Meet Our Speakers

Hi, my name is Charity, and I am professionally caremad about computers. I am an operations and database engineer and sometimes engineering manager. Right now I am the CEO and cofounder of Honeycomb, where we build observability for distributed systems. (“Monitoring” doesn't have to be a dirty word; give us a try.) Until recently I was a production engineering manager at Facebook. I spent 3.5 years working on Parse (both pre and post-acquisition by FB). I also spent several years at Linden Lab, working on the infrastructure and databases that power Second Life. I am the co-author of “Database Reliability Engineering” by O'Reilly. I was a classical piano performance major in college, but dropped out because it turns out I prefer not being dirt poor. I have been building systems and engineering teams ever since. I love startups, chaos and hard scaling problems, and somehow I always end up in charge of the databases.

My name is Ben. I'm best known for my involvement writing RxJS. I'm also a father of 3 amazing kids. I've lived all over the United States. My home state is Michigan, but I've spent a lot of time in Ohio and Pennsylvania. I lived in Silicon Valley for 6 years working for Netflix and then Google before finally escaping to live in Austin, Texas. My real passion is art. Maybe at somepoint I'll get the courage to post a bit of it here. First I need to make a little time to do more. But I also love art history, museums, and that sort of thing.

Hi I'm Una (like unicorn). I'm a Brooklyn-based developer who's making the web more styleable as a Developer Advocate at Google Chrome. Previously, I was the Director of Product Design at Bustle Digital Group and worked on building maintainable design systems as a UI Engineer at both DigitalOcean and IBM Design. I also co-host two web development podcasts: Toolsday, and the CSS Podcast, as well as the web video series Designing in the Browser. I create technical illustrations called Dev Doodles, do brush lettering and calligraphy, and started technical meetup groups in Washington, DC and Austin, TX.

Håkon came to Opera from W3C, where he was responsible for style sheets. In 1994 he invented a small language called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS describes how web pages are presented — on screens, in print, or read out loud. You can read about it in a book ‘Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web' he co-authored with Bert Bos. The book is written in HTML and CSS. Håkon is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab where he was part of Walter Bender's Electronic Publishing Group.

Vitaly loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany. While writing algebra proofs and preparing for software engineering at nights in the kitchen, at the same time he discovered passion for typography, interface design and writing. After working as a freelance designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine back in 2006, a leading online magazine for designers and developers. His curiosity drove him from interface design to front-end to performance optimization to accessibility and back to user experience over all the years.Vitaly is the author, co-author and editor of all Smashing books, and a curator of all Smashing Conferences. He currently works as creative lead of Smashing Magazine and front-end/UX consultant in Europe and abroad.

Kitze loves to rant about webdev. He is the founder of Sizzy - the browser for developers. He created React Academy to teach React and GraphQL around the world. He's documenting his journey on YouTube, streams on Twitch, and has a blog that he maintains once in a blue moon.

Kent C. Dodds is a JavaScript software engineer and teacher. He's Co-Founder and Director of Developer Experience at Remix! Kent's taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make the world a better place with quality software development tools and practices. He lives with his wife and four kids in Utah.

Evangelina Ferreira is a Front-end developer and teacher. She currently works as a UI Developer and has been teaching web technologies at the National Technological University of Argentina for more than five years.Throughout her career Evangelina has been deeply involved in the Argentinian web community. She enjoys giving workshops and talks and since 2015 she has been organizing CSSConf Argentina, an international non-profit event that brings experts from all around the globe to speak about web technologies. In her spare time she loves reading W3C drafts as much as Harry Potter, creating animations and playing with her cats.

Erik Rasmussen is an expat American JavaScript hacker living in Spain. He's best known as the author of two of the most popular form libraries in React, Redux Form and Final Form. He's currently trying to promote mindful Flow at Centered.

