a women’s philanthropic initiative, advised a start-up national women’s PAC, grew a citizen-leadership development program, and completed three charity-inspired marathons—projects emblematic of her passions and values. She’s turned on by the audacity of The Big Idea and that larger-than-life goal you just can’t seem to shake. She’s an instigator, a motivator, and a provocateur, and she’s never met a revolution she didn’t like.

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup, and has had plenty of startup failures along the way. He is a frequent speaker at business events, has advised a number of startups, large companies, and venture capital firms on business and product strategy, and is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School. His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs. He lives in San Francisco.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance. He has provided early funding for LinkedIn, Yelp, and dozens of successful technology startups, many run by former colleagues who have been dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.” He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He started the Thiel Fellowship, which ignited a national debate by encouraging young people to put learning before schooling, and he leads the Thiel Foundation, which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking about the future.

Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and The New York Times bestselling author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which is now available in 19 languages.

Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007, and was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP. Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship Shop@AOL service. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications. He also served as vice president of Netscape’s widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. Before joining Netscape in July 1995, he held various senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation.

Ben has an MS in Computer Science from UCLA and a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Ben serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Caffeine, Capriza, Databricks, Foursquare, Genius, Lyft, Magnet Systems, Medium, NationBuilder, Okta, SignalFx, Sisu, Tanium, TripActions, United Masters, and Usermind. He is also on the board of CODE2040.

Saygin is the Founder & CEO of the Middle East’s (ME) first & largest car buying service, SellAnyCar.com and Founder of the first & largest online private shopping club in the ME, Sukar.com, which has been acquired by Souq.com, making him Partner at the Souq.com and Jabbar Internet Group, becoming the largest ecommerce company in the Arab world, with 3000+ employees. In its largest acquisition outside the US to date, Amazon.com has acquired Souq.com Group. He has been selected as a UBS Industry Leader, a network of Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals.

He was also Advisory Board Member & Academic Lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the Canadian University of Dubai.

He was referred to as “the region’s online business guru” by the National newspaper in the UAE, while Arabian Business named him as “one of the region’s finest young entrepreneurs and a major part of the entrepreneurial scene in recent years”.

Fortune magazine (mag) named him in the 40 under 40 list, as one of the most influential young people in business, Entrepreneur mag ME awarded SellAnyCar.com, with Saygin at its helm, as the “Fastest Growing Company in the ME”, while the National newspaper sees it among a handful of tech companies to “have the potential to break the $1bn barrier”. In a cover story, Entrepreneur mag ME titled him as “undoubtedly one of the youngest & most successful internet entrepreneurs in the ME”, awarded SellAnyCar.com as “Technology Innovator of the Year”, while Khaleej Times awarded him as the Technology Leader. Gulf Business selected him as 1 of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs in ME.

In a cover story, Arabian Business counts him as 1 of the most successful entrepreneurs to call Dubai home. During the World Government Summit, HH Sheikh Saif Bin Zayed, Minister of Interior of the UAE, presented Saygin as an inspiring story for the country, in the presence of world leaders, incl. HH Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Saygin regularly shares his knowledge and lifestyle as a speaker and public figure.

One of the leading European experts in the field of strategic leadership and decision-making, passionate about advanced technologies and their impact on competitive strategies of businesses, as well as on the effectiveness of teams and leaders.

Author of the book “Labirynt. Sztuka podejmowania decyzji” (“The Labyrinth: The Art of Decision Making”), which became a Harvard Business Review Poland’s bestseller in just four weeks and has been translated into many languages, including English, Chinese, Russian and Greek. Pawel is also the author of an essay included in the book “Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose from the World’s Greatest Thought Leaders”, published in the US in 2018. His latest book, released in November 2020 in Polish, is “Świat Schrödingera. Kronika nieprzewidywalnej przyszłości” (“Schrödinger’s World: A Chronicle of an Unpredictable Future”).

