Tara Lewis oversees Yelp’s community expansion efforts throughout North America. She works directly with an incredible team of Regional Managers to hire, manage and support teams of Community Ambassadors who serve as Yelp’s community leaders and local marketing directors in their respective markets. Together, their goal is to build the brand and grow Yelp communities via strategic initiatives, both online and offline. She and her teams celebrate what makes each community special and take pride in the relationships they build between great local businesses and Yelp’s community of users.

She is also Yelp’s Trend Expert, working alongside Yelp's data science and PR teams to identify emerging consumer trends across food, drink, beauty, wellness, and beyond. Since stepping into the role, she’s made appearances on The Today Show and Good Morning America, and has been featured in The New York Times, Elle, HuffPost, AdWeek, Travel + Leisure, Forbes and more.

Tara is passionate about diversity, inclusion and belonging initiatives and believes that intentional efforts are essential for effective community building. At Yelp, she has served as a leader for numerous employee resource groups aimed to facilitate an authentic space for conversation and support for employees with shared social identities, characteristics or life experiences.

Prior to joining Yelp in 2009, Tara was the Director of Partner Marketing at Steve Case’s start-up, Revolution Health as part of Revolution Ventures. In this role, she was tasked to build community by harvesting and nurturing relationships with health and wellness support groups and organizations by developing cross-promotional campaigns, projects and events.

Tara is a graduate of Cornell University and currently lives in Washington, DC. 

As VP of Community for Peloton, Jayvee Nava oversees Member engagement across several social media platforms, playing a lead role in interacting with Peloton’s growing Member community and maintaining the deep loyalty that is a key driver in the company’s success. Jayvee joined the company in 2014 as part of Peloton’s first-ever studio team, and, as one of the company’s first 50 employees, has a deep-rooted understanding and passion for what it means to be part of the Peloton community. Today, Jayvee and her team are responsible for managing and moderating Peloton’s platform and online communities, such as the Official Peloton Member Page on Facebook, which currently has more than 470,000 Members, Member surprise and delight initiatives, as well as spearheading Peloton Homecoming, the company’s largest annual Member event, which has hosted up to 3,000 Members in NYC IRL in 2019 and over 50,000 Members virtually in 2021.

Stephanie has spent the last 8+ years launching and scaling Atlassian’s award-winning community, leading a globally distributed, high-impact team of 30+ community-builders across social, community, and customer advocacy. She’s a passionate supporter of the community-led movement and has played an instrumental role at Atlassian in establishing community as a central part of their business and their customer experience. Now over four million members strong, Atlassian’s community has become a best-in-class example of a B2B community at scale.

Bridget Sauer leads the Customer Advocacy team at Atlassian which consists of both the Customer Marketing and Community Content Programs. She has close to a decade of experience working on Community teams, and specializes in all things content: From UGC to customer stories and beyond.

Bridget lives in Bellingham, WA where she spends time hiking, painting, and corralling her two sphynx cats.

Kobie is a partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest and longest-running venture firm in Southern California. He joined the firm in 2016 and has led investments in companies including TheWaveVR, Cordial, Bevy, The Mighty and MetaCX. Kobie is also the founder/creator of Valence, a networking platform aimed to unite the combined global power of black professionals. Kobie has deep experience in SaaS businesses, marketing technologies, and emerging technologies including VR and AR (he was an early personal investor in Oculus which was acquired by Facebook for $3BN). Kobie joined Upfront from Accel, where he was involved in investments including Campaign Monitor, UserTesting, AdRoll, and Invoca. Prior to Accel, Kobie was the Chief Marketing Officer at REVOLVE, one of the largest global fashion ecommerce players based in Los Angeles. Earlier in his career, Kobie helped found OpenView Venture Partners and was an investor at Insight Venture Partners where he sourced notable early investments in Exact Target (acquired by Salesforce for $2.5B) and Instructure (NYSE: INST.) Kobie received an AB in Economics from Harvard University where he was also captain of the track team and a multi Ivy League champion.

David is the Founder of CMX (cmxhub.com), the world's largest and most passionate network for community professionals. Thousands of community professionals come to CMX for support and education in community strategy. The community industry's largest event, CMX Summit, brings together thousands of attendees each year, and 50+ local CMX Connect chapters gather regularly around the world.

In 2019, CMX was acquired by Bevy (Bevy.com) where David serves as the VP of Community. Bevy is a leading provider of community software, powering live community events and experiences for companies like Slack, Twitch, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Duolingo.

David is a 3x startup founder, an experienced community leader, and has personally advised and trained hundreds of organizations in community strategy over the past decade. 

For the past 15 years Derek has been building communities. He is the Co-founder/CEO of Bevy, a SaaS product that helps companies like Salesforce, Atlassian, Google, Snowflake, and Adobe build virtual and in-person communities. He co-founded Startup Grind, a community of 600 Chapters in 125 countries educating, inspiring, and connecting startup people. Since 2012, Startup Grind has hosted 15,000 events for more than 500,000 people. In 2010, he co-founded Commonred which was acquired by Income.com. Derek also previously worked as a product manager at Electronic Arts. He currently lives in Palo Alto, CA with his wife and four children.

Eva Miranda is a technical writer with communication superpowers. At Bevy, she uses those powers for good - writing documentation and enabling the communication of others. Working at startups she has worn many hats, talked to many people, and watched teams grow. She sees an overlap of communication and community in the best way.

She’s active in the Society for Technical Communicators, mentors students in STC and at her university, and spends a lot of time trying to keep plants alive.

