Our History
Speakers featured in the past
Past Event Highlights
All Our Past Speakers
Liam Martin
Liam Martin is the co-founder and CMO of Time Doctor and Staff.com — one of the most popular time tracking and productivity software platforms in use by top brands today. He is also a co-organizer of the Running Remote Conference.
He consults on outsourcing and process design and is passionate about how to gain insights into the inner workings of how people work.
He is an avid proponent of remote work and has been published in Forbes, Inc, Mashable, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, The Huffington Post, Venturebeat, and many other publications specifically targeting the expansion of remote work.
The mission statement that feeds all the products and services that Liam is involved with stems from empowering workers to work wherever they want, whenever they want.
Liam has an undergraduate and graduate degree in Sociology from McGill University. He lives in Canada but travels 3-6 months out of the year due to his ability to work wherever and whenever he likes. He chooses a new place to travel a few times a year but usually spends time in Austin, Las Vegas, and Ubud each year and loves to encourage others to work remotely on his travels.
Tara Vasdani
Tara Vasdani is the Principal Lawyer and Founder of Remote Law Canada., a law firm specializing in Civil Litigation, Employment Law, and Remote Work. In both 2018 and 2019, she has been nominated for Canadian Lawyer’s Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers, and in 2019, she was featured in Forbes.
Tara’s law firm is exclusively remote, and it thrives on using legal technology and artificial intelligence to more efficiently serve clients, and encourage the remote work movement. Tara is dedicated to advocating for her clients, from the consultation stage, through to negotiations, and if necessary, trial – using solid litigation experience. In both 2018 and 2019, she has set national and international legal precedents.
Remote Work areas of expertise:
- Remote Work Agreements
- Remote Work Policies
- Health & Safety Checklists
- Remote Work Request Forms
- Remote Work Handbooks
- Legal and HR Compliance
Zoë Harte
Zoë Harte holds the position of Chief People Officer at Upwork and leads their talent strategy. She has guided the growth of the company’s team by more than 75 percent, from startup to becoming a public company. She implements innovative management approaches and focuses on building a mission-driven culture for Upwork’s team of employees and global network of freelancers.
Zoë has been recognised as one of SIA’s Global Power Women in Staffing for three consecutive years.
Mariano Suarez-Battan
Mariano Suarez-Battan is co-founder and CEO at MURAL.
Teams of all sizes and industries use MURAL’s digital whiteboard to explore complex challenges visually, facilitate design thinking exercises, and organize Agile processes. Global 2000 companies like IBM, Intuit, Steelcase, and Autodesk have deployed MURAL at scale to enhance visual collaboration in their digital workplace.
Mariano is on a mission to inspire, enhance and connect imagination workers so that they can collaborate on creative problem solving wherever they may be.
Previously, he co-founded Three Melons, a game studio that designed and published online games. Bola was their hit product with more than 20 million players globally. The company was acquired by Playdom/Disney in 2010.
Claire Lew
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
David Heinemeier Hansson, popularly known as DHH, needs no introduction.
He is the CTO of Basecamp, co-author of 4 books, and the creator of the open-source Ruby on Rails framework.
If you haven’t noticed, David has a thing for taking things out of obscurity and making them popular.
- In an age when PHP was the de-facto standard of web development, David created Ruby on Rails.
- When everyone was running after VC money, David along with co-founder Jason Fried, bootstrapped Basecamp (previously 37signals ).
- And years before people thought of remote work, David co-authored “Remote – Office not required”.
David is a rare kind of programmer. He cares deeply about both — writing beautiful code and building software that makes an impact. Something you can clearly see in Basecamp and Ruby on Rails.
David is a best-selling author. He has co-authored 4 books on making work-life better. His most popular book — Rework — is a New York times, Wall Street Journal, and Sunday Times bestseller, with half a million+ copies sold worldwide. And his latest book — It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work — is about making running a business calm and enjoyable.
We love it when he says –
Nobody is an overnight success. Most overnight successes you see have been working at it for ten years.
Here is everything about him in his own words on his personal site — dhh.dk. He has also been contributing to the blog Signal v Noise for the past two decades.
For someone who enjoys growing things slowly, it’s almost ironic that David is also into racing cars.
Reema Batnagar
Reema Batnagar joined Pixar Animation Studios in February 2019 as Vice President, Human Resources. In her role, Batnagar is responsible for leading Pixar’s human resources department, which includes talent acquisition, leadership/organizational development, total rewards, and employee relations.
Batnagar brings over 20 years of HR experience to the job. Prior to Pixar, Batnagar worked at Sony Interactive Entertainment as Head of HR for Sales & Marketing, where she led learning and development and talent management. She has also held a variety of senior HR leadership and organizational development roles at VMware, Adobe, and Intuit.
Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Batnagar holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and psychology from St. Olaf College and a master’s degree in human resources and organizational development from University of Minnesota.
Tracy Hawkins
Tracy Hawkins has been active in all aspects of corporate real estate and facilities management for over 15 years – her skills encompass project management, design and construction, leasing & transactions, workplace operations and the remote experience.
With international experience leading corporate real estate teams in the film, fashion and the technology sectors, notably previously at Yahoo! for 7 years and now at Twitter as their VP of Workplace Transformation. She has been at Twitter for the last 8 years joining them to lead their EMEA and APAC Real Estate & Workplace teams in 2013 moving from Dublin, Ireland to San Francisco in 2014 to head up their Design & Construction team during a period of explosive growth which ultimately led to her returning from maternity leave to assume leadership of their global Real Estate & Workplace team in March of 2016. Tracy is responsible for all workplaces at Twitter, be that in an office or remote, her goal is to ensure their employees have the choice and agility to do their very best work regardless of geography.