Pawel is a highly regarded inspirational speaker and advises leading companies in Europe, North America, and Asia. He designs and conducts workshops and training sessions for business owners and senior executives. He has spoken at conferences alongside speakers such as Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, Prof. Dave Ulrich, Prof. Andrew McAfee, Prof. Joseph Badaracco, and Prof. Heike Bruch. For over eight years, he worked at the consulting firm Hay Group, initially as a consultant and later as the leader of the Diagnostics advisory team in Central and Eastern Europe. In 2006, he joined the executive search firm SpenglerFox, where he was responsible for the results and development of the Polish branch. From 2007 to 2014, he served as the CEO of the ICAN Institute, the publisher of Harvard Business Review Polska magazine.

In October 2016, he was selected among over 16,000 candidates to join MG100, the elite global group of Marshall Goldsmith’s experts. Other members of the initiative include professionals such as Dr. Jim Kim, former president of the World Bank, Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford Motor Corporation, Aicha Evans, former Vice President of Intel Corporation, and General Bernard Banks, responsible for leadership development at the US Army West Point Academy. Pawel was also recognized as one of the Leading Global Coaches (Thinkers50 Gala, 2019), one of the Top 20 Mentors of the Globe (International Federation of Learning and Development, 2022) and one of the Biggest Voices In Leadership (Peoplehum, 2023).

In 2005, Pawel completed a train-the-trainer program at the McClelland Center in Boston, and in 2015, he obtained the Stakeholder Centered Coaching™ executive coach certification. In 2018, he completed the Executive Program at Singularity University in Silicon Valley. In February 2021, he completed the Minds and Machines program developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his free time, he enjoys enology and mountaineering expeditions in the Himalayas, Pamir, and Caucasus.

Tim Draper is the founding partner of Draper Associates and DFJ. Tim’s original suggestion to use viral marketing as a method for spreading a software application from customer to customer was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail, Skype, and others.

Tim has been recognized as a leading supporter of entrepreneurship with numerous awards and honors. He was listed as #46 of the most outstanding Harvard alumni, #7 on the Forbes Midas List, #1 of the Most Networked Venture Capitalists by Always On, and #98 in Worth Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful People in Finance. Tim also received the World Entrepreneurship Forum’s “Entrepreneur for the World” in 2015.

Tim received a BS from Stanford University with a major in electrical engineering and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

He served on the California State Board of Education in 1998-1999, and currently leads an initiative to create six new states in California (Six Californias) to encourage competition and choice in government.

In 1994, he created a non-profit for young children to learn about business and entrepreneurship called BizWorld. In 2011, he created Draper University of Heroes, a residential and online school to help extraordinary young people meet their entrepreneurial goals.

Gary Vaynerchuk builds businesses. Fresh out of college he took his family wine business and grew it from a $3M to a $60M business in just five years. Now he runs VaynerMedia, one of the world’s hottest digital agencies. Along the way he became a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist, investing in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, and Birchbox before eventually co-founding VaynerRSE, a $25M investment fund.

Gary also currently hosts The #AskGaryVee Show, a way of providing as much value as possible by taking questions about social media, entrepreneurship, startups, and family businesses and giving his answers based on a lifetime of building successful, multi-million dollar companies. The show is also available as a podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and SoundCloud.

Gary is also a prolific public speaker, delivering keynotes at events like Le Web, and SXSW, which you can watch on his YouTube channel.

He was named to both Fortune and Crain’s 40 under 40 lists in consecutive years, and has been profiled in the New York Times, Fortune, and Inc.

If you could ask only one person for advice about starting a company or joining a startup, chances are you’d pick John Doerr.

John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins.

For 37 years, John has served entrepreneurs with ingenuity and optimism, helping them build disruptive companies and bold teams. In 2018, he authored Measure What Matters, a handbook for setting and achieving audacious goals. Through his book and platform, WhatMatters.com, he shares valuable lessons from some of the most fearless innovators of our time.

