Disrupt 2020

Meet the Disrupt 2020 ‘TC10’

Comment

If 2020 hasn’t been wild enough, there’s an extra special twist going down at Disrupt 2020 beyond the fact that, for the first time ever, the conference will be fully virtual.

It also happens to be the show’s 10th anniversary. Time flies when you’re changing the world, eh?

As part of Disrupt’s 10th anniversary celebration, we’re doing something brand new. So it is with great pleasure that I introduce the TC10.

The TC10 is a group of entrepreneurs, investors, etc. that have been a staple of the Disrupt conference over the past decade. They’ve spoken at the show — either for a fireside chat or on a panel or as a Startup Battlefield judge — at least three times. (Some of them have been there more times in the past 10 years than they haven’t.)

The TC10 will all be featured in various ways throughout the show, from fireside chats to Startup Battlefield judges to the Pitch Deck Teardown! This is the piece I’m personally the most excited about.

The Pitch Deck Teardown takes a look at real startup pitch decks submitted by attendees of the show. These world-class investors and entrepreneurs will walk through each deck, slide by slide, and give feedback on what they like, what they don’t and how they would change it. Not only will this give entrepreneurs a crystal clear look at what investors are looking for in a pitch deck, but it will also show how many investors and entrepreneurs have different opinions on what makes a great deck, giving founders the insight they need to tailor their decks appropriately based on the intended audience.

You can apply to the Pitch Deck Teardown right here.

So without any further ado, I’m proud to announce the Disrupt 2020 TC10:

Aileen Lee

Aileen is the founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage focused fund. They seek to back exceptional teams building technology that re-imagines work and personal life in large and growing markets — what they call “Life 2.0.” She was formerly a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and the CEO of RMG Networks.

A graduate of MIT, Aileen has an MBA from Harvard Business School and is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 9

Image Credits: Cowboy Ventures

Charles Hudson

Charles Hudson is the managing partner and founder of Precursor Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in the first institutional round of investment for the most promising software and hardware companies. Prior to founding Precursor Ventures, Charles was a partner at SoftTech VC. In this role, he focused on identifying investment opportunities in mobile infrastructure.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 3

Image Credits: Kathleen Dylan Studios

Cyan Banister

Cyan is addicted to early-stage angel investing. She spends a lot of her time dreaming about what the future could look like and invests in people who do the same but are creating it. Most recently she was at Founders Fund, a top-tier fund in SF. Most of her successful investments have a common theme around job creation and flexibility, but she has invested in everything from rocket ships to sandwich delivery. She’s currently a partner at Long Journey Ventures.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 6

Drew Houston

Drew Houston is co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. Since founding the company in 2007 with Arash Ferdowsi, Drew has led the company’s growth from a simple idea to a service used by over 600 million people around the world. Drew received his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2006. After graduating, he turned his frustration with carrying USB drives and emailing files to himself into a demo for what became Dropbox. Today, Dropbox is one of the world’s leading business collaboration platforms, with 15 million paying subscribers and nearly 3,000 employees across 12 global offices.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 3

Kirsten Green

Combining a unique and unconventional blend of professional history and acquired investment experience, Kirsten formed San Francisco-based Forerunner Ventures in 2010, where she serves as founder and managing partner. Noticing that emerging purchasing processes were linear and ripe for improvement, Kirsten developed a pacesetter mentality and analytical eye to remain ahead of experience-driven retail trends and identify compelling brand platforms and visionary entrepreneurs.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 3

Image Credits: Forerunner Ventures

Megan Quinn

Megan Quinn is the chief operating officer of Niantic where she oversees business operations and international development across the company. In 2015, Megan was a general partner at Spark Capital, where she focused on growth-stage investments, including Glossier, Handshake, Pendo, Rover and InVision. During this period, she also led Spark Capital’s investment in Niantic during the company’s Series B funding round where she joined the company’s board. She held product leadership positions at Google and Square prior to getting into venture.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 3

