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Tap into the wisdom of founders and tech titans at Disrupt. From actionable tips to hard-won lessons, they’ll share what works (and what doesn’t) to guide you as you build your own path forward.
I’ve always thought, “What can I do that opens up possibilities?” I grew up in South Africa and went to an Afrikaans high school, and we didn’t speak English at home. But I pushed myself to go to an English-speaking university, and that opened up a door. Then I chose to work for McKinsey, because I thought it would open another door and maybe I’d get a chance to work overseas.
I was reading about what was happening in Silicon Valley in the mid 90s, before I came to the U.S. Already, I’m starting to see the beginnings of the internet. Did I fathom how big it would be? Absolutely not. I didn’t know what venture capital was. I didn’t know that I would join a startup. I just had an intuition that I needed to be here. A friend of mine introduced me to Elon in 1999 and I joined PayPal. Then when Mike Moritz asked me to come interview at Sequoia, that was just another door opening. Where might this one lead?
Whenever I interview people, I ask about those key moments in somebody’s life where they’ve made career decisions. And I think about companies in the same way—there are these crucible moments that have an enormous bearing on ultimate outcomes.
May Habib is the CEO and co-founder of Writer, a leader and pioneer in enterprise AI. With Writer’s end-to-end AI agent platform, hundreds of companies like Accenture, Intuit, Mars, Uber, and Vanguard are building and scaling AI agents that are grounded in their company’s data and fueled by Writer’s enterprise-grade LLMs. From faster product launches to deeper financial research to better clinical trials, companies are quickly transforming their most important business processes for the AI era in partnership with Writer.
Writer houses the world’s only enterprise-specific AI research lab. Its family of enterprise-grade Palmyra LLMs includes state-of-the-art frontier models, as well as self-evolving, open-source, and domain-specific models. Palmyra models define industry-leading standards for enterprise-grade transparency, reliability, safety, efficiency, and observability.
May is an expert in natural language processing and AI-driven language generation. She has led Writer to become one of the world’s fastest-growing generative AI companies, securing its position as a Forbes 50 AI company and inclusion in the World Economic Forum’s Unicorn Community.
Founded in 2020 with its headquarters in San Francisco and offices around the globe, Writer is backed by world-leading investors, including Premji Invest, Radical Ventures, ICONIQ Growth, Insight Partners, Balderton, B Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Adobe Ventures, Citi Ventures, IBM Ventures, and others. May and the Writer team have raised over $326M in funding at a valuation of $1.9B.
May graduated with high honors in Economics from Harvard University. She is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network, a recipient of Inc.’s Female Founder Award, and one of Worth’s Groundbreaking Women for 2025.
Eunice Kim was named Chief Product Officer in October 2023. She previously led the company’s global Consumer Product Innovation team. Eunice joined Netflix in early 2021 after having spent 10 years in product leadership roles at Google Play and YouTube. Prior to Google, she worked at several tech startups as well as PepsiCo and Adobe Systems. Eunice holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She serves on the Board of Directors for Cure CMD.
Alex co-founded Wayve in 2017 to reimagine autonomous mobility through embodied intelligence. From his award-winning research at the University of Cambridge, he seized the opportunity to use deep learning to pioneer an entirely new way to solve self-driving. He showed for the first time that it was possible to teach a machine to understand where it is and what’s around it and then give it the “intelligence” to make its own decisions based on what it sees with computer vision.
As CEO, Alex is responsible for the company’s overall strategy, primarily focusing on establishing all necessary ingredients to develop and deploy AV2.0 globally. He also works closely with our partners and investors to ensure that our technology is commercially viable and can be widely adopted.
Under Alex’s leadership, Wayve is fast becoming one of the most exciting companies in the autonomous vehicle industry.
Before founding Wayve, Alex’s passion for autonomous vehicles began as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics. His research has received numerous awards for scientific impact and made significant contributions to the field of computer vision and AI. He was selected on the Royal Academy of Engineering’s SME Leaders Programme and named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 innovators list.
Edo Liberty is the founder and CEO of Pinecone whose mission is to make AI knowledgeable. Pinecone is the leading vector database for building accurate and performant AI applications at scale in production. Prior to founding Pinecone, Edo was a Director of Research at AWS and Head of Amazon AI Labs where his team worked on data systems and services including SageMaker and OpenSearch. Before AWS, Edo was a Senior Research Director at Yahoo and Head of Yahoo’s Research Lab in New York. As an adjunct professor at Princeton and Tel Aviv University, Edo taught long-term memory in AI and data mining. His academic work focuses on numerical linear algebra, streaming algorithms, data mining, and mathematical foundations of machine learning. Edo holds a B.Sc in physics and computer science from Tel Aviv University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Yale. He has authored more than 75 academic papers and patents.
Mati Staniszewski is the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, a research company building audio AI tools to solve audio intelligence and make digital interactions feel more human — with voice as the most direct path to that. Before founding ElevenLabs, Mati worked at Palantir as a Deployment Strategist, managing large-scale implementations across public and private sectors, and at BlackRock, where he helped launch the Aladdin Wealth platform.
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From seed to Series C and beyond, TC All Stage on July 15 in Boston brings together the entire startup ecosystem. Learn from experts like Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Jahanvi Sardana (Index Ventures), Chris Gardner (Underscore VC), and more. Save up to $475 and tap into real talk, sharp insights, and connections that drive growth.
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