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Max Rhodes is the co-founder and CEO of Faire, an online wholesale marketplace built to reduce the inventory risk discouraging small retailers from testing new products, with broader lessons on early startup stress, decentralized decisions, and B2B commerce.
Matt Lerner led growth at PayPal and served as a partner at 500 Startups before founding SYSTM, focusing on the specific constraints that block startup scale and the customer discovery, language-market fit, and few high-leverage actions behind non-linear growth.
Kyle Parrish was Figma’s first sales hire and VP of Sales, building its enterprise engine by layering top-down sales discipline over bottom-up product adoption and enforcing a no-discount policy to protect value while scaling hiring, pricing, and operations.
Krithika Muthukumar is OpenAI’s VP of Marketing and was the first marketing hire at Stripe and Retool, applying a “diagnostician” mindset that treats growth as a system requiring specific fixes across teams, developer audiences, products, and go-to-market strategy.
Kiren Sekar, an early Meraki leader and former Chief Product Officer at Samsara, built hardware and software for heavy industries such as trucking and construction, grounding product management and technology scaling in direct learning from customers in the field.
Kevin Wang built FOSSA to solve the open-source compliance friction he encountered as a developer, creating a platform for enterprise dependency and licensing management while surfacing practical questions about developer tools, early-stage fundraising, and scaling open-source security.
Kelly Watkins is a marketing executive and advisor who served as Slack’s VP of Global Marketing and Abstract’s CEO, grounding product-led growth in straightforward storytelling rather than metrics alone while shaping brands and steering companies through structural transitions.
Kate Taylor is a journalist, arts critic, and historical novelist whose work spans film, visual art, literature, Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, and the Dreyfus Affair, illuminating the mechanics of storytelling and how Canadian media institutions adapt to the digital age.