My name is Lea Verou and I wear many hats. My day job is researching how to make web programming easier at MIT CSAIL, working with David Karger in the Haystack group. I have a long-standing passion for open web standards. I'm an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) member as of Jan 2021. The TAG is a special W3C working group that ensures all new Web technologies are well-designed and consistent with the rest of the Web Platform, and do not expose Web users to harm. I've been one of the few Invited Experts of the W3C CSS Working Group since 2012 and co-edit several CSS specifications, so if you're a Web developer, you probably use bits of my work daily. In the past, I have also worked at W3C/MIT as a Developer Advocate. I love sharing knowledge and have given over 100 invited talks at web design/web development conferences around the world. My talks are known for their interactive style and are often cited as one of the few examples of live coding that doesn't suck. I have also written a bestselling book on advanced CSS and several articles.

Misko Hevery is the CTO at Builder.io, where he is helping to empower anyone to create blazing fast sites. Previously he has worked at Google, where he created Angular, AngualarJS and was co-creator of Karma. Before focusing on making the web better, he brought testing culture to Google and the world through his blog. Miško started his career by designing digital circuits and moved to databases, full-stack development, and finally, front-end frameworks, giving him a unique perspective. He understands all of the layers from the web down to a transistor.

Nader Dabit is a web and mobile developer, author, open source enthusiast, and Senior Developer Advocate at Edge i Node.

Hi, I am Francesco, I am 38 from Rome, Italy. I am a Computer Scientist who worked from 2017 to 2020 on the Copernicus project for the European Space Agency. I am very active on Social Media since January 2020, I became a Docker Captain in June 2021, I have been a host for the Official Docker All-Hands in September 2021, and a guest on the official Docker Youtube channel. I've interviewed 150+ Developers on my YouTube Channel. Currently Developer Advocate at daily.dev I am currently creating content about Web3. I stream on Twitch, and I started posting videos on TikTok.

Debbie O'Brien is a Developer Advocate with over 10 years experience in Frontend development. She has worked as a Tech Lead and consultant for many important clients with varios technologies and often with a strong focus on performance. She has lead teams both in house and remotely as well as giving workshops and training. She has many years of experience as a mentor for online learning platforms, Treehouse and OpenClassrooms as well as the Google Developer Expert program. Debbie is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in developer technologies, Google Developer Expert in web technologies, GitHub Star and Cloudinary Media Developer Expert, an Auth0 Ambassador and Nuxt Ambassador.

Raza is the Head of Dev Rel at thirdweb. An accountant by profession, but technology enthusiast by heart. Wildly passionate about emerging technologies and educating about them. Raza considers himself a below average developer and the walking proof that anyone can learn how to develop. Currently Raza is focused on teaching developers on how to get started in Web3 through his Twitter, Tiktok and YouTube channel. By no means does Raza think that Python is the best programming language out there. In his spare time he loves to binge watch anime.

Tejas Kumar is a gifted public speaker with an engineering background, who started his coding journey at age 8. Today, Tejas travels the world encouraging and inspiring developers to build great things with code.

Tiffany Tse is a UX Manager on the API Libraries and Developer Documentation team at Shopify. where's she's also previously worked as a front-end developer and developer advocacy lead. She has taught as a professor in the joint York University/Sheridan College Design Program as well as Algonquin College. Tiffany specializes in developer education, user experience, design systems, and accessibility. Tiffany lived in Ottawa for a decade, and therefore has a huge appreciation for speaking, teaching and travelling to cities with warm temperatures.

Ekene is a Developer Experience Engineer and Technical Writer. He is currently working with the Developer Experience team at Netlify where they build tools, create content, open-source repos, and demos to teach and also help developers build a better web with Netlify's products and services.

He's a great teacher and instructor. At his spare time, he likes to write blog posts and create courses for different platforms to educate more learners.

Camila is an engineer and educator who believes that technology education should be accessible to all. She is passionate about crafting simple and concise developer content to help developers start building in web3. Camila is a Developer Relations Engineer at Edge & Node, a core developer at The Graph Protocol. You can find her on all platforms @camiinthisthang

Sven Peters, former developer advocate at Atlassian and MongoDB - now at Manfred, has been studying trends in software development for the last 15 years uncovering the cultural and technical attributes to help development teams work effectively and drive innovation. He has 20 years experience in writing code, leading teams, and sharing his experience with thousands of developers at uncountable conferences in 25+ countries.