David Siegel is the CEO of Meetup, the largest platform for finding and building local communities. He has 25 years of experience as a technology and digital media executive leading organizations through innovative product development, rapid revenue growth, and digital traffic acceleration. Prior to joining Meetup, David was CEO of Investopedia and before that, President of Seeking Alpha. David holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics & Economics and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia University where he teaches strategic planning and entrepreneurship. He is the author of Decide & Conquer: 44 Decisions That Make or Break All Leaders and hosts the podcast Keep Connected, which is dedicated to the power of community. 

Kalah Haley is the Founder and CEO of Saint Rock Media, an events marketing and production company that partners with enterprise and nonprofit organizations to strategize and execute their business objectives through virtual and hybrid event solutions. After the restrictions of Covid, Kalah and team have executed over 100 virtual and hybrid events. Kalah knows what truly drives conversions and moves audiences—and it’s not mastering the marketing flavor of the week.

It’s how well you connect with the most fundamental motivations of your audience while telling a compelling story with technology as a backdrop. Saint Rock Media is a flagship agency partner with Hopin and produces events around the world with clients, including USC Marshall School of Business, NFL Players' Association, JAM South Africa, Clari, and Running Remote.

Melody is the CEO / Co-founder of Observable, where she is building the future of data collaboration. Before Observable, she was a VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for large scale systems in search, search quality, cluster management, and Google Cloud delivering successful outcomes for millions of users. She also led the DevOps practice at Google Cloud. Melody is a hands-on technology leader with more than 25 years experience building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems and solving problems at scale. Melody instills passion around data innovation - improving exploration and insights from data toward better actions and outcomes. She is an expert in tools and systems for productive teams to thrive, and that's exactly what she is bringing to the future of data collaboration on Observable.

Laura Nestler is the VP of Community at Reddit where she leads the Community Operations team and is responsible for driving Reddit’s international community strategy and development, and growing the team into a global organization. Laura is a global leader with a 15-year track record of building strategic, high-impact teams and scalable community systems at growth-stage startups. Nestler joined Reddit from Duolingo, where she served as Global Head of Community, working across product, marketing, and strategy to develop vibrant and authentic community products and programs. Prior to Duolingo, Nestler spent nine years at Yelp, where she was instrumental in crafting the original community growth playbook before moving to London (UK) and Sydney (AUS) for seven years to drive Yelp’s international expansion.

Gustave Sauveroche currently leads Reddit's efforts to launch and grow local communities outside of the US from a Community-led perspective.

A citizen of the world, he has lived in 6 countries, speaks 5 languages, and advocates to bring the value of online communities to every culture.

His expertise lie in growing communities across and within cultural/national boundaries, bringing people together around authentic, engaging communities. He has significant experience leading and scaling international, diverse teams to cater for and grow markets and regions sustainably, hand-in-hand with users.

Alexis leads the Zoom Global Community team, focused on building and growing an online self-service support community accessible to all Zoom users. The Zoom Community welcomes a place to empower customers to openly ask questions, find solutions, and collaborate with peers. Alexis is passionate about community engagement, scaling global self-service support, and driving successful online interactions. With ten years of experience in community management, Alexis is a seasoned professional in online collaboration and digital support forums. 

Since 2019, Mandy Ross has served as Community Manager for Product and Design in the award-winning Atlassian Community. Mandy creates programs that enable connection between Atlassian's product teams and our 1.8+ million community members and customers. With 15 years experience as a leader in technical program management and 7 years as a community-driven marketer at Apple, Sony, and Boeing, Mandy is uniquely positioned to unite product leaders with Atlassian users and empower teams everywhere.

Molli has been naturally drawn to community since wandering across the “internets” back in the mid-90s. Her background includes extensive experience in the Games industry, including Kabam and Electronic Arts, and working with a wide range of audiences of interactive and (very) passionate communities. She's currently immersed into the world of virtual reality at Meta as Community Manager for Horizon Worlds.

George is Meta's Global Community Lead for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation. In that role he helps the company go from 0-1 on major new frontiers in community, including developing a vision of how communities can thrive in the Metaverse. When 5 million people joined 4,000+ Facebook Groups working to support Ukrainian refugees in the weeks after the invasion George led the company's efforts to support those key community builders. Prior to joining Meta George spent ten years as a community organizer, focused on building social cohesion and civic participation, and three years founding www.safepassage.org.uk in response to the Syrian refugee crisis.

Katie Ray is the Head of Community at Metadata.io. She has built communities, grown communities by 20%, and created community programming. She spends time learning new ways to grow communities, connecting with other CM's, and engaging with members. She recently received her MBA at Texas Tech University, and won CMX'er of the Year in 2022. In her down time, she loves to read and write, go on date nights with her husband, and play with their 3 adopted huskies.

Sarah Greisdorf is a Community Manager at Squarespace where she runs strategy and engagement initiatives for the pro user community. Since starting in March 2021, Sarah has pioneered collaboration between the product department and community team to improve the cycle of feedback for product development and increase the trust that the community has in the brand. Sarah also runs Holdette, a support network for recent-grad women that exists to support the transition from college to adulthood. Sarah has successfully launched seven Holdette chapters across the country including in San Francisco, LA, Boston, and New York. Sarah loves infusing opportunities for community building into everything she does, regularly hosting dinner parties, retreats, and planning trips for friends all in the name of building stronger relationships with those around her.

Hayley Rosenblum is a champion of creativity who specializes in fan engagement, helping artists build lasting relationships with their fans online.

As an integral member of musician Amanda Palmer’s team, Hayley helped Palmer shape the way independent artists use the internet to connect with fans since 2009.

