It's the startups that make winters hot

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.

Cassie Kozyrkov

CHIEF DECISION SCIENTIST

As Chief Decision Scientist at Google Cloud, Cassie Kozyrkov advises leadership teams on 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 theater, in an art museum, exploring the world, or curled up with a good novel.

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.

Paul Duan

PRESIDENT & FOUNDER

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, ranging from helping micro-finance institutions operating in Africa, to launching an online platform in partnership with the Department of Justice in California to collect police use-of-force data from more than 800 police agencies. In 2015 Bayes 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.

Prior to Bayes Impact, Paul was the first data scientist at Eventbrite, where he built industry-leading fraud detection algorithms. He studied a mixture of mathematics, economics and political science at Berkeley, the Sorbonne University, and Sciences Po, where he delivered the school’s commencement speech in 2017.

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.

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.

Rares Florea

REGIONAL COUNTRY MANAGER WITHIN CEE

With over 13 years experience in various fields of activity such as financial services, retail, and e-commerce, Rares Florea presently holds the position of Regional Country Manager within CEE at Fitbit.

Rares oversees the commercial activities for over 18 markets. Before joining Fitbit, Rares also handled the commercial partnerships for various other brands in the wearables & luxury industries.

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.