CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER OF BLUE APRON
Before joining Blue Apron in June 2019, she most recently served as VP of Engineering at XO Group Inc., the premier technology company that helps millions of couples navigate and enjoy life’s biggest moments through industry-leading digital brands, including The Knot, The Bump, The Nest and GigMasters. Prior to XO Group, Irina was Executive Director of Engineering at Amplify, a curriculum and assessment company where she focused on designing tools and services to improve educators’ ability to teach and test students. Before that, Irina was a Director of Enterprise Platform Engineering at Redcats USA, a global online home shopping retailer with a number of sites and brands, where she spearheaded its global e-commerce platform implementation. Irina holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics from Odessa National ‘I.I. Mecnikov’ University in Ukraine.
SENIOR DISTINGUISHED ENGINEER AT RED HAT
Jan Mark Holzer is a Senior Distinguished engineer and member of Red Hat’s CTO office. In his role, Jan helps Red Hat’s large customers adopt new and emerging open-source solutions to solve their business and technology challenges. He has consulted for many Fortune 500 companies, helping them build their next-generation infrastructures and application architecture.
Holzer is also the primary interface between customers and Red Hat’s R&D organization and the CTO office. This includes strategic leadership for Red Hat’s Global Executive Briefing Center program. As part of that program, he is a frequent presenter and moderator for strategic customer engagements.
CHIEF OF STAFF TO THE CTO AT REDDIT
Lisa O’Keefe is Chief of Staff to the CTO at Reddit where she’s a trusted partner and advisor to CTO Chris Slowe, and entire Reddit tech org.
Reddit is a network of more than 100,000 communities where people can dive into anything through experiences built around their interests, hobbies and passions. Reddit users submit, vote and comment on content, stories and discussions about the topics they care about the most. From pets to parenting, there’s a community for everybody on Reddit and with more than 52 million daily active users, it is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet.
Before Reddit, Lisa worked on grant-funded research projects at Northwestern University and advised Chicago-area CTOs and tech companies. She was VP of Talent and Culture at Moxie award-winning Signal (formerly BrightTag), where she and Eric Lunt worked to build the Signal engineering team and culture. She credits her work at Signal for preparing her for her role today, and for being the source of her most important adult friendships.
Lisa has a Masters of Science in Library and Information Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts from DePaul University. She lives in the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago with her cats. She dislikes writing about herself in third person but she’s really honored to be a judge in this year’s event.
DIRECTOR, EXECUTIVE INNOVATION AT MICROSOFT CORP
A trusted global industry thought leader and advocate for utilizing technology to solve evolving business challenges and opportunities for Fortune 500 companies. Megan has 15+ years of experience delivering complex digital transformation and innovation initiatives across a variety of business models, regions, and cultures. A pragmatic strategist with proven success delivering large scale and impactful innovation, Megan thrives on bringing together diverse teams of people to solve real world problems, delivering innovation technology solutions that provide value to customers and suppliers alike. Megan has a strong passion for mapping the evolution of technology to business opportunities that captivate new customer connections over time.
CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER OF ELLEVEST
Rajesh Jayaraman is a successful entrepreneur and technology executive. He has extensive experience leading and scaling technology and engineering organizations at startup & growth stage FinTech companies.
He is the CTO at Ellevest, an investing platform that is focused on closing the gender investing gap, where he is responsible for engineering, technical and financial operations.
VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT AT APPLIED SYSTEMS
Sarah Ratcliffe, VP of Product Management at Applied Systems, helps insurance businesses adapt and transform in an evolving world with world-class technology. She’s a creative product manager who oversees enterprise software solutions. In that work, Sarah applies her robust background in sales strategy and management. She’s passionate about creating products that transform how people protect what matters most — and she’s devoted to inclusion and diversity in the workplace. Her strength as a VP stems from a combination of leadership acumen, business strategy, sales skills and insurance knowledge.
