CEO, Nextdoor

Prior to serving as Nextdoor’s CEO, Sarah Friar was CFO of Square. Under Friar’s leadership, Square launched its initial public offering in 2015 and added $30Bn in market cap. Before her tenure at Square, Friar served as senior vice president of finance and strategy at Salesforce. Friar also held executive roles at Goldman Sachs, as well as leadership positions at McKinsey in both London and South Africa. Friar sits on the boards of Walmart and Slack, and is the co-founder of Ladies Who Launch, a nonprofit that celebrates and empowers women entrepreneurs. Friar earned her MEng in Metallurgy, Economics, and Management from the University of Oxford and her MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar.

CEO, Google and Alphabet

Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet and serves on Alphabet’s Board of Directors.

He joined Google in 2004 and helped lead the development of Google Toolbar and then Google Chrome, which grew to become the world’s most popular internet browser. In 2014 he was appointed to lead product and engineering for all of Google’s products and platforms — including popular products such as Search, Maps, Play, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Apps (now G Suite). Pichai became Google’s CEO in August 2015. He joined the board of directors of Alphabet, Google's parent company, in July 2017.

Under his leadership as CEO, Google has been focused on developing products and services, powered by the latest advances in AI, that offer help in moments big and small. It has invested in new opportunities such as Google Cloud and YouTube and has continued to be a leader in advanced technologies, including machine learning and quantum computing.

In December 2019, in addition to his role as CEO of Google, Pichai became the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Pichai grew up in Chennai, India and studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology where he was awarded an Institute Silver Medal. He holds a master's degree from Stanford University and an MBA from the Wharton School, where he was named a Siebel Scholar and a Palmer Scholar.

Technology Reporter, The New York Times

Taylor Lorenz is a technology reporter in New York covering internet culture. Before joining The New York Times, she was a technology and culture writer at The Atlantic and The Daily Beast. Lorenz was a 2019 Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University where her research focused on Instagram and news consumption. She is also an affiliate at Harvard's Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. 

Veteran Technologist Columnist, Commentator, Reviewer, and Conference Producer

Walt Mossberg is a veteran technologist columnist, commentator, reviewer, and conference producer. He is widely credited with pioneering the modern, consumer-focused, technology review and commentary at the Wall Street Journal. He also co-founded AllThingsD, Recode and the D and Code Conferences. He co-created and co-hosted a popular podcast, Ctrl-Walt-Delete.

He was, from 1991 through 2013, the principal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Mossberg left the Journal at the end of 2013 to form the independent Recode technology web site and conference business with his longtime business partner, Kara Swisher. Recode is a direct descendant of AllThingsD, a technology conference and web site owned by Journal publisher Dow Jones, but created and operated for 12 years by Mossberg and Swisher. Along with other reporters from AllThingsD, Mossberg and Swisher started Recode in 2014, and it was acquired by Vox Media in 2015.

From 2015 to 2017, Mossberg was executive editor of The Verge and editor-at-large of Recode, web sites owned by Vox Media. Mossberg wrote a weekly column for both and also had a weekly podcast, Ctrl-Walt-Delete. Mossberg was also co-executive producer of the annual Code Conference.

Mossberg retired from weekly column writing, podcasting, conference producing and TV appearances in July of 2017. He is now working on new projects, especially his service as a member of the executive committee of the board of the non-profit, nonpartisan News Literacy Project.

Mossberg was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal from 1970 until the end of 2013. He was based in the Journal's Washington, D.C., office, where he spent 18 years covering national and international affairs before turning his attention to technology. His Personal Technology column appeared every Thursday for 22 years. He also edited the Digital Solution column each Wednesday (authored by his colleague, Katherine Boehret), and wrote the Mossberg's Mailbox column on Thursdays. He appeared weekly on CNBC, and has been interviewed repeatedly on programs like Charlie Rose and The PBS News Hour, as well as on National Public Radio.

