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Tech Surge Global Deep Tech Summit 2023
Please join us in the heart of Silicon Valley for the exclusive TechSurge Deep Tech summit. Network and learn alongside leading CEOs and founders, prominent investors and analysts, and path-breaking academics – most importantly, leave inspired about the future of Deep Tech.
Hosted by venture investment firm Celesta Capital, TechSurge is an annual Deep Tech conference fostering dialogue at the intersection of technology advancement, entrepreneurship, and the investment landscape.
Mountain View, CA, USA
Cocktails to follow.
2023 Tech Trends Outlook: Why Deep Tech? Why Now?
Kokalitcheva
India: The New Deep Tech Frontier
Indermit
Examining the Evolving Venture Investment Landscape
Navin
Chaddha
Tugnait
Chip Wars: What's Next for the Global Semiconductor Market?
Mehrotra ‍
DiLullo
Powering our Data-Led Future with Hyperscale Cloud Computing
Montemayor
The Next Evolution of the Distributed Web
Vint
Lareina
Bioconvergence: Accelerating life Sciences with Deep Tech
Rothman, PhD
Matheu, PhD
Dornbusch
Delivering on the Promise of AI
Kunle
Olukotun
In Conversation With Kara Swisher: The Road Ahead for Tech Investing
Additional speakers to be confirmed.
Pioneer and Evangelist of the Internet
Recipient, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Turing Award
Vinton G. Cerf earned his B.S. in mathematics at Stanford in 1965 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science at UCLA in 1970 and 1972 respectively.
Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. He has served in executive positions at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet Society, MCI, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A former Stanford Professor and former member of the US National Science Board, he is also the past President of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Internet Society and serves in advisory capacities at NIST, DOE, NSF, NRO and NASA. He is a member of both the US National Academies of Science and Engineering.
Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, US National Medal of Technology, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the Prince of Asturias Award, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper award, the ACM Turing Award, the ACM Systems Software Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Marconi Fellowship, the Legion d'Honneur, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the Library of Congress Living Legend Medal, the Terra Mariana Medal (Estonia), the St. Cyril and St. Methodius Medal (Bulgaria), the Areté Medallion (Elon University), the Murillo Toro Medal (Colombia), the Catalunya International Prize, the George C. Marshall Innovation Medal and the Franklin medal. He is a member of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and a Freeman of the City of London. He is a Fellow of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Computer Society and the Hasso Plattner Institute.
He is a member of the Halls of Fame of the Internet Society, the Consumer Technology Association, and member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He has delivered the Romanes Lecture (Oxford), the George Gamow Lecture (University of Colorado) and Shannon Luminary Lecture (Nokia, Bell labs). He is a Foreign Member of the British Royal Society and Swedish Academy of Engineering, Eminent Member of Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE) and holds 29 honorary degrees.
Managing Director, Mayfield
Navin Chaddha is Managing Director at Mayfield. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Tech Investors fourteen times, including being named in the Top Five in 2020 and 2022. His investments have created over $120 billion in equity value and over 40,000 jobs. During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 60 companies, of which 18 have gone public and 27 have been acquired.
Navin holds an MS degree in elctrical engineering from Stanford University and a B. Tech. degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi, where he was honored with the distinguished IIT Alumni Award.
CEO, JC2 Ventures
Fmr. Chairman and CEO, Cisco
President, Qatalyst Partners
Jason DiLullo has been President of Qatalyst Partners since 2016 and has 30 years of strategic advisory experience, almost all of which have been focused in the technology industry. Jason joined Qatalyst in 2010, founding and leading Qatalyst's semiconductor practice for 6 years. Subsequently, Jason moved to London to help further develop Qatalyst's business in Europe and Israel. Currently located in San Francisco, Jason advises companies on strategic transactions across all global technology markets. Prior to Qatalyst, Jason was a Managing Director and Co-Head of Technology Mergers and Acquisitions, Americas at Credit Suisse. During his career, Jason has advised on well over 100 completed transactions, including mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, hostile takeovers and defense, leveraged buyouts, spin-offs and financings, representing $200B+ of value.