John was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than half a million jobs and the world’s second and third most valuable companies. He’s passionate about encouraging leaders to reimagine the future, from transforming healthcare to advancing applications of machine learning. Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs for change in public education, the climate crisis, and global poverty. John serves on the board of the Obama Center and ONE.org.

Eight-time entrepreneur-turned-educator Steve Blank is credited with launching the Lean Startup movement. He’s changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Recognized as a thought leader on startups and innovation, Steve was named one of the Thinkers50 top management thinkers and recognized by the Harvard Business Review as one of 12 Masters of Innovation.

His Harvard Business Review cover story (May 2013) defined the Lean Startup movement.

He teaches his Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and NYU, among others; and created the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps that is now the standard for science commercialization in the U.S. His Hacking for Defense class at Stanford is revolutionizing how the U.S. defense and intelligence community deploys innovation with speed and urgency, and its sister class, Hacking for Diplomacy, is doing the same for foreign affairs challenges managed by the U.S. State Department.

A prolific writer and speaker, Steve blogs at www.steveblank.com. His articles regularly appear in Forbes, Fortune, The Atlantic and Huffington Post.

Tom Kolditz is the founding Director, Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice University.

The Doerr Institute, Tom’s fifth successful leader development start up, was named top university leader development program by the Association of Leadership Educators and the #4 Leader Development Program worldwide by Global Gurus.

Prior to founding the Institute, Tom designed the Leader Development Program at the Yale School of Management and chaired the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at West Point for 12 years.

Brigadier General Kolditz has more than 35 years in leadership positions on four continents, and received the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s highest award for service.

He is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association, and has published more than 75 articles and book chapters to date, including in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the proceedings of the World Economic Forum.

Stephen R. Poland has worked with hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs, mentoring them on startup mechanics, funding plans, pitch decks, financial models, and due diligence documentation for the angel funding process.

Steve brings more than 20 years’ experience in startups and entrepreneurship to his career. Leveraging leadership roles with the Walt Disney Company, MacMillan Publishing, and Bertelsmann, Steve co-founded startups in the digital music and on-demand media manufacturing sectors, as well an early days anti-virus product.

Along with being co-founder of 1×1 Media, Steve works as a venture growth advisor in Western North Carolina.

An entrepreneur since the age of 21, Gino has had an obsession for learning what makes businesses and entrepreneurs thrive.

At 25 he took over the family business, which was deeply in debt and in need of help. After turning the company around and running it for seven years, he and his partners successfully sold the company.

Gino then set out to help entrepreneurs and leaders get what they want from their businesses.

Based on his years of real-world experience, he created the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®), a practical method for helping companies achieve greatness.

He has personally delivered more than 1,900 full-day sessions for more than 135 companies, helping them implement EOS. He is also the author of the award-winning, best-selling book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, which has sold over 1 million copies, as well as five other books in the Traction Library that have sold almost 2 million copies.

Gino is the founder of EOS Worldwide, an organization that helps thousands of businesses implement EOS with the aid of an international team of over 450 professional and certified EOS Implementers and online support. There are more than 130,000 companies using the EOS tools worldwide.

Dr. Donatas Jonikas holds a Ph.D. in Economics and a Master’s in Marketing Management with more than 12 years of experience in the field. Donatas developed and helped to implement winning marketing strategies for more than 50 businesses in different countries and industries around the globe. He has shared the stage with many of the world’s foremost innovative business and startup experts in conferences, hackathons, entrepreneur events, and competitions. In order to write the ‘Startup Evolution Curve’, he did a global research on startups surveying 1,447 startup founders and running close to 500 additional in-depth interviews on how to start a startup business successfully and adopt effective growth hacks. Being a scientist, a marketer, and a military commander (reserve lieutenant) makes him an extraordinary mentor for startups where so much uncertainty exists in every step.

Jason Calacanis  is a technology entrepreneur, angel investor, and the host of the popular weekly podcast This Week in Startups. He’s the founder of a series of conferences that bring entrepreneurs together with potential investors.

As a “scout” for top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and later as an angel investor, Jason has invested in 150 early-stage startups including 4 that have achieved billion-dollar valuations (so far).

