HYbrid | 17-18 May 2022 | Montreal, CA
Shape The Future Of Work
40+ speakers across two live stages
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.
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.
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.
Dethra Giles
Dethra Giles is a four-time TEDx speaker, executive coach, and award-winning author best known as the CEO of ExecuPrep, a remote first, international Performance Optimization Consulting firm specializing in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Dethra was ranked Engagedly’s as a Top 100 Influencers for outstanding contributions towards promoting a culture of diversity and inclusion and selected as HR Gazette’s HRchat Pod Top 22 most influential experts in HR. Clients call her “University tested, and industry approved.” Her unique blend of advanced education and industry experience positions her to provide maximum impact to executives and high potential teams.
Having worked with clients like Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey, Kaiser Permanente, The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and Cox Communications, Dethra takes her education and years of experience and turns them into results-driven actions for her clients.
According to Dethra, her job is to deliver results to her clients by developing actionable strategies, optimizing performance, and eliminating distractions.
Andrew Jernigan
Andrew Jernigan is the CEO of Insured Nomads.
Andrew is justice driven and is passionate about protecting people, those from every country, and every type of work style. He is leading the first insurtech for global benefits and international insurance to provide expats, digital nomads, remote workers, travelers, world schoolers, and international citizens with a frictionless solution-set as required for the successful international lifestyle. He partnered with Not For Sale to support their work of providing intervention, rescue, protection and education – empowering vulnerable communities so that the exploitation of humans for trafficking is stopped.
Aydin Y Mirzaee
Aydin Y Mirzaee is the CEO at Fellow.app — helping managers and their teams work better together.
He is a tech loving entrepreneur with a passion for building great products, leadership and people.
Previously , he was the co-founder and co-CEO of Fluidware, maker of FluidSurveys.com and FluidReview.com. With a team of incredibly talented people, they grew Fluidware (without external Angel/VC) into a very profitable and rapidly growing SaaS business with over $10M+ in annual recurring sales and over 75 people in staff. They subsequently had a very successful acquisition to the world’s largest survey company: SurveyMonkey.
After spending some time helping with the integration of FluidSurveys into SurveyMonkey, he served as General Manager of FluidReview and the Ottawa office.
Throughout his career, Aydin have had the opportunity to lead teams in Product Management, Product Marketing, Engineering Management, Outbound & Inbound Sales, Enterprise Sales, Customer Onboarding, Customer Services, Churn Management and Growth Marketing: Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing (paid acquisition), Lead Nurture, Content Marketing / Demand Generation, Conversion Optimization.
He is a big believer in fostering entrepreneurship and spends most of his time outside of work with organizations such as Fresh Founders, Invest Ottawa, SaaSNorth Conference, University of Ottawa Engineering and C100.
Ally Fekaiki
Ally is a 30 year old British-Iraqi entrepreneur. Ally founded Juno in 2019, after his personal experiences at work made him realise that giving people a more autonomous and tailored employee experience would make the world a much better place.
Sagar Khatri
Sagar Khatri is a young and dynamic professional and CEO of Multiplier, a SaaS-based global employment solution that was founded in 2020.
Having worked with global brands, he hones rich and well-rounded experience in Regional P&L Management, International Expansion, Fundraising and M&A. He has been a part of the leadership team at Hmlet and worked in deal advisory at Nomura prior to that.
He hails from India and is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay – one of the most prestigious universities in India.
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.
Darren Murph
Named an “oracle of remote work” by CNBC, Darren serves as GitLab’s Head of Remote. A visionary in organizational design, he works at the intersection of culture, operations, people, marketing, and communication. He’s spent his career leading remote teams and charting remote transformations. 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 has pioneered the Head of Remote role, interviewed by Harvard Business School, CNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Fortune, Digiday, Business Insider, and more.
Mike LaRosa
People know him as “Mike the Coworkaholic”. Since 2013 he’s researched, studied and visited over 600 flex workspace locations in 42 countries. His blog, Coworkaholic, is all about “coworking and traveling the world on points and miles”. Mike has consulted organizations such as JLL, Selina, WeWork, Deskpass, Marriott and many others on the ever changing needs of a modern workforce.
As the Head of Content at Running Remote, he’s excited to curate dynamic and engaging speakers, panels and discussions to drive conversation on the “Future of Work”.
Mike Vardy
Mike Vardy – also known as “The Productivityist” – is a highly-acclaimed productivity strategist and the creator of the productivity philosophy and framework known as TimeCrafting. He’s considered to be one of the top thought leaders in the personal productivity and time management space, with over 15 years of expertise under his belt and having coaching hundreds of clients over that timespan.