CEO, Excision Bio
Daniel Dornbusch has over 25 years of experience building pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and currently serves as the CEO of Excision BioTherapeutics, Inc. He has held management roles in large pharmaceutical, small biotechnology, and diagnostics companies spanning business development, mergers and acquisitions, marketing, sales, commercial strategy, and product development. He was the founding CEO of Acteris, Inc, serves on the board of Arrow Pharmaceuticals, and held senior roles at Nodality. Daniel worked in roles of increasing responsibility at Novartis in business development and international commercial leading territories in the US and Latin America. Daniel led commercial teams at Genentech and started his career at the Genzyme Corporation, serving in various roles including business development, product management, and corporate development.
Daniel received his B.A. in Biology and English from Cornell University, M.S. from Tufts University School of Medicine and Emerson College, and M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.
Chief Economist, World Bank
Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. He brings to the role a broad combination of leadership, expertise, and practical experience working with governments on macroeconomic imbalances, growth, poverty, institutions, conflict, and climate change.
Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, Gill served as the World Bank's Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he played a key role in shaping the Bank's response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development program.
Gill is widely regarded for his contributions to development economics. He spearheaded the influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His pioneering work includes introducing the concept of the "middle-income trap" to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. He has published extensively on key policy issues facing developing countries—among other things, sovereign debt vulnerabilities, green growth and natural-resource wealth, labor markets, and poverty and inequality.
Gill has also taught at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.
CEO, Arm
Rene Hass was appointed Chief Executive Officer and to the Arm Board in February 2022. Prior to being appointed CEO, Rene was President of Arm's IP Products Group (IPG) from January 2017. Under his leadership, Rene transformed IPG to focus on key solutions for vertical markets with a more diversified product portfolio and increased investment in the Arm software ecosystem. In addition to his role as CEO, Rene also sits on the board of Arm China.
Rene joined Arm in October 2013 as Vice President of Strategic Alliances and two years later was appointed to the Executive Committee and named Arm's Chief Commercial Officer in charge of global sales and marketing.
Before joining Arm, Rene held several applications management, applications engineering and product engineering roles, including seven years at NVIDIA as vice president and general manager of its computing products business. Prior to NVIDIA, Rene held executive roles at Scintera Networks and Tensilica.
Rene serves on the boards of Computacenter and Mythic and is based in Silicon Valley, U.S. He also spends significant time in the major technology centers of Europe and APAC.
Rene earned his BS in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Clarkson University and is a graduate of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business Executive Education Program.
Chairman, Alphabet Inc.
Fmr. President, Stanford University
John L. Hennessy is Director of Knight-Hennessy Scholars, the largest fully endowed graduate-level scholarship program in the world. He is Chairman of the Board of Alphabet and serves on the Board of Directors for Cisco Systems and the Board of Trustees for Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Formerly the tenth President of Stanford University, he is also a computer scientist who co-founded MIPS Computer Systems and Atheros Communications. He and Dave Patterson were awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for 2017.
Partner, Wilson Sonsini
Raj Judge is a corporate partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Raj specializes in corporate and securities law for technology companies and advises on venture financings, IPOs, and mergers and acquisitions. He has been involved in over 500 transactions during the 20 years he has practiced with the firm. He serves as company counsel to prominent venture-backed and emerging growth companies at every stage of growth. Raj also leads the firm's India practice. He counsels many India-based companies and U.S. enterprises with operations and investments in India. He has significant experience with both U.S. and India-based IPO transactions, including the landmark IPOs of Infosys and Wipro. He has advised companies on re-incorporations from India to other jurisdictions, investments into and from India through tax jurisdictions, and other complex cross-border transactions. In addition, Raj regularly advises on mergers and acquisitions for India-based and U.S. companies.
Business and Technology Reporter, Axios
Kia Kokalitcheva is a San Francisco-based technology and business reporter at Axios. She covers tech, Silicon Valley, and venture capital.
Founder, Prellis
Dr. Matheu founded Prellis Biologics in October 2016 to solve the systemic problem in bioprinting technologies: the inability to match the resolution and printed feature size necessary to build a physiologic organ or tissue system. Today Prellis Biologics has achieved the fastest high resolution bioprinting ever reported by using holographic projection of multi-photon lasers and can replicate true-to-form complex tissue structures. Dr. Matheu is a trained Immunologist who pioneered immune cell imaging in a variety of living tissues and the characterization of immune responses that are dependent on cell motility and cell-cell interactions. During her academic career, Dr. Matheu authored numerous peer-reviewed publications and a book chapter detailing methods and approaches for high-resolution 3D imaging in living tissues, with a focus on immune responses.