Sean Falconer is Head of Developer Relations at Skyflow. Sean spends his time building, writing, speaking, and connecting with communities about engineering and data privacy. He has a wide range of interests and expertise, including full stack development, developer experience, and API design. Prior to Skyflow, Sean led developer relations for Google's Business Communications product suite and was CTO and founder of a startup focused on mobile hiring tools. You can connect with Sean on Twitter @seanfalconer

As the Vice President of Developer Relations Strategy and Experience at Cisco, Grace Francisco is responsible for defining and growing Cisco's broad-based developer strategy. Creating new capabilities and programming for DevOps, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), cloud architects, and developers building for a cloud-first world, she is building an expanded ecosystem supporting cloud native architectures. She also leads Cisco DevNet, Cisco's 500,000-plus-strong developer community, which features programs that catalyze innovations and accelerate automation and digital transformation throughout the industry.

Feross is the founder and CEO of Socket, where he's working on a new approach to open source supply chain security. Feross is the author and maintainer of WebTorrent, StandardJS, and 100s of other open source projects which are downloaded 500+ million times per month. Feross is a lecturer at Stanford University where he teaches CS 253 Web Security. Socket, the company Feross started, is auditing every package on npm to detect suspicious changes and block software supply chain attacks. Hundreds of companies use Socket to protect their software applications and critical services from malware and security threats originating in open source code.

Peter McKee is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at JFrog and maintainer of the open source project Ronin.js. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA but currently residing in Austin, TX, Peter built his career developing full-stack applications for over 25 years. He has held multiple roles but enjoys teaching and mentoring the most. When he's not slapping away at the keyboard, you can find him practicing Spanish and hanging out with his wife and seven children.

Ben is a second career developer who previously spent a decade in the fields of adult education, community organizing, and non-profit management. He works as a developer advocate by day and experiments with open source projects at night. He writes regularly on the intersection of community development and tech. Originally from Southern California and a long-time resident of New York City, Ben now resides near Tel Aviv.

Brandon is the Founder and CEO of Flightcontrol and the Creator of Blitz.js. He's deeply passionate about helping people reach their dreams and about making development and entrepreneurship more accessible. Outside of work he loves flying airplanes and helicopters, rock climbing, and traveling.

I'm a Developer, Designer, Founder, Mentor, Speaker & UX Advocate creating award-winning digital experiences with a holistic approach to problem solving for over a decade

In the past, I have been a freelancer specializing in making existing applications collaborative. Now, I'm a full-time open-source developer working on the foundational technology for building collaborative, local-first applications. My main project is Yjs - a general-purpose CRDT that specializes in rich-text editing. I'm part of a collective that is building an ecosystem of software around Yjs. One objective of our collective is to bring Yjs-compatible CRDT implementations to more programming languages.

Josip is working on services and frameworks that power Infobip's public APIs. He cares about stability and reliability of his software solutions and is always trying to inspire others to do the same. In addition to crafting software he's interested in building teams, propagating good practices and educating others.

Bolaji is a Software Engineer, Content Creator, and Community Engineer who currently works as a Developer Advocate at Commerce Layer. He's passionate about sharing knowledge, learning, teaching, building communities, web engineering, documentation, Jamstack, headless commerce, composable infrastructures, and open-source. Bolaji also manages the Open Source Community Africa, a community for open-source creators and contributors in Africa alongside other local communities.

Dario Sindičić is an engineer with a background both in the development and also in systems engineering. His career started with a competitive programming after which he entered into Linux eco-system learning more about opensource technologies. He is a contributor to many opensource projects and his everyday tasks including resolving strange and peculiar issues.

Dario is an experienced Systems Engineer currently working in Apis IT as an ICT Specialist in distributed systems department. During his career he managed medium and large IT environments with a large spectrum of technologies. As a Linux and Unix enthusiast managing large number of servers his everyday tasks include finding new ways to automate repetitive tasks as well as to monitor services and machines in a holistic way so that nothing is left to chance.