His work has been featured in Lifehacker, Fast Company, HuffPost, Inc., and Forbes. Vardy is a renowned international speaker and has taught productivity practices on popular online education platforms CreativeLive, Skillshare, and LinkedIn Learning where his courses are among the most popular in the business category. He also hosts A Productive Conversation with Mike Vardy, a conversational podcast that has featured guests such as Seth Godin, Brian Tracy, Keith Ferrazzi, and Gretchen Rubin – and has been downloaded over 5 million times since its inception.
Mike lives in Victoria, Canada with his wife, daughter, and son.
Ryan Burke
David Barrett
David Barrett is the founder and CEO of Expensify. He started programming at the age of six and has been aspiring to become an expense report magnate ever since. David attended the University of Michigan where he worked in the Virtual Reality Lab before moving to Texas to write 3D graphics engines for the video game industry. Next, he moved to California to join Travis Kalanick in building Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file transfer technology, which was acquired by Akamai in 2007.
In 2008, David left Akamai to start Expensify and has since been relieving the world’s frustrations one expense report at a time. Under David’s leadership, and with remote employees around the globe, Expensify has grown into a platform with 10 million users (from solo entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies), processed over 1.1 billion transactions, and surpassed $100 billion processed worldwide. In 2019, Expensify made waves by becoming the smallest company ever to run a Super Bowl ad with its award-winning “Expensify This” campaign.
Andrea Robb
Andrea Robb is a founding member of Vibrancy – a future of work design firm – and Andrea Robb Consulting. She is a former HR executive with a long career rooted in organizational design, learning, diversity + belonging, talent acquisition, culture, and people operations for some of the world’s more recognized brands including Airbnb, Autodesk, Lucasfilm, and Levis Strauss & Co.
As a visionary, designer, and builder, he is known as an innovator in building, scaling, or transforming organizations. She also brings a strong business focus to increase value for the customers, employees, shareholders, and communities. Andrea believes data and stories are a knock-out combo to design and sustain vibrant organizations.
As the baby of six kids, she learned to operate as the runt of the litter – noticing patterns and figuring out how to get things done creatively with less resources. As serious as she is about getting things done, you can count on Andrea to make the work fun. Finally, as the mom of two kids, she is deadly serious about designing workplace norms that allow the next generation to flourish.
Andrea is a board of director for the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan, her alma mater where she majored in psychology. She also holds a Masters from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in Public Policy + Education.
Alex Morris
Alex is a partner in McKinsey’s Toronto office and core leader in our innovation practice. Alex
offers strategic and creative counsel to CEOs, senior executives, and board members
looking to de-risk and accelerate change. His experience includes nearly two decades
transforming organizations, unlocking new growth, and taking a purpose-driven and
customer-centric approach to addressing strategic opportunities and challenges. Alex co-
chairs The Climate Change Fund, sits on the Government of Ontario’s advisory committee
for virtual learning in higher education, and lectures and speaks on the topics of strategy,
innovation, culture transformation, and the future of work.
Tony Jamous
Tony Jamous is the CEO and founder of Oyster, the company that believes anything is possible remotely. As a distributed talent enablement platform, Oyster are making remote work a reality for everyone . The new land of opportunity is anywhere with internet. Are you ready?
In 2010, Tony started Nexmo, API Platform for building communication applications. Nexmo grew rapidly to $100m in revenues in less than 5 years and eventually became public in 2016 after merging with Vonage (VG:Nasdaq). Nexmo hired people in over 50 countries. Delivering a great employee experience for all our distributed workforce was a major challenge. This has led him to appreciate the value of Oyster.
Tony is also a tech investor and you view his portfolio on crunchbase.
He is passionate about making an impact aligned with his values, and he believes anyone can achieve their full potential, regardless of where they are located.
Neil Miller
Neil Miller is the Director of The Digital Workplace. He has talked with over 200 of the best thinkers and leaders in the world about how to rebuild work for the digital age by redefining productivity, collaboration, leadership, technology, and culture.
He’s a prolific thought stealer and curator of the most amazing list of check in questions in the world.
Dave Cairns
Dave Cairns started his career at CBRE in 2012 after being a professional poker player where he was ranked as one of the top 100 online tournament players in the world for a time. Since then, Dave has become a thought leader within the commercial real estate industry with global recognition. He is an avid content creator on LinkedIn, who is highly respect by his peers, and has received over 1 million views in 2020 alone.