From 2013-2016 Hayley served as Kickstarter's Music Outreach Lead and Campaign Strategist helping artists in all stages of their career, from up and coming acts to Grammy award winning musicians, connect with their fans through digital marketing best practices to bring their creativity to life through their crowdfunding projects.

Since June 2021, Hayley has transformed Patreon’s online creator community as their Head of Online Community where she manages the Official Patreon Creator Community Discord server, tripling its membership within her first year.

Richard Millington is the founder of FeverBee.

FeverBee takes a different approach to building communities. FeverBee believes in research, not assumptions. Data, not guesswork. And FeverBee puts psychology before technology.

Since 2010, FeverBee has helped over 300 organizations develop thriving communities. Even in the most challenging environments, FeverBee has helped customers, members, and employees to help and support one another.

Many of the world’s largest organizations, including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and SAP, have trusted FeverBee to develop their community strategies, training programs, and redesign their community experience.

Richard is also the author of three popular community-building books, Buzzing Communities, The Indispensable Community, and Build Your Community

Buzzing Communities introduced a psychology-driven approach to making a community work. The Indispensable Community pushed readers to look beyond engagement to prove the value of community. And Build Your Community, published by Pearson in 2021, is a comprehensive guide to setting up a successful community strategy aligned to modern practices.

With 10+ years experience in community management, Mindy has built a career focused on bringing people together and strengthening relationships, both online or IRL. Whether it's working with 150M MAU or creating intimate programs, her goal is to make the internet a *slightly* better place, where genuine friendships and belonging can be shared.

Nikki has had the pleasure of having a viewpoint from ground level, to the 1000 ft view. She has been a Community Manager in a local city, lead a global team of CMs, moved into Community Ops and was Shopify's first Senior Community Strategist to help scale their efforts across a 10,000+ person organization and for their over 2 million merchants.

During that time, she helped build and scale their internal community - the Women's Employee Resource Group. Building community, empowerment and psychological safety for women in the workplace.

Developer Relations @ Google, leading teams working at the intersection of community and technology. Founder of the Italian Community Managers summit, servant leader, community scientist and developer. I love yellow, being a dad, everything eXtended Reality, running on the beach, snowboarding and Tiramisù.

Jacqueline’s area of expertise is in crafting brand stories, developing outreach and marketing strategies to grow strong ecosystems and communities. She has 11+ years of experience working in marketing and sales organizations in Silicon Valley. Jacqueline has a thorough understanding in developer outreach, project & program management, content development, product & digital marketing, event planning and execution of large scale conferences in high tech. Let her help you build your brand, campaign, and community.

Community Program Manager at HubSpot, Jenny Sowyrda has been at the forefront of scaling an Enterprise SaaS Community for over 5 years. A collaborator by nature, Jenny enjoys bringing her marketing and customer success experience to cross functional community projects, while maintaining a focus on the customer experience.

Jenny created programs to scale HubSpot's Community from a support forum to an engagement platform. At her core, Jenny enjoys helping people, and feels fortunate to have built a community that has helped millions of people find answers, connections and learn from their peers.

Shreyas is a community builder with over a decade of community building experience. He's passionate about building a decentralized & distributed open web. He's a computer science engineer by education, but succumbed to the lure of building communities & took up community building in open source as a full-time profession. He's been involved in Web3 since 2014.

He's currently leading the community support efforts at the NEAR Foundation. Previously, he's worked at companies like CoinList, Tyk, HasGeek etc., building & executing their developer community strategy. Education, crypto, startups, community building, remote work are some of the topics that he enjoys talking about. He's also invested in and are advising companies in that space.

Lead Developer Community Advocate, DevRel Team at OutSystems.

After becoming a software engineer, he started Accurate System Ltd. with his various experiences. And then, he worked as a mobile app technical evangelist at Mitsui Knowledge Industry. After that, worked as a developer advocate in the IBM Global team, leading DevRel (Developer Relations), a marketing approach to developers.

Currently working as a Lead Developer Community Advocate at OutSystems. He also works as a lecturer at the Faculty of Informatics, University of Tsukuba. He also had been a Microsoft MVP, and was previously a musician, and a hairdresser.

His authors include "Developer Marketing DevRel Q&A" (Impress R&D), "Hajimete-no Node-RED", "Jissen Node-RED Katsuyou Manual" (Kogakusha), "Practical Node-RED Programming" (Packt), etc.

Gina is the Director of Membership Programs and Community for Zumba® Fitness, and is a community enthusiast and a passionate listener. She has had the honor of connecting with and learning from community members around the world. Throughout 10+ years of community work, Gina has developed global community volunteer and mentoring programs, created support and educational resources and experiences, and worked to create continuous opportunities for connection.  

David has over 20 years of community experience working for brands such as Instagram where he was Director of Global Community Programs for 5 years in London and San Francisco behind worldwide phenomenons such as Worldwide Instameet and the @instagram channels in 7 different languages. He also headed Social Media at the BBC, spearheading social in 29 languages, engaging audiences worldwide.

At Booking.com David looks after Content Engagement and Intelligence which includes Communities, Moderation and Community Operations, UGC, Machine Learning and more.

He teaches a course on Social Media Engagement at Domestika.

Pablo Gonzalez is the inventor of the Relationship Flywheel™️, host of the B2B Community Builder and Not Your Average Investor Shows, and Co-Founder of BeTheStage.live- an agency that works with core values led companies to turn their clients into a community and their community into their greatest business asset.

He’s obsessed with human connection, and he’s used his expertise to grow non-profits, sell $60M+ construction projects, rescue fledgling start-ups, set record breaking quarters for $100M+ companies, and be named a Latino Leader of the Future and a Top 20 Under 40 various publications.

