TechCrunch Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey. Whether you’re a budding founder with a revolutionary idea, a seasoned startup looking to scale, or an investor seeking the next big thing, Disrupt offers unparalleled resources, connections, and expert insights to propel your venture forward.
From idea to IPO, Disrupt 2025 will map out the path for startups to achieve their next major milestone.
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Looking to meet founders, connect with investors, seek advice, or land your next big role? Disrupt is the must-attend event to make it all happen in person.
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Disrupt is more than a startup launchpad — it’s a growth accelerator. Dive into sessions on scaling, sales, and leadership, and connect with the investors and tech experts who can help take your business to the next level.
Gain insights from today’s tech giants
Tap into the wisdom of founders and tech titans at Disrupt. From actionable tips to hard-won lessons, they’ll share what works (and what doesn’t) to guide you as you build your own path forward.
Disrupt 2025 speakers
Adam Bain
Co-Founder and Managing Partner01 Advisors
Rajat Bhageria
Founder and CEOChef Robotics
Gabby Cazeau
PartnerHarlem Capital
Dick Costolo
Co-Founder and Managing Partner01 Advisors
David Cramer
Co-Founder and CPOSentry
Jai Das
Co-Founder, President, and PartnerSapphire Ventures
David Fischer
General Partner01 Advisors
David George
General PartnerAndreessen Horowitz
Alejandro Matamala Ortiz
Co-Founder and Chief Design OfficerRunway
Marlon Nichols
Co-Founder & Managing General PartnerMaC Venture Capital
Adam Bain is the co-founder and managing partner at 01 Advisors, a venture firm targeting companies who have found product-market fit and are looking for operating expertise as they scale. He also serves on the Board of Directors at Opendoor (NASDAQ: OPEN).
Adam is the former Chief Operating Officer of Twitter, where he was responsible for the company’s business lines, including the go-to-market, product and operations teams for the advertising and data businesses. Previously, Adam was the President of the Audience Network at News Corp and ran Product teams at Fox Sports and The Los Angeles Times.
In 2012, Adam ranked #1 in Ad Week’s annual listing of the top 50 indispensable talent. In 2013, Adam was inducted into The American Advertising Federation Hall of Achievement. In 2015, Adam was named one of the 30 United Nations Women “He for She” Impact Champions to help advance gender equality.
Rajat Bhageria is the Founder and CEO of Chef Robotics, a company based in San Francisco that designs and deploys AI-enabled robotics that help food companies flexibly automate their production, thereby helping them overcome the labor shortage, increase production volume, and keep production on-shore. He’s also the Founder and Managing Partner at Prototype Capital.
Gabby Cazeau is a Partner at Harlem Capital – where All Winners are Welcome. At the firm she invests in pre-seed and seed startups, primarily in Enterprise and Vertical software and Applied AI. Gabby sits on the VC Council of Startup:NYC. She has been featured in Business Insider, CNBC, and named to Crain’s NYC 40 Under 40. Gabby received her MBA from the Yale School of Management and holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis
Dick Costolo is a co-founder and managing partner at 01 Advisors, an early growth venture firm leveraging our operating experience to help companies scale. Prior to co-founding 01 Advisors, he was CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015 and has been Founder and CEO of multiple startups, including FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007. The former improv comedian has been a consultant on HBO’s “Silicon Valley” and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
David Cramer is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Sentry, which helps developers find and fix bugs faster so they can get back to the fun parts of building. David started Sentry as an Open Source side project in 2012; today it’s used by over four million developers at over 100,000 organizations, including companies like Anthropic, Disney, Instacart, Duolingo, Slack, and Cursor. In his spare time, he builds projects to dogfood Sentry on and is an angel investor in Vercel, Laravel, Dandelion Chocolate, and dozens of other companies.
Jai is Co-Founder, President, and Partner at leading global software VC firm, Sapphire Ventures. His current investments include Glean, Netskope, Cohesity, Huntress, ThoughtSpot, Defense Unicorns, Clari, CircleCI, DataRobot, JumpCloud, Simpplr, Blockdaemon, and UJET. Fourteen of his investments have IPO’ed, including MuleSoft, Jfrog, Five9, Nutanix, Alteryx, Square, ExactTarget, Apigee, Box, and SumoLogic, while twenty-four of his investments have been acquired. Jai focuses primarily on enterprise tech trends, including AI as a platform shift and its impact on B2B SaaS, and the evolving VC landscape as it pertains to growth-stage companies.
David Fischer is a General Partner at 01 Advisors, a venture firm targeting companies that have found product-market fit and are looking for operating expertise as they scale.
David is the former Chief Revenue Officer of Facebook. He served at the company from 2010 to 2021, overseeing the advertising business and managing the sales and marketing teams worldwide. In that role, he led the growth of the company’s revenue from less than $1 billion a year to over $100 billion in 2021, while serving over 200 million businesses through the company’s products. Prior to joining Facebook in 2010, David was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. Starting in 2002, he built and directed Google’s online sales channel.
David previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff of the U.S. Treasury Department in the late 1990’s. Prior to that, David was an Associate Editor at U.S. News & World Report, where he covered economics and business from Washington, DC.
