Meet the big-name tech leaders, thought-provoking academics, talented creatives, and exceptional founders who build our future speaking at TOA23.
Marc-Alexander Christ is co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at SumUp. After graduating from the University of Maatricht, he started his career in Investment Banking at European Investors in New York, followed by a position as VP at JPM in London and Frankfurt. After collecting his first experience in the startup world as head of sales at CityDeal (Groupon), Marc cofounded MIOSATO, the online fashion gallery and SumUp the leading mPOS player in Europe.
Co-Founder
SumUp
Dr. Menas C. Kafatos is Quantum Physicist, Cosmologist, and a Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. Founding Dean of the Schmid College of Science and Technology, Dr. Kafatos currently serves as the director of the Center of Excellence in Earth Systems Modeling and Observations at Chapman University. Author of numerous books including The Conscious Universe, The Non-local Universe (with Robert Nadeau, Springer-Verlag and Oxford), Principles of Integrative Science (with Mihai Draganescu, Romanian Academy of Sciences Press), and the forthcoming book You Are the Universe with Deepak Chopra (Harmony 2017).
Quantum Physicist & Cosmologist
Chapman University
Shanna H. Swan, PhD, is an award-winning scientist based at Mt. Sinai and one of the leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists in the world. Dr. Swan has published more than 200 scientific papers and has been featured in extensive media coverage around the world. Her appearances include ABC News, NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, CBS News, PBS, BBC, PRI Radio, and NPR, as well as in leading magazines and newspapers, including Newsweek, The Washington Post, USA TODAY, Time, US News & World Report, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Daily News (New York), Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, Daily Mail (London), New Scientist, Mental Floss, Mother Jones, New Telegraph, The Times, The Observer, Euronews, and the National Post.
Environmental & Reproductive Epidemiologist
Mount Sinai
Mara Gordon, Co-Founder of Aunt Zelda's and Octopi Wellness, has developed cannabis treatment protocols for thousands of patients driven by data. Gordon, a process engineer, created software enabling her to take a detailed and scientific approach to plant medicine. With 500,000 views of her TEDx talk, she is featured in Mary Janes: The Women of Weed, The Medicine in Marijuana and Weed the People
Co-Founder
Aunt Zelda's
Pia Mancini is a democracy activist, open source sustainer, co-founder at Open Collective and Chair of Democracy Earth Foundation. She worked in politics in Argentina and developed technology for democracy around the world. YC Alum, globe-trotter and Roma’s mum. She is now based in NYC. YC Alum, YGL (World Economic Forum).
Co-Founder & CEO
Open Collective
Bradley is the co-founder and CEO of Roll. Prior to Roll he was one of the founding researchers at CoinDesk, creating the company’s State of Blockchain report and serving as a product lead on the research team as the Ethereum Mainnet went live in 2015. He was previously an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Techstars and is the best-selling author of #BreakIntoVC
Co-Founder & CEO
Roll
Eric Wahlforss is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dance. He co-Founded SoundCloud in 2007 and served as its Chief Technology Officer. He holds an M.Sc. degree in Industrial Economics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and has studied three years at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Founder
Soundcloud / Dance
Discover some the most brilliant minds who have shared their insights with us in the previous editions of TOA
Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision. As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations. Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher.
VP & CTO
Amazon
Allen is one of LinkedIn’s co-founders and is currently responsible for LinkedIn’s content, community and communications product initiatives, including products such as LinkedIn Today, Signal, Homepage, Groups, and Polls. Prior to Linkedin, Allen designed exploratory products and marketing programs at PayPal, and was part of the founding team at SocialNet.com, a first-generation social site supporting dating, recreational and professional activities.
Co-Founder
Gavin Wood is a British computer scientist and software engineer famous for being the co-founder of Ethereum, inventor of smart contract programming language Solidity, and creator of Polkadot. Before joining the blockchain industry, Wood studied at the University of York, where he earned a Master of Engineering degree in 2002 and a PhD in Music Visualization for Human Computer Interfacing in 2005.
Free-Trust Technologist and Founder
Ethereum, Polkadot, Kusama, Parity, Web3 Foundation
Jawed Karim (born 28 October 1979) is a German-American Internet entrepreneur, who co-founded YouTube and was the first person to upload a video on it. The video he released was named ‘Me at the zoo’ and as of 2016 has reached 34 million views. Many of the core components of PayPal, including its real-time anti-internet fraud system, were also designed and implemented by Karim.