A SERIAL ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE
Tat Ng is a serial engineering and technology executive who has built & led teams in companies ranging from early stage startups to IPO companies to deliver B2B and B2B2C SaaS solutions in a wide range of industries from supply chain, eCommerce, fintech, martech, transportation, to most recently HR/benefits. He has a strong track record in building great engineering organizations that build technology platforms that drive business results to customers and values to shareholders. Tat is passionate in creating engineering culture that brings out the creativity and best ideas from all levels. Tat enjoys deep technical discussions through the lens of business applications.
VICE PRESIDENT OF ENGINEERING AT CADIENT TALENT
Michelle is a results-driven software engineering manager skilled at delivering high-performance, multi-million-dollar web applications built in SaaS architecture for Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Cadient Talent, Michelle held several leadership roles at PeopleFluent, culminating in her role as Senior Vice President. She oversaw their SaaS-based talent acquisition applications suite, providing market-leading recruiting workflow, onboarding, interview scheduling, and contact management modules.
Michelle has also held technical, managerial roles at Plurimus, Keane, Ciber, and Computer Associates. She holds a BBA in Management Information Systems from Kent State University and currently serves on the board of MDLive.
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF LUCID GREEN
As a serial entrepreneur, Larry brings a wealth of hands-on experience, with a focus on computational linguistics (machine learning), IoT and SaaS based finance and marketing platforms. Appinions was sold to Scribblelive in April 2015. Prior to Appinions, Larry served as co-founder and CEO of Semagix Group, which was sold to Warburg Pincus in 2006. Larry was also the founder and CEO of Protege Holdings, recognized as an “Upside 100” company, as well as the founder of Citria and Delrina Europe. Delrina was sold to Symantec in 1995. Larry guest lectures entrepreneurship at the Cornell University – Johnson School of Management. He holds a BCom and BAcc from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and is a chartered accountant CA(SA).
CTO DIGITAL AT AL JAZEERA MEDIA NETWORK (AJMN)
David “Hos” Hostetter, Digital CTO at Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN) embraces the double bottom line in everything that he does.
As a mission driven technologist, Hos and his team at AJMN innovate and deploy technologies that day in and day out enable a forceful and empathetic Voice for the Voiceless that simultaneously exceeds market leading privacy, usability and revenue objectives. Hos brings a wealth of experience having worked at both startup and large enterprise companies — he brings the passion, energy and momentum of a successful start-up to everything that he touches.
Hos has spent decades at the forefront of big data, digital media, and machine scalability across multiple positions with various companies including publicly traded Hipcricket (CTO) acquired by Aurea, Loudeye (CTO and Executive Vice President) acquired by Nokia, MOD Systems (VP Engineering) and over 11 years at Microsoft.
David is a patent holder who has continually initiated and driven IP creation and patent securitization throughout his professional career.
GLOBAL ECOSYSTEM LEADER AT IBM STORAGE
Doug leads solutions, alliances and sales for global growth initiatives. A five-year IBM storage veteran, he joined IBM to grow software-defined storage and led product marketing before shifting to solutions in 2020. Before IBM, Doug worked for Continuum MSP, Red Hat, and AMD in product management, marketing, and business development. Early in his career he led IT operations for several Boston area start-ups that included web services, security, parallel filesystems, and online gaming. Doug is a graduate of Yale University and a former New York stagehand. Now a resident of North Carolina, he has lived in four continents and is a passionate biker and rower.
CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER OF BETTERCLOUD
Jim Brennan serves as the Chief Product Officer for BetterCloud, where he leads the company’s product management, product operations and product design teams. He brings more than 20 years of experience in the development, management, and marketing of technology solutions, primarily in the information security industry. Jim joined BetterCloud from IBM, where he served as Vice President of Product Management for the company’s Security Operations & Response portfolio. Prior to IBM, he led the product management team responsible for infrastructure security services at Dell SecureWorks. Other notable roles include positions with Internet Security Systems, Red Hat, EMS Technologies and the United States Department of Defense. Jim holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a Master of Business Administration from the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.