More than anything, he’s dying to be your friend!

Cherish Santoshi is an award-winning developer relations manager and an active thought leader in the DevRel ecosystem. He has contributed heavily in the technical community space for the last 9 years and managed various programs for brands like Google, Amazon, and HackerEarth. In his career, Cherish has managed programs for a community of 5 million developers across the globe.

A passionate storyteller, Anthea landed her first radio news producer and reader job at 16. She's been creating impactful stories and spaces for connection ever since.

Anthea believes in the magic that happens when you bring people together around shared stories, values and purpose. She spends most of her time creating events and content that enables this to happen offline and online.

With a background in financial services and fintech in Africa, she is now working to engage tech and recruiter audiences in EMEA at OfferZen. As head of Engagement, she uses PR, events, partnerships and swag to drive connections to and with OfferZen's communities.

In her spare time, you’ll find her in the outdoors, geeking out on camping gear and country hopping in Africa for months at a time thanks to remote work. She holds a degree in Political Science from Stellenbosch University.

Jephtah is an intrinsic community manager based in Lagos, Nigeria. After 5+ years in Marketing, he realised that community management is his passion. This passion led to the creation of his blog where he has unpacked insights from interviews with top community managers and builders, including Jennifer 'Jae' Washington the head of community at Headspace - the meditation app with more than 30 million users, along with Ben Lang the head of community at Notion which has approximately 20 million users, he also has written about gamification in communities and defining what success looks like in them. Jephtah became the first local-based Nigerian to be awarded a full scholarship to Commsor's CSchool (A cohort for Community Managers) and the only African recipient for the 2022 CRNetwork Scholarship powered by The CommunityRoundtable. Jephtah advocates for DEI(Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in the community management space as he wants more Global Opportunities for Community Managers living in Nigeria. In his spare time, he volunteers for several non-profit organisations as a program director and he published his first book last year.

Emily is Head of Creator Community at Patreon, leading a team and executing programs that brings life- and career-changing peer-to-peer learning, connection, and collaboration to creators at scale. Previously, she spent over a decade at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) building relationships at the nexus of contemporary art, culture, and social impact. She is privileged to work with an established network of creatives, clients and collaborators under the name Earnest Agency, and serves on the founding team of The Space Program, San Francisco and the Visiting Committee for the Smith College Museum of Art. 

Linda Lian is co-founder and CEO at Common Room, the intelligent community growth platform for today’s fastest-growing companies. Lian founded Common Room in 2020 to help bring organizations of all sizes closer to their communities. Common Room is the first and only platform that gathers community engagement, product usage, and customer data into a single place and makes it actionable for organizations. Previously, Lian led product marketing for serverless computing at Amazon Web Services, where she saw firsthand the impact developer communities had on delivering better user experiences, increasing product adoption and advancing the company’s goals. Lian lives in Seattle where she enjoys spending time in the outdoors and with her partner, dog, and cat.

Rebecca Marshburn is Head of Community at Common Room, co-host of the Serverless Chats podcast, and believer in poetry. Rebecca has worked in various community capacities since 2012—from running content for a local community nonprofit in New Orleans and studying the power of communal spaces to leading the AWS Serverless Heroes and Community Builders programs and launching and running Common Room’s Uncommon community, a healthy and fun space where more than 1000 community and DevRel builders share expertise and collective elevate the community function.

Todd Nilson is an experienced digital strategist with over 25 years of consulting experience, specialized in community-building, digital workplace transformations, and marketing strategy. He has additional background in competitive intelligence research, gamification, recruitment, employer branding, and virtual collaboration.

Todd has led transformational technology workshops and projects for brands such as Activision, Facebook, SAP, Truth Initiative, Steelcase, Schneider National, Sargento, Greenpeace, and Medtronic.

Jonny Quirk has spent 15 years working for numerous startups on both sides of the Atlantic, specialising in community, marketing, growth, and expansion. Ex Yelp, WeWork Labs, Deliveroo and beyond...Always battling to explain the real value of community to C-suites and venture-rich dreamers...

Krystle Blough launched her career in tech when she joined wikiHow at its very beginning in 2005, where she cultivated the community through incredible growth as Director of Community until 2016. She is now the Head of Community at Boto.io, a growth-stage startup in the Web3 space with the mission of building the world’s biggest, collaborative library of bots. Krystle now lives in Bend, Oregon with her husband and daughter.

Abbiola Ballah (she/her) is a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB) Mentor and Founder of Phern Education Studios. She founded Phern Education Studios to be a catalyst for change in the DEIB space by prioritizing not just learning but taking action.

In her signature mentorship program, Taking Inclusive Action, she guides online business owners and community leaders to go beyond simply stating their stance on inclusion and instead building practices and policies to create online environments where people feel like they belong, no matter their identities.

Abbiola also offers private DEIB consulting and workshops for larger organizations.

Previously, Abbiola applied a DEIB lens to help revise the Standards of Good Practice of Education Abroad in collaboration with the Forum on Education Abroad which is recognized by the US Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission as the organization for setting the standards for education abroad programs internationally.

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Abbiola has lived internationally in Japan, the USA, and Belize for 20+ years and worked as an educator and program designer for 17+ years, giving her a unique lens through which she approaches DEIB.

Abbiola has spoken at the Yellow Co. Values Summit, Wealth and Wellness Network Summit, and at private universities, in business masterminds, and online communities. She has been featured in Feminist Magazine (FEM) as well as on several podcasts such as the Transcend Your Dichotomy Podcast, Badass Business Podcast, and the Career Resilience Podcast to name a few.