Working alongside his team, Dave’s focus is on working with high growth companies in the tech sector, Space as a Service Operators (#SPaaS), and with financial services firms on a local, national and global level.
Dave also leads a partnership with Deloitte on their Technology Fast 50 program, advising many of Canada’s fastest growing technology companies on their real estate requirements.
Jennifer Dennard
Jennifer Dennard is the Founder and COO of workplace collaboration software company, Range. Global teams at Twitter, New Relic, CircleCI, and more keep their teams in sync and connected with Range. Prior to founding Range, Jen led Medium’s organizational development team. Jen has partnered and consulted with startups and multinational corporations on empowering autonomous and distributed teamwork. She lives in Colorado with her two cats and husband.
Paul McKinlay
Paul McKinlay is VP of Communications and Remote Working at Cimpress, parent company to e-commerce brands like Vistaprint.
Paul has been leading employee communications, change, engagement and L&D teams both in-house and in agency for over twenty years.
Nacho Rodriguez
As CEO and Founder of Repeople, Nacho has been actively involved in the design and implementation of a strategy that positions the Canary Islands as the world’s best ecosystem for remote workers. At repeople, he has created a network of coworking spaces, colivings and flexible offices spaces where an international community of remote workers live and work perfectly integrated with the local community. Nacho has also been actively involved in the design and implementation of destination marketing strategies that include the production of large international events, the collaboration with international brands and the creation of outstanding experiences for team retreats and offsites for distributed companies that choose the archipiélago as meeting point.
Chase Warrington
Chase Warrington is the Head of Remote at Doist, a remote-first team with 85 employees in 30+ countries. He is also a regular contributor to many of the leading remote-work courses, conferences, and publications, as well as the host of his new podcast, About Abroad. Having worked remotely since 2009, and managed teams spanning all timezones, he is passionate about making remote-work, work.
Chase is from the US, but is currently living in Spain.
Ike Stranathan
ke Stranathan is an American entrepreneur and the CEO of STAFFVIRTUAL. He is an avid traveler who has visited over 60 countries. Ike founded STAFFVIRTUAL in 2009, and has been building remote teams of customer support, back-office, and IT professionals in the Philippines ever since.
Today, Ike runs STAFFVIRTUAL with his Filipina business and life-partner, Fiona Lideza, who is the company’s COO. Together they have built a 500 person business that provides teams of vetted customer support, back-office and IT professionals for companies around the world.
Ike firmly believes in the transformative powers remote teams bring, because he sees it every day. Ike’s clients routinely save 70% on labor costs, while becoming more efficient and profitable. Many of them are “remote-first” companies who have continued to grow rapidly, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and Great Resignation.
Samantha Fisher
Samantha “Sam” Fisher is the Head of Dynamic Work at Okta, where she leverages her diverse background across design and construction, associate services, technology, sustainability, and marketing and communications to bring a people-centric lens to Okta’s Dynamic Work framework. In her role, Fisher is focused on enablement for both productivity and connectivity, and partners with cross functional teams to re-imagine workplace design, activate the use of workplace data, explore workplace technologies, and amplify the employee experience.
Fisher has more than 15 years of experience as an executive real estate leader, primarily within Corporate Real Estate organizations, focused on strategies and operations that enhance experience and deliver business value. Prior to joining Okta, Fisher led transformational workplace efforts that integrate people, process, and technology at organizations including Transwestern, Citadel, and Capital One. Understanding that the workplace is a vital part of the business ecosystem and a key element of organizational culture, Sam focuses on developing creative and holistic solutions that augment talent strategies, optimize technology enablement, support shifts in workforce operations, and balance objectives spanning multiple time horizons.
Drew Calin
Drew was born and raised in Los Angeles, but has spent the past decade living and working Asia. His entire career has centered on commercial roles, building sales teams at fast-growth digital businesses.
After spending nearly a decade in building the advertising sales business with LinkedIn in the Southwest US, Southeast Asia, and Hong Kong, he completed a dual degree EMBA, moved to Bali, had founded his own startup, and had 2 children (3rd on the way!).
Today, he’s focused on pioneering the movement of the distributed workforce at Multiplier, one of the world’s leading digital employment software solutions.
Laurel Farrer
As the Founder and CEO of Distribute, a virtual organizational development think tank and consulting firm, Laurel Farrer is an internationally-renowned thought leader on the topic of remote work. For the past 15 years, she has been unlocking the power of distributed workforces to create impact in corporate and socioeconomic infrastructures.
