There are only a few weeks left until 20 of the world’s best early-stage startups take to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 to compete for the $100,000 equity-free grand prize and eternal glory. They will face tough questions from our judges and must stand out in front of a crowd of star founders. We are excited to share the final group of judges for this year’s show!
Be in the room: Buy your card now and save up to $400. Avoid high prices at the door!
Watching Startup Battlefield is an exciting journey, and it’s also an opportunity for investors and founders alike.
Final Countdown: Startup Battlefield judges at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023
We’re excited to announce the next trio of top investors who will be judging the Startup Battlefield competition.
Guru Chahal, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
Guru Chahal is a visionary investor with a passion to revolutionize the digital landscape. Known for his insight into industry trends spanning DevOps, automation, security, and application development, Guru offers invaluable expertise. Since 2012, he has been an instrumental force at Lightspeed, leading early investments in leading companies such as Zscaler (IPO), Avere Systems (acquired by Microsoft), and Avi Networks (acquired by VMware). As a co-founder of Avi Networks in 2013, he played a pivotal role in propelling the company from infancy to serving the needs of 20% of Fortune 50 giants. Guru’s dynamic journey led him to Lightspeed in 2019, where he continues to make smart investments in cutting-edge ventures like ngrok Hubilo, Noname, Infiot and Pensando.
Jacob Andrew, Partner, Greylock
Jacob Andreu is a product executive and builder who supports founders in building the next generation of consumer software.
Prior to joining Greylock, Jacob spent eight years at Snap, where he helped scale the company from its early days to more than 360 million DAUs (daily active users) and $4.5 billion in revenue. For most of his time at the company, he managed a team of several hundred people across the product, design, growth, data science, analytics, and user research teams. Under his leadership, he launched some of its largest initiatives, including Spotlight. Most recently, he launched My AI, Snap’s chatbot powered by ChatGPT.
Prior to joining Snap, Jacob co-founded and product management at ThinkAkili, an online retail analytics platform. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biomedical computing from Queen’s University.
Nikita Shamgunov, Partner, Khosla Ventures
Nikita is passionate about deep technology, data infrastructure and system software. Prior to joining Khosla Ventures, Nikita co-founded SingleStore, a data and analytics company valued at over $1.3 billion. He served as founding CTO and then CEO, successfully scaling the company to over 40M in ARR and near profitability. For the first nine months, Nikita lived in the programming office next to the servers. Before founding SingleStore, he worked as a senior engineer at Facebook, and before that he worked at Microsoft on the SQL Server product.
At KV, Nikita is incubating Neon — a new database company building serverless Postgres — which has raised $50 million in its seed and Series A rounds.
Nikita has a PhD in Computer Science from Saint Petersburg. During his university years, Nikita won a bronze medal in the ACM ICPC International Student Programming Competition.
Mar Hershenson, founding managing partner of Pear VC
Marr is the founding managing partner of Pear. After earning his doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Marr developed pioneering technology to improve the design of analog semiconductors. Since then, she has gained over 13 years of corporate experience, co-founded three startups in the e-commerce/mobile, enterprise software and semiconductor industries, and filed 14 separate patents.
As co-founder and managing partner of Pear, Marr provides operational and technical expertise to the investment team.
She is currently a lecturer at Stanford University, where she teaches Lean Launchpad, one of Stanford’s flagship entrepreneurship classes. Prior to that, she was a consulting professor at Stanford University where she taught the introductory course in analog circuit design for nearly a decade.
Marr serves on the Board of Trustees of Harvey Mudd College and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the founder of Equity Summit, the premier conference to connect URM Venture Capital GPs with LPs, and an inaugural founding member of All Raise.
She has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a Top Innovator Under 35, named an Innovation Champion by Fast Company, received the Marie R. Pistil Achievement Award from the Digital Automation Conference, and was recognized on the Forbes Midas List in 2021 and 2022 And 2023. .
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 will be held September 19-21 in San Francisco. Buy your card now and save $400 before prices go up on September 15.
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