Co-Founder
Youtube
Steve is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, the “front page of the internet” and fourth most visited site in the U.S. He has led the company’s development of native image and video hosting, a new mobile app, and a full site redesign while growing the Reddit community to over 330 million monthly users. In addition to his work at Reddit, Steve is a mentor at Hackbright Academy, a San Francisco-based coding school for women.
Co-Founder & CEO
Matt Mullenweg is best known for co-founding WordPress, but his innovations didn’t stop there. A spirited public speaker, Matt Mullenweg shares his insights on the future of work and bringing companies imaginatively to scale. More than 40% of the Internet’s top 10 million sites use WordPress, the content management system co-created by Matt Mullenweg. As CEO of Automattic, the company he founded to develop WordPress, Mullenweg demonstrates the commercial viability of open-source SaaS software.
Founder
Wordpress / Automattic
Former Minister of State for Digitalisation
Member of the German Bundestag
Richard "Richie" Hawtin is a British-Canadian electronic musician and DJ. He became involved with Detroit techno's second wave in the early 1990s,and has been a leading exponent of minimal techno since the mid-1990s. He became known for his recordings under the Plastikman and F.U.S.E. aliases. Under the latter, he released his debut album Dimension Intrusion (1993) as part of Warp's Artificial Intelligence series.
Artist
Nicole Moudaber is an event promoter, record label founder, radio host, and one of the most passionately followed DJ/producers in the world. Ignited by an internal combustion engine fueled by raw emotion, Nicole Moudaber is at the forefront of her own movement. The sought after DJ and Producer presides over an empire that includes MOOD; her highly influential record label and global party brand, as well as a hugely popular radio show, a back catalogue of incendiary techno releases and a range of philanthropic endeavors.
DJ/Producer
Renaud Visage co-founded the world's largest event technology company, Eventbrite (NYSE: EB), and now helping start-ups scale as an angel investor (60+ startups in portfolio), as a venture partner with seed fund Point Nine Capital, and as a non executive board director (ABTasty, Athenian, Bearer, Meister).
Co-Founder
Eventbrite
Juergen Mueller is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, leading the Technology and Innovation board area. As Chief Technology Officer (CTO), he oversees SAP’s platform and technology development. In addition, he is responsible for innovation efforts related to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as well as new technologies.
CTO
SAP
Adam D'Angelo (born August 21, 1984) is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California. He was chief technology officer of Facebook, and also served as its vice president of engineering, until 2008. In June 2009, he started Quora. He invested $20 million of his own money into Quora as part of their Series B round of financing. He is a member of the board of directors of OpenAI.
Co-Founder & CEO
Quora
Silicon Valley entrepreneur, passionate about building businesses and excited about emerging technologies that have a positive impact to transform lives. Served as CEO of two successful Silicon Valley public companies and on boards of Arm, Cadence, Cymer (ASML) and others. Seed investor to innovative companies including Berkeley Lights, Fungible, Zoom Video, Graphcore and TTTech.
Former President
Samsung Electronics
Scott Croyle is a Director at Apple. Croyle worked on Android products for over a decade before moving to Apple. He oversaw devices like the HTC One M7 and M8 before moving on to Nextbit, where he worked on the cloud-focused Nextbit Robin smartphone. Several months after Razer bought Nextbit, Croyle departed for a studio called Attic, where he stayed for almost three years. He joined Apple as a director in April 2020.
Director
Apple
Robert Habermeier is a Thiel Fellow and co-founder of Polkadot. He has a research and development background in blockchains, distributed systems, and cryptography. A longtime member of the Rust community, he has focused on leveraging the language’s features to build highly parallel and performant solutions.
Co-Founder
Polkadot
Michael Alyn Pondsmith (born April 14, 1954), typically credited as Mike Pondsmith, is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for his work for the publisher R. Talsorian Games, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines since the company's founding in 1982. Pondsmith is credited as an author of several RPG lines, including Mekton (1984), Cyberpunk (1988), and Castle Falkenstein (1994).
Creator, Game Designer
Cyberpunk
Arlan Hamilton is a remarkable entrepreneur who built a venture capital fund from the ground up, while homeless. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm dedicated to minimizing funding disparities in tech by investing in high-potential founders who are people of color, women, and/or LGBT. Started in 2015, Backstage has now invested nearly $5M into 100 startups led by underestimated founders.
