Engineer leaders investing in early stage founders building
picks and shovels
for developers

Andrew Hoag is the CEO of TeamPay. He's a builder of products, teams and companies. Based in New York, with networks in Silicon Valley, Berlin and London. He's an entrepreneurial leader who enjoys creating things from scratch, but has also led product lines with $60MM+ in revenue and can still write a line of code once in a while. He has consulted with companies in Germany on marketing, fundraising, digital strategy, and product roadmap. Clients have included corporates like Axel Springer and E·ON, and startups like riskmethods, Resolution Foundry, and Qwant. Previously, he founded urbantag in 2011 to tackle the trillion-dollar online-to-offline commerce market. Urbantag was born out of innovation at Black Drumm, where he won an fbFund award and launched several products enabling marketers to reach more customers through social media and word-of-mouth channels. Urbantag (neé Black Drumm) exited in October 2012. Prior to this, he co-founded two startups as CTO and COO, and has been an angel investor and advisor to several others, helping them raise venture capital and with product strategy.

Dileep Thazhmon is the co-founder and CEO of Jeeves. Previously he was the co-founder and COO of Jeeng/PowerInbox for 8 years. He also worked in the Product team at PayPal and as a M&A consultant at Deloitte.

Emmanuel Straschnov is the co-founder of Bubble. Born in Paris, he studied computer science and mathematics at Ecole Polytechnique and received his MBA from Harvard Business School. He is committed to breaking the economic limits of technology and devising solutions that enable innovation and product development without coding software.

Joshua Haas is the co-founder and lead engineer of Bubble. After studying at Harvard, he worked for Bridgewater Associates, an asset management firm; and then founded a company called KeywordSmart, a platform to help photographers organize their photo libraries.

Oleg is the cofounder and CEO and at People.ai. Previously, he helped start and scale three AI/machine learning companies, two of which, including Oleg's own Semantria, were subsequently acquired. He has a strong interest in data science, machine learning, and NLP.

Melanie is the co-founder and CEO at Canva, an innovative online design and publishing tool. As CEO, she raised one of Australia’s largest early stage investment rounds. Canva has been growing rapidly since its launch in August 2013 and is now empowering millions of people from every corner of the globe to create great designs and reach their goals, whether that's landing a job with a stylish resume, getting their business off the ground by creating great marketing materials or connecting with their community by designing great social media graphics.

Cliff is the co-founder and COO at Canva, founded with Melanie in 2013. Cliff helped to build the company into the largest school yearbook company in Australia, then expanding it internationally. Since its inception, Canva has grown to have more than 10 million users in 179 countries and a team of more than 150 people across two offices. With Melanie, he has raised over $US 42 million in funding from top US and Australian investors such as Matrix Partners, Felicis Ventures & Blackbird alongside Hollywood celebrities Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson.

Cameron is the co-founder and CPO at Canva. He leads the design and product teams there, focusing on future product directions and innovative experiences. Cameron started his own design agency before working with Lars and Jens Rasmussen — co-founders of Google Maps — to realise the design vision for their groundbreaking communication tool, Google Wave. He then founded an ambitious email startup with two other Google alumni before meeting Melanie Perkins & Cliff Obrecht, and deciding to help them build the beginnings of Canva.

Hiro is the founding CEO of Treasure Data, a SaaS company focussed on CDP (Customer Data Platform). His vision of delivering data warehousing as a cloud-based service drives all aspects of the company’s service and business development. Hiro is a long-time open source advocate, and at Red Hat was a catalyst in bringing together open source innovation and enterprise computing.