Only a couple extra weeks till 20 of the world’s high early-stage startups take to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 to compete for an equity-free, $100,000 grand prize and everlasting glory. They’ll face robust questions from our judges and should stand out in opposition to a crowd of super-star founders. We’re excited to share our ultimate cohort of judges at this yr’s present!
Be within the room: Purchase your cross now, and save as much as $400. Keep away from the worth hike on the door!
Watching the Startup Battlefield is a thrill experience, and it’s additionally a possibility for traders and founders alike.
Ultimate Countdown: Startup Battlefield judges at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023
We’re excited to announce the following trio of top-tier traders who will decide the Startup Battlefield.
Guru Chahal, Accomplice, Lightspeed Enterprise Companions
Guru Chahal is a visionary investor with a ardour for revolutionizing digital landscapes. Famend for his insights into trade developments encompassing DevOps, automation, safety, and utility improvement, Guru gives invaluable experience. Since 2012, he has been an instrumental drive at Lightspeed, spearheading early investments in groundbreaking corporations like Zscaler (IPO), Avere Methods (acquired by Microsoft), and Avi Networks (acquired by VMware). As a co-founder of Avi Networks in 2013, he performed a pivotal position in propelling the corporate from infancy to catering to a powerful 20% of Fortune 50 giants. Guru’s dynamic journey led him again to Lightspeed in 2019, the place he continues to make astute investments in cutting-edge ventures like ngrok, Hubilo, Noname, Infiot, and Pensando.
Jacob Andreou, Accomplice, Greylock
Jacob Andreou is a product government and builder who backs founders constructing the following era of client software program.
Previous to becoming a member of Greylock, Jacob spent eight years at Snap, the place he helped scale the corporate from its early days to 360 million+ DAUs (every day energetic customers) and $4.5 billion in income. For many of his time on the firm, he ran a group of a number of hundred individuals throughout the product, design, progress, knowledge science and analytics, and person analysis groups. Below his management, he launched a few of its largest initiatives, together with Highlight. Most just lately, he launched My AI, Snap’s personal AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT.
Previous to Snap, Jacob co-founded and led product at ThinkAkili, a web-based retail analytic platform. He holds a BS in Biomedical Computing from Queens College.
Nikita Shamgunov, Accomplice, Khosla Ventures
Nikita is captivated with deep tech, knowledge infrastructure, and system software program. Previous to becoming a member of Khosla Ventures, Nikita co-founded SingleStore, a unicorn knowledge and analytics firm valued over $1.3 billion. He served as a founding CTO after which CEO, efficiently scaling the corporate to over 40 million in ARR and close to profitability. For the primary 9 months, Nikita lived within the workplace coding subsequent to the servers. Previous to founding SingleStore, he labored as a senior engineer at Fb, and earlier than that he was at Microsoft on the SQL Server product.
At KV, Nikita is incubating Neon — a brand new database firm constructing serverless Postgres — that raised $50 million in its seed and Collection A rounds.
Nikita has a PhD in laptop science from St. Petersburg. Throughout school years, Nikita obtained a bronze medal in ACM ICPC, and worldwide scholar programming competitors.
Mar Hershenson, Founding Managing Accomplice, Pear VC
Mar is Pear’s founding managing associate. After incomes a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford College, Mar developed a groundbreaking strategy of optimizing the design of analog semiconductors. Since then, she has accrued over 13 years of founder expertise, co-founding three startups in cell/e-commerce, enterprise software program and semiconductor industries, and has registered 14 separate patents.
As Pear’s co-founder and managing associate, Mar brings operational and technical experience to the funding group.
She is in at present a lecturer for Stanford College, educating Lean Launchpad, considered one of Stanford’s premier entrepreneurship courses. Previous to that, she was a consulting professor at Stanford educating the introductory course in Analog Circuit Design for practically a decade.
Mar serves on the board of trustees of Harvey Mudd School and is on the advisory board of the Electrical and Laptop Engineering division at Carnegie Mellon College. She is a founding father of Fairness Summit, the premier convention for connecting URM Enterprise Capital GPs to LPs, and an preliminary founding member of All Elevate.
She has been acknowledged by MIT Expertise Overview as a High Innovator Below 35, named a Champion of Innovation by Quick Firm, awarded the Digital Automation Convention’s Marie R. Pistil Achievement Award, and acknowledged on the Forbes Midas Checklist in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco. Purchase your cross now and save $400 earlier than costs go up September 15.
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