Founder & Managing Partner
Backstage Capital
Dominik Richter is the Founder & CEO of HelloFresh. HelloFresh SE is a publicly traded meal kit company based in Berlin, Germany. It is the largest meal-kit provider in the United States, and also has operations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Europe (GB, D-A-CH, Benelux, France, Italy and Scandinavia) and Japan. It has been listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since its IPO in November 2017.
Founder & CEO
Hello Fresh
Maximilian Tayenthal is Founder and Co-CEO of N26. Together with his business partner and friend Valentin Stalf, he has built one of the fastest-growing mobile banks in the world. Their vision is to create a bank that 100 million people around the world love to use, giving people the power to live and bank their way.
Founder & Co-CEO
N26
Martine Rothblatt is Chairman & CEO of United Therapeutics, a company she started to save the life of one of her daughters. She leads efforts to create novel therapies for rare diseases, to decode the pharmacogenomic properties of medicines and to manufacture an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. She previously created and led Sirius XM as its Chairman & CEO, and launched other satellite systems for navigation and international television broadcasting.
Chairman & CEO
United Therapeutics
Luis von Ahn is an entrepreneur and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, regarded a pioneer of crowdsourcing. He is known for inventing CAPTCHAs, being a MacArthur Fellow and selling 2 companies to Google. He has been named one of the 10 Most Brilliant Scientists by Popular Science, 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover, and 100 Most Innovative People in Business by Fast Company. Luis is the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, the world's most downloaded education app with 120 million users.
Founder
Duolingo
Sebastian Siemiatkowski (born 1981) is CEO & co-founder of the Stockholm-based payments company Klarna. While studying at the Stockholm School of Economics he was inspired to think about what kind of payment solution for e-commerce would make it possible to separate the fun experience of buying from the tedious process of paying. Convinced that the solution to this dilemma would truly add value for both buyers and sellers, the idea to introduce after-delivery payment as a service was born.
Co-Founder & CEO
Klarna
Boyan is the founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, the foundation that develops advanced systems to rid the world’s oceans of plastic. In February 2013, he decided that the future of our oceans was a more pressing issue than his aerospace engineering degree, and now he dedicates himself full-time to managing the rapid growth of the organization, while also overseeing the team’s technology developments.
Founder & CEO
The Ocean Cleanup
Mathias Döpfner is Chairman and CEO of Axel Springer AG in Berlin. He has been with Axel Springer AG since 1998, initially as Editor-in-Chief of Die Welt and since 2000 as Member of the Management Board. During his career he has held different positions in media companies. Among others he was Editor-in-Chief of the newspapers Wochenpost and Hamburger Morgenpost.
Chairman & CEO
Axel Springer SE
Niklas Östberg is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Delivery Hero. Niklas worked for five years as a corporate consultant for Oliver Wyman before co-founding Pizza.nu (later OnlinePizza.se), where he served as chairman. In 2011, he founded Delivery Hero with some collaborators from the Berlin start-up scene in order to roll out the business globally from Germany. The company so far has achieved from 1 to 30,000 employees and 1 million drivers across 50 countries in 4 continents, 1 to 9,000,000 orders delivered every day and a billion dollar IPO.
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
Delivery Hero SE
Paola Antonelli is senior curator in the department of architecture and design of the Museum of Modern Art, where she has worked since 1994. She has lectured worldwide in settings ranging from peer conferences to global interdisciplinary gatherings such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, and she has served on several international architecture and design juries. From 1991 to 1993, she was a Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Senior Curator
MoMA
Anne Boden is CEO and founder of Starling Bank. Prior to Starling, she was Chief Operating Officer of Allied Irish Banks Plc and Head of EMEA, Global Transaction Banking across 34 countries for RBS and ABN AMRO.Anna has more than 30 years experience in banking, having begun her career at Lloyds Bank, before moving on to Standard Chartered Bank and then UBS in Zurich and was recently recognised as one of the Global Power Women in FinTech. She holds a BSc in Computer Science and Chemistry, an MBA and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of IT.
Founder & CEO
Starling Bank
Former NFL Player Wade Davis is a thought leader, public speaker, and writer on gender, race, and orientation equality. Wade is currently the Vice President of Inclusion Strategy for Product at Netflix and has consulted for companies including Google, Procter & Gamble, Viacom, and others to co-create transformative solutions to build inclusive corporate cultures. Additionally, Wade coaches senior leaders to adapt and flex their leadership styles to meet the needs and develop their employee population.