In 1999, Mossberg became the first technology writer to receive the Loeb award for Commentary. In 2001, he won the World Technology Award for Media and Journalism and received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Rhode Island. In 2017, he was awarded the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mossberg is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers on information technology. In 2004, in a lengthy profile, Wired called him "The Kingmaker", saying "few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures.”

The Washington Post  declared Mossberg “one of the most powerful men in the high-tech world” and “a one-man media empire whose prose can launch a new product.” And the New York Times calls him a “protean critic of the new economy’s tools and toys.”

In 2007, the New Yorker magazine profiled him in an article entitled: “Everyone listens to Walter Mossberg.” In 2008, and 2010-2013, Vanity Fair magazine listed him as a member of its “New Establishment” list of the top leaders of the Information Age.

He is a former trustee of Brandeis University.

A native of Warwick, Rhode Island, he holds degrees from Brandeis and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He lives in Maryland with his wife, Edith Mossberg, an early childhood educator, and has two sons and a granddaughter.

Anchor, MSNBC, and Senior Business Correspondent, NBC News

Stephanie Ruhle anchors MSNBC Live with Stephanie Ruhle on weekdays. Ruhle also appears across all NBC News and MSNBC platforms as NBC News’ Senior Business Correspondent, including NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, TODAY, NBCNews.com, and NBC News BETTER where she hosts the “BETTER Business” series.

Ruhle has interviewed titans in politics, business, entertainment and sports. As a Wall Street veteran, she is known for bringing her business acumen and hard-hitting style to high profile interviews, for her original reporting, and bringing humanity into her news coverage, including her reporting on the migrant crisis at the border in McAllen, Texas and her daily “Good News Ruhles” segment.

Ruhle is also the host of the podcast, Modern Ruhles: Compelling Conversations During Culturally Complicated Times. The show takes aim at zeitgeist topics with the goal of understanding and respecting ideas that conflict with our own. It is not meant to change our minds, just to open them and hopefully help us become better and smarter in the process.

Prior to Bloomberg, Ruhle worked at Deutsche Bank, serving as a managing director in global markets senior relationship management. Ruhle began her career at Credit Suisse, where she was the highest-producing credit derivatives salesperson in the US.

Ruhle plays an active role in women’s leadership development, having founded the Corporate Investment Bank Women’s Network and co-chaired Women on Wall Street. Ruhle is a member of the board of trustees for Girls Inc. NYC and in 2016 was honored as one of their Women of the Year. She is also on the Leadership Council at Robin Hood, NYC’s largest poverty-fighting organization.

Ruhle received a bachelor’s degree in International Business from Lehigh University, living abroad in Guatemala, Kenya and Italy.

Writer, Activist, Comedian

Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated host who has worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show, advised the Obama White House, and cleaned bathrooms to pay for his Harvard education. He’s the creator and host of Live On Lockdown, an interactive, entertaining, and informative show made for the pandemic. He’s also hosted the iHeartMedia podcast Spit, wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black, and serves on the boards of BUILD and the Brooklyn Public Library. Thurston makes media, delivers keynotes, and promotes action with his unique blend of criticism, humor, and optimism. He’s most invested in topics of race, technology, democracy, and climate because the hard stuff has already been solved.

Professor at Columbia University and Author

Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia University, and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. A veteran of Silicon Valley and the White House, he is author of four books The Master Switch, and The Attention Merchants, and most recently the Washington Post bestseller The Curse of Bigness.

Venture Capitalist

Rana Yared was a partner at Goldman Sachs, first in the Principal Strategic Investments Group and later in GS Growth. In that capacity, she oversaw investments in Financial Technology and Enterprise Technology, as well as the commercialization of Goldman Sachs’ technology assets in both New York and London.

Yared joined the firm as an analyst in 2006 and was named Managing Director in 2013 and Partner in 2018. She represented Goldman Sachs on the Boards of Tradeweb, NAV, Vestwell, New York Shipping Exchange, and Swapclear @ LCH.

Yared holds a bachelor of science from the Wharton School and a bachelor of arts in International Relations, both from the University of Pennsylvania, and a MSc from the London School of Economics

She will join Balderton in London as a general partner in August 2020.