She studied International Education Management at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Applied Linguistics & TESOL at the University of Leicester in the UK, and Communication Arts at St. Francis College, New York.

Abbiola is an avid reader, travel nerd, theatre buff, and Japanese karaoke queen.

Ilker is a Community Management and Strategy consultant who specializes in determining and enhancing the business value that communities can provide to organizations.

Ilker led Olympic volunteers in London 2012 Olympic Games, innovation projects at Cisco’s innovation center in Istanbul and Google’s developer communities in Turkey, Central Asia and the Caucasus - a community of over 50 thousand members across 10 countries. He has been supporting many local and international clients as a community strategy consultant under ilkerakansel.com since 2020.

Ilker is also the founder and a host of the Istanbul Chapter of the CMX Connect network and is currently writing the very first book on Community Management in Turkish."

Jamie is a community strategist and startup advisor, specializing in developer experience. She has been building communities for tech companies for over a decade, working with companies like SAP and MongoDB to build and grow developer communities from zero to over 3 million users strong. Today, she is the Sr. Director of Community for venture capital firm, Unusual Ventures, where she works with tech startup founders to shape the developer communities and community-led organizations of the future. 

Alesa Little has over 16 years of experience in online training and education, with 10 years of experience managing online forums and communities. Alesa is enthusiastic about building engaging community experiences that drive adoption and success. She believes in the power of community building as a means to change lives, foster belonging, and augment support experiences.

Alesa has a Bachelor of Science degree from BYU and is CompTIA A+ certified. Alesa is also a podcaster in her spare time and gets nerdy about strong female characters in science fiction/fantasy entertainment.

Drew Bonillas is a Customer Community Manager at BigCommerce. He is responsible for supporting, engaging, and growing the global community of BigCommerce merchants and retailers. Drew’s passion for community building fuels his work to help customers develop meaningful connections with each other — and with the BigCommerce team. Outside of work, you can find Drew cooking with friends and exploring his home of Austin, TX.

Lori is a CMX Denver Co-Host, a CHAOSS.Community podcast panelist, and the Developer Community Lead at IndyKite. She's built communities for SaaS companies and associations, and brings 15+ years of tech writing, project management, and event management experience to community management. A recent cancer survivor, she's planning a podcast on the cancer survivors and careers. Her hobbies include masters swimming, apparel sewing, and being a field hockey mom, backyard birder, and volunteer. She lives in Denver with her husband, daughter, cat, and dog. 

My name is Yurii, and I am 200% sure that community is where people take other peoples' problems as their own. So I use this knowledge by applying my expertise in real life and helping people foster their communities! And while doing it, I talk with community experts on a podcast about their Community Life and explore Communiverse together 🌌

Once upon a time, Piper thought she wanted to be a writer, but she ended up spending all her time in the writer communities instead of actually writing. That was when she realized she would rather work in the community space than write.

Piper has been working in the field for about fifteen years. She started in the trenches and worked her way up. She finds personal meaning & fulfillment in her work and loves to help others do the same.

Taylor is on a mission to build the opposite of loneliness in the world. As Head of Community at Groove, she brings solopreneurs from around the world together to get sh*t done and make progress on the projects that matter to them. Before Groove, she built powerful online learning experiences with best-selling author, Seth Godin, at Akimbo and altMBA. Outside of work, you can find her exploring the streets of NYC, reading outside, playing board games, and planning her next event.

Céline is a seasoned Community Professional, having started her career at Yelp in 2014, where she grew the community of her hometown of Frankfurt, for 3 years. She has been working with different types of communities ever since as a consultant as The Community Mentor. Her experience covers a range of startups from the tech field to lifestyle brands as well non-profits, such as the Global Shapers of the WEF. She is at the moment leading the Canva Creators Community in Germany since beginning of 2022. 

Born in Albania, raised in Italy, educated in the UK, and now living in Estonia, Eni is a connector on a mission of building global communities for businesses that up-level humanity. She currently works as the Head of Community at Mindvalley, a global platform that delivers transformational education, online and offline. In this role, she leads the learning experience of millions of students. In the past, she collaborated with the Italian Ministry of Education and the International Organization for Migration, before kicking off her career in community building.

Paz is an Australian community builder, co-founder and classical guitarist. She loves all things community, having left her full time job to build The Community Collective, a community for community builders in the Australian and New Zealand startup space.

She loves helping people to launch startups and build communities. Previously she managed Startup Victoria’s founder community, Australia's largest startup community with over 60,000 people, grew RMIT Activator’s entrepreneurial community from 500 to 5000+ over 3+ years and nurtured an in person migrant women community through entrepreneurship at not-for-profit SisterWorks.

Paz now lives in Torquay along the Surf Coast in Australia where she loves body boarding and composing relaxation music as Paz Sounds (her personal music brand).

My name is Etienne Nichols, and my mission is to engineer a worthwhile life.

As a MedTech Professional, Community Manager, & Podcaster I have a passion for people, building productive relationships, and delivering true quality results, on time, on budget.

My goal is to help MedTech Professionals work efficiently towards commercialization by connecting them with other MedTech pro's to improve their Design Controls and Quality Management System processes. I love helping MedTech professionals bring safe, high quality products to market.

If there's anything I do to help, reach out! People are my passion.

Amanda Martin is currently the Head of Community at Unbounce, a marketing SaaS company with a core purpose of helping small businesses grow smarter. Since starting in this role in September 2021, she has led the charge to build out a new strategy and implement a revitalized community — involving a complete migration from one community platform to another — which launched in May 2022. Before Unbounce, she spent five years managing a global community of data professionals who work with the Microsoft Data Platform. With a background in marketing and sociology, Amanda found her professional sweet spot when she discovered the world of community management and hasn't looked back since. Outside of her working life, she can be found hiking in the Canadian Rockies near her home, travelling the world (after a two year hiatus!) and spending time with her young family.