VP of Inclusion (Product)
Netflix / Former NFL Player
Entrepreneur, investor at Yes VC, Host of Should This Exist?, a podcast about technology's effect on humanity. Writer, artist and reader. Homeschooling mother, thinker. Co-founder of Flickr, Hunch, Sesat School, Kahvila Silli. Serve on the Boards of Directors at Public Goods, Sundance and McSweeneys.
Partner & Investor
Yes VC
Kathleen Breitman is the CEO of Tezos, a blockchain-based smart contract platform with an on-chain governance mechanism to coordinate and push upgrades to its network. Prior to Tezos, Kathleen was a senior strategy associate for R3, a blockchain consortium of more than 70 financial firms. She has also worked at Accenture, Bridgewater Associates, and the Wall Street Journal. She holds a degree from Cornell University.
Co-Founder
Tezos
Tom Hulme is a General Partner at Google Ventures. Prior to GV, Tom was a design director at IDEO Europe. He founded OpenIDEO, an open innovation platform where 100,000 users from more than 170 countries solve challenges for social good. Tom also launched OIEngine, a SaaS platform with a number of clients, including Harvard Business School and the Knight Foundation.
General Partner
Google Ventures
Taavet is the Chairman of Wise, which he co-founded in 2010. Prior to starting Wise, Taavet was Skype’s director of strategy until 2008, starting as its first employee. He’s also an active angel investor in Europe with 100+ investments including Bolt, Zego, Veriff, Gideon Brothers, Meatable, Farewill and many others. More recently he co-founded Jõhvi Coding School to help increase the amount of people with coding skills and Certific to help bring trust to the medical testing market.
Co-Founder & Chairman
TransferWise / Plural Platform
Aina Abiodun, Founder of Just & Green Partners brings over 15 years of experience in tech, social & environmental impact and brand strategy. Her hands-on in-house and consulting work extends across global brands from Meta, Logitech, Merck and Novartis to The Obama Foundation. Aina has also been a venture backed founder, 2x CEO and COO of companies across the US and Europe. She's an outspoken practioner and advocate of just leadership in the climate transition.
Founder
Just & Green Partners
Alex Salnikov is the Head of Product and co-founder of Rarible, a top-ranked community-centric NFT marketplace. A blockchain trailblazer and an active developer in the crypto space since 2012, Alex previously served as the chief technology officer of CoinOffering, the first company to offer its shares in the form of blockchain assets. With a BA in Computer Science and an MA in Data Science, Alex’s specialities span a variety of sectors including market analysis, decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenomics.
Co-Founder & Head of Product
Rarible
Alexandra Cousteau, is an award-winning advocate for ocean restoration and abundance. As a leading figure in ocean activism, Cousteau collaborates with world leaders across sectors to influence, convene and mobilize action to achieve measurable outcomes that will make the oceans more biodiverse and abundant. Cousteau is the President and Co-Founder of Oceans 2050, an organization that is dedicated to restoring abundant oceans in one generation.
Co-Founder
Oceans 2050
Abraham (Avi) Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University. He received a PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel at age 24 (1980-1986), led the first international project supported by the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983-1988), and was subsequently a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1988-1993). Loeb wrote 8 books and over 800 papers on a wide range of topics, including black holes, the first stars, the search for extraterrestrial life and the future of the Universe.
Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science
Harvard University
Co-founder and Director
Deadfellaz
Bruce Pon is the Founder of Ocean Protocol, the decentralised exchange protocol to unlock data for AI and business innovation since 2017. Previously, Bruce co-founded BigchainDB, ascribe and Avantalion–a consulting firm that helped build 20 banks around the globe for companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi & Jaguar LandRover.
Founder & Board Member
Ocean Protocol
Co-Founder (Founding CTO)
Webflow
Camila Russo is the Founder at The Defiant, a daily newsletter decrypting the intersection of blockchain and finance. Author of upcoming Harper Collins book ‘The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum’. Russo is also a former market and crypto reporter at Bloomberg News.
Founder
The Defiant
Cassie is a data scientist and leader at Google with a mission to democratize Decision Intelligence and safe, reliable AI. She is also a popular keynote speaker. Cassie brings a unique combination of deep technical expertise, analytics management experience, and ability to lead organizational change. She provided guidance on more than 100 projects and designed Google's analytics program, personally training over 20000 Googlers in statistics, decision-making, and machine learning.
