Lip-Bu Tan

Lip-Bu Tan is Founder and Chairman of Walden International (“WI”), and Founding Managing Partner of Celesta Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures, with over $5 billion under management.  He formerly served as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman of Cadence Design Systems, Inc.  He currently serves on the Board of Schneider Electric SE (SU: FP), Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), and Credo Semiconductor (NASDAQ: CRDO).

Lip-Bu focuses on semiconductor/components, cloud/edge infrastructure, data management and security, and AI/machine learning.

Lip-Bu received his B.S. from Nanyang University in Singapore, his M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his MBA from the University of San Francisco. He also received his honorary degree for Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of San Francisco.  Lip-Bu currently serves on Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)’s Board of Trustees and the School of Engineering Dean’s Council, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Council, University of California Berkeley (UCB)’s College of Engineering Advisory Board and their Computing, Data Science, and Society Advisory Board, and University of California San Francisco (UCSF)’s Executive Council. He’s also a member of the Global Advisory Board of METI Japan, The Business Council, and Committee 100. He also served on the board of the Board of Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) from 2009 to 2021, and as a Trustee of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore from 2006 to 2011.  Lip-Bu has been named one of the Top 10 Venture Capitalists in China by Zero2ipo and was listed as one of the Top 50 Venture Capitalists on the Forbes Midas List. He’s the recipient of imec’s 2023 Lifetime of Innovation Award, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) 2022 Robert N. Noyce Award, and GSA’s 2016 Dr. Morris Chang's Exemplary Leadership Award.  In 2017, he was ranked #1 of the most well-connected executives in the technology industry by the analytics firm Relationship Science. 

Ankur Gupta

Ankur Gupta is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Design Creation at Siemens EDA. This includes Test, Embedded Analytics, Digital IC design, Power Optimization, and Power Integrity Analysis. Formerly he was head of Product Management and Applications at Ansys, Semiconductor and Head of Applications Engineering for Digital Implementation & Signoff at Cadence Design Systems.

Ankur has 20+ years of experience in EDA, working on some of the industry’s most innovative Test, Digital Design, Implementation and Signoff products. He holds a Master’s Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from Iowa State University.

Thomas Sohmers

Thomas Sohmers is an innovative technologist and entrepreneur, renowned for his pioneering work in the field of advanced computing and artificial intelligence. Thomas began programming at a very early age, which led him to MIT as a high school student where he worked on cutting-edge research. By the age of 18, he had become a Thiel Fellow, marking the beginning of his remarkable journey in technology and innovation. In 2013, Thomas founded Rex Computing, where he designed energy-efficient processors for high-performance computing applications. His groundbreaking work earned him numerous accolades, including a feature in Forbes' 30 Under 30. After a stint exploring the AI industry, working on scaling out GPU clouds and large language models, Thomas founded and became CEO of Positron in 2023. Positron develops highly efficient transformer inferencing systems, and under Thomas's leadership, it has quickly become one of the most creative and promising startups in the AI industry.

Jia Li

Jia is Co-founder, Chief AI Officer and President of a Stealth Generative AI Startup. She is elected as IEEE Fellow for Leadership in Large Scale AI. She is co-teaching the inaugural course of Generative AI and Medicine at Stanford University, where she has served multiple roles including Advisory Board Committee to Nourish, Chief AI Fellow, RWE for Sleep Health and Adjunct Professor at the School of Medicine in the past. She was the Founding Head of R&D at Google Cloud AI. At Google, she oversaw the development of the full stack of AI products on Google Cloud to power solutions for diverse industries. With the passion to make more impact to our everyday life, she later became an entrepreneur, building and advising companies with award-winning platforms to solve today's greatest challenges in life. She has served as Mentor and Professor-in-Residence at StartX, advising founders/companies from Stanford/Alumni. She is the Co-founder and Chairperson of HealthUnity Corporation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. She served briefly at Accenture as a part-time Chief AI Follow for the Generative AI strategy. She also serves as an advisor to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). She is a board member of the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. She was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, a recognition bestowed on 100 of the world’s most promising business leaders, artists, public servants, technologists, and social entrepreneurs in 2018. Before joining Google, She was the Head of Research at Snap, leading the AI/AR innovation effort. She received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.

Partha Ranganathan

Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan is currently a VP & Engineering Fellow, Google where he is the area technical lead for hardware and datacenters, designing systems at scale. Prior to this, he was a HP Fellow and Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs where he led their research on systems and data centers. Partha has worked on several interdisciplinary systems projects with broad impact on both academia and industry, including widely-used innovations in energy-aware user interfaces, heterogeneous multi-cores, power-efficient servers, accelerators, and disaggregated and data-centric data centers. He has published extensively (including being the co-author on the popular "Datacenter as a Computer" textbook), is a co-inventor on more than 100 patents, and has been recognized with numerous awards. He has been named a top-15 enterprise technology rock star by Business Insider, one of the top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Tech Review, and is a recipient of the ACM SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes award, Rice University's Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni award, and the IIT Madras distinguished alumni award. He is one of few computer scientists to have his work recognized with an Emmy award. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, and has also served on the board of directors for OpenCompute.

Maria Barisano

Maria Barisano is a Managing Director and Partner, based in the San Francisco office. She has been with BCG since 2013. As a core group member of BCG's Technology Media and Telecommunication (TMT) Practice Area, she works mainly for companies in the technology / high-tech industry.

Maria is leading the Women in Tech effort on the West Coast within BCG. Maria consistently engages with numerous high-profile women C-suite personnel in the tech industry. Maria is immensely knowledgeable in a broad set of topics, with a strong focus on growth/Go To Market acceleration.