Our History
Speakers featured in the past
Past Event Highlights
All Our Past Speakers
David Allen
One of the world’s most influential thinkers on productivity, David’s 40 years of experience as a management consultant and executive coach have earned him the title of “personal productivity guru” by Fast Company and one of the top 5 executive coaches by Forbes Magazine. His bestselling book, the groundbreaking “Getting Things Done” and its methods, commonly known as “GTD,” spawned a movement with millions of practitioners and fans around the world. His methods of staying relaxed and focused in our fast-paced world are now being spread by certified trainers and coaches in more than ninety countries.
Ashley Kramer
Ashley Kramer is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer of GitLab Inc., the DevOps Platform. GitLab’s single application helps organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently while strengthening their security and compliance.
As CMO and CSO, Ashley leverages her leadership from roles in marketing, product and technology to message and position GitLab as the leading DevOps platform through the next stage of growth. She is responsible for GitLab’s product marketing, brand awareness, communications, analyst relations, community, competitive positioning, marketing ops and revenue pipeline generation including all digital and sales development efforts. Ashley also leads the strategy for product-led growth and code contribution to the GitLab platform.
Prior to joining GitLab, Ashley was CPO and CMO of Sisense and has held several post-IPO leadership roles including SVP of Product at Alteryx (NYSE: AYX) where she led the messaging, positioning and roadmap for the Alteryx Analytics Platform and Head of Cloud at Tableau where she led the effort to transform Tableau (now a Salesforce company) to a cloud-first company and ran Tableau Online, their fastest growing product. She also has held various marketing, product and engineering leadership roles at Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and NASA.
As a former engineer, Ashley understands and can capitalize on the value of GitLab’s unique ability to solve a deep developer pain point – streamlining the development process and bringing innovative ideas to customers in a quicker and more efficient way. She approaches everything with a customer-first mindset and has a passion for solving the challenge of positioning and messaging software platforms to technical audiences.
Ashley has an MSBA with a Concentration in Computer Information Science from Colorado State University and a BS in Computer Science from Old Dominion University where she also played Division I soccer. She currently is on the Board of Seeq Corporation and advises several startups.
Rowena Hennigan
Rowena Hennigan is a global expert in remote work & digital nomadism. A founder, speaker, professor and a globally acclaimed leader and a Linkedin Top Voice. She is a popular Linkedin Learning Instructor on the topics of staying productive when you travel and becoming a digital nomad. #WorkIsNotAPlace – this is Rowena’s motto and her trending hashtag.
Originally from Galway, Ireland, she is now based in Zaragoza, Spain, regularly mixing remote work and travel with her location-independent family. Rowena advocates for life-work balance, advised by her lived experience of moving countries due to her daughter’s ill health. Using her wealth of personal experience in remote work to educate both companies and workers on skills for an effective and positive nomadic experience, she delivers consultancy and training via her brand “RoRemote”.
Regularly featured in international media, including the NY Times, she was named in the Top 10 Global Voices in Remote Work by Linkedin News in both 2021 and 2022. Also in the Top 25 list of Remote Work influencers by Remote.com in 2021 and 2022. Rowena is an engaging keynote speaker both in live and virtual events: always using real-life experiences and practical exercises, her sessions are interactive, enticing and dynamic.
Brian Elliott
After 25 years in tech as a startup CEO and exec at Google and Slack, Brian founded Future Forum, a think tank focused on the future of work, co-authored a bestseller (How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to do the Best Work of Their Lives) and was named to Forbes’
Future of Work 50.
Brian’s work enables leaders to build a future of work that’s better for people and organizations. He works with startups focused on the future of work, and with large enterprises wrestling with the intersections of people and technology, culture and productivity. You’ll find more of his thoughts and work on LinkedIn.
Annie Dean
Annie Dean is the Global Head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, where she is responsible for the 11,000+ person company’s shift to a distributed work model. Annie oversees the Real Estate and Workplace Experience teams and the Team Anywhere Lab, a dedicated group of behavioral scientists focused on designing and validating evidence-based ways of working. Most recently, Annie was Meta’s first Director of Remote Work, where she created and led a portfolio of future of work strategies. As a globally recognized expert on remote and flexible working, Annie’s work has been featured byThe New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company.
Casey Fenton
More than 20 years ago, Casey Fenton gave himself an objective; to hack his own destiny. He dreamed of having a positive impact on the world, but how does one person from a small town in Maine create real change?
As an introvert turned omnivert, and programmer, Casey Fenton explored the intersection of humanity and technology which resulted in him founding Couchsurfing, the world’s greatest trust experiment, and growing the platform to more than 20 million members.
Casey Fenton is passionate about bringing people together and creating win-win systems where game mechanics work out such ways that everybody gets more. In 2010, he was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship for contributing new ideas for improving human well-being. in
Most recently he has founded Upstock, a bold replacement for the antiquated legacy equity systems that provides Fortune 1000 equity for all businesses. Upstock delivers on equity’s true promise of helping companies dramatically improve worker attraction, motivation and retention, often doubling or tripling.