Chief Decision Scientist
Daniel Krauss is Chief Information Officer at Flix, where he manages the areas of technology, HR development and customer service. Working in collaboration with his co-founders, he was keen to give up his long-standing job at Microsoft to build and continue the development of Europe’s largest long-distance bus provider. Krauss is also an investor and a member of different advisory boards including powercloud, Cloudflight and uvex.
Co-Founder and CIO
Flixbus
Deborah Okenla is the founder of Your Startup, Your Story (YSYS) & LaunchEdi. YSYS is a startup community for founders, developers, creatives, investors and more on a mission to make a difference. The community is a space for people with shared values to build relationships in marketing, technology, venture-funding and more.
CEO & Founder
YSYS & LaunchEDI
Claire is a trained doctor, and served as a pediatrician in London before specializing in clinical genetics. With a degree in both pathology and medicine from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, Claire oversees all of Ada’s medical affairs. As an industry thought leader, she gives a voice to the clinicians, patients, and doctors to ensure that our product meets their needs.
Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer
Ada Health
Erika is currently, the executive director of Ethics in Entrepreneurship, a non-profit whose mission is to foster ethical questioning, culture, and systems in startups and startup ecosystems. We provide programs catered to workers, investors, and founders. Erika is an advisor to several family offices, venture capital firms, and governmental investment programs focused on healthcare, biosciences, and biotechnology companies. She invests a portion of her time building cross-border networks between the US and the Asia Pacific region to facilitate the growth of companies operating in emerging markets.
Founder
Ethics in Entrepreneurship
Erika Lust (born 1977) is a Swedish erotic film director, screenwriter and producer. Since the debut of her first indie erotic film The Good Girl in 2004, Lust has been cited as one of the current leading participants in the feminist pornography movement,asserting that an ethical production process sets her company apart from mainstream pornography sites
Founder
Erika Lust Films
Dr. Florian Heinemann is a General Partner and co-founded the firm in 2012. He is responsible for the functional areas of marketing, CRM and business intelligence. Before co-founding Project A, he was managing director at Rocket Internet with the same areas of responsibility (2007-2012).
Founding Partner
Project A Ventures
Founder & CEO
Freigeist
Fred Wilson has been a venture capitalist since 1987. He currently is a partner at Union Square Ventures and also founded Flatiron Partners. Fred has a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Fred is married with three children and lives in New York City. Fred is Chairman of the NYC Department of Education's CS4All Capital Campaign and is co-Chairman of Tech:NYC.
Founder & Partner
Union Square Ventures
George M. Church, PhD ’84, is professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, a founding member of the Wyss Institute, and director of PersonalGenomes.org, the world’s only open-access information on human genomic, environmental, and trait data. His team invented CRISPR for human stem cell genome editing and other synthetic biology technologies and applications.
Geneticist / CRISPR Inventor
Harvard MIT
Imogen Jennifer Heap (born 9 December 1977) is a British musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. Her work has been considered pioneering in pop and electropop music.Heap developed the Mi.Mu Gloves, a line of musical gloves, as well as a blockchain-based music-sharing program, Mycelia. She also composed the music for the West End/Broadway play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Over the course of her career, she has received two Grammy Awards, one Ivor Novello Award, and one Drama Desk Award.
Founder
Mi.mu Gloves
Jamie Metzl is a leading technology and healthcare futurist, geopolitical expert, novelist, entrepreneur, and media commentator, Founder and Chair of the global social movement OneShared.World, and an Atlantic Council Senior Fellow and Singularity University faculty member. Described by some as “the original COVID-19 whistleblower,” he was among first to call for a full investigation into pandemic origins in early 2020.
Founder / Futurist
OneShared.World
Jeanette J. Epps (Ph.D.) was selected as an astronaut in 2009. She has been assigned to her first spaceflight, Expedition 56/57, scheduled to launch in May 2018. Her training included scientific and technical briefings, intensive instruction in International Space Station systems, spacewalk training, robotics, T-38 flight training and wilderness survival training. The New York native was a NASA Fellow during graduate school and authored several journal and conference articles.