‍President and CEO, Micron
Mr. Mehrotra joined Micron in May 2017, after a long and distinguished career at SanDisk Corporation where he led the company from start-up in 1988 until its eventual sale in 2016. In addition to being a SanDisk co-founder, Mr. Mehrotra served as its president and CEO from 2011 to 2016, overseeing its growth to an industry-leading Fortune 500 company. He also served as a member of its board of directors from July 2010 to May 2016.
Prior to SanDisk, Mr. Mehrotra held design engineering positions at Integrated Device Technology, Inc., SEEQ Technology and Intel Corporation.
Within the past five years, Mr. Mehrotra served on the board of directors of Cavium, Inc., and currently serves on the board of CDW Corporation.
Mr. Mehrotra earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley and is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Executive Program (SEP). Mr. Mehrotra holds more than 70 patents and has published articles in the areas of nonvolatile memory design and flash memory systems.
Executive Vice President & Chief Customer Officer, Northwestern Mutual
Christian W. Mitchell is executive vice president and chief customer officer at Northwestern Mutual. He leads strategic ideation necessary to elevate the client experience and deliver bold solutions to launch Northwestern Mutual ahead of its competitors. Mitchell oversees initiatives and deliverables to build the most powerful digital engine in financial services, including engineering solutions, data analytics, digital products, and consumer insights.
Mitchell joined Northwestern Mutual in 2006 as part of the Managed Investments team and has served in a variety of leadership positions throughout the company, including as president of the Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company, where he managed $129 billion in client assets and led the company to impressive growth in advisory and private client services. He also let the company's investment in ClientWise, a premiere coaching and consulting firm. Previously, he was vice president of corporate strategy, and spearheaded Northwestern Mutual's venture capital efforts – including its investment in automated advice firm Betterment and the acquisition of LearnVest.
He serves on Northwestern Mutual's Senior Leadership Team and sits on Northwestern Mutual's Future Ventures investment committee.
Mitchell is a graduate of Indiana University and earned his MBA in finance from the Yale School of Management. In his free time, Mitchell serves on the board of directors for the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, plays guitar with his wife and five children, and is an avid sailor.
Chief Digital Officer, General Mills
Jaime Montemayor is chief digital and technology officer for General Mills. He leads the IT, Digital, Data and Analytics and Cybersecurity and is responsible for leading General Mills digital transformation efforts, including new capabilities to advance innovation and speed to market.
Montemayor joined General Mills with over 20 years of experience in the technology space, having held leadership positions at Oracle, 7-Eleven and PepsiCo.
During his time with PepsiCo, Montemayor led multiple IT-enabled business transformations globally, spearheaded the development of the analytics-at-scale strategy and deployed innovative capabilities to better prepare the company for future retail and consumer trends. Most recently, he served as senior vice president and chief information officer, Digital Innovation, Data and Analytics where he was responsible for the enterprise commercial, innovation and data and analytics teams.
Montemayor's career has been global and multicultural with a focus on delivering significant business value, developing talent and building strong teams across many geographies including North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia.
A graduate of ITESM (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico), Montemayor began his technology career at Oracle Corporation, before holding leadership roles at Booz Allen & Hamilton and PepsiCo. He received his Master's Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1988 and serves on the board of trustees for Northwestern Mutual.
VP Engineering, Google
Elissa Murphy joined Google in 2016 and runs the software engineering org for Google Nest which includes the Nest Thermostats, Google Home, and Chromecast devices and services. Before joining Google, she was CTO at GoDaddy and part of the transformative management team that stepped in to take the company public as one of the top IPOs of 2015. While at GoDaddy, she also helped change the company into one of Anita Borg's Top 13 companies for women in tech.
Over the last 14 years, she's focused on designing, building and running low-level processing and serving infrastructures for several companies including Yahoo!. At Yahoo!, she oversaw the Cloud systems and also the world's largest private Hadoop cluster which powered most of the ad systems.
