Panel discussion
Naveen Gavini
Naveen Gavini is the SVP of Products at Pinterest, where he oversees all design and product efforts for both consumer and advertiser products. He is incredibly passionate about building great user experiences and creating environments that stimulate creativity and innovative thinking. Prior to this role Naveen led both the design and engineering functions and was one of Pinterest's earliest engineers, joining in 2012. Since then, he played a critical role in scaling the engineering team, and was involved in almost every major new product initiative the company has developed for users.
Edward Kim
Edward Kim is the co-founder and the CTO of Gusto. He currently oversees all engineering and software development at Gusto. Prior to co-founding Gusto, Edward was the CEO and co-founder of Picwing, a Y Combinator startup and photo-printing platform. Before founding Picwing, Edward worked as a senior project engineer at Volkswagen Group of America Electronics Research Lab, where he led research and development for cloud-based navigation and speech recognition systems for Volkswagen and Audi. Edward is also the developer of several award-winning Android apps that have generated more than $1 million in revenue. Edward holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
John Thimsen
John Thimsen is CTO & Global Head of Engineering for Qualtrics. He’s been with the company since early 2015, and has grown the Engineering organization from 50 to 350 in that time frame. Prior to Qualtrics, he spent 10 years at Amazon in various roles, most recently as an Engineering Director on the Amazon Echo team where he responsible for the Alexa software organization. Prior to Amazon, he worked at Microsoft, Openwave Systems, and Active Voice Corporation in hands-on engineering roles. A common thread in John’s career is building large-scale, web-based products. Working at Qualtrics is a continuation of that trend, as Qualtrics’ XM Platform helps companies manage the core experiences that matter. John has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington.
Andy Chen
Andy Chen is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and is responsible for driving the firm’s executive recruiting strategy. He advises our entrepreneurs around all areas of talent in order to recruit the best team and to build iconic companies. He is also responsible for the KPCB Fellows Program, an initiative aimed at developing and mentoring the next generations of leaders. Before joining KPCB, Andy was an analyst at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covering science, technology and weapons. In this role, he provided intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers, including the president of the United States. Earlier in his career, Andy built and led the contingency recruiting practice at Riviera Partners, a leading recruiting firm that specializes in building teams for high-growth startups.