Astronaut
NASA
Jenny Kleeman is a journalist, broadcaster and documentary-maker who has traveled the world finding extraordinary characters to turn into film, print and audio. She writes for the Guardian, The London Times and the Sunday Times. She has reported for BBC One's Panorama, Channel 4's Dispatches and VICE News Tonight on HBO, as well as making 13 films from across the globe for Channel 4's Unreported World. She is the host of the weekend Breakfast show on Times Radio. Her first book, Sex Robots & Vegan Meat, was first published in 2020.
Author
Sex Robots & Vegan Meat
Julian Teicke is the CEO & Founder of wefox Group. He is a serial founder, investor and mentor, and an entrepreneur out of passion to fundamentally change the status-quo in the insurance industry. The wefox Group is one of the fastest growing insurtechs in the world and they are the force behind the consumer-facing insurance carrier ONE and the insurance platform wefox.
Founder & CEO
WeFox
Jutta Steiner is a Co-founder & CEO of Parity tech. Currently, Jutta is a Co-founder & CEO of Parity Technologies and Grid Singularity. In addition, she serves as a COO at Ethcore and Manager Security Audit and Integration at Ethereum. Jutta started her career in 2011, being an intern at Deutsche Post DHL. In 2011-2012, she was a Researcher at École Polytechnique. From 2013 to 2014, Jutta was an Associate at McKinsey & Company. In 2015, Jutta served as a COO at Project Provenance.
Co-Founder & CEO
Parity Technologies
Katie serves as the CEO & Managing Partner of The Engine, a venture capital fund built by MIT, that invests in early-stage companies solving the world’s biggest problems through the convergence of breakthrough science, engineering and leadership. She serves as a Board Member at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Form Energy, Via Separations, Lilac Solutions, WoHo and VEIR.
CEO & Managing Partner
The Engine
Kevin Abosch (born 1969) is an Irish conceptual artist who works across traditional mediums as well as with generative methods including machine learning and blockhain technology. Abosch's work addresses the nature of identity and value by posing ontological questions and responding to sociological dilemmas. Abosch's work has been exhibited throughout the world, often in civic spaces, including The Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, The National Museum of China, The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin Airport and others.
Crypto Artist
Selfemployed
Lasse Clausen is a founding partner at 1kx. He is a former technology entrepreneur turned token network investor, and he is deeply engrossed in the impact crypto will have on society. Across all that he does, he is trying to bring the best possible version of a decentralized economy to life. Finding and supporting incredibly talented people who share his vision of a decentralized future is one of the many reasons he’s seen so many projects go from vision to reality. That, and his electronic music playlists.
Founding Partner
1kx Capital
Leilani is the Global Director of The Shift, an international movement to secure the right to housing and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing (2014- 2020). The Shift was launched in 2017 with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Cities and Local Government and works with multi-level stakeholders around the world including with several city governments in North America and Europe.
Global Director
The Shift
Lucas von Cranach is the Founder of One Football. He was a supporter of 1. FC Cologne long before he was set to become an entrepreneur in the football industry. It all started in the early days of the smartphone when Lucas realized that there was no service providing fans with live scores and results. He started out with a simple SMS-service delivering livescores to the fans’ pockets. Only a few years later this service has turned into one of the most successful football-apps around the globe connecting more than 20 million fans.
Founder & Investor
One Football
Magnus Resch, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading art market economists. He is a bestselling book author, University Professor and serial entrepreneur. He founded Gymondo.de (exit), Magnusclass.com, Larryslist.com and Magnus.net, the Shazam for art. Leonardo DiCaprio is an investor and advisor to the company. Magnus lectures at Yale University, published in Science, the world’s leading academic journal, and has written seven books on the art market, including three bestsellers.
Professor for art economics
Yale University
Chief Executive and Co-Founder of Babbel, Markus is an entrepreneur with an academic, technical & marketing background. After completing his Humanities major, he began his career as a researcher and academic teacher at NYU and Humboldt University, where he found his passion for teaching. Following his time as an academic, he led the development of online marketing and web infrastructure and managed the online and systems teams at music software company Native Instruments for 6 years. Coming back to learning and teaching, he co-founded Babbel in 2007.
Founder & CEO
Babbel
Monique Morrow is Senior Distinguished Architect for Emerging Technologies at Syniverse Technologies where her main role and responsibilities is to provide thought leadership and to help the strategic direction and vision for Syniverse's identified emerging technologies across the company, partners and industry forum. Specific focus areas include extensions of Distributed Ledger Technology [DLT] and other emerging components of Blockchain technologies to Syniverse’s Lines of Business and our Enterprise.