Prior to her time at Yahoo!, Elissa worked in various engineering startup groups at Microsoft including high performance computing, cross company ML efforts like anti-spam and anti-phishing, and Azure (under Ray Ozzie, the Microsoft CTO after Bill Gates). She began her work in tech at several OS utility companies such as Symantec's Norton Group working on memory managers, disk repair and recovery, and antivirus. She managed many of the top ten selling consumer products for the Mac and the PC while in those roles. Over the course of her career, she's worked in a variety of product management, marketing, business development, engineering and general management roles.
Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Stanford University
Co-founder, SambaNova Systems
Kunle Olukotun is the Cadence Design Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University. Olukotun is a pioneer in multicore processor design and the leader of the Stanford Hydra chip multiprocessor (CMP) research project. He founded Afara Websystems to develop high-throughput, low-power multicore processors for server systems. The Afara multi-core processor, called Niagara, was acquired by Sun Microsystems and now powers Oracle's SPARC-based servers. In 2017, Olukotun co-founded SambaNova Systems, a Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence company, and continues to lead as their Chief Technologist.
Olukotun is the Director of the Pervasive Parallel Lab and a member of the Data Analytics tor What's Next (DAWN) Lab, developing infrastructure for usable machine learning. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an ACM Fellow, and an IEEE Fellow for contributions to multiprocessors on a chip design and the commercialization of this technology. He also received the IEEE Harry H. Goode Memorial Award.
Olukotun received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan.
Nobel Prize Winner
Professor, Yale University
Fmr. Chief Scientist, General Electric Healthcare
Host of On with Kara Swisher & Pivot Podcasts
Editor-at-Large New York Magazine
Kara Swisher is the host of On with Kara Swisher and co-host of the Pivot podcast. She is the former host of the Sway and Recode Decode podcasts and the co-founder of the technology website Recode. Swisher recently stepped away from her role hosting and organizing the Code Conference, which she co-founded nearly two decades ago. She also left her role as a weekly columnist at the New York Times. Swisher is also editor-at-large of New York Magazine and a regular contributor to NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.
Considered the top reporter in the tech game, Swisher has been reporting on the industry since the early 1990s. She was there when Amazon was looking for its first headquarters in Seattle, when Google was in its garage and when Netflix was just a small startup. Once called Silicon Valley's most feared but revered journalist by New York Magazine, Swisher has established herself as the oracle of the tech world with unrivaled access to the industry's most significant leaders.
CEO, Fairfax Digital
Sanjay Tugnait is a visionary C-suite executive with a proven record of driving digital transformation across Fortune 500 companies, making them cognitive enterprises for the future. With a unique ability to forge long-standing client relationships and ecosystem partnerships, he is a trusted advisor for clients to solve their most strategic challenges, a mentor for future leaders, and a global corporate citizen with a passion to leverage emerging technologies towards a greener and sustainable planet.
Sanjay is currently the President and CEO of Fairfax Digital Services. In this role he is responsible for the digital transformation, business value creation and enabling journey to sustainability of the Fairfax group companies globally.
Previously Sanjay held leadership roles as the Chief Market Maker and Global Managing Partner– Sustainability Practice for IBM Consulting, Chief Executive Officer for Capgemini Canada, and Managing Partner in Accenture's North America Financial Services practice. He started his consulting career with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) and was a Principal in the strategy and business transformation practice. Sanjay has represented companies at global forums - UNCOP26, Glasgow and the World Economic Forum, Davos. He has been an advisor and mentor to global startups in France, India, US, and Canada. He was also a judge at Les Innovators - an annual startup competition organized by French Tech and Chamber of Commerce.
Sanjay serves on the boards of multiple non-profits - his roles include Chairman of the Blockchain Research Institute Advisory Board (founded by Don Tapscott); President of France Canada Chamber of Commerce (ON), Canada; Board Member of Trillium Health Partners Foundation; and Breast Cancer Canada. He is also on the Dean's Advisory Council for Schulich School of Business at York University.
Sanjay graduated from the Sustainable Business Strategy program from Harvard Business School; Leadership Development Program from Booth School of Management; and has an MBA from London University. He is a-PADI certified scuba diver and an avid golfer.
