Alisa is an executive coach who works with senior executives and high potential leaders to help them create positive permanent shifts in their leadership impact and the results they achieve.  She was named the #1 Startup Coach in the world at the 2019 Thinkers50 Marshall Goldsmith Coaching Awards in London.

She also works with executive teams to help them be stronger as a team, have the right conversations and take the right actions to move forward faster.

Alisa provides practical tools and serves as a thought partner to support the challenging process of change. Leaders get the chance to practice their new behaviors and troubleshoot before doing them live.

Prior to becoming a coach, Alisa, a CPA, was the CFO of Clairvergent Technology Group, a Vice President at two high-tech start-ups. She was a manager and consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers and The Monitor Group. Alisa holds an MBA from Cornell University and a BS from Boston University. She is a guest lecturer at Harvard and Cornell Universities and the Naval War College. She is a coach for the prestigious Linkage Global Institute for Leadership Development and for the Center for Inclusive Security, Harvard University.

Alisa is the executive coach for Runway – the incubator at Cornell NYC Tech that helps post-docs commercialize their technology and build companies. She serves on the Entrepreneurship at Cornell Advisory Committee and the President’s Council of Cornell Women.

She was selected as one of the Top 10 Coaches by Women’s Business, which called her “absolutely brilliant, laugh-out-loud hilarious and a superhero.” A dynamic speaker and skilled facilitator, she is known for her humor, energy, results-orientation and motivational style, along with a propensity to burst into song without warning.

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.

Pawel combines the experience of a consultant on organizational culture and leadership development (HayGroup). With HayGroup, he delivered 100+ organizational culture diagnosis & modelling projects, mainly in the Central&Eastern Europe Region

Between 2007 and 2014 he was also the CEO of a rapidly growing company, the ICAN Institute. With ICAN Institute, Pawel grew the company significantly, building teams and designing structures & processes that enabled further growth.

As an entrepreneur, he has written two books on the topics related to both categories: “Labyrinth. The Art of Decision-Making” that was published in Polish (2015), English (2019), Chinese (2020) and Russian (2020); and “Schrodinger’s World. The Chronicle of an Unpredictable Future” that was published in Polish in November 2020;

He has helped in numerous succession plans in quickly growing startups, introducing professional executive teams and supporting the founder(s) in the succession;

Pawel has also developed and successfully implemented the Four Pillar Model of Team Effectiveness in companies operating in Europe, North America and Asia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behavior and the dynamics of viral businesses, as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive, “blitzscale” growth. Ranging from LinkedIn to PayPal, from Airbnb to Convoy to Facebook, Reid invests in businesses with network effects and collaborates on building their product ecosystems.

Reid co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in 2003. LinkedIn is thriving with more than 500 million members around the world and a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising, and software licensing. He led LinkedIn through its first four years and to profitability as Chief Executive Officer. In 2016 LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft, and Reid became a board member of Microsoft.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rhonda Abrams was born in Los Angeles, CA and earned degrees from both UCLA and Harvard. She has advised, mentored and consulted entrepreneurs and small business owners for over twenty years. Her knowledge of the small business market and her passion for entrepreneurship have made her one of America’s most recognized advocates for small business. Her weekly newspaper column, “Small Business Strategies,” is the nation’s most widely-read column about small business, reaching more than 20 million readers through 130 newspapers, USATODAY.com, Inc.com, and Costco Connection magazine.

Rhonda’s first book, Successful Business Plan: Secrets & Strategies, was acclaimed by Forbes magazine as one of the two best books for small business and by Inc. magazine as one of the six best books for startups. Now in its sixth edition, it is used as the primary text for business plan classes by over a thousand business schools.

Josh Kaufman is the author of three bestselling books: “The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business”, “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything… Fast!”, and “How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be.”

Josh’s research focuses on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, productivity, creativity, applied psychology, and practical wisdom.

Josh has been featured as the #1 bestselling author in Business & Money, as ranked by Amazon.com.

“The Personal MBA” has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Business Training and Business Management on Amazon.com. The widely-acclaimed Personal MBA manifesto and business reading list has been downloaded over 3 million times by readers around the world.

“The First 20 Hours” has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Business Self-Improvement, Educational Psychology, and Personal Transformation on Amazon.com. His TEDx talk on “The First 20 Hours” has been viewed over 12 million times worldwide, putting it in the top 10 most-viewed TEDx videos and top 100 most-viewed TED talks published to date.

