Fireside Chat
The Fireside Chat series welcomes esteemed guests, primarily founders, managing partners, and VPs, for intimate and insightful discussions. Dive deep into their journeys, gain industry insights, and connect with the minds shaping today's business landscape
Past Fireside Chat Guest Speakers
Thank you for your contributions to the community!
Microsoft Corporate Vice President
Lan Ye
🔥 The Leadership Fireside Chat of 2024 in the Seattle Area is Here! 🔥
Are you ready to take your career to the next level? 🚀 Want to become a better version of yourself, but feeling lost without role models or direction? In today's competitive workplace, we need more than hard work – we need a guiding light. 🌟
Meet Lan Ye, Microsoft CVP, and learn how she broke through barriers and rose to the top. This is your chance to hear her real-life success story, get inspired, and ignite your own growth! 🌠
Join us on October 27th in Redmond for this exclusive face-to-face opportunity!
📅 Date: October 27th 3-5PM
📍 Location: Redmond Hotel Conference Room
💸 Donation: $50
Seats are limited! Sign up now to unlock your potential! ✨
✨ It's a rare opportunity, so click here to register: https://lu.ma/6nisk9vj
Fireside Chat with John Lee and Peter Kao
Bay Area Leadership Fireside Chat
👨💼 John Lee was a Senior Vice President at Morgan Stanley and UBS Bank. He successfully sold a company for $103 million.
👨💻 Peter Kao is a serial entrepreneur and CEO, as well as an AI expert. He was a Director at AT&T, where he led the development of a successful product within three years, and he is currently an executive at a major tech company in the Bay Area.
President of Microsoft Developer Division
Julia Liuson
As President of Microsoft’s Developer Division, Julia leads the technical and business strategy, product development and engineering teams for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, all Microsoft programming languages and runtime, Azure DevOps, Azure SDKs, and Azure Application Development PaaS and Serverless offerings. She also manages GitHub as an independent operating entity.
Founder, Asian American Forward Political Action Committee
Don Sun
Big Data, AI, Asian American Candidates and fundraising for 2024 and beyond.
Council Member at City of Mountain View
Margaret Abe-Koga
Councilmember Margaret Abe-Koga is a working mom, former small business owner, and breast cancer survivor. Margaret was born at Stanford Hospital and raised on the Peninsula by immigrant parents from Japan. She and her husband Yotto saved to purchase their home in Mountain View, where they raised two daughters who attended public schools and cared for Margaret’s aging parents.
A graduate of Harvard University, Margaret is passionate about equity, community service, and quality schools, She got her start in public service as a Congressional Aide to U.S. Representative Anna Eshoo and also served as Assembly Evan Low’s District Director. Her first elected public office was the Santa Clara County Board of Education. Since 2007 Margaret has served on the Mountain View City Council, where she was the first Asian Pacific Islander American woman to serve as Vice Mayor and Mayor in the City’s history.
Corporate Vice President at Microsoft
Lan Ye
As the Corporate Vice President of the Microsoft Teams Calling, Meeting and Devices group, I lead a team of program managers and engineers who are obsessed with making workplace communication simpler and more inclusive. I joined Microsoft out of college and worked on a wide range of consumer and enterprise products including Windows Media, Digital Rights Management, Zune, Windows Phone, mobile gaming, Skype, Lync and incubation projects. In recent years, I led the convergence and transformation of the Microsoft's Unified Communication strategy from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.
Corporate Vice President at Microsoft
Donna Liu
Donna Liu is a Corporate Vice President in the Artificial Intelligence and Research Group at Microsoft. She is responsible for the strategic planning, technical innovation, and execution of a global team of data analysts, engineers and scientists to deliver on business and organizational objectives for Cortana and Bing Maps. Under her leadership, the team provides state-of-the-art natural language understanding for a broad range of products and services across Microsoft and delivers key productivity skills for Cortana customers. Additionally, she has guided Bing Maps to mature into a viable global mapping and geospatial competitor, and her team has spearheaded various initiatives into OpenStreetMap collaboration, image recognition, and fleet management services for logistics customers.
Prior to her current role, Donna led many major search domains in Bing Search, including Local, Travel, Image, Video, Entertainment, and Shopping. Notably, she led engineers across 4 continents to deliver Bing Local Search matching the US leader in quality and in many global markets. She also built Bing Multimedia (Image and Video) Search capabilities to be best-in-class and grew Bing Multimedia query share in the US to outpace that of core web search, average Bing search and the competition.
