Leading Through Uncertainty: Decision‑Making in Volatile Times

Chris Lyon is Senior Vice President of Engineering at Twilio, where he leads Global Engineering. His teams build the products and capabilities behind Twilio's customer engagement platform, the messaging, voice, email, and data tools businesses use to reach customers and personalize every interaction.

Before Twilio, Chris was SVP of Engineering at ForgeRock, where he led global engineering. Before that, he was SVP of Engineering at MuleSoft, a Salesforce company, where he ran the teams behind Core Platform and the API and Security Platform, the technology behind MuleSoft's Anypoint application network.

Chris has more than 34 years of experience in engineering, security, and operations. He has held engineering leadership roles at Lookout Mobile Security, Jive Software, and Mozilla, and has also founded and run his own company. Most of his focus goes into scaling engineering teams, connecting engineering work to business strategy, and building teams that keep getting better at what they do.

Chris is an engineer first, and it shows in how he leads: he stays close to architecture decisions, code reviews, and the tradeoffs behind every release, not just the org chart. He judges good engineering by what happens after ship, whether customers trust the product and keep using it, and he builds his teams around that.

Amit Gupta is a Partner at SNR Ventures.

SNR is an early-stage venture capital firm defined by its principles-driven approach and commitment to backing the most ambitious founders. Founded and led by Kevin Mahaffey and Amit Gupta, SNR operates with a distinct philosophy centered on productivity and long-term partnership.

The firm is obsessed with what matters: identifying truly transformative opportunities, pursuing equity-efficient execution, and being the kind of investor founders can trust in both breakthroughs and crises. SNR's investment thesis focuses on companies that increase planetary productivity, particularly those leveraging AI-driven innovation across software automation, robotics, and biology.

As a partner, Amit brings deep operational experience from leadership roles at multiple high-growth companies spanning early-stage through the public markets, including Qualcomm, Lookout, and Benchling. He combines concentrated early-stage investing with a passion for helping technical founders with company building. In some cases that materializes into a role helping in the trenches and in others a more passive, help as needed voice. Through direct advisory work and advising Y Combinator Continuity, Amit has helped countless companies navigate the complexities of scaling.