Jiaona Zhang ("JZ") is the Chief Product Officer at Laurel. She has led product organizations at Linktree, Webflow, Airbnb, WeWork, Dropbox, and Pocket Gems. Prior to her career in product, she worked as a management and private equity consultant. In addition to her work, she advises and invests in start-ups. JZ received her BA from Yale University in Economics.Topics:

• How product leadership differs across company stage
• Building and scaling product organizations through hypergrowth phases
• Where product management heading in an AI-first world

#VCPodcast #ProductLeadership #CPO #StartupLife #TechLeadership

Lauri Moore is a Partner at Bessemer’s Silicon Valley office, where she focuses on early-stage opportunities in data, AI, developer tools, and related infrastructure. With a unique background spanning research, data science, product management, and investing, Lauri is a passionate ally and coach for entrepreneurs, collaborating with them to tackle the inevitable challenges of company building. Before joining Bessemer, Lauri was a Partner at Foundation Capital. She also co-founded a company that automated top-of-funnel screening using voice AI, leveraging one of the earliest (and ultimately not good enough) externalized BERT models in 2018. Lauri has held product leadership roles at LinkedIn and worked in data science and product across several startups. Her career began at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the Research & Statistics Group, although her first job was as a figure skating coach. Lauri graduated from Columbia College, Columbia University, where she studied Mathematics, Economics, and History. She also holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where she was an Arbuckle Leadership Fellow.Topics:

• The Future of Developer Tools
• The New AI Stack in Data ML and Infrastructure
• Data as the New Code

#VentureCapital #AI #DataInfrastructure #DeveloperTools #Startups

sands of enterprise companies globally.  Sparked by his vision and focus to use AI technology to bridge the gap between humans and machines, today Umesh is recognized as an enterprise AI pioneer. Uniphore’s Business AI Cloud, launched in 2025, is among the first enterprise-grade AI platform purpose-built to unify data, knowledge, models, and agents in a way that’s truly usable, scalable, and secure for business. Known for his grit as a leader, his passion for customers and his deep understanding of technology, he is called upon to guide some of the world’s largest brands through their digital transformation. Umesh’s strong portfolio of patents serves as a testament to his innovative thinking and commitment to advancing AI technology.     As an international business leader, Umesh has been recognized with many awards including ‘40 under 40’ Bright Young Business Leaders in the Economic Times, ‘Next Generation Leader’ by Time Magazine, and previously, as an ‘Innovator Under 35’ by MIT Tech Review.  Umesh values mentorship and spends time working with the next generation of entrepreneurs through StartUp Connect, a nonprofit organization that helps young founders scale their businesses, creating more economic opportunities.  Umesh is an alumnus of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology and an accomplished speaker and highly sought-after presenter. Topics:

• The role of emotion AI in enterprise applications
• Building AI products that large enterprises actually adopt and pay for
• How to evaluate which AI capabilities to build in-house vs acquire

#EnterpriseAI #ConversationalAI #BusinessAI #AgenticAI #ZeroDataAI