James served as the Chief Executive Officer of 7-Eleven and chairman and CEO of Blockbuster. James graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree from the College of the Holy Cross. He also obtained an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1980. James is the founder of the 'Education is Freedom' foundation

Sourjyendu is the founder and Chief Business Officer at DealShare.

After spending 15+ years with leading Retail and FMCG organisations such as Metro, Raymond and Britannia, Sourjyendu kicked off his startup journey at the age of 40 to build Bharat's first social e-commerce unicorn.

Taru Kapoor is the general manager of Tinder and Match Group in India. In her previous stints, she has worked with Sequoia Capital and The Boston Consulting Group. Taru graduated from IIT Delhi with a B.Tech and M.Tech in Chemical Engineering and received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.

Shrishti is the Managing Partner at SSV. SSV is a sector-agnostic family-office investing in early-stage companies. Through SSV, she has invested in 30 companies such as Plum, Kutumb, Chingari, Rupifi, Jar and 10Club.

Abhinandan is a screenwriter who kicked off his career as an assistant director to Andhadhun writer and National Award-winning filmmaker Hemanth M Rao. His writing credits include Netflix's Little Things Seasons 3 & 4 and Teen Tigada, a film for Prime Video's Unpaused anthology.

Jeffrey Paine is the Managing Partner & Co-founder at Golden Gate Ventures and an Edmund Hillary Fellow. Jeff is one of the most thoughtful VCs I have come across. Last year, he launched an initiative called Coachable that focuses on founders' mental wellness by pairing them with experienced coaches and mentors. He wishes for other like-minded VCs and corporations to join this initiative so that more founders get the support they need while building their startups.

Amit is the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Tau Ventures, an AI-focused seed fund. He kicked off his career at Google and then went to work with Norwest Venture Partners and Samsung NEXT- Samsung's investment arm. He has also co-founded HealthIQ, which is valued at USD 450M. He did his bachelor's and masters from Stanford and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Tarun Davda is the Managing Director of Matrix Partners, India. Prior to joining Matrix Partners India, Tarun was the Co-founder, India CEO and Board Member at StepOut.com, a venture-backed startup. StepOut became India’s #1 online dating site with over 5 Million users. Before that, Tarun established BigRock.com (incubated by the Directi group) - India’s #1 provider of domain name registration and other web services. Tarun started his career at Infosys as an IT consultant. He has an MBA from the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad and an Engineer from VJTI, Bombay.

Mahi de Silva is a serial entrepreneur. His company AdMarvel was acquired by Opera, and within the first month of acquisition, AdMarvel 10Xed Opera’s browser monetization. With his latest entrepreneurial stint, Amplify.ai recently merged with Triller.

Mahi is a University of Kansas and Stanford graduate and was a part of the core startup team at VeriSign. He eventually became the company’s VP (Engineering) and, later, GM of its Wireless Services.

William Mcquillan is a founding partner at Frontline Ventures, Frontline is an early-stage venture capital fund with €250M under management and over 100 investments across Europe and the US. He was the youngest Partner of a European VC fund when Frontline was founded.

Omid is of Iranian origin who was born and bought up in Germany. He kicked-off his career with Google in Dublin, then moved to Google US and was responsible for Google’s LATAM cloud business, landed up heading international expansion for the Chinese bike-sharing unicorn platform Ofo and now he is with Robinhood, Fintech unicorn in the US. Omid's vast experience across different international markets allows him to draw comparisons between regions in ways few can.

Karthik Prabhakar is the Executive Director and Partner at Chiratae Ventures. It is one of India’s leading early-stage venture capital fund with investments in the likes of Myntra, Lenskart, Bounce, CureFit, Policybazaar, EarlySalary and others. In this conversation, he talks about the Indian venture capital landscape, early-stage tech sector and foreign entrants such as Amazon, TikTok and others.

Rui Ma, is the Writer & Co-Host of The Tech Buzz China podcast. She is a China Tech expert and ByteDance observer and commentator. She has spent 15 years in Investment Banking, Private Equity and Venture Capital. She shares her observations about the Chinese Tech ecosystem, the growth of the second generation of Tech gainst such as ByteDance, Pingduoduo, Meituan. and much more.

Robert talks about his China immersion. How he built and scaled Airbnb China and shares his views and frameworks on building a venture in China. Why and How to China.