Hila Fish is a Senior DevOps Engineer at Wix. She believes the DevOps culture is what drives a company to perform in its best, and carries the vision to enhance and stabilize the business by taking care of its infrastructure. In her spare time, Hila is a lead singer of a cover band, giving back to the community by co-organizing DevOps-related events (Inc. ""DevOpsDays TLV"" & ""StatsCraft""), mentoring in “Baot” (Women in tech Israeli community) and other tech communities, and sharing her passion and knowledge whenever possible.

Jemima Abu is a self-taught Front End Developer and school-taught Systems Engineer from Lagos, Nigeria. She is an avid advocate for diversity and intersectionality in technology and accessibility in web development.

Alex has spent the past 11 years working on the Open Web within Browser, Communications, and FinTech organizations. With a background in web technologies and developer advocacy, he's helped organizations build developer-friendly products while engaging with the developer community at large. As the new Technology Lead for the Interledger Foundation, he focuses on lowering the barrier to entry into the Payments ecosystem and driving the adoption of the Web Monetization standard.

Arik is the CEO and co-founder of Rapyd, a global Fintech as a Service platform that helps businesses collect and disburse money via locally preferred payment methods. Arik is a cloud services expert and was surprised by the challenges faced by how the legacy payments infrastructure is hindering growth in the payment space. Arik started Rapyd in order to help build a global financial technology infrastructure that allows online commerce companies, gig economy platforms, financial institutions or any digital business to embed financial services into their consumer offerings in a very simple way. A serial entrepreneur, Arik is experienced in building high-growth technology companies that leverage using cloud computing that scales to meet rapid global customer demand. Prior to Rapyd, Arik founded ITNAVIGATOR a cloud-based contact center and unified communications platform which was acquired by Avaya in 2013.

Wojtek is a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS dedicated for Central and Eastern European region. Working with Cloud Computing and Data Engineering since 2015 - in different roles: starting from IT Operations Engineer, Software Engineer and Cloud Architect. Functional programming and Serverless architecture aficionado. 9x Certified AWS Specialist. Speaker, lecturer, and content creator.

Bojan Vrhovnik is currently working as Cloud Solution Architect for Microsoft Azure. His job includes solving technical challenges at partner companies, working on examples of complex scenarios to solve specific challenge (proof of concept architectures / solutions) and introducing deep technical presentations on cloud technologies to ease up the developer/IT life. His passion is working with .NET Core, Azure Web Apps, Azure Functions, Linux, Azure Search, Kubernetes and Azure DevOps / Github. Prior joining the professional team at Microsoft Slovenia, he worked as a web developer in major companies in his country on CMS and banking systems. He is actively engaged on social media (twitter @bvrhovnik) and writes blog posts at https://beyondlocalhost.tech. In his free time, he likes to go hiking with his family and do functional exercise as part of his weekly routine.

Luka has been doing computer stuff professionally for over 20 years. A software engineer turned cloud architect who loves putting out trash fires for money. Runs Awesome Force, a full service chaos management agency. Formerly infrastructure lead at Noom, engineering lead at Meetup, CTO and co-founder at Hitlist and developer at DeviantArt.

Noel is a product manager who believes that products can only be successful if they provide a high user experience. He is currently focussing on bringing developers closer to telcos, and enable them to directly interact with the core network.

Coding has been my passion since I was a child. Over the course of three decades I've seen various technologies come and go (and have a good feeling about which ones will stick around). Lately, my primary focus is streaming technologies, because I believe that they will become an indispensable part of any thriving business. I am currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Raiffeisenbank Austria d.d.

Ivan co-founded Codeanywhere, the first cross platform Cloud IDE, which now has over a two million developers worldwide. Alongside this, Ivan founded the largest developer conference in SE Europe called Shift, which was acquired by Infobip - a global communications cloud provider in 2021. Ivan now serves as the Chief Developer Experience Officer at Infobip, running all global developer facing operations.

Shawn has worked on JavaScript, Serverless, and Cloud Developer Experience at Netlify, AWS, Temporal, and now Airbyte. He has started and grown communities for thousands of developers from /r/reactjs to Svelte Society and now mentors junior developers in the Coding Career Community.