VP of Engineering at Newfront
Lin Yuan
Yuan Lin, a member of the 22nd class of Wharton's EMBA program, currently serves as the VP of Engineering at Newfront Insurance. She is responsible for overseeing the entire R&D team, including Product Development, Infrastructure, and Data. Yuan Lin graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011 and joined Facebook prior to its IPO. Two years later, she became the Tech Lead for Facebook's Graph Search team. In 2014, she joined Coursera as a Tech Lead and transitioned to an Engineering Manager a few months later. In 2018, she joined Lyft and built the Insurance Tech team from scratch, focusing on optimizing the company's most significant operational cost—Insurance Cost—and helping Lyft become profitable. All the companies she has worked for have successfully gone public. Currently, she is committed to exploring the digital transformation in the commercial insurance sector, the application of artificial intelligence in business risk management, business decision-making, and corporate development, as well as establishing behavioral guidelines that enterprises need to follow in the development of artificial intelligence and other technologies. As a career woman who has grown step-by-step from an Engineer to an Executive in successful unicorn companies, she is also happy to share her various experiences and insights gained during her development in the tech field.
Managing Partner at Amino Capital
Sue Xu
Dr. Sue Xu is a Managing Partner at Amino Capital, with investment theme of data moat, network effect and domain agnostic. She has successful investments from inception to unicorn in Generative AI, Consumer, SaaS and Frontier tech.
She was interim CEO of CandyHouse and CyteSi. Since 2012, she has involved with more than 260 investments mostly in seed and Series A, with 17 unicorns and over 35 companies with valuation higher than $100M, including Chime, Rippling, Grail(acquired by Illumina), Webflow, Weee, DFINITY, Replit, Oasis Labs, OmiseGo, Turing, Wyze, GetAccept, Guesty, Avail MedSystems, Instawork, Wetravel, StarRocks, Karbon Card, Unbabel, and WriteSonic.
Dr. Sue Xu began her early stage entrepreneurship when she was the founding scientist of GlycoMira (also involved in undergrad and PhD laboratory spin-offs). She has three patents and over 20 journal publications, and previously was a medical school researcher at Stanford University.
Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fun
Lu Zhang
Lu Zhang, Founder and Managing Partner of Fusion Fund, is a renowned Silicon Valley-based investor, a serial entrepreneur, and a Stanford Engineering alumna. With a strong technical background, Lu has extensive experience bringing a broad range of technologies to commercialization and deep domain expertise in AI in healthcare, Enterprise AI/Networks, Edge Computing, and Data Privacy.
Prior to starting Fusion Fund, Lu was a serial entrepreneur and materials science researcher. Lu is a first-generation immigrant originally from Inner Mongolia. At the age of 21, she built a medical device company for Type II Diabetes diagnosis based on her graduate school research in Stanford University. Following the acquisition of her startup by a leading public medical device company, Lu began investing in and supporting early-stage entrepreneurs. This eventually led her to create Fusion Fund in 2015. Since then, Lu has built a distinguished eco system and established her reputation in the VC industry. She was honored as Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum (Davos), Silicon Valley Women of Influence, Best 25 Female early-stage investor by Business Insider, Featured Honoree of VC of Forbes 30 under 30 and Town & Country 50 Modern Swans - Entrepreneurship Influencer.
Lu frequently speaks at high-profile tech conferences such as World Economic Forum(Davos), Future Investment Initiative (FII), Web Summit, SuperReturn, etc., and she is a guest lecturer at Stanford University and Wharton. Lu serves as a board member of many portfolio companies, the Board and Chairwomen of the Youth Council of Future Science Award, and Jury Board of the Cartier Women Initiative and Young Leader Award. She holds an M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Zoom
Xuedong Huang
Xuedong (XD) Huang is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Zoom. Prior to Zoom, he was at Microsoft where he served as Azure AI CTO and Technical Fellow. His career is illustrious in the AI space: he founded Microsoft’s speech technology group in 1993, led Microsoft’s AI teams to achieve several of the industry’s first human parity milestones in speech recognition, machine translation, natural language understanding, and computer vision, is an IEEE and ACM Fellow and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.