Silicon Valley Editor, The Verge

Casey Newton is the Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, reporting on the people and products shaping the future of technology and culture. Newton has covered the technology industry for more than a decade, and is responsible for both breaking news reports and thoughtful investigative features that have come to shape the way we understand it. Today, his writing focuses on the intersection between social media and democracy, a subject on which he writes a daily newsletter called The Interface. In his spare time, Newton is a cast member of the San Francisco improv troupe Luxury Cruise Singles Mixer.

CEO, Uber

Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber, where he manages the company’s fast-growing business in 63 countries around the world and leads a global team of more than 22,000 employees. Khosrowshahi was previously CEO of Expedia, which he grew into one of the world’s largest online travel companies. A seasoned executive with a background in both engineering and finance, Khosrowshahi oversaw a number of acquisitions that bolstered Expedia’s offerings and aggressively invested in mobile, which now accounts for more than half of Expedia’s traffic. He was also beloved by Expedia’s employees and named one of the Highest Rated CEOs on Glassdoor. Khosrowshahi was promoted to Expedia CEO after serving as the CFO of IAC Travel, a division of IAC, which purchased Expedia in 2002 and spun it off in 2005. He was also instrumental in the expansion of IAC’s portfolio of travel brands. Before joining IAC, Khosrowshahi served as vice president of Allen & Company and spent a number of years as an analyst. He currently serves on the board of directors of Expedia and Catalyst.org and was previously on the board of the New York Times Company. He’s a passionate advocate for refugees in crisis around the world, having himself left Iran during the Iranian Revolution at the age of 9. Khosrowshahi grew up in Tarrytown, New York, and received his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Brown University.

Founding Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

Emily Bell is founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and a leading thinker, commentator, and strategist on digital journalism. Established in 2010, the Tow Center has rapidly built an international reputation for research into the intersection of technology and journalism. The majority of Bell’s professional career was spent at Guardian News and Media in London working as an award winning writer and editor both in print and online. As editor-in-chief across Guardian websites and director of digital content for Guardian News and Media, Bell led the web team in pioneering live blogging, podcasting, multimedia formats, data and social media, making the Guardian an internationally awarded beacon of digital transformation. She is co-author of a number of lectures and papers on the transformation of journalism and continues to write a regular column for the Guardian and Columbia Journalism Review, and is a contributor to the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, and numerous other outlets. She lives in New York City with her husband and three sons.

General Manager, TikTok North America and ANZ

Vanessa Pappas is the general manager of TikTok North America and ANZ, overseeing the strategic business direction and content, operations, marketing, user growth, and product teams. In her current role, Pappas focuses on the growth of TikTok's presence across these markets as the company continues to scale globally.

Previously, Pappas served over seven years at YouTube where she was most recently the global head of creative insights, overseeing YouTube’s global creator research & trends, audience development, creative strategy and growth teams. Prior to this, Pappas was the global head of audience development, YouTube, focused on developing audience growth strategies for creators, publishers, labels and artists. In this role, Pappas developed the YouTube Creator Playbook, the definitive resource for building viewership on YouTube, which reached over 20 million creators during her time.  

Pappas received two master's degrees in media from the New School and the University of Queensland.  

Journalist and Author of For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist as well as the executive producer and host of several critically acclaimed digital series at Vox Media. Her first book, For the Love of Men: A New Vision for Mindful Masculinity, was published on September 10, 2019. She's been listed as one of Forbes' 30 Under 30, Mediaite’s Most Influential in News Media, Marie Claire’s List of Most Powerful Women, and was recently ranked as one of the world’s most influential people in gender policy. She regularly appears on MSNBC offering her perspective on national politics, disability and women’s issues.

Co-founder, Gig Workers Collective

Vanessa Bain is a former educator from Silicon Valley that began working as a shopper for Instacart in 2016. Bain has been grassroots organizing Instacart shoppers for the past four years and has organized six Shopper walkouts and boycotts. In January, she co-founded Gig Workers Collective, an organization that fosters worker-led organizing in the gig economy.