Co-Founder
Humanized Internet
Om Malik is an award-winning journalist and the founder of GigaOm. With seed funding from True Ventures, he turned the one-man technology blog, which he started in 2001, into a pioneering media company and research firm. Om previously served in various editorial roles for Business 2.0, Forbes.com, Red Herring, and Quick Nikkei News.
Founder
GigaOm
Phil Libin is co-founder and CEO of All Turtles and mmhmm. He started the globally distributed product studio All Turtles in 2017 to solve meaningful problems. mmhmm was hatched from All Turtles in 2020, and is a desktop and web app that puts you on screen with your slides so you can stay engaged with your audience. Previously, Phil was the co-founder and CEO of Evernote, growing the product to hundreds of millions of users.
CEO & Co-Founder
All Turtles and mmhmm
Raffaela is the Founder WildWildVentures GmbH, a venture builder and investor focused on Web 3, NFTs and sustainability. WWV’s portfolio includes venture building through the CPG Club Incubator and investing via Own Fund and Proof Collective. Previously, she founded CareerFoundry, a leading online school for UX Design and digital careers with over 100 employees.
Founder
WildWildVentures
Remment Lucas Koolhaas is a Dutch architect, architectural theorist, urbanist and Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is often cited as a representative of Deconstructivism and is the author of Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.
Architect
OMA
Rolf is a serial entrepreneur. Right out of university, in 1999, he started one of the best-funded European first wave internet companies ciao.com. In 2005, he started his second company trivago.com, which became, within a decade, the most successful hotel search and one of the largest global consumer brands. He brought trivago public at Nasdaq in 2016 and moved lately from his CEO role into a board position.
Founder
Trivago
Sarah Kunst is the managing director of Cleo Capital & a contributing editor at Marie Claire Magazine. She has served as a senior advisor at Bumble where she focused on their corporate VC arm Bumble Fund and on the board of the Michigan State University Foundation endowment. Kunst has been named a Future Innovator by Vanity Fair, Forbes Magazine 30 under 30 and a top 25 innovator in tech by Cool Hunting.
Managing Director
Cleo Capital
Seth Bannon is a Founding Partner at Fifty Years. Seth has seeded a range of startups shaping the world for the better — companies like Upside Foods (culturing meat to eat), Solugen (engineering enzymes to produce industrial chemicals sustainably), and Astranis (small satellites to cover the Earth in Internet). A graduate of Y Combinator, Seth was named twice to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Social Entrepreneurship.
Founding Partner
Fifty Years
Shermin is the author of the book Token Economy, the founder of Token Kitchen and BlockchainHub Berlin. In the past she was the director of the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics which she also co-founded and a curator of the infamous TheDAO (Decentralized Investment Fund) back in 2016.
Author
Token Economy
Scientific Head
Social Neuroscience Lab, Max Planck Society
Tao Tao is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at GetYourGuide. He leads the company’s business operations. Under Tao’s direction, GetYourGuide has grown into the leading global online booking platform for incredible travel experiences, with more than 75.000 activities offered to date. As COO, he ensures GetYourGuide’s business runs smoothly along its entire value chain.
Co-Founder & COO
Get Your Guide
Wendy Kopp is CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations that are cultivating their nations’ promising future leaders to ensure their most marginalized children have the chance to fulfill their true potential. Wendy founded Teach For America in 1989 to marshal the energy of her generation against educational inequity in the United States.
CEO and Co-founder
Teach for All
Wes is co-founder of Maven, the first platform for cohort-based courses. Maven helps creators build a cohort-based course and deliver an incredible student experience at scale. More here and in TechCrunch. Previously, Wes was the co-founder of the altMBA. Under her leadership, the altMBA grew from zero to 550 cities in 45 countries in three years of high-growth. She designed the altMBA's beloved coaching system, grew the global community, built the marketing engine to drive sustainable acquisition/retention, and built a team of 40 people to support rapid scaling.
Co-Founder
Maven
Audrey is currently the Co-CEO at Clue, the female health app that helps millions of people better understand their menstrual cycle so they can live full and healthy lives. In this role, she leads product, design, data science, and growth. Before joining Clue, she was Product Lead of the Pinterest Home Feed, Director of Mobile at HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb), and the first Product Manager at Yelp. She also co-founded, pivoted, navigated the business and emotional roller coaster, and shuttered a photo-sharing startup called Waddle.
Co-CEO
Clue by BioWink GmbH