Building vs Buying: Expert Insights for Smart Choices

Rong Yan is CTO at HeyGen, the all-in-one video creation suite designed for businesses and creative professionals. He brings the company’s mission of making visual storytelling globally accessible to life, enabling nearly 100k customers to create videos 10x faster, localize them into 170+ languages, and personalize them at scale.

Rong has nearly 20 years of engineering leadership experience from leading companies including IBM, Facebook, and Square. Prior to joining HeyGen, he was VP of Engineering at HubSpot leading Data Intelligence and Automation, as well as Senior Director of Engineering at Snap, where he led the team of 250+ engineers in developing and maintaining Snapchat features like Camera, Messaging, Stories, Discover, Memories, and Identity.

Allan Leinwand is Chief Technology Officer at Webflow, leading the engineering team that is building solutions to bring development superpowers to everyone. Prior to Slack, Allan was CTO at Shopify and Senior Vice President of Engineering at Slack. Throughout his career, Allan held senior leadership positions at multiple companies and was a venture capital investor for seven years. He founded Vyatta (acquired by Brocade), the open-source networking company, and co-authored “Cisco Router Configuration” and “Network Management: A Practical Perspective” and has been granted a patent in the field of data routing. Leinwand previously served as an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught on the subjects of computer networks, network management and network design. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Jan Chong is Vice President of Engineering at Tilt, a financial technology startup that seeks to expand access to fair credit to give anyone the opportunity to improve their financial security and mobility. Prior to Tilt, Jan ran engineering at Tally. Jan spent seven years at Twitter, leading teams in the Consumer Engineering organization. She holds a BS, MS in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University.

Alon Levi is VP of Engineering at WorkOS, a modern platform that empowers any developer to quickly build and ship enterprise features.

He previously led engineering teams at Google, Dropbox, Quip, Salesforce, and Slack, where he focused on developer platforms, enterprise features, productivity, and more.

Alon is a Bay Area native, loves to travel, and spends his free time entertaining his three young kids.