David George is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s Growth investing team and has led many of the firm’s growth investments.
Prior to joining a16z, David spent seven years at General Atlantic leading and partnering on numerous consumer internet and enterprise software growth investments, including Airbnb, AppDynamics, Opendoor, Slack, and Uber. Previously, he was an investment associate at FFL Partners and an investment banking analyst for William Blair & Company.
David graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the Board of Trustees and Investment Committee of Sacred Heart Schools-Atherton and the Advisory Council of the IDEA Center at the University of Notre Dame, and sits on the board of the Foundation for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. David is a proud native of Kentucky, where he developed his love of basketball, bourbon, and horse racing.
Alejandro Matamala Ortiz is the Chief Design Officer and Co-founder of Runway. He previously was a research resident at New York University, exploring the interaction of AI and Creativity.
Marlon Nichols is the co-founder and managing general partner of MaC Venture Capital, a leading seed-stage firm renowned for backing visionary founders who redefine industries. Under his leadership, MaC has grown into one of North America’s largest seed-stage venture firms, surpassing $600 million in assets under management (AUM). In October 2024, the firm announced the closing of its third fund ($150 million), further solidifying its influence in the early-stage investment landscape.
Marlon’s portfolio includes industry-defining companies such as Airspace, Blavity, FINESSE, Gimlet Media, MongoDB, Pipe, Purestream, Thrive Market, and Shekel Mobility, among others. His keen eye for transformative opportunities has earned him widespread recognition, including consecutive placements on Los Angeles Business Journal’s LA500 (2022–2024) and Business Insider’s Seed 100 (Top Early-Stage Investors) for three years. Additionally, he ranks 25th on the Kauffman Fellows Fund Returners Index and has been featured in PitchBook’s 25 Black Founders and VCs to Watch for six years.
His expertise is frequently sought by top media outlets such as Axios, CNBC, Fortune, and more.
A passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion, Marlon serves on the board of Kauffman Fellows, working to expand representation for underrepresented minorities in venture capital. With a unique blend of technology acumen and leadership principles shaped by his athletic background, he actively mentors CEOs, fosters strategic partnerships, and helps founders scale their businesses into market leaders.
Dr. Astro Teller currently oversees X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory for building breakthrough technologies and businesses designed to help tackle huge problems in the world. Before joining Google / Alphabet, Astro was the co-founding CEO of Cerebellum Capital, Inc, an investment management firm whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved by a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning.
Before his tenure as a business executive, Dr. Teller taught at Stanford University and was an engineer and researcher for Phoenix Laser Technologies, Stanford’s Center for Integrated Systems, and The Carnegie Group Incorporated. Dr. Teller holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Stanford University, Masters of Science in symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the Hertz fellowship.
Gale Wilkinson is the founder and Managing Partner at VITALIZE, a seed stage venture capital fund investing in transformative WorkTech software. Previously, Wilkinson founded IrishAngels, one of the largest angel groups in the world. Gale has led nearly $80M in early-stage deals across 150+ portfolio companies, and she has made 50 personal angel investments. Her experience prior to VC includes founding two HR tech startups, consulting for new product launches with Nielsen, and data strategy with Orbitz.
Wilkinson received a BBA with honors from Notre Dame and an MBA with honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is a founding Board member of Chicago:Blend, an organization focused on increasing diversity in VC and startups in Chicago.
Wilkinson enjoys public speaking, design, teaching, and connecting. Her inspirations include energy work, vintage and antique pieces, dogs, and nature. She is an avid dog rescuer and will be publishing her first book (on pet loss grief) very soon. You can find her on X @galeforceVC. She lives in Chicago and Nashville with her husband and two dogs.
Yin Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Pulley, the equity management platform empowering startups to take control of their cap tables with speed and transparency.
A seasoned entrepreneur and engineer, Yin has founded four companies. Before Pulley, she built ventures ranging from door-to-door laundry service to computer vision technology for advertising. Her most notable early success, Echo, a customizable Android lock screen, amassed over five million downloads before being acquired by Microsoft in 2015, where it continues to live on as Microsoft Launcher. Yin is redefining how startups manage equity—one founder at a time.
Zeya Yang is a Partner at IVP, where he invests in AI-native companies transforming how we work and create. Zeya brings sharp product intuition and a thoughtful, founder-first mindset to every partnership, shaped by his experience as both an investor and a builder. Prior to IVP, he focused on early-stage SaaS and AI investing at a16z. Before his time in venture, Zeya led product for several teams at Plaid and was the founding PM of the Subscription Growth team at Dropbox.
Zeya’s investing track record includes companies like Graphite, Macro, and Tennr. He’s become a trusted thought partner to technical teams navigating the path to product-market fit. A global citizen, he’s lived in China, Japan, and Canada and draws on that perspective to connect with founders.
Zeya holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University, where he graduated second in his class, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar.
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More than 1,200+ AI leaders, VCs, and innovators will meeting June 5 in Berkeley for an immersive experience with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere and more. Explore the AI ecosystem through main stage sessions, breakouts, and live demos of the latest AI innovations.
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