“How to Fight a Hydra” has been featured as the #1 bestseller in Modern Philosophy on Amazon.com.

Josh’s research has been featured by The New York Times, The BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Fortune, Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, Fast Company, Financial Times, HarvardBusiness.org, The World Economic Forum, Inside Higher Ed, Lifehacker, MarketWatch, The Independent, Bloomberg TV, PBS Next Avenue, CCTV, and CNN’s Sanjay Gupta MD.

Josh has been a featured speaker at The Aspen Ideas Festival, Stanford University, World Domination Summit, Pioneer Nation, Microconf, BaconBiz, Google, and IBM.

JoshKaufman.net was named one of the “Top 100 Websites for Entrepreneurs” by Forbes in 2013.

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.

Jeff Walker has literally transformed the way stuff is sold online. Along the way he’s become one of the top entrepreneurial and marketing trainers in the world. But it didn’t start out that way…

When Jeff started his first online business, he was a stay-at-home dad taking care of two small children. The “business” was launched from the baby’s changing room – and it started with a free email newsletter sent to 19 people. That was in the Internet Dark Ages of 1996.

After that humble start, Jeff quickly developed an underground process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success.

But the success-train was just getting started – once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking. Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in sales with their launches.

Back in the old days before he started teaching his “Product Launch Formula”,
almost no one in the online entrepreneurial world talked about “product launches” and the idea of a “million dollar day” seemed almost ludicrous. But now, in the post-Product Launch Formula world, the million dollar (and multi- million dollar) launches hardly raise an eyebrow. They’ve almost become routine.

Of course, Jeff’s techniques are not just for big gurus — he’s taught thousands of students (who operate in hundreds of niches), and they’ve generated more than $500 million in sales (and that number grows every day.)

Jeff lives in Durango, Colorado where he pursues his passions for all kinds of outdoor fun. He lives with his wife Mary and their dog Jenny. And even though the children are out of the house, Jeff still has lots of adventures with them (especially on skis and mountain bikes).

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.

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.

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.

Jeff Bussgang is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur and professor at Harvard Business School (HBS). His venture capital firm, Flybridge Capital Partners, has made investments in over 100 technology-focused startups since inception fifteen years ago and over $600 million under management.

At HBS, he teaches Launching Technology Ventures, a popular class for MBA students starting companies or pursuing careers in startups. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Bussgang was an entrepreneur—serving as cofounder and president of Upromise (acquired by Sallie Mae) and an executive team member at Open Market (IPO 1996).

He is the author of a book for startup joiners, Entering StartUpLand:  An Essential Guide to Finding the Right Job and Mastering the VC Game, an essential guide for entrepreneurs raising capital and building their startups.  He has also authored well over twenty HBS case studies, teaching notes and book chapters regarding startup management and entrepreneurship. He started his career with The Boston Consulting Group and holds an MBA from HBS and a BA in computer science from Harvard College.

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.

Scott Belsky is an executive, entrepreneur, author, and investor (and all-around product obsessive). He currently serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. Scott’s passion is to make the creative world more productive, connected, and adaptive to new technologies. Scott co-founded Behance in 2006, and served as CEO until Adobe acquired Behance in 2012. Millions of people use Behance to display their portfolios, as well as track and find top talent across the creative industries. After Behance’s acquisition, Scott helped reboot Adobe’s mobile product strategy and led Behance until 2016, when he spent a few years as an investor and advisor to multiple businesses. Alongside his role at Adobe, Scott is a Venture Partner at Benchmark – a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, an early-stage investor, and is co-founder and Executive Chairman of Prefer, a referrals platform that empowers the careers of independent professionals (aka “Soloists”).

Over the years, Scott has pursued other projects to help organize and empower the careers of creative people. These include 99U, Behance’s think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world; and a popular line of organizational paper products that help organize creative people and teams.

Ryan Roberts is a corporate attorney who represents startup companies through all phases of their growth process. He is well respected by clients and peers alike for his in-depth expertise regarding the legal aspects of entrepreneurship, and his international client roster is comprised of emerging growth companies and venture capital funds. Ryan holds a BA and an MA in economics from USC and a Juris Doctor degree from UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. In 2006, Ryan launched StartupLawyer.com, a legal resource for startup companies, which Forbes has named one of the 100 best websites for entrepreneurs.