Silicon ValleyImmersion

Daniela Amodei is co-founder and President of Anthropic, the frontier research lab behind the Claude models, which she started in 2021 with her brother Dario and other former OpenAI colleagues. She previously served as VP of Safety and Policy at OpenAI and spent five years at Stripe in recruiting and risk operations. She is the executive who sets Anthropic's operating and trust-and-safety standards that govern how enterprises can deploy Claude.

Kate Jensen is the Head of Americas at Anthropic, where she leads the company's go-to-market teams across the Americas as well as its global Public Sector and Beneficial Deployments organizations. Before joining Anthropic, Kate was Head of Platform Sales at Stripe and a sales leader at Google Cloud.

Ani Subbarao leads Anthropic's strategic enterprise go-to-market team in the Americas, which partners with many of the largest industrial and consumer companies in the world, including The Coca-Cola Company. Ani's team works directly with executive leadership to bring Claude into the core of their businesses.

Patrick Gardner is Anthropic's account director for The Coca-Cola Company. He supports the world's most recognized CPG and retail brands on their strategy and deployment of Claude across their organizations. Patrick serves as the day-to-day lead for Anthropic's partnership with Coca-Cola.

Guru Chahal is a Partner at Lightspeed focused on early-stage enterprise investing across AI, cloud infrastructure, security, DevOps, and observability. He first joined Lightspeed in 2012 after Nuova Systems was acquired by Cisco, worked on investments including Zscaler and Avere Systems, then left to become a co-founder of Avi Networks, acquired by VMware in 2019. He combines operator and investor perspective on the infrastructure and security questions large enterprises face when scaling AI.

Amish Desai is a Partner on Lightspeed's growth private equity team, which he joined in 2024, partnering with founders and executive teams across enterprise growth businesses and building the firm's strategy in leading AI technology and services companies. He previously built and scaled the tech-focused buyout practice at Elliott Management, closing more than $20B of transactions across enterprise software, services and media, and began his career as a consultant at Bain & Company.

Marc Andreessen is co-founder and General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture firm he started with Ben Horowitz. He co-created the Mosaic browser, co-founded Netscape, which sold to AOL, and co-founded Loudcloud/Opsware, which sold to Hewlett-Packard. He serves on Meta's board and sits on numerous portfolio boards, giving him a broad view of how consumer demand and technology platforms shift. Andreessen Horowitz is the largest VC firm by AUM, and its January 2026 close of $15B across five funds equaled about 18% of all US venture dollars deployed in 2025.

David George leads the Growth practice at Andreessen Horowitz, which he joined in 2019. He has led growth investments in SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, Roblox and Databricks, and was previously at General Atlantic backing Airbnb, CrowdStrike, Slack and Uber. He offers a clear view of how late-stage private capital now funds the AI and consumer companies reshaping demand.

Mark Schaaf joined Beacon as Chief Product Officer and COO in June 2026, alongside a $225 million Series C to build an AI-native business operating system. He was previously CTO of Instacart, building its technical foundation ahead of IPO, and earlier CTO of Thumbtack, first COO of Retool, and a Google engineering leader. His Instacart background speaks directly to grocery e-commerce and retail media.

Goutham Buchi became CTO of Beacon Software in June 2026, building AI platforms for everyday 'Main Street' businesses. He was previously CTO of AngelList, spent over six years as a senior engineering director at Coinbase, and led growth engineering at Coursera. He is a strong counterpart on embedding AI into the operations of distributed, transaction-heavy businesses.

Tony Gentilcore co-founded Glean in 2019 and leads product engineering for its enterprise AI platform, which connects company knowledge and data to AI assistants and agents. He spent a decade at Google, helping modernize the search results page and founding Chrome's Speed Team. He works closely with Fortune 500 CIOs on deploying AI search across large, multi-department organizations.

Amar Maletira is the COO at Glean, where he oversees the go-to-market organization and overall company operations. He brings more than two decades of experience leading and growing global technology businesses, most recently as CEO of Rackspace Technology. Before that, he served as President at Rackspace and EVP & CFO at VIAVI Solutions.

Zhamak Dehghani is co-founder and CEO of Nextdata, which builds tooling to decentralize and automate data management for analytics, applications and AI agents. She originated the data mesh concept in 2019 at Thoughtworks and wrote 'Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale,' leaving in 2022 to found Nextdata. Her domain-ownership model suits global groups unifying data across brands and markets.

Joon Sung Park is co-founder and CEO of Simile, a company building a foundation model and AI simulation platform for human behavior. Joon earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford, where he pioneered the field of “generative agents”—AI systems that can remember, plan, and simulate human behavior. His landmark Smallville research became one of the foundational demonstrations of AI agents interacting in a realistic social environment.

Michael Bernstein is co-founder and Chief Data Officer of Simile and a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, where he is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on using AI and computational systems to understand and simulate human behavior and how social systems behave at scale. His collaboration with Joon Sung Park led to the research that underpins Simile’s technology.

John Williams joined Stripe's go-to-market leadership team in early 2026 as Head of Enterprise Sales, AMER, responsible for growth across Stripe's enterprise customers in the Americas. He is a senior revenue executive focused on scaling billion-dollar-plus businesses, with prior roles at Salesforce, SAP and Oracle.

Nazli Tan is co-founder and CEO of Hilbert, an AI-native growth infrastructure company helping businesses understand what is driving growth and identify the actions that will improve revenue, retention, and profitability. She spent a decade running growth for high-velocity B2C businesses, most recently building Getir’s global growth function across nine countries and hundreds of millions in marketing spend. Nazli holds a B.S. in Mathematics with high honors from Middle East Technical University and an M.S. in Financial Engineering from Boğaziçi University.

Pablo Palafox is co-founder and CEO of HappyRobot, which builds the AI voice and workflow agents enterprises use to run logistics, GTM and complex business operations. He holds dual master’s degrees in industrial engineering from the Technical University of Madrid and TUM, and was a published AI researcher in TUM’s 3D AI Lab and a Meta Reality Labs research scientist before leaving his Ph.D. in 2022 to found the company with his brother Javier. HappyRobot went through Y Combinator and has raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Base10.

Carolina Parada is Vice President and Head of Robotics at Google DeepMind, leading the effort to bring AI into the physical world through the Gemini Robotics models and the GR 1.5 series. She previously led robot mobility and vision groups at Google AI, ran camera perception for self-driving cars at NVIDIA, and spent seven years in Google Speech driving the work behind “Ok Google,” Assistant and Voice Search. She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, where her research was in speech and language processing.

Michael Clark is President of Google Cloud North America, leading field sales, consulting, partner and customer-engineering teams across the region. He joined Google Cloud in 2018 after more than 20 years at Microsoft in senior enterprise leadership roles, rising from Managing Director of the East Region to President for North America. He is a graduate of Tulane University.

Jose Luis-Gomes is Vice President, Retail and Consumer Goods at Google Cloud, a role he took in April 2025 after four years as Managing Director for the same sector. He previously spent 12 years at dunnhumby, most recently as President of North America, working with Kroger, McDonald's, P&G and Kraft on loyalty, personalization and merchandising, and has served on the IFCO Systems board since 2021.

Anita Beveridge-Raffo has led Palantir's Retail and Consumer Goods business since January 2025. She joined Palantir in 2015 and spent more than nine years as a deployment strategist running technical deployments across retail and CPG; before that she led Nike digital strategy in New York at AKQA as a WPP Fellow. She writes for Fortune and The New Stack on where retailers and food brands go wrong with AI and how to operationalize it.