Image Credits: Megan Quinn

Michelle Zatlyn

Michelle Zatlyn is co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, a leading internet security, performance and reliability company that was named to CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List, selected by The Wall Street Journal as the Most Innovative Internet Technology Company for two successive years, and named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Before co-founding Cloudflare, Michelle held positions at Google and Toshiba and launched two successful startups. She holds a BS degree, with distinction, from McGill University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 3

Niko Bonatsos

Niko Bonatsos is a managing director at General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with approximately $5 billion in total capital raised. Working from the firm’s San Francisco Bay Area offices, Niko focuses his investment strategy on finding first-time technology founders with strong product instincts, a robust appetite for learning and a desire to create innovations with the potential to benefit millions. In his nine years with GC, Niko has been instrumental in the firm’s investments in Atrium, Audius, Cover, Hive, HubHaus, ClassDojo, Paribus (acquired by CapitalOne), Sleeper and Snap (NYSE: SNAP) among others.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 4

Image Credits: General Catalyst

Roelof Botha

Roelof F. Botha has spent over 15 years building companies in Silicon Valley. He began within the walls of nascent PayPal, where he joined in March 2000 while completing his MBA at Stanford. He became CFO in 2001 and led the company through both its IPO in early 2002 and the subsequent acquisition by eBay. Roelof joined Sequoia Capital in 2003 to help founders build enduring businesses. In addition to leading the U.S. office and serving as one of three Stewards of the global Sequoia Partnership, Roelof focuses on internet, services and software investments.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 8

 

Susan Lyne

Susan Lyne is co-founder and general partner of BBG Ventures, an NYC-based early-stage fund leading investments in companies built by underestimated founders that are transforming our collective and lived experiences. Since 2014, the fund has invested in 60 companies, including Zola, The Wing, Modsy, Lola, KiwiCo, Glamsquad, HopSkipDrive, Spring Health and Blueland. Before founding BBG Ventures Susan held leadership positions at media, technology and entertainment companies of all sizes and stages, from startups to public companies.

# of Disrupt Appearances: 6

Join us and the TC10 at Disrupt 2020 from September 14-18 by getting your Digital Pro Pass today! Prices are discounted for just 72 hours during our flash sale, so if you’ve been on the fence, now’s the time to act!

More TechCrunch

Anterior, a company that uses AI to expedite health insurance approval for medical procedures, has raised a $20 million Series A round at a $95 million post-money valuation led by…

Anterior grabs $20M from NEA to expedite health insurance approvals with AI

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. There’s more bad news for…

How India’s most valuable startup ended up being worth nothing

If death and taxes are inevitable, why are companies so prepared for taxes, but not for death? “I lost both of my parents in college, and it didn’t initially spark…

Bereave wants employers to suck a little less at navigating death

Google and Microsoft have made their developer conferences a showcase of their generative AI chops, and now all eyes are on next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which is expected to…

Apple needs to focus on making AI useful, not flashy

AI systems and large language models need to be trained on massive amounts of data to be accurate but they shouldn’t train on data that they don’t have the rights…

Deal Dive: Human Native AI is building the marketplace for AI training licensing deals

Before Wazer came along, “water jet cutting” and “affordable” didn’t belong in the same sentence. That changed in 2016, when the company launched the world’s first desktop water jet cutter,…

Wazer Pro is making desktop water jetting more affordable

Former Autonomy chief executive Mike Lynch issued a statement Thursday following his acquittal of criminal charges, ending a 13-year legal battle with Hewlett-Packard that became one of Silicon Valley’s biggest…

Autonomy’s Mike Lynch acquitted after US fraud trial brought by HP

Featured Article

What Snowflake isn’t saying about its customer data breaches

As another Snowflake customer confirms a data breach, the cloud data company says its position “remains unchanged.”

1 day ago
What Snowflake isn’t saying about its customer data breaches

Investor demand has been so strong for Rippling’s shares that it is letting former employees particpate in its tender offer. With one exception.