(Optional Expansion) She and her team of fellow experts collaborate with the world’s leading businesses and governments on three primary topics: how to convert business operations from physical to virtual, how to build products and content for the remote work market, and how to leverage workplace flexibility to solve global concerns. In addition to being a regular Forbes contributor, Laurel’s subject matter expertise has also been showcased by brands like Zoom, Microsoft, Gallup, NPR, Logitech, BBC, New York Times, Vistaprint, Fast Company, and Upwork. She was also included on Forbes “Next 1000” list of inspiring entrepreneurs in 2021.
Nathan Barry
In previous careers Nathan has been a designer, author, and blogger. After learning the power of email marketing he gave up a successful blogging career to build ConvertKit. Outside of work Nathan spends his time playing soccer, woodworking, and chasing after his three boys.
Allen C. Koski
Allen has been actively involved in developing and supporting international healthcare, global wellness, dental, disability and travel medical plans for multinational employers ranging from the Fortune 100 to emerging multinationals for over 30 years. He has met with groups which include international assignees, traveling executives, local nationals, and medical providers with trips to 75+ countries including China, India, Turkey, Chile, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Czech Republic. He has consulted and advised on global initiatives tailored to the employer’s workforce, goals and budget. He co-hosts the podcast, “The New Nomad”.
He is a featured presenter at the IFEBP Global Certificate Series where he presents biannually on “Comparative Healthcare Systems” and the “Fundamentals of Global Benefits Programs”. He has attained CEBS Fellowship Status from ISCEBS. He has written various articles, notably “Culture, Infrastructure and International Health Benefits Delivery” in Benefits Quarterly; and “Expatriate Benefits for a Changing Global Economy” in Benefits & Compensation Solutions; “Critical Conditions – Seeking Suitable Health Care in China” in Mobility. His latest is “Implications of Underwriting International Medical Insurance” in Newsbriefs based upon an ISCEBS Symposium Presentation.
Allen currently resides in Wilmington, Delaware with his wife and two children and is a graduate of Drew University in Madison, N.J.
Insured Nomads is the first Insurtech in global benefits, offering a full portfolio of insurance solutions for the globally mobile including international health, life and disability, and travel insurance. Uniquely positioned with innovative technology to empower an easy and efficient customer experience. Serving clients around the world, with numerous customer service points, operating a lean and agile enterprise with strategic partners around the globe. Insured Nomads focused People, Technology, Informatics and Service. Available direct and through select brokers/intermediaries. Please visit www.insurednomads.com for more information.
Sally Thornton
Sally is the CEO & Founder of Forshay, a firm that offers a modern approach to executive
recruiting, with the unusual blend of supporting overworked teams with interim experts
in the People/HR and Marketing domains, all grounded with inclusion, diversity, and
belonging. Forshay is proud to be a B Corporation, a for-profit community using business
as a force for good.
Forshay was awarded #290 on the Inc. 5000 “Fastest-Growing Private Companies” list
for 2015, and made the list again in 2019. Prior to founding Forshay, Sally co-founded
and was CEO of Flexperience. Under her leadership, Flexperience grew into a nationally
acclaimed firm, and was awarded “Top 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies” in 2010
by the San Francisco Business Times.
A speaker in two TEDx talks, Sally is a frequent keynote speaker on the future of work,
women in leadership, the science of work/life blend, applying design thinking to make
work better, harnessing the value of a multi-generational and diverse workforce, and
talent recruitment and engagement strategies. Sally has been featured in the Wall Street
Journal, BBC, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, YahooFinance, Huffington Post, KQED
radio, NBC11 News, ABC7 News, among numerous other media publications.
Sally lectures regularly at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business as well as UC
Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She served for six years on the Advisory Council of
Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the educational partner of LeanIn.org.
However, her friends say the only thing that people really want to hear is that she was in
two Prince videos.
Sami Hero
Sami Hero is the Chief Revenue Officer for Remo where he manages sales, marketing, customer success and analytics teams. Sami’s primary focus is to help organizations advance their digital transformation journey and enable remote and hybrid work whether it’s for specific events or on-going meetings, workshops, peer-2-peer engagements leading to improved outcomes and engagement. Sami is passionate about people and finding talent to nurture anywhere in the world. He has over 20 years’ experience managing globally distributed teams and most recently he’s managed a global team at HappyOrNot and currently 100% remote team at Remo.co
Sami has extensive experience in B2B from startup to scale-up to major global corporations. He’s versatile and used to managing hundreds of million P&L but also getting his hands dirty and running growth hacking or sales activities. He speaks five languages, lived in six countries and has dual citizenship. He’s now based in Finland after 16 years in the United States. When he’s not working, he enjoys hanging out with the family including four kids, wife, and a puppy not forgetting sports such as golf, downhill skiing and paddle tennis.
