The Next Wave: AI, Chips & Quantum in 2026

Prashanth Chandrasekar is Chief Executive Officer of Stack Overflow and is responsible for driving Stack Overflow’s overall strategic direction and results. Prashanth is a proven technology executive with extensive experience leading and scaling high-growth global organizations. Previously, he served as Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s Cloud & Infrastructure Services portfolio of businesses, including the Managed Public Clouds, Private Clouds, Colocation and Managed Security businesses.

Before that, Prashanth held a range of senior leadership roles at Rackspace including Senior Vice President & General Manager of Rackspace’s high growth, global business focused on the world’s leading Public Clouds including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud, which became the fastest growing business in Rackspace’s history.

Prior to joining Rackspace, Prashanth was a Vice President at Barclays Investment Bank, focused on providing Strategic and Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) advice for clients in the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) industries. Prashanth was also a Manager at Capgemini Consulting where he managed Operations transformation engagements and consulting teams across the US. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng in Engineering Management from Cornell University and a B.S. in Computer Engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Maine.

Rodrigo Liang is the CEO and co-founder of SambaNova. Since 2017, the company’s core mission has been to democratize access to AI by making it available to organizations of every size. Accomplishing that requires a full-stack approach encompassing chips, software, and systems that are more flexible and power-efficient than GPU-based technology.

Before SambaNova, Rodrigo spent a combined 15 years leading one of the industry’s largest semiconductor engineering teams at Sun Microsystems and Oracle, building high-performance processors for enterprise systems. He started his career at Hewlett-Packard. He holds MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Born in Taipei, Taiwan, he was raised in Brazil and educated in Germany. His years in Brazil helped inspire the company’s name, Portuguese for “New Dance,” a nod to its innovative approach to AI technology.

Ahmed Lone is a co-founder of Traversal, where he and his team are revolutionizing site reliability with AI agents. He leads product development to challenge the status quo of observability — replacing endless dashboards with a system that delivers narrowed-down root causes and only the charts engineers actually need. Ahmed studied computer science and finance at the University of Pennsylvania, began his career as a quant trader at Citadel Securities — where even a minute of downtime could carry massive financial and regulatory consequences — and later became a researcher and graduate student at Columbia University. Having experienced the pain of being paged in the middle of the night, he helped start Traversal to end on-call for good.

Robert “Bob” Petrocelli joined Vimeo as Chief Product and Technology Officer in 2024. He brings over 35 years of technical computing and product development experience to the brand. Most recently, he served as CTO at Pluralsight. With leadership experience in computer science and automated imaging/computer vision, Bob’s passion led him to the medical field, where he developed the first commercial picture archiving and communications system for echocardiography in collaboration with HP Medical Systems. He’s founded two companies, Heartlab and GreenBytes, which were acquired by Agfa and Oracle, respectively. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Rhode Island and a Ph.D. from Brown University.

Laura Sellers is the Co-President and Chief Product and Technology Officer at Anaconda where she leads the company’s product strategy and technological innovation. With over 25 years of experience in the technology industry, Laura has established herself as a visionary leader with exceptional expertise in scaling product and engineering teams.

Throughout her career, Laura has demonstrated a remarkable ability to align technological capabilities with market needs, driving product strategies that deliver significant value to customers while accelerating company growth. Her deep understanding of both technical and business domains enables her to bridge the gap between innovation and practical application.

Prior to joining Anaconda, Laura held key leadership positions at Alteryx and Collibra, where she played instrumental roles in product development and technological advancement. Her experience spans across data analytics, business intelligence, and data management platforms, giving her unique insights into the evolving data ecosystem.

Laura holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Iowa State University.

Tomer Shiran, founder and CPO at Dremio. Dremio is the Agentic Lakehouse: a unified, high-performance platform that automates operations, enables AI agents, and serves prep, query, and access straight from cloud storage. Tomer oversees the development of the company’s core technology and growing the team to 100 employees. Tomer Shiran served as Dremio’s CEO for the first 4.5 years, overseeing the development of the company’s core technology and growing the team to 100 employees. Previously, he was the fourth employee and VP Product of MapR, a Big Data analytics pioneer. Tomer held numerous product management and engineering roles at IBM Research and Microsoft. He is the founder of two websites that have served millions of users and 100K+ paying customers. He holds an MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Computer Science from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and is the author of numerous U.S. patents.

Ryan Wang is the Co-founder and CEO of Assembled, an AI-powered platform enabling modern support teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Trusted by hundreds of companies—including Robinhood, HubSpot, and Stripe—Assembled’s AI support agent automates over 70% of interactions and its workforce management platform enables planning across both human and AI agents.

Before founding Assembled, Ryan was an early engineer at Stripe, where he developed machine learning systems for fraud detection and support automation. He began his career in management consulting at a boutique firm led by Steve Levitt and Daniel Kahneman. Ryan holds an M.S. in Statistics and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago, where he received the Goldberg Prize in Economics.

Cecilia Ziniti is the co-founder and CEO of GC AI, the leading AI platform for in-house legal teams, trusted by 700+ companies to streamline contract drafting, review, and research. A seasoned tech and legal executive, Cecilia has helped shape major tech shifts – from the early internet and mobile to autonomous driving and AI. Previously, she was a founding legal leader on Amazon’s Alexa team and served as general counsel at high-growth startups including Cruise and Replit. Across her career, she’s helped close over $350M in venture funding, served as corporate secretary to startup boards for more than 25 quarters, and led hundreds of high-stakes transactions and IP matters.