First 20 Speakers Slush 2024 🔥

The Stage Program at Slush is at the heart of our mission: helping and creating founders to change the world.

Slush team works tirelessly on a curating Stage Program that distributes first-hand knowledge on company-building and inspires the next generation of founders.

Slush 2024 program is:
🎤 Non-commercial (meaning they don’t pay or get paid)
🎤 Laser-focused (literally) on providing company-building advice.

First 20 Speakers Slush 2024 🔥

• Milda Mitkute, co-founder of Vinted.
  
  Vinted was founded in 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania, by Milda Mitkutė and Justas Janauskas. It started as a solution to a relatable personal problem that we still help our members solve today—an overflowing closet. Milda was about to move from her hometown in Lithuania to Vilnius, the capital city.
  
  The platform was born from Milda’s need to downsize her wardrobe before moving to Vilnius. She created an online space where friends could browse and take her unwanted clothes. The idea quickly gained popularity, receiving significant media attention in Lithuania.
  
  Vinted expanded to Germany in 2009 and continued to grow internationally. Today, Vinted operates in over 20 markets, employs over 2000 people, and is led by Group CEO Thomas Plantenga.
  
  
• Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity
  
  Perplexity is a conversational “answer engine” that provides precise, user-focused answers to queries—with in-line citations. Aravind co-founded the company in 2022 after working as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind.
  
  To date, Perplexity has raised over $100 million from investors, including Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Susan Wojcicki. He has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. You can find him on Twitter/X and LinkedIn.
  
  
• Neha Narkhede is an Indian American technology entrepreneur, investor, Founder & CEO of Oscilar.
  
  Oscilar – a no-code, AI-powered risk decisioning platform that helps fintechs manage fraud, credit and compliance risks.
  
  Neha is the Co-Founder and former Chief Technology Officer, and currently a board member of Confluent (NASDAQ: CFLT). As a software engineer at LinkedIn, she helped develop the open-source messaging system Apache Kafka, which is now used by more than 80% of the Fortune 500.
  
  In 2014, she co-founded Confluent, which helps organizations process large amounts of data to create transformative real-time products. Neha has been listed as one of America’s Top Self-Made Women by Forbes, Forbes’s Top 50 Women In Tech, MIT Tech Review’s Innovators under 35 and Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People. Neha has a Master’s in Computer Science degree from Georgia Tech and advises and invests in numerous technology startups.
  
  
• Nik Storonsky launched Revolut in 2015 to transform the way we spend and transfer money abroad.
  
  Since then, he has put Revolut on the path to becoming the world’s first truly global bank, changing the way we do all things money. Previously an Emerging Markets Equity Derivatives Trader at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers, he traded over $2bn across various options, swaps, and FX instruments.
  
  Nik holds an M.S. in Applied Physics and Mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and an MA in Economics from the New Economic School, Moscow. He is a keen kite surfer, mountaineer, and championship swimmer.
  
  
• Anne Boden is the founder of Starling Bank, a leading bank that announced record profits in 2023.
  
  She stepped aside as CEO in June 2023 but remains highly involved as a leading shareholder. Anne chronicled Starling’s story in “Banking on It”, a bestseller and The Times’ Business Book of 2020.
  
  She is also the author of “The Money Revolution” and “Female Founders Playbook.” In 2018, Anne was awarded an MBE and chaired the UK Government’s Women-led High-Growth Enterprise Taskforce.
  
  
• Reshma Sohoni is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Seedcamp, a European seed fund established in 2007 to empower European entrepreneurs to compete globally.
  
  Seedcamp has since become a leader in early-stage investment, backing over 500 companies, including notable unicorns like Revolut, wefox, and Sorare. Reshma is recognized as one of the most influential women in tech and VC, appearing on the Forbes Midas List for Europe five years in a row.
  
  She was also named the FT’s most influential BAME tech leader in 2019 and received an MBE in 2021 for her contributions to British technology entrepreneurship.
  
  
• Qasar Younis is the Co-Founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a company valued at $6 billion that develops software for autonomous vehicles. Before founding Applied Intuition, Qasar served as the COO of YCombinator and founded TalkBin, which Google later acquired.
  
  
• Lourdes Agapito is a Professor of 3D Vision at University College London (UCL) and Co-founder of Synthesia.
  
  Her research focuses on inferring 3D information from single images or videos. She earned her BSc, MSc, and PhD from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and was an EU Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford. Lourdes became a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London in 2001 and joined UCL in 2013, becoming a full professor in 2015.
  
  She has held key roles at top Computer Vision conferences and been a keynote speaker at major events. In 2017, she co-founded Synthesia, an AI video generation platform now valued at $1 billion that serves over 50,000 businesses.
  
  
• Thomas Wolf is the Co-founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) of Hugging Face, where he has been instrumental in advancing open-source, educational, and research initiatives.
  
  He is known for creating widely accessible open-source software, such as the Hugging Face Transformers and Datasets libraries. Thomas advocates for open science in AI/ML, working to bridge the gap between academia and industry, notably through the BigScience Workshop on Large Language Models (LLM), which led to the BLOOM project.
  
  
• Kirsten Green is the Founder and Managing Partner of Forerunner, a venture capital firm focused on modern consumer brands and innovative teams.
  