Jason’s book “Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups: Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000” was released by Harper Collins on July 18th, 2017. He lives in San Francisco, California.

Giff Constable is an author, repeat entrepreneur, and product leader. Most recently, he served as the Chief Product Officer at Meetup. He has sold three companies while at the helm, and helped build many others. In 2020, he published the science fiction novel Becoming Monday. In 2014, he published the book Talking to Humans as a practical guide to customer discovery for aspiring entrepreneurs. The book went on to win a special award from the National Science Foundation and is now standard reading in university and accelerator programs around the world. In 2018, he and his collaborator Frank Rimalovski followed up with the sequel Testing with Humans, which is all about running effective experiments.

Prior to Meetup, Giff was VP of Product at fintech startup Axial, where he led product, pricing, design, engineering and content strategy. Prior to Axial, he was CEO of the global innovation consulting firm Neo, which was acquired by Pivotal. Neo built a globally-recognized brand for modern product strategy, development and design. Giff personally led major innovation projects at the Mayo Clinic and Time Inc, among others.

Going back further, there are more startups (Trilogy, Envive, The Electric Sheep Company, Aprizi) and even stints as an investment banker at Broadview / Jefferies.

He tries to give back to the startup and innovation community whenever possible, across writing, mentorship and events. He lives outside of New York City with his wife and two children.

Pat Flynn is a beloved thought leader in the areas of online entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and lifestyle businesses. He is routinely celebrated for his transparent leadership style and authentic principles. Pat overcame career adversity at an early age by finding his own path and true passion. Despite his success in business, Pat’s greatest joys are spending time with his family and friends as well as helping inspire and educate others on how to succeed with their own entrepreneurial careers.

Pat has been featured in The New York Times and Forbes Magazine for his accomplishments, and has recently been enjoying talking about his story and business strategies in front of large crowds at various conferences and events all around the world. His top-ranked business podcast, The Smart Passive Income Podcast, has earned over 25 million downloads and continues to inspire people as they work through their online business journey today.

Pat is also an advisor to Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building schools in the developing world, as well as companies such as LeadPages and ConvertKit.

Mike Michalowicz had founded and sold two multi-million dollar companies. Confident that he had the formula to success, he became an angel investor… and proceeded to lose his entire fortune.

Then he started all over again, driven to find better ways to grow healthy, strong companies. Among other innovative strategies, Mike created the “Profit First” formula, a simple and extremely effective ways for businesses to ensure profitability from their very next deposit forward.

Mike is now running his third million dollar venture, Profit First Professionals (an organization that certifies accountants and bookkeepers in Profit First methods that drive profitability for their clients), is a former small business columnist for The Wall Street Journal; is the former MSNBC business make-over expert; is a popular keynote speaker on innovative entrepreneurial topics; and is the author of Clockwork, Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, which BusinessWeek deemed “the entrepreneur’s cult classic.”

Mike is also a guest lecturer for collegiate entrepreneurial programs such as Babson, Boston College, Columbia, Copenhagen Business School, Emerson, Harvard, Penn State, Pepperdine and Princeton. His books are in the core curriculum for entrepreneur students at Pepperdine, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford University, and universities across the country. His books have been translated into over 10 languages.

John Zeratsky is a technology designer, startup investor, and the bestselling author of Sprint and Make Time.

John has focused his career on helping small teams build big things through customer-driven discovery and validation. He was an early employee at FeedBurner, which Google acquired in 2007. At Google, he led design for AdWords Editor and DoubleClick Search, enterprise advertising products responsible for 60% of Google’s revenue. He joined YouTube in 2010 and designed the YouTube Channels platform.

At GV (Google Ventures), John and his team developed the Design Sprint process and personally supported many of GV’s most successful investments, including Slack, One Medical Group, Flatiron Health, Blue Bottle Coffee, Gusto, and Digit.

John has reached millions with his writing about resetting the defaults of busyness and distraction. He’s written two bestselling books and published articles in The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Fast Company, and many other outlets.

John studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the UW School of Human Ecology, where he’s now an advisor to the Dean and faculty.

Originally from small-town Wisconsin, John has lived in Chicago and San Francisco with his wife Michelle. They spent 18 months traveling in Central America aboard their sailboat Pineapple before moving to Milwaukee in 2019.

Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which now gets around 25 million page views per year. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 3000 startups, including Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, and Reddit. In 2019 he published a new Lisp dialect written in itself called Bel.

Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O’Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Michael E. Gerber is a true legend of entrepreneurship.

Inc. Magazine
 calls him “the World’s #1 Small Business Guru” — the entrepreneurial and small business thought leader who has impacted the lives of millions of individuals and hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide for over 40 years.

Michael E. Gerber is the author of the mega-bestseller “The E-Myth Revisited” and five other E-Myth books concerning small business and entrepreneurship.  Additionally, Mr. Gerber has written 14 industry-specific E-Myth Vertical books co-authored by industry experts.  These books are written for: Attorneys, Accountants, Optometrists, Chiropractors, Landscape Contractors, Financial Advisors, Architects, Real Estate Brokerages, Insurance Stores, Dentists, Nutritionists, Bookkeepers, Veterinarians, Real Estate Investors and soon to be HVAC Contractors.

Today, Michael is on a new mission, to bring economic development strengths and capabilities to millions of people around the world by awakening the new entrepreneur within them.  His one-of-a-kind entrepreneurial incubator called The Dreaming Room: Design, Build, Launch & Grow™, is now being led throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. This program will soon be sponsored by cities throughout the United States, and soon in cities throughout the world.

Based on his intimate, in-depth experiences with entrepreneurs in his Dreaming Room™ events, along with the tens of thousands of clients his company has coached and mentored over the past 40 years, Michael E. Gerber has  authored his revolutionary new book on entrepreneurship and The Dreaming Room™ called: “Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Can Create Extraordinary Companies.”

Mr. Gerber believes that awakened entrepreneurs seek a path that has, at its core, a higher, more inspiring meaning than just making money, selling a product, or seizing market share.  According to Mr. Gerber, a new entrepreneur is a trailblazer seeking to transform lives in all areas – from designing a small business, building it, launching it and growing it.

As a result of a participant’s experience in The Dreaming Room: Design, Build, Launch & Grow™ the evolving entrepreneurs within will discover the means to create a new company, or transform an old one, while going on to work ON his or her business and life, rather than just IN it — unfailingly reflecting his or her transformational resolve into the actions needed for a company to flourish.

Michael and his wife, Luz Delia, live in Carlsbad, California.

Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of Techstars.

In addition to his investing efforts, Brad has been active with several non-profit organizations. He currently is chair of the National Center for Women & Information Technology and on the boards of Path Forward, the Kauffman Fellows, and Defy Ventures.

Brad is a writer and speaker on the topics of venture capital investing and entrepreneurship. He’s written a number of books as part of the Startup Revolution series and writes the blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals.

Brad holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Management Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Brad is also an art collector and long-distance runner. He has completed 24 marathons as part of his mission to finish a marathon in each of the 50 states.

Ash Maurya is the author of the international bestseller “Running Lean: How to Iterate from Plan A to a plan that works” and the creator of the one-page business modeling tool “Lean Canvas”. His new book is “Scaling Lean: Master the Key Metrics for Startup Growth”.

Ash is praised for offering some of the best and most practical advice for entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs all over the world. Driven by the search for better and faster ways for building successful products, Ash has developed a systematic methodology for raising the odds of success built upon Lean Startup, Customer Development, and Bootstrapping techniques.

Ash is also a leading business blogger and his posts and advice have been featured in Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and Fortune. He regularly hosts sold out workshops around the world and serves as a mentor to several accelerators including TechStars, MaRS, Capital Factory, and guest lecturers at several universities including MIT, Harvard, and UT Austin. Ash serves on the advisory board of a number of startups, and has consulted to new and established companies.