Jean Hsu
Jean Hsu is the Vice President of Engineering at Range. Prior to Range, she built product and engineering teams at Google, Pulse, and Medium, and co-founded Co Leadership, a leadership development company for engineers and other tech leaders. She’s also a co-actively trained coach and has coached engineers, tech leads, managers, VPs of Engineering, and CTOs. She loves to play ultimate frisbee and lives in Berkeley with her partner and two kids.
Laïla von Alvensleben
Laïla von Alvensleben is Head of Culture & Collaboration at MURAL. She loves to help people work from anywhere.
Her mission is to enable distributed teams to cultivate a successful company culture to work better remotely.
She discovered remote work in 2014 when the trend of living as a digital nomad was rising rapidly. That’s when she decided that she wouldn’t restrict her life to working in the same location with a 9-to-5 job. To this day, she still believes that being location-independent allows us to engage in experiences that inspire us, both on a personal and professional level.
Over the years, she has researched Remote Design Thinking and shared her insights with the design community to help anyone be creative while free to choose the lifestyle they want.
She started out as a UX designer at Hanno, a fully remote design team with no office—her teammates were spread across Europe and southeast Asia and only met online to get work done. Together, they helped startups, non-profits and enterprises launch digital products and services. They also launched the Remote Starter Kit to give everyone all the tools, processes and tips to kick off their remote work experience.
These days she splits her time as Head of Culture & Collaboration at MURAL, a digital whiteboard enabling virtual collaboration, and facilitating online workshops to transform the way organisations work. She is also one of the first members of the Remote Work Association, a global network that promotes location-independent jobs.
Lawrence Coburn
Lawrence Coburn is a serial entrepreneur who lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with his wife and daughter. He is the CEO and co-founder of twine (twine.nyc), an employee connection platform helping to connect remote and distribute teams, which he launched in 2020. Previously, he founded DoubleDutch, the market leader for mobile event apps, which was acquired by Cvent in 2019. When not working, you can find Lawrence riding bicycles with his family, on the basketball court, or reading Science Fiction.
Lavinia Iosub
Lavinia has spent the last ~10 years becoming an expert in the mindset, practices and tools to make that happen and she is always excited to share.
She runs a company called Livit, where they support entrepreneurs, remote workers and startup teams build innovative businesses, careers, and lifestyles, that fully align with this intense digitization era and the best interests of our societies.
Andrew Blain
Andrew is a founder of remoteaf.co, the world’s first framework for remote friendly business agility. As a successful founder, technology leader and company director with expertise in strategy, organisational design, complex facilitation and adaptive leadership, Andrew is shaping the future of work.
Kaylie Boogaerts
Kaylie has spent the past 6 years helping business owners build productive world-class remote teams and implement efficient processes by:
– Developing a stellar hiring, onboarding and performance system for their team
– Implementing an efficient system for their day-to-day operations & communication
– Growing them into the best remote leaders
Dan Martell
Dan Martell is an award-winning Canadian entrepreneur, top angel investor, founder of SaaS Academy and CEO of Clarity, Flowtown and Spheric Technologies, mentors at least a half-dozen Technology Accelerator events, runs the biggest Youtube channel for SaaS entrepreneurs in the world. He served as a former adviser to billion-dollar SaaS companies like Intercom, Hootsuite, and Udemy.
In 2012, he was named Canada’s top angel investor having completed over 33 investments with companies like Udemy, Intercom and Unbounce. He is an investor in 40+ startups.
An avid reader who dreams of remaining a lifelong student, Dan invests in startups whose opportunities and ideas he can get excited about. His philosophy is to build companies that solve the business problems he faces. He takes risks in work and life and focuses on the journey over the reward. Dan is relentless in his work ethic — if a job has to get done, he’ll do it right away. He is a board member of Propel ICT and also volunteers his time working with youth battling addictions at Portage NB. He is passionately involved in facilitating micro-lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries through the non-profit, Kiva.org.