Managing Partner, Fund of Funds, National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF)
Anand Unnikrishnan has 20+ years of experience across India and Australia in areas such as investment management, finance and consulting, of which the last 15 years have been in investment management in India. Through his career, Anand has been involved in several direct and fund investments in sectors such as roads, power, healthcare, renewable energy and real estate.
In his current role, Anand manages a one-of-its kind professionally managed Fund of Funds in India and has invested over US$500 million across credit, growth, buy-out and venture capital funds. He is a recipient of the LP of the Year Award, 2022 by VC Circle in India.
Prior to joining NIIF, Anand was a senior executive of Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (MIRA) team in India for about 10 years. In his tenure with MIRA, Anand was instrumental in establishing the fund and worked across several roles in the business, including being a member of the Board and the Investment Committee of MIRA's Indian fund vehicle. Before MIRA, Anand worked with KPMG for over seven years in India and Australia, across audit and financial advisory services.
Anand holds a Bachelor of Commerce and is an Indian Chartered Accountant and has completed his Certified Public Accountancy (US).
Senior Partner, McKinsey
Lareina writes and speaks on technology and diversity. In her role as chair of the McKinsey Technology Council, she recently published the firm's annual "Technology Trends Outlook" and "Value creation in the metaverse" reports, which examine long-term technology shifts and the implications for different industries.
Lareina also cofounded "Women in the Workplace," an annual research partnership with LeanIn.org, which reports on the state of women in corporate America year over year. In addition to this yearly report, she has coauthored a significant body of research on diversity including "Race in the workplace: The frontline experience," and "Delivering through diversity." Lareina frequently speaks about women in business at prominent industry events. She writes and speaks widely on diversity and inclusion topics, including appearances in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Fortune, Fast Company, and CBS News, among others.
Outside of McKinsey, Lareina is on the board of the San Francisco Ballet and the advisory boards of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University and the Beyond Barnard program at Columbia University.
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Venue & Lodging Details
The TechSurge Summit will take place at the Computer History Museum. Free all day parking is available onsite.
401 N Shoreline Blvd
Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
A hotel block has been secured for TechSurge attendees at the Shashi Hotel, two blocks from the event venue, to provide. A special rate has been secured for our guests (Feb 12-14), if you choose to stay there. Please follow the below reservation link to book your reservation today.
TechSurge Summit Hotel Bookings
What is TechSurge?
TechSurge is an annual Deep Tech-focused thought leadership conference for leaders in technology development, commercialization, and investment. Through a day-long program of keynote talks and discussion forums, attendees explore opportunities and challenges in the development, commercialization, and acceleration of global Deep Tech sectors including semiconductors, AI, manufacturing automation, digital biology, and more.
Who attends TechSurge?
TechSurge is intended for senior business, investment, and academic leaders and executives from the technology sector.
Is TechSurge an open invitation event?
TechSurge is primarily an invitation-only event with limited capacity, intended for senior stakeholders active in the Deep Tech space. If you would like to request an invitation to the event, please fill out the request form below and we will respond to you as soon as possible.
I received an invitation - am I allowed to invite a colleague?
Space is limited at TechSurge and predominantly invite-only, for select individuals and organizations. If you or your organization were invited and/or received a registration link, please register and we will confirm your attendee seat.
If your organization is interested in attending with a larger group (more than 5), please reach out to techsurge@celesta.vc to discuss arrangements.
Which topics will be covered at the event?
The TechSurge program will explore topics across the intersection of the macroeconomic landscape, market trends for technology investors, and expert deep dives within key Deep Tech verticals. Planned topics to be covered include AI, blockchain, biotech, semiconductors, cloud, and others. Please check back for the full agenda of talks and panels as the event draws closer.
Is the event catered?
Yes, we will be serving light morning fare with coffee, a seated lunch, and closing the day with a small bites and cocktail hour. Ample refreshments will also be served throughout the day.
Attendees can share any special dietary restrictions through our registration form so the proper arrangements can be made.
Can my company sponsor?
We offer multiple event partnership and sponsorship opportunities for companies similarly interested in fostering vibrant conversation and community around Deep Tech investment. Please reach out to techsurge@celesta.vc to request further information.