Tracy is married to Grant, they have a 5 year old daughter, she is on the Boards of Blue Bear School of Music and Twitter Foundation and has been an active member of Corenet for over 10 years both in London and the Bay Area.
Amir Salihefendić
Amir Salihefendić is the CEO and founder of Doist — the software company behind Todoist, one of the world’s most popular productivity tools used by over 25 million people, and Twist, a team communication app that helps remote-friendly teams cultivate a more organized, transparent, and balanced workplace.
Originally from Bosnia, Amir grew up in Denmark and studied computer science at Aarhus Univeristet in Aarhus, Denmark. Prior to Doist, Amir was part of the founding team of Plurk, a Twitter precursor used by millions of people that continues to be one of the most popular social networking sites in Asia. He created Todoist in 2007 while still a university student with two programming jobs on the side. At the time, it was one of the very first digital task managers available.
Currently based in Barcelona, Spain with his Chilean wife, Amir’s mission is to create a future in which anyone can work hard and without distractions from anywhere in the world. He believes everyone should be empowered to tackle the challenges they are passionate about, and then unplug at the end of the day with the reassuring peace-of-mind their work and team is accounted for.
Stacy Elliott
Stacy Elliott is the Sr Director of Executive Communications; Office of the Executive Vice President of Microsoft.
Stacy spent her early career in public relations with multi-national consumer brands as her clients, including Lever Brothers, Ralston-Purina, Carnation, Pepsi-Co, and American Airlines. In the mid-90s, Stacy was recruited to bring her experience to the consumer technology realm, helping Microsoft launch its early consumer-focused technology products including education and gaming software, and home
After eight years in Redmond, WA., she left Microsoft’s main campus to pioneer a remote job-share scenario from her home in Dallas, TX. Working remotely for the past 16 years, she’s held a variety of marketing and communication leadership roles, including launching the first executive speaker bureau and leading a global brand team for Microsoft’s advertising business. These days, she continues to use her communications skills at Microsoft for speechwriting, executive communications, and public relations in support of HR and Microsoft’s Chief People Officer.
Micha Kaufman
Micha Kaufman, is Fiverr‘s Founder, has served as our Chief Executive Officer and as a member of the board of directors since our inception. He is the visionary behind Fiverr’s product and platform strategy, leading the company in changing how the world works together and providing opportunities for anyone, anywhere to build their business, brand or dreams. Prior to co-founding Fiverr, Mr. Kaufman founded and led several technology ventures, including Keynesis Ltd., Invisia Ltd. and Spotback Ltd. Mr. Kaufman has served as a member of the Policy Board of Cerca Partners, a venture capital firm, since November 2016. Since August 2017, Mr.Kaufman has served as a member of the board of directors of Drove Network Ltd. Mr. Kaufman holds an LL.B degree from Haifa University in Israel.
Janelle Bieler
Janelle Bieler was appointed as Adecco Canada’s President in 2020, following her role as Senior Vice President for Adecco Staffing in the U.S. In that role, Janelle was responsible for Adecco USA’s retail organization, encompassing more than 150 branch locations and over 200 sales leaders. She led and helped to accelerate the focus and growth within this important area of business.
Janelle joined Adecco in 2014 as Regional Vice President, Los Angeles region. A passionate sales leader, Janelle developed and implemented new sales strategies to drive results. Prior to joining Adecco, Janelle worked in market leadership and sales with a large car rental company, a technology company and a large staffing firm. She earned her undergraduate degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Matt Barrie
Matt Barrie is an award winning technology entrepreneur and Chief Executive of ASX listed Freelancer Limited. Twelve-time Webby award-winning Freelancer.com is the world’s largest freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace by total number of users and projects posted. Matt is also Chief Executive of Escrow.com, a world leader in secure online payments with over US$4.0b in transactions secured.
Matt was Adjunct Associate Professor in Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Sydney for 15 years. He is the co-author of over 20 US patent applications. Previously, he founded and was Chief Executive of Sensory Networks Inc., a vendor of high performance network security processors which sold to Intel Corporation in 2013 (NASDAQ: INTC).
In 2014 he was named the most influential person in information technology in Australia by Smart Company. In 2015 he was named in the Top 100 Most Influential Engineers in Australia by Engineers Australia. In 2016 he was awarded Libertarian of the Year by the Australian Libertarian Society. In 2018 he was named Alumnus of the Year in Entrepreneurship by Macquarie University. In 2019 he won a Gold Stevie for Executive of the Year.
Matt holds first class honours in both Electrical Engineering and Science, a Masters in Applied Finance, and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia.
Matthew Kepnes
Matthew Kepnes, popularly known as Nomadic Matt, is a New York Times best-selling author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day and Founder/CEO at Nomadic Matt.
He has traveled to close to 100 countries and territories, flown hundreds of thousands of miles, slept in all sorts of places, tried weird food (including fried maggots), made life long friends, learned multiple languages, and, most importantly, discovered that one doesn’t need to be rich to travel.
It’s his mission to help travelers to realize their travel dreams. He has helped millions of people to travel more with tested and proven tips and advice.