Arlen Kimmelman, overachiever, M.A., Ed.M.; iorad’s Dir of Program Engagement; manages iorad’s Education Ambassadors; Google Cert Trainer; Nat’ Bd Certified Teacher; Cert School Librarian; Cert English Teacher; NJ Assoc. of School Librarians Past-Prez providing professional development since 2002.

Adam Davis, B.S. Education, M.M.E.; Teacher for Hudsonville Public Schools; Google Cert Trainer; Google Diamond Level Product Expert in Sheets/Docs/Slides; Active presenter on technology and music education. He has presented on various topics at state, national, and international conferences.

Erin Mikail Staples is a very online individual passionate about facilitating better connections online and off. She’s forever thinking about how we can communicate, educate and elevate others through collaborative experiences.

Currently, Erin builds community and thinks about the philosophy and tooling of the community and developer advocate world at Orbit. Much of her day is spent empowering individuals to build, foster, and embrace healthy communities. Outside of Orbit, She is a comedian, graduate technical advisor, no-code content creator, triathlete, avid reader, and cat parent.

Most importantly, she believes in the power of being unabashedly "into things" and works to help friends, strangers, colleagues, community builders, students, and whoever else might cross her path find their thing.

Tirza Austin is an online community builder for the American Society of Civil Engineers. She’s implemented and launched various programs including the ASCE mentoring program and a virtual roundtable series.

She is a CMX Communiteer and CMX Host for the DC area, Area Director for her Toastmasters District, Cookie Mom, Troop Leader, and Troop Organizer for her daughter's Service Unit/Troop, manager of her daughter's baseball team, and contributor to the Community by Association blog and a member of American Society of Association Executives. She has little free time, but when she does she enjoys spending time with her nine-year-old daughter, Pearl outside or by the water. 

In 2010, I transitioned from male to female and put my entire 10-year journey on Youtube.

Over the next decade, that decision has snowballed into an active and healthy career in community management, diversity, education, and measurement in anonymous community health.

In 2016, we created RESCQU.NET. – a nonprofit organization that simultaneously marketed to an invisible audience and catered to their anonymity. In 2017 I graduated with a degree focused on community management that took me around the world. In 2017 I became a full-stack marketer at DigitalMarketer. For the past 5 years, I've built quantitative and qualitative data measurement tools for brand communities online.

With SociallyConstructed.Online I am committed to helping businesses build robust, self-sustainable communities. I want to offer you and your business that same chance.

Spend fewer resources on advertising. Develop a solid measurement-focused strategy that monitors lifetime value across the customer value journey to build a financially and socially rewarding community for you.

Shawna James is a Community and Events Manager at PreSales Collective, an online professional community which serves over 22,000+ PreSales professionals globally. She manages their event season and leads special programming including: Ambassadors; DEE&I, and WISE (Women in Solutions Engineering). Prior to pivoting into working in tech communities Shawna spent most of her career in non-profit, getting her start in Community organizing with the March for Our Lives: Boston movement. Shawna lives in Brooklyn, NY with her dog Nova.

Nikiya Crisostomo is the Head of Community at OpenSpace, a construction technology company based in San Francisco. She built the OpenSpace Community, a space for construction professionals to connect, learn, and innovate. Prior to working in community, Nikiya was an engineer in the construction industry. She considers herself an anti-disciplinarian, with interests and skills that break down the barriers between disciplines. As a multi-hyphenate Filipino woman working in the white male dominated spaces of construction and technology, she brings her passion for diversity in everything she does.

Willa Tellekson-Flash is Director of Community at Public.com, the popular investing platform where members build a modern portfolio of any asset class – from stocks & ETFs to crypto & NFTs to art, collectibles, and more all in one place. At Public.com, Willa leads investor engagement and advancement, supporting a community of millions of investors, creators, and analysts.

Willa is a respected leader in the community space, having spoken about community-building and leadership for Built In, Uncommon, Aspire IQ, and Community Club, and on podcasts such as The Community Corner,  Companies & Communities, Your Brand, Your Story, and Your World, Your Money. In 2022, she was named to Forbes' Under 30 list for her community leadership at Public.com.

Prior to joining Public.com, Willa championed customer experience and advocacy at LOLA and held editorial roles at Here Magazine (Away) and Well+Good. She holds a B.A. in Education Studies and French from New York University and is an avid distance runner.

With nearly a decade of community experience in both irl & digital forms, I've got you when it comes to community development! Having strolled into community building even as a substitute teacher, I have been able to progress into roles with non profits, B2B/B2C start ups & individual community builders.

I have a particular knack for: facilitation, engagement strategy, metric creation, user research, roadmapping, & interview assistance.

Aside from those goodies, you can find me typically involved in: writing (shocker), drinking hot beverages, acquiring tattoos, holistic health research, reading historical fiction|true crime|spirituality, playing volleyball, watching heavy dramas, practicing tarot and of course traveling often.

Monica is a true community builder who devotes her time to the development of community in web3. She is passionate about leading with integrity, creating the win-win effect and understanding what it takes to build a truly great enterprise in the web3 space during unpredictable, fast-moving times.

Monica is Head of Community at Upstream where she is building the future of communities through their DAO-in-a-box, no code, full-stack platform. At Upstream, they focus on supporting and building inclusive communities in the web3 space on a global scale. Upstream has successfully transitioned from a web2 community platform to a web3 DAO platform in less than a year.