Urban is CTO with more than 15 years of experiences leading big web transformations. With passion for new technologies he is trying to guide his team to build advanced and useful products for the clients. Using only MACH stack / architecture bringing complex ideas into life is a challenge which motivates him. In his “second life” he is well known house producer and DJ with addiction to analog gear.

Houssein is the creator of GitPoint, one of the most popular open-source React Native projects and he has also written multiple books such as Modern AngularJS and Fullstack React Native. Houssein has given talks on progressive enhancement and building for the mobile user at over a dozen conferences and events.

Toma is 22 years old and works as a Full Stack Software Developer at Codeanywhere and is also a Computer Science student. Even though he's young, he has been active as a developer for 5 years and loves to share his knowledge with the community.

Oded Shopen works for VMware Tanzu as a Senior Lead Solution Engineer and Spring Advocate, spreading the message of cloud native development, cloud native platforms on Kubernetes and app transformation. His background includes designing large-scale, cloud-native solutions running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, using Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

Gift Egwuenu is a Developer Advocate at Cloudflare. She has over 5 years of experience in web development and building tools to help businesses grow. In her previous role, she worked as a front-end developer. She is now working in developer relations.

Lucas Bernalte is a Senior Frontend Engineer at Docker. He loves making software with JavaScript full stack. He enjoys helping junior developers progress in their career path. When not coding and listening to lo-fi music, you can also find him singing or playing guitar.

Nic is a developer advocate and polyglot programmer working for HashiCorp, and the author of “Building Microservices in Go” and "Service Mesh Patterns." In his spare time, Nic coaches and mentors at Coder Dojo teaches at Women Who Go and GoBridge, speaks and evangelizes good coding practice, process, and technique, and works to raise money for a charity he runs with his wife.

Adrienne Tacke is a Filipina software engineer, keynote speaker, published author of the book Coding for Kids: Python, and a LinkedIn Learning instructor who specializes in Cloud Development courses. Perhaps most important, however, is that she spends way too much money on desserts and ungodly amounts of time playing Age of Empires II.

Petar works on high-performant backend systems and realizes their full potential.

Danica Fine is a Senior Developer Advocate at Confluent where she helps others get the most out of their event-driven pipelines. In her previous role as a software engineer on a streaming infrastructure team, she predominantly worked on Kafka Streams- and Kafka Connect-based projects. She can be found on Twitter, tweeting about tech, plants, and baking @TheDanicaFine.

Philipp lives to demo interesting technology. Having worked as a web, infrastructure, and database engineer for over ten years, Philipp is now a developer advocate and community team lead in EMEA at Elastic — the company behind the Elastic Stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash. Based in Vienna, Austria, he is constantly traveling Europe and beyond to speak and discuss open source software, search, databases, infrastructure, and security.

Works as Software engineer on Kafka ecosystem at Infobip, creator of Kafkistry. Born and raised in Croatia, graduating Master's degree at FER University of Zagreb. Enjoys problem solving, helping others and following good practices while being open-source enthusiast. Enters the zone with a good piece of music.

Lucija Reic, professionally known as Luce, is a startup and disruptive technology enthusiast and the backbone of Infobip Startup Tribe. With years of experience working on different consultation projects, she knows all the tips and tricks when it comes to business development. Her current mission is to use this knowledge to help young startups navigate the rough sea of entrepreneurship. Whatever the Q, she has an A. If she wasn’t this she would be a proofreader or a professional chinchilla rescuer.

Senior software developer and ex Santiment CTO, Valentin turned full-time farmer in mid 2020 and now regularly performs security audits for yield-chasing hedge funds. A must-follow for high level discussions on platform exploits, smart contract audits and all things yield.

Adam is a co-founder and board member of Aleph Zero Foundation—a Swiss non-profit organization offering a new blockchain infrastructure layer with a scalable plug-and-play privacy solution, and CTO of Cardinal Cryptography—a polish start-up offering blockchain R&D solutions. Adam is also a Ph.D. in Mathematics in the area of probability applications, and an academic lecturer in blockchain, distributed computing and cryptography domains.