Casey Fenton continues his work with helping humanity solve some of the non-obvious problems of today by teaching others how to hack their egos and thereby destiny and become the people they aspire to be and not just dream of being.
Soumyasanto Sen
Soumyasanto Sen ranks among the top global influencers and thought leaders, as well as being an advisor and leader in Digital HR, Workforce Transformation, Remote Work, and the Future of Work. He has more than 20 years of experience in this aspiring area across North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific for large and mid-size companies. He is also the author of a highly popular book, Digital HR Strategy: Achieving Sustainable Transformation in Digital Age, and co-author of The Sustainable Organisation – a paradigm for a fairer society.
Laura Daniels
As Chief People Officer at Typeform, Laura Daniels leads the People and Home team including talent acquisition, people experience, and business partnering. She is responsible for the global people strategy, helping the organization scale by cultivating a best-in-class workforce.
Prior to joining Typeform, Laura held a number of leadership roles at Autodesk, Charles Schwab, and PerkinElmer where she helped build business-driven strategies, programs, structures, and teams that were innovative and results-driven. Laura believes in using strength-based leadership to achieve growth and success, prioritizing the focus and development of areas in which individuals and teams excel. Laura has a Bachelor of Arts in History and Women’s Studies from Santa Clara University and a Juris Doctorate from Golden Gate University School of Law.
Lara Prospero
Lara has been acting as a strategist on learning and cultural change processes, with her major focus on the definition of programs and initiatives that allow the attraction and retention of top talent individuals to act on the new digital world. With her background in Physics, Lara has been showing high problem solving capabilities, as well as disruptive creativity on how to address classical problems, in a innovative fashion.
Lara joined Microsoft back in May 2012 as a PFE Manager, being involved in People Management activities for teams delivering in Western Europe Countries.
Darren Murph
Named an “oracle of remote work” by CNBC and featured in The Forbes Future of Work 50, Darren is a recognized visionary in organizational design. He serves as Ford’s Head of Technology Strategy Communications. He leads at the intersection of people operations, marketing, and strategic communication. His career is defined by leading remote teams, charting remote transformations, connecting nonobvious dots, and architecting inclusive cultures. He holds a Guinness World Record in publishing, and authored GitLab’s Remote Playbook and “Living the Remote Dream: A Guide To Seeing the World, Setting Records, and Advancing Your Career.”
Darren pioneered the Head of Remote role in the historic IPO of GitLab. His interviews are found in CNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Fortune, Digiday, Business Insider, and more.
Q Hamirani
Q is a business minded people and operations leader, advisor and executive coach. He joined Airbnb in 2018 as its first global people ops leader, and was responsible for the strategic vision, build-out and execution of Airbnb’s people operations function from the ground up. Additionally, he was responsible for leading Airbnb through numerous pivotal milestones including hyper growth, pandemic responses, workforce restructuring, IPO and the future of work. Most notably, Q ideated and incubated Airbnb’s Global Nomad program in 2020 that eventually became Airbnb’s formal Live & Work Anywhere program in 2022. This program created an extraordinary opportunity for Airbnb to become industry leaders in the future of work by leveraging their existing business model to enable their employees to live and work anywhere. Airbnb decided to invest in the creation of a newly formed cross functional center of excellence (COE) to make this opportunity a reality.
Q has been leading the build out of this newly created global COE since April 2022 that brought together Airbnb’s legacy workplace, immigration, relocation, mobility tax and operational teams to work in close partnership with corporate tax, accounting, employment legal, privacy, public policy and external comms teams to drive our vision and enhance our employee experience and business growth collectively. Q has leaned on his engineering roots to become a web3 enthusiast, evaluating the impacts of decentralized models on the people and operations functions. He has worked with web3 creators and founders to help craft their optimal people and operations strategies to achieve their growth objectives. Q is a trusted advisor to founders, C-Suites, people executives and several accelerator programs globally. He leverages his first hand experience from working across his own startups, various venture growth and PE backed firms, Big 4 management consulting and Fortune 100 companies to provide valued insight and drive sustainable change. Q specializes in strategy and operations, operating models, workforce planning, technology, IPO and SOX readiness, cross-border mobility programs to support the future of distributed work, and employee experience service delivery models. You can learn more about Q at www.hamirani.com.
Nick Bloom
Nick is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He has been researching working from home for 20 years, winning a Guggenheim Fellowship for this in 2022. He has been heavily involved with policy, including meeting President Obama, and speaking in the White House 2014 Working Families Summit. Has consulted with 100s of CEOs and managers, and been covered extensively on working from home by international media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, Financial Times and the Economist. He was called the “Prophet of remote work” by Fortune Magazine, “America’s best work-from-home expert” by Business Insider, and elected to Bloomberg50 for advice on WFH.
Emeric Ernoult
Emeric is a serial entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in Social Media and SaaS. He is the CEO and co-founder of Agorapulse, a Paris-based Social Media Management Software launched in 2011. Agorapulse has 160 team members across the globe and is currently being used by more than 37,000 users across 180 countries.
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.