How you look back and forward at your career will shape you. If you can learn to visualize the story of your future you can make choices today to grow to new heights. If you're exploring new opportunities, the way you pre-tell that story will help you to know if you've found your next right thing or not. In this session Lindsey will walk through his career journey and share tales of paths taken and not - how they look from the rear-view mirror and what the future holds at Vercel.

There are so many different ways to grow in our industry, and one of the best potential shortcuts to turbocharge your growth is to join a hyper growth startup. You will be given responsibility beyond your title, you will wear many hats—you will experience a ton in a shorter, intense period of time. We’ll discuss ways to succeed at these startups: how to have a growth mindset, to keep an open-mind and optimize for learning above everything else. During your time at one of these companies, it's imperative to try and absorb the enthusiasm and knowledge that you will be able to glean from everyone around you, and to in-turn learn to foster and share your energy with others. We’ll also touch base on learnings beyond engineering: you will be in a position to influence cross functional partners—there are few other roles where you as a senior leader will have such a critical part to play in the running of the company.

In this session, Jonathon will discuss why Alignment is the one thing you’ll find at the heart of the most successful relationships, product teams, and organizations. He will provide a straightforward, honest look at why so many digital product initiatives fail or underperform. Next, he will highlight how top-performance digital product companies build alignment to inform effective product strategy and empower product teams to deliver extraordinary outcomes.

Starting with the announcement of OpenAI’s DALL·E 2 in April of this year, enthusiasts and research engineers alike have generated a tidal wave of interest in the latest quantum-leap ML advances for Generative AI—particularly for forms of human expression. DALL·E 2 pioneered a new AI technique known as Diffusion Models: learning from a huge range of photography and visual expression on the open web, then “denoising” an initial input of random noise, while using the power of Transformers to structure how the resulting image evolves based on an input prompt. Over the last 6 months, DALL·E 2 has attracted enthusiastic supporters (and a few critics, as with any new disruptive technology) in artistic, engineering, and research communities. That’s because these models power new forms of expression, including techniques that work “backwards” from images to understand the concepts the model “sees”. In this panel, we’ll compare and contrast the impact that Generative AI has had across a wide range of products and tasks, from the impact on the field of software engineering, to the workflows adopted in creative fields. We’ll also talk about the impact on curation and community on the web, and how the act of discovery and inspiration might change with workflows powered by Generative AI.

Advances in cloud infrastructure and the broad adoption of hybrid/remote work models have given organizations new options for driving productivity and operational efficiency. Now that so many devices are connected to our networks outside of the data center, we’re seeing a significant rise in security attacks around the world. Join us for a fireside chat with Anand Oswal, SVP, Network Security for Palo Alto Networks, to discuss how the cybersecurity industry is innovating with AI to respond to the changing threat landscape. One of the most exciting developments is adoption of Deep Learning techniques to stop attacks before they happen.

Whatnot Head of Growth Engineering and former Pinterest growth leader and entrepreneur Jeff Chang will discuss how to build an effective growth team from the earliest stages, how to structure that team, and how to ensure they drive maximum impact throughout the varying stages of growth to come.

Cash App’s engineering team has historically had a very bottom-up culture where teams are chartered with constraints and goals, and are empowered to achieve those goals however they choose. And while we share a lot of technical foundations, such as service containers, frameworks, common/shared infrastructure, tooling & developer experience, teams may choose to adopt different tools, vendors, technologies, architecture or programming languages & paradigms if this allows them to achieve their goals more quickly or efficiently. However, while this approach has allowed us to build a successful business, as we’ve grown in scale to almost 1,000 engineers, it has started to show signs of failure, and manifests as overchoice, confusion, redundancy, and lack of leverage. In this presentation we will walk you through some of the history of Cash App’s engineering team, how we developed the culture that we have, our successes, and the unique challenges that this causes. We’ll talk about how we’re approaching solving them with a high level of engagement & alignment across our entire engineering team.

There is no better predictor of a leader’s success than the caliber and passion of their team. Leaders are measured by the output of their teams - and legendary leaders take pride in handcrafting their team. Despite having such a profound impact on one’s success, leaders often find it impossible to prioritize the warranted diligence. Handcrafting a team is tough. It takes grit, patience, and a lot of work. This provocative session will inspire you to go all in on building your team. We cover the fundamental building blocks to help you become an awesome recruiter, a source of energy for your existing team, and shaping the culture of your team.