Manuela Bárcenas
Manuela Bárcenas is a startup marketer on a mission to help managers and their teams work better together. In 2018, Manuela was marketing hire #1 at Fellow.app – one of the fastest growing startups in Ottawa. At Fellow, she helped launch the successful Supermanagers podcast, she runs a newsletter with thousands of subscribers called the Manager TLDR, and now leads a team of marketers that develop content and programs to accelerate revenue and build Fellow’s brand.
Libryia Jones
Libryia Jones, also known as “The Remote Work Queen” is a Client Director at a Technology Consulting Firm and also a Remote Work Advocate and Social Educator who shares resources and content that helps people find and land remote jobs.
Through her company, Quit Commuting, Libryia hosts a digital course, a virtual remote work conference, and a private community focused on providing remote work opportunities.
Tracy Keogh
Tracy is the co-founder of one of the largest remote communities, Grow Remote.
Having more than 10 years of experience in technology startups, Tracy spent the last few years in community development in regional and rural Ireland.
She is also working on a cross-divisional central task force at the Bank of Ireland, supporting the organization in embedding remote work across the enterprise
Daphnée Laforest
Daphnée is the founder of Modern Leaders, a consulting firm on a mission to help executives, people ops and team leaders drive a company-wide shift toward remote-first ways of working.
Within 10 years of experience in fully distributed companies, she played key roles in establishing scalable workflows for growth, facilitating business decisions remotely and building internal products dedicated to digital-first teams.
At Modern Leaders, Daphnée advises organizations wanting to elevate their practice to reflect today’s digital workplace, become better facilitators and enhance their org-design & workflows.
As an early advocate of remote work, she previously led in 2016 the first online conference about corporate remote work with over 1500 live attendees. Recently, she launched the Remote First Podcast where every week she chats with leaders from large companies (Shopify, Slack, Elastic ) about their experience at scaling a digital-first culture.
Amy Lynch
Amy Lynch believes everyone deserves to design a life that works for them and their family. Over the past decade, she’s negotiated remote work arrangements in between living and working in Canada, England, Ireland and Australia (and having three kids).
Amy became an accidental activist while bringing her children into business settings and as the founder of Mixing Babies And Business™, she produces professional development events, a podcast and digital resources for parents interested in entrepreneurship, flexible and remote work.
Her social impact movement has been recognized as a Finalist for Canada’s Top 100 Recovery Projects in 2020 by Future of Good and is now a Startup Canada Community. When not with her family or writing, you’ll find her at a local pottery studio.
Event MCs
MC's & Moderators
Lila MacLellan
Lila MacLellan is a reporter for Quartz, a global business news site. She covers the workplace, leadership, and management topics for Quartz at Work. Her bylines have appeared in business and lifestyles publications in the US and Canada, including The Atlantic, The Globe and Mail, Institutional Investor, Natural Health, Western Living, and Vancouver magazine. Lila is based in New York and has lived and worked in Canada, Japan, and the US.
Douglas Ferguson
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques. He has helped transform teams from Nike, U.S. SOCOM, Google, the Air Force, Apple, Adobe, Dropbox, Fidelity, Vrbo, Liberty Mutual, Humana, and SAIC.
Douglas is a thought leader and master facilitator of Design Sprints, Innovation Acceleration, Team Alignment, Meeting Systems, Culture Transitions, and Change Transformations. He is also the author of four books: Magical Meetings, Beyond the Prototype, How to Remix Anything, and Start Within. He has been published in Forbes, Fast Company, Innovation Leader, and is a regular contributor to The Future Shapers. He publishes a weekly podcast called Control the Room.
Motivated by a mission to rid the world of horrible meetings and offer meaningful magical meetings in their place, Voltage Control is calling upon fellow facilitators to transform meeting and innovation culture. From free weekly community meetups to Control the Room–the annual facilitator summit, Voltage Control is building a community of facilitators to change the world.
Douglas is active in the Austin startup community where he serves on the board of several non-profits, mentors startups, and advises early-stage ventures. Prior to founding Voltage Control, Douglas held CTO positions at numerous Austin startups where he led product and engineering teams.
When not facilitating or coaching facilitators you might find Douglas patching up his Modular Synth, boxing, or doing pilates.
Gonçalo Hall
NomadX is a community centric brand that creates legendary experiences for digital nomads all around the world.
Gonçalo is also the creator of the Digital Nomad Village in Ponta do Sol, Madeira and Cape Verde Remote Work Program, founder at Remote Work Movement Podcast, Future of Work Conferences, Remote Portugal and Remote Europe, projects that help the remote work movement in different angles.
Danny Page