Over the years, Monica has supported South Florida's Tech and Startup Scene. Monica serves on the board of the Shrimp Society and prior to Upstream she has spent her time connecting startups, investors, major tech communities, and universities in South Florida. She uses her diverse experience to use creativity as the gateway to help meet the needs of our growing web3 community.

For her it's simple. Work hard, be kind and master the art of 'how can I bring you value?'

Josh's career in tech has been deeply linked to community. He first served as an advocate for a startup launching in the Spiceworks community. Since then, he's participated in, presented at, and contributed to open-source and product-centric communities. Today, Josh is Head of Growth at Common Room, the intelligent community growth platform, where he helps community, DevRel, and web3 leaders build powerful, repeatable, member-centric programs, measure their impact, and prove the ROI of their communities to stakeholders across their organizations.

Chris is an award-winning community and collaboration leader, who always thinks "people first, technology next." For more than 20 years, he has helped organizations build relationships with their audiences through strategic communication, community management, content development, and global business strategy. He believes in the proven power of community to deepen trust, increase loyalty, reduce costs and grow revenue. And that power comes when you align community with real business goals to design meaningful online experiences and deliver measurable business results. He is driven by a passion to empower companies to leverage the power of community as a strategic asset and competitive advantage in the marketplace. Chris began his community journey launching and growing a live music community that explores and celebrates the concert fan experience. Throughout his career he has helped agencies, clients and big brands build strategies that engage and deepen relationships with their customer and employee audiences. Currently, he is Head of Community at Esri. Chris speaks, teaches and consults regularly.

Bri Leever has been architecting and growing communities for over seven years. Her life's craft is to facilitate transformation through community and beauty. Now, Bri she partners with purposeful brands to help them transition from being product-led to community-led by crafting a community framework to activate their top customers. She splits her time between Portland, OR and Hawaii Island and you’ll usually find her in the water in her free time.

Maria Tranquilli is a community executive working at the nexus of innovation, entrepreneurship and defense, driving community-led solutions to the world's biggest problems. With over 15 years experience leading global community growth from the trenches of multi-million dollar businesses, Maria previously was Head of Global Programs and Founder Community @ NASDAQ, and currently leads Defense Programs & Community @ Shift. 

Rebecca Houghton is a technical program manager with over twenty years experience in the tech industry and ten years working on customer experience programs and support communities. As the platform planner for the Microsoft Answers Support Community, Rebecca drives the platform business requirements and strategy for Microsoft’s largest online support community.

April dreams of a world where everyone feels fully valued and seen. She is an entrepreneur and choreographer who founded and sold a community-first business after 11 years and now builds community strategy for the world’s most inspiring companies through Wondry, an agency focused on community-building through education and sprint work.

This love for building connection is no coincidence. Moving through over 22 foster homes as a child left her with the strong conviction that a sense of belonging can radically change the course of one’s life, and now dedicates all of her time to people-first endeavors.

Her newest project is “How to People”, a podcast about navigating sticky situations and developing deeper EQ. She’s the one all of her friends call when they need the right words for tough conversations .

When she’s not building community, you can usually find her teaching at Infuse Dance Studio, a dance studio for adults she opened in 2011. She might also be cuddling her dog Roo or quoting way too much Seinfeld.

Molly Kipnis is the Community Manager at Gong, where she helps revenue professionals learn, share, and grow in their careers. On a typical day at Gong, Molly can be found creating content, developing growth strategies, executing programs, and connecting with Gong Community members. CMX holds a special place in Molly’s heart — Molly met her now-manager and mentor Nisha Baxi, Head of Community at Gong, during a virtual session at last year’s CMX Summit. Molly lives in Chicago, IL with her fiancé Alex and her doodle Penelope. On the weekends, you can find Molly trying a new workout class or pasta dish.

Karin is Head of Developer Community for StarTree, a start-up founded by the original creators of Apache Pinot. From a B.A. in broadcasting and a background in major entertainment and event production companies, she started exploring tech fields and discovered her love for application development and data science. Karin explored all the directions her career could have gone and took a leap of faith, entering a field where today she’s gratified to discover all the ways she can make a difference. 

Sumeru (aka 'Sumo') is also known as "The Community Guy for SaaS 🐮"

He's helped 3 SaaS brands become unicorns through Community & Content (Addepar, Gong.io & Thinkific)

He is a passionate community builder, and has built communities with over over 300,000 members

He is also the founder of the largest community for B2B customer enablement professionals called CustomerEducation.org

His work has been featured in leading publication like CBS News, The Globe and Mail, Yahoo Finance and The Wall Street Journal

Tali is passionate about people, communities, and technology.

As Elementor's Community Manager, she helps web professionals to build their local communities, support each other, and grow their businesses.

Community and community-led initiatives are her favorite methods of spreading human solidarity and knowledge. 

Lucy heads up Teach For All's effort to build an interconnected, global community where the tens of thousands of teachers, alumni and staff in Teach For All’s global network are connected to and learning from one another, to accelerate their local impact. By 2023, there’ll be 100,000+ alumni spread across 60 countries and 20,000 teaching participants in classrooms. As the size of Teach For All’s global network grows, the value of a thriving interconnected global community grows exponentially. Before joining Teach For All in 2016, Lucy helped build the Teach First Innovation Unit – running incubation and acceleration programs for UK focused social entrepreneurs. She has also spent time building new programs at the English Department for Education as a Policy Fellow, UNHCR and Oxfam GB. She has a Masters in Educational Leadership and is a qualified teacher having taught Politics & Social Studies at a high school in the UK for two years at the start of her career.