Pavel is a firm advocate for the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies, and in 2014, co-founded Wirex, a crypto payments platform, as a solution to the then complex process of buying crypto. He brings 15 years experience in software development and IT management from Barclays Capital, Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas. He's published articles in international publications from City A.M. to Asia Times, and is a sought-after speaker at blockchain and payments conferences globally, having spoken at Money 20/20 Europe, Paris Fintech Forum and Finsum Japan. At Wirex, Pavel leads a team of 300+ dedicated and engaged employees, including 100 highly skilled engineers and developers based in Eastern Europe. He's responsible for the high-level functioning and growth of the company, focusing on new product development and platform evolution.

Belma is a Master of software engineering with a passion for new technologies and an ambitious spirit. She gathered both startup experience and fullstack development during college internships, but after she graduated in 2017. she decided to pave her own way in building businesses. Right after college, she cofounded NodeFactory, a blockchain company that successfully offered development of decentralized applications, infrastructure, protocols and web3 tooling. In July 2021, Belma did her first exit when NodeFactory was acquired by ChainSafe. She now works as Head of Solutions, leading R&D efforts within ChainSafe.

Twice ICPC World Finalist. Latin American Champion Award in ICPC WF2017.

Melvin Deng is the CEO of QCP Capital, a full suite crypto asset trading firm and one of the largest global market makers in options with $2b in assets deployed. Inspired by the potential of cryptocurrency to disrupt financial services, he left a more than 15 year banking career, to join QCP Capital in 2021. As the CEO, Melvin's vision is to bring the company's institutional-grade experience, research and infrastructure to the crypto and traditional finance ecosystem. He was previously the Head of Treasury for Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, responsible for business and balance sheet strategy.

Ben Kurrek is an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo for Mechatronics Engineering. He is currently working for NEAR as a developer relations engineer. He is truly immersed in the ecosystem and is in constant communication with both the community and other members of the NEAR team. He creates new and exciting technology used by developers and ensures that people are supported in the ever-changing blockchain space. Through his role as both a co-founder and Web3 developer at Fayyr, he has a strong presence in every aspect of the platform. Most notably, his expertise in blockchain and smart contract development has led to some of Fayyr's most innovative technology that many users in the NEAR ecosystem are eager to use.

Software engineer who turned into an engineering manager. Found new joy through challenges in the web3 space and contributing to open source!

I am a tech enthusiast and researcher with 3 years of professional blockchain experience, which includes development, project and team leadership. My web3 adventure began in 2016. as a hobby and turned into a profession in 2019. when I started working on Sourcify as a part of EF's Solidity team. Currently, my role is Chief of Innovation, leading the NEAR Balkans Innovation Lab.

Denny Balon has been working in IT for 19 years. Creating various products since he was 17. Denny has a heart of an engineer and mind of an entrepreneur. For the last 14 years Denny held various top-management positions mostly concentrating on product development. Denny's moto is "Create teams, create value!"

Bernard Ivezic is an intrapreneur who founded the 1st mainstream publication on startups in Croatia, Startup Report, within the most influential daily in the country, Jutarnji list. He propelled the LinkedIn page of Novac.hr into Croatia's fastest-growing media LinkedIn page in 2021. Bernard kickstarted The Yearly List of the most prominent startups in Croatia, 'Novac.hr TOP25 startups to watch', supported by Infobip. He co-founded Croatia's 1st online research agency, PROOF, but that startup failed. He has more than 20 years of experience in the media and communications industry. He's an alumnus of the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Investing in fintech and "enabling technology" companies in CEE. Series A opportunities

Mike Butcher MBE is Editor-at-large of TechCrunch. Mike has been named one of the most influential people in tech, in surveys by GfK NOP, The Independent, and Wired UK. He is a regular broadcaster, appearing on the BBC, Al Jazeera, Sky News, CNN, and Channel 4, among others. He co-founded The Europas European Tech Startup Awards, refugee non-profit Techfugees, and military charity TechVets. He has advised both the EU and the UK government on tech startups, and was awarded an MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list 2016 for services to the UK technology industry and journalism.