  With over 25 years of investment experience, Kirsten’s success is rooted in her product expertise, consumer insight, and thesis-driven approach. She is an early investor in companies like Faire, Chime, Glossier, and Hims & Hers.
  
  Since founding Forerunner over a decade ago, she has grown the firm to manage over $2 billion across six funds.
  
  
• Divesh Makan is a Founding Partner of ICONIQ Capital, a global firm established in 2011 that advises and invests for influential families and organizations, bridging technology and traditional industries. I
  
  CONIQ focuses on building resilient portfolios, partnering with visionary entrepreneurs, and creating unique opportunities across various sectors. Before ICONIQ, Divesh held leadership roles at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Accenture, specializing in private equity.
  
  He is also a trusted advisor and board member for the UCSF Foundation and SFJazz.
  
  
• Pejman Nozad is the Co-Founder and Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, where he has been a seed investor in numerous iconic tech companies, including Doordash, Dropbox, and Gusto.
  
  Ranked #1 on the Forbes Midas Seed List in 2023 and 2024, Pejman’s journey to becoming a venture capitalist is unique. An immigrant from Iran, he started in the U.S. living in an attic above a yoghurt shop and later worked at a rug store in Palo Alto.
  
  Through small investments and keen insight, he built a reputation for identifying talent and nurturing promising tech ideas.
  
  
• Victoria van Lennep is a Co-founder of Lendable, an AI-powered consumer finance platform operating in the UK and US.
  
  Lendable has originated around £4 billion in loans and is rapidly expanding into auto finance and credit cards. The platform’s core is a proprietary AI system that more accurately assesses risk, enabling instant loan approvals and disbursements.
  
  
• Bryan Kim (“BK”) is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he focuses on investing in consumer and app-layer AI companies, particularly those revolutionizing creation, socialization, and work. He currently serves on the boards of Partiful and Snackpass and is a board observer at Captions and Eleven Labs.
  
  Previously, BK was the CFO at Bungalow, managing finance, strategy, and expansion. At Snap, he held key leadership roles during its hyper-growth, IPO, and international expansion, building and leading teams responsible for user growth, monetization, and acquisitions.
  
  
• Eynat Guez is an expert in global payroll, payments, and workforce management with over 20 years of experience.
  
  As Co-founder and CEO of Papaya Global (valued at $3.7B), she focuses on modernizing payroll technology for global enterprises. Her vision involves replacing outdated methods with a streamlined, embedded solution. Fortune has recognized Guez as one of the 15 most powerful women in tech and FinTech Magazine as a Top 10 founder-CEO.
  
  
• Grace Isford is a Partner at Lux Capital in New York City, investing in cutting-edge computational sciences, including AI, ML, and software infrastructure.
  
  Previously, she was a principal at Canvas Ventures, sourcing 10 investments. Active in supporting female founders, Grace serves on the Stanford Technology Ventures Program board and is involved with All Raise. Originally from Connecticut, she enjoys running, cycling, and has lived in Tokyo, Japan, aspiring to re-learn Japanese.
  
  Before founding Datadog, Olivier Pomel was VP of Technology at Wireless Generation, where he developed data systems for K-12 teachers and expanded the development team from a few members to nearly 100 top engineers in New York.
  
  The company was eventually acquired by News Corp. Prior to this, Olivier held software engineering roles at IBM Research and various internet startups. He is also an original author of the VLC media player and holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Ecole Centrale Paris.
  
  
• Gaurab Chakrabarti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Solugen.
  
  As a physician-scientist, he extends his commitment to “do no harm” beyond medicine, aiming to decarbonize the harmful chemicals industry. In 2016, he founded Solugen to address this challenge by using biology in innovative ways to tackle complex problems.
  
  
• Leigh Marie joined Kleiner Perkins as a Partner in 2023, focusing on partnering with emerging infrastructure and ML application founders.
  
  She began her investing career at Founders Fund. She was previously an early engineer and the first product manager at Scale AI, where she led product development for 3D annotation products used in machine learning by autonomous vehicles, robots, and AR/VR companies.
  
  Originally from Alabama, Leigh Marie graduated from MIT and enjoys playing poker, running long distances, and scuba diving outside of work.
  
  
• Mati Staniszewski is the Co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a company he started in 2022 with his childhood friend Piotr Dabkowski.
  
  Growing up in Poland, Mati and Piotr were inspired by the “poor” dubbing of American movies they watched together, leading them to create a platform to eliminate linguistic barriers in content. Before founding ElevenLabs, Mati worked at Palantir and BlackRock and earned a degree in Mathematics from Imperial College.
  
  
• Elisabeth Rizzotti, a physicist and business leader, transitioned from physics to strategic consulting at Accenture and leadership roles at Banca Lombarda and UBI Banca, where she oversaw the integration into Intesa Sanpaolo.
  
  In 2021, she co-founded newcleo, a nuclear technology company, combining her scientific and business skills. As COO and Managing Director, Italy, she leads global operations. Under her guidance, newcleo has raised over €400 million and employs over 750 staff, focusing on sustainable innovations in the nuclear industry.

The full list of speakers you can find on the Slush website.

Slush’s mission is to empower founders to transform the world. The program is designed to inspire and educate these visionaries.