It's the startups that make winters hot

Casey Fenton

Co-founder & CEO

As an introvert and programmer, Casey Fenton explored the intersect of humanity and technology which resulted in him founding Couchsurfing, the world’s greatest trust experiment, and growing the platform to more than 15 million members. Casey is passionate about bringing people together and creating win-win systems where game mechanics work out such ways that everybody gets more. Most recently he has founded UpStock, a bold replacement for the antiquated stock option system that provides Fortune 1000 equity for all businesses and is also the co-founder of the personal reputation platform Wonder which provides 360-degree feedback to give individuals insights into how others perceive them on life´s most important questions.

Ginny Fahs

CO-FOUNDER AT #MOVINGFORWARD

Ginny Fahs is a software engineer, writer, and activist committed to making technology’s next chapter more human and inclusive. She lives in San Francisco, where she works as a backend engineer at Uber. In March, Ginny co-founded #MovingForward: a social movement that rallies VC firms to publish their external discrimination/harassment policies and reporting contacts on VentureMovingForward.org. Over 115 VC firms have joined the movement, including a16z, Sequoia, Greylock, First Round, GV, Benchmark, Accel, and others.

Cassie Kozyrkov

CHIEF DECISION SCIENTIST

As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie Kozyrkov advises leadership teams on the decision process, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She works to democratize statistical thinking and machine learning so that everyone – Google, its customers, the world! – can harness the beauty and power of data. She is the force behind bringing the practice of Decision Intelligence to Google and she has personally trained over 15,000 Googlers in machine learning, statistics, and data-driven decision-making. Before her current role, she served in Google’s Office of the CTO as Chief Data Scientist. Prior to joining Google, Cassie worked as a data scientist and consultant. She holds degrees in mathematical statistics, economics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. When she’s not working, you’re most likely to find Cassie at the theatre, in an art museum, exploring the world, or curled up with a good novel.

Joshua Slayton

FOUNDING CTO

Joshua is the founder of CoinList, the platform for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and other crypto-financial services. Since its inception in mid-2017, CoinList has run many of the top ICOs, including the $250M Filecoin ICO. Previously Joshua was Founding CTO at AngelList, the world’s largest platforms for startups to fundraise and recruit.

Kristel Kruustuk

CO-FOUNDER & CEO

Kristel is Co-founder of Testlio – an end-to-end QA management platform and community of expert testers that help businesses deliver amazing customer experiences.

Kristel began her career as a software tester in 2009, but quickly became frustrated with the shortcomings of traditional QA and crowdsource testing. Testlio was founded to solve these issues. Since launching, the company has raised $8M in funding led by Altos Ventures and Vertex Ventures, hired over 60 employees, and established offices in Tallinn, Tartu, and San Francisco.

Dominic Jacquesson

DIRECTOR OF TALENT

Dominic is working with Europe-based founders and senior executives across Index’s portfolio. He has first-hand experience of scaling companies between zero and 400 people, and the challenges of building executive teams, managing multi-site and international operations, and steering company culture through periods of growth, crisis, M&A, and public listings. Prior to joining Index in 2012, Dominic served twice as a Chief Operating Officer, in both New York and London.

Jennifer Kanyamibwa

SENIOR DESIGN PROGRAM MANAGER

Jennifer Kanyamibwa is the Senior Design Program Manager for the Design and User Research department at Twitter leading strategy and operations initiatives. Prior to Twitter, Jennifer was the Design Studio Manager at Slack. With a career that spans across technology, government, finance, brand strategy, international events and non-profits — she has worked on many teams and is passionate about the power of collaboration.

Oscar Kneppers

FOUNDER

Rockstart Founder Oscar Kneppers is a successful serial entrepreneur and a celebrated internet publisher – launching several cross-media brands since 1998 focused on new media, innovation, and technology. After selling his media businesses Oscar founded Rockstart in 2011.
Rockstart, ‘The Global Startup Machine’, helps startups be more successful in their first 1,000 days through funding and mentorship, community and office space, and startup events in over 25 cities across Europe.

Meera Innes

FOUNDER

Meera is done with the BS narrative about startups. Entrepreneurship is harder than anyone talks about, and she won’t shut up until she’s satisfied founders are getting the support they need. She is a big fan of calling out systemic shit when she sees it.

Tristan Thomas

HEAD OF MARKETING

Tristan is the Head of Marketing and Community at Monzo, the UK’s fastest growing bank. He joined the company at just 15 people and since then has helped grow it to over 500 employees and more than 1.2 million employees. His team oversees everything from crowdfunding campaigns to community engagement.

Paul Duan

FOUNDER & PRESIDENT

Paul Duan is a social entrepreneur using technology to empower people at scale. As the founder and president of Bayes Impact, he is one of the pioneers in using algorithms to create social impact. Since 2014, Paul led multiple projects throughout the world and he was one of the first non-profits to be admitted to Y Combinator, the world’s most prestigious technology incubator. Today, Bayes Impact’s primary focus is Bob, an AI employability coach.
Paul currently serves as a member of Action Publique 2022, the French government reform group headed by Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. He is also a Forbes 30 under 30 recipient and the youngest Ashoka Fellow in France.

Sonny Vu

FOUNDER

Sonny helps founders build companies in new materials, semiconductors, and synthetic biology for clean energy and food production. Recently, he was CTO of Fossil Group. He’s founded: Elemental Machines (IoT), Misfit (wearables; acquired by Fossil for $260m), AgaMatrix (biosensors), FireSpout (NLP; acquired by Ask Jeeves). Before startups, he worked on a Linguistics PhD at MIT under Noam Chomsky.