Former banker with an engineering background. Freelance consultant, helping the startup scene through angel investments, mentorships, lectures and advising. Partner in a new regional growth VC Fund.

Engineer turned into an enterpreneur. For over 20 years I've been trying to build or guide people to building useful and cool stuff with technology. From seriously hands-on projects to strategic planning of companies. Today I'm all about listening to new ideas by new people and helping them succeed.

Engineering Director at Infobip, with 10+ years of experience in IT. One of the founders of 2 communities in Zagreb - Java and Leading in Tech. After working hours, a huge outdoors sports and photography fan

Darko is General Partner of daFUND, pan-European early-stage VC fund focused on supporting B2B start-ups powered by software. Besides being an experienced investor, Darko has significant experiences in executive positions (Netcetera from Switzerland, Mimovrste, Elektro Energija, Najdi.si from Slovenia, Trimo UAE etc.) as well as an entrepreneur (DG180 – M&A and strategy advisory, Securities Grid – white-label platform for tokenized securities, BUDS – boutique advisory, Adeptio etc.) and as a board member (Cognism, One PM, Securities Grid). Over the years, Darko also advised a number of companies from around the globe – from US to UK, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Slovenia, Serbia and Macedonia.

Jan is a founding partner of Credo Ventures, a seed stage venture capital firm based in Prague, Czech Republic. At Credo, we invest in outstanding technology founders from central Europe, helping them to realize their global ambitions. Jan is a Kauffman Fellow, a highly sought-after program and network dedicated to the world of innovation investing.

Tena started her career as a journalist and then explored the advertising and IT industry before circling back to media, where she became a partner at business and tech magazine Netokracija. During this time, she's coached and consulted numerous startups on media relations and advertising. Following a successful exit, she's now a Global Developer Content Expert at Infobip.

Albert Gajšak is a 23-year-old technology entrepreneur from Croatia. At 18 years of age, he has dropped out of college and founded CircuitMess, an ed-tech startup designing and producing radically different educational STEM toys. The company was founded alongside the launch of the first product called MAKERbuino, a DIY game console. In 2018, CircuitMess released an educational mobile phone called MAKERphone, and in 2020, a STEM toy subscription called CircuitMess STEM Box. CircuitMess Batmobile is the latest product Albert is working on which is an educational AI-powered robotic car developed in collaboration with Warner Bros.

Sabina is a Managing Director in the Sovereign Institution Group at Goldman Sachs, responsible for developing and enhancing the firm's relationships with global sovereign wealth and institutional clients. She also helps to lead the firm's efforts in sustainability and inclusive growth, including the firm's $750 billion commitment to support and accelerate the climate transition and balanced growth across its investing, financing, and advisory businesses. Sabina serves on the boards of several community and economic development organizations, including as co-chair of Network 20/20's BOLD Fellowship Program on Entrepreneurship, Youth Employment, and Economic Development as well as the board of the Afghan Future Fund. Sabina earned a BA in Government and Philosophy from Harvard College in 2012.

Former founder, now turned into an investor - launched the first 100% secondary deals focused VC fund in the Baltics

Vedran Bilas is professor of electrical engineering and dean elect at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing of University of Zagreb. His research interests include low-power and energy-efficient sensing and sensor data analytics. He teaches electronic instrumentation and electronic systems, as well as engineering management and technology entrepreneurship.

Jure is an experienced venture capital investor, who founded the Slovenia-first VC fund in 2008. He is a managing partner in the leading regional VC managing firm, focused on early-stage tech investments. He has led or participated in over 50 technology transactions over the last fifteen years.

Vidette Adjorlolo is the founder and CEO of Sorted Chale, an African travel startup with presence in Ghana, Ivory Coast and soon to be expanding across 4 other African countries. Vidette champions the perspective that, in order for the international community to fully commit to Africa economically, a level of socio-cultural equity ought to be accumulated. Sorted Chale provides a bridge towards making this a possibility. Currently, Sorted Chale is building a Marketplace of travel experiences in Africa, a crossbreed between Airbnb Experiences and Couchsurfing Hangouts.