Rippling bans former employees who work at competitors like Deel and Workday from its tender offer stock sale

It turns out the space industry has a lot of ideas on how to improve NASA’s $11 billion, 15-year plan to collect and return samples from Mars. Seven of these…

NASA puts $10M down on Mars sample return proposals from Blue Origin, SpaceX and others

Featured Article

In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch

When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be…

1 day ago
In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch

The keynote will be focused on Apple’s software offerings and the developers that power them, including the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS and watchOS.

Watch Apple kick off WWDC 2024 right here

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Anna will be covering for him this week. Sign up here to…

Startups Weekly: Ups, downs, and silver linings

HSBC and BlackRock estimate that the Indian edtech giant Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is now worth nothing.

BlackRock has slashed the value of stake in Byju’s, once worth $22 billion, to zero

Apple is set to board the runaway locomotive that is generative AI at next week’s World Wide Developer Conference. Reports thus far have pointed to a partnership with OpenAI that…

Apple’s generative AI offering might not work with the standard iPhone 15

LinkedIn has confirmed it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on data gleaned from their participation in LinkedIn Groups. The move comes more than three months after…

LinkedIn to limit targeted ads in EU after complaint over sensitive data use

Founders: Need plans this weekend? What better way to spend your time than applying to this year’s Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt. With Monday’s deadline looming, this is a…

Startup Battlefield 200 applications due Monday

The company is in the process of building a gigawatt-scale factory in Kentucky to produce its nickel-hydrogen batteries.

Novel battery manufacturer EnerVenue is raising $515M, per filing

Meta is quietly rolling out a new “Communities” feature on Messenger, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. The feature is designed to help organizations, schools and other private groups communicate in…

Meta quietly rolls out Communities on Messenger

Featured Article

Siri and Google Assistant look to generative AI for a new lease on life

Voice assistants in general are having an existential moment, and generative AI is poised to be the logical successor.

2 days ago
Siri and Google Assistant look to generative AI for a new lease on life

Education software provider PowerSchool is being taken private by investment firm Bain Capital in a $5.6 billion deal.

Bain to take K-12 education software provider PowerSchool private in $5.6B deal

Shopify has acquired Threads.com, the Sequoia-backed Slack alternative, Threads said on its website. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal but said that the Threads.com team will join…

Shopify acquires Threads (no, not that one)

Featured Article

Bangladeshi police agents accused of selling citizens’ personal information on Telegram

Two senior police officials in Bangladesh are accused of collecting and selling citizens’ personal information to criminals on Telegram.

2 days ago
Bangladeshi police agents accused of selling citizens’ personal information on Telegram

Carta, a once-high-flying Silicon Valley startup that loudly backed away from one of its businesses earlier this year, is working on a secondary sale that would value the company at…

Carta’s valuation to be cut by $6.5 billion in upcoming secondary sale

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has successfully delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station, a key milestone in the aerospace giant’s quest to certify the capsule for regular crewed missions.  Starliner…

Boeing’s Starliner overcomes leaks and engine trouble to dock with ‘the big city in the sky’

Rivian needs to sell its new revamped vehicles at a profit in order to sustain itself long enough to get to the cheaper mass market R2 SUV on the road.

Rivian’s path to survival is now remarkably clear

Featured Article

What to expect from WWDC 2024: iOS 18, macOS 15 and so much AI

Apple is hoping to make WWDC 2024 memorable as it finally spells out its generative AI plans.

2 days ago
What to expect from WWDC 2024: iOS 18, macOS 15 and so much AI

As WWDC 2024 nears, all sorts of rumors and leaks have emerged about what iOS 18 and its AI-powered apps and features have in store.

What to expect from Apple’s AI-powered iOS 18 at WWDC 2024

Apple’s annual list of what it considers the best and most innovative software available on its platform is turning its attention to the little guy.

Apple’s Design Awards highlight indies and startups

Meta launched its Meta Verified program today along with other features, such as the ability to call large businesses and custom messages.

Meta rolls out Meta Verified for WhatsApp Business users in Brazil, India, Indonesia and Colombia