Psychologist by vocation, CX researcher and practitioner by heart, with background in iGaming, Retail and academic research. Currently building InsiderCX to bring out omnichannel customer feedback for companies of all shapes and sizes.

Michael Selden is the CEO & Co-founder of Finless Foods, the first cell-cultured seafood company as well as the first to serve cell-cultured fish in the United States, was founded on the central mission ‘to create a future for seafood where the ocean thrives.' Selden developed a passion for the interrelation of science & food systems, specifically the critical roles they play in economic, environmental, and social justice issues, during his time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he earned a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Finless Foods was incorporated in 2017 & has a staff of 35 & growing.

Marin has over 10 years of experience mentoring youth in summer science camps where he was designing and delivering project-based STEAM learning programs to elementary and high school students. This experience led to founding EdTech startup STEMI with the vision of creating an ecosystem for connecting schools with the tech industry. The company is creating STEM programs in collaboration with tech unicorns and delivering them trough the Deep Education Experience Platform to schools worldwide.

Financial exec, turned fintech entrepreneur, turned venture capitalist. Stan has been actively working in Western Balkans, as well as with SEE diaspora in global tech hubs. He is advising portfolio companies on SaaS metrics, sales development, and fundraising.

Lea is the founder of company Perle Net doo, which has been developing Xoink app since 2019 - the first educational screentime app for kids. Before she decided to fully devote herself to the development of her own idea and company, Lea built her career for 18 years as a manager in the hotel industry, mostly in procurement and logistics. She found her opportunity during her maternity leave when, as a hobby, she assembled the basic functionalities of today's app in a clickable excel chart and started researching how to bring this idea to life. Additional impulse for her to start working on Xoink full time, was the moment when project received 200K euro grant from EU funds for development of the innovation. She is a mother of two children to whom she tries very hard to demonstrate and prove that they can be whatever they want in life. She loves fitness and has been training every day for years, just so she can eat more :-)

Infobip's CTO and cofounder Izabel Jelenic started his business career as a developer, but he soon became the visionary and leading force of what has become one of the world's top-performing communication platforms. Implementing new solutions on the Infobip platform and nurturing the rapidly growing Infobip development team is instrumental in his everyday work while creating the most productive and rewarding working environment for employees.

With 10 years of experience in business development and sales engineering in the CPaaS industry, Tamara has a unique experience in understanding today's customer needs and expectations. Her engineering background gives her a 360 view of the challenges businesses need to overcome to thrive. In her free time, she enjoys climbing rocks, spending time outdoors, and traveling.

Tunya joined the 500 team based in Istanbul a year ago as an Investment Analyst, to invest in early-stage startups emerging from CEE and Turkey. Her main responsibility is to discover startups and founding teams with high potential to scale globally and analyze the market and the competition & conduct due diligence in order to contribute to the investment decision process. In addition, she is the ESG specialist of the fund, being responsible for measuring the impact & sustainability of the portfolio companies and reporting to the investors. She is also leading the fund's marketing and community efforts. She holds a B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University and prior to joining the 500 Emerging Europe team, she was the Analyst of Galata Business Angels, the prominent angel investor network in Turkey with 40 members. She is also a Turkish Entrepreneurship Foundation Fellow Alumni.

Operations manager of the Croatian Artificial Intelligence Association doing a master in corporate finance. Her main focus is to promote the concept of techno optimism and build a heterogeneous community of experts around the same idea. She manages several pan-European and Croatian projects, such as the European AI Forum and the largest Croatian AI conference - AI2Future.

The lucky guy who is privileged to work with talented girls and boys for more than seven years on various software and IoT products. First as a PM and Head of Client Services at Infinum and lately joined Infobip's product gang as a Group Product Manager responsible for the growth area. In my previous life, I was an average backend developer.

Born and raised in Croatia, studied in Italy, Switzerland and the UK, with tenure in Tanzania and Japan. Nikola has worked in the public sector for the UN which is how he originally arrived in Japan in 2011. He has worked in tech for a long time - he ran startups and worked with Nikkei in Tokyo. Nikola is currently leading the Startup Ecosystem department at Infobip and supporting tech ecosystems around the world.