Erin is a passionate community builder who believes that an active community has the potential to be a driving force within any organization. She looks to infuse community throughout the entire journey, from prospect to customer as well as internally, to ensure employees within an organization understand the value and impact of a flourishing community. While managing Docebo Community in its first full year, Erin has navigated many obstacles as a team of one but she has risen to the challenge and is paving the way for a growing community team. 

Drew Frey has been a community builder since 2009. Before leading user programs at Zendesk, he spent four years at Webroot where he led their community and customer advocacy programs. Keeping pace with changing technologies to build relationships between brands and customers is what he finds most fascinating about this line of work. Based in Denver, Colorado with his wife and two dachshunds, he spends his time watching soccer, playing golf, skiing, and hiking.

Whitney Knight is a brand builder with over a decade of experience working with global and national brands. Whitney founded The Ask Method in 2021 to help other women leverage the power of networking and asking for more. Whitney lives in Memphis, TN.

With an inherent mindset to put the customer first, I am deeply focused on fostering communities of practice and finding new ways for technology users to connect, collaborate, and share, from co-building user group networks, to reimagining advocacy and future marketplaces.

As lead Community Strategist with SIemens Digital Industries Software, I am focused on developing a robust Community strategy and leading the company towards our 2025 Community Vision as we begin the transformation to SaaS.

Sanmaya Mohanty is the Program Manager of APAC Community for PowerToFly - the largest gender diversity recruiting platform and community connecting women with fortune 500 corporations and fast-growing startups. Sanmaya launched PowerToFly’s Diversity Hackathon Series in early 2022, and the Diversity Hackathon Series has garnered over 25,000+ registrations in just 6 months. He has hosted over 100 chats with female thought leaders worldwide. Sanmaya is an avid traveller and often travels across India solo. He is also the creator of https://guide.cmgr.page/ a comprehensive resource for community managers.

Long before Emily knew the job title, “Community Manager” existed - she was building thriving communities. She’d always had a knack for building strong relationships with customers and intuitively understood how connections between humans transpire. Emily realized when you’re tapped into the nuance of those dynamics, you can create magic inside of communities and impact the bottom line of your business at the same time.

Emily developed a mastery for the nuance and foundational principles that create thriving communities where the people love to be, and businesses thrive from the impact those communities drive.

She applied this mastery to co-founding XY Adviser, a highly engaged global professional network of financial advisers and built a community where 100% of the content shared on the XY platform is member-generated. With her creative approach to community building, Emily has championed a culture of sharing, collaboration and positivity in an industry notoriously known for working in silos and isolation. 

Kaila only has 1 rule and it’s to never go straight home after work. In a city like New York, the opportunities to be a part of amazing communities are endless.

She’s a multi-passionate community builder and storyteller hosting dinners in the NYC tech scene and co-creating company wide events for The Org. She didn't start her career cultivating community for tech startups. It was a windy road of tenacity, gaining self awareness through hard lessons, and a lot of kindness from others. After years of catalyzing professional communities in NYC and Seoul as a “passion project” on the side, she quit her main job in software sales enablement in May 2021. It gave her the feeling of closing a great book and the anticipation of opening the next one.

Unemployed and full of energy, she volunteered with Seoul Startups, the largest international community of entrepreneurs, investors, designers, and developers in South Korea. The experience of hosting events amidst a pandemic and strict city rules is what solidified her conviction in gathering. People were craving to come back together in person. She used this opportunity to be creative in how people met up – morning hikes, hackathons, and intimate lunches. Coming together for a shared experience is the fabric of a thriving community.

Last year, she got hired at The Org to cultivate their internal community and grow their external community. Currently, she is putting on more intimate dinners and events in Soho while co-leading the annual Offsite in late September. When she’s not busy connecting people, she writes a newsletter, creates TikToks, and runs in Central Park. She’s @kailajlim across socials.

Jessica leads the Lenovo eCommerce global team responsible for the EDU, Gaming, and SMB Communities. During her 20+ years in EdTech, Jessica held venture growth and marketing strategy roles for EdTech startups and VC firms focused on online learning, STEM+ literacy, and workforce development. In addition to her role at Lenovo, Jessica is an adjunct professor and Advisory Board Member for the Master of Arts in Educational Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nisha Baxi is the Director of Community at Gong and former Head of Marketing and founding team member of Monte Carlo Data. She has had the pleasure of growing a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurship community organization to 15K members, built programs and frameworks at Microsoft, Salesforce, and Facebook that are still used today continuing to drive adoption and fostering loyalty.

Nisha is on the Board of Directors for the American Red Cross, enjoys golf and lives in Mountain View with her husband, Neel Mehta. 

In her 12 years as a community professional, Nicole's experience has ranged from consulting to launching communities for startups to currently leading the community team at Zendesk. She's built communities across forums, social media, and offline. Her background also includes social media management, event production, communications, and freelance writing.

Nicole has become known at Zendesk as a strategic connector, and has made it her team's mission this year to identify opportunities to reduce redundancies and increase efficiency through cross-functional projects and collaboration. 

Jessica leads corporate team-building experiences that help teams connect through play. She also leads her own community & marketing consulting agency for education startups, schools and nonprofits. Jessica has managed more than a dozen online learning communities, facilitated technology leadership programs for teenagers and led growth of the Startup Weekend Education program worldwide. She volunteers on the SXSWEDU Launch Advisory Board. Jessica is more than a little obsessed about events and typically produces 50-100 events per year.

Jared Robin founded RevGenius during the height of the pandemic. Over the past 2 years its grown to 27,000 of the most engaged sales, marketing, revops and customer service professionals in the space.

After recovering fully from a major trauma in her late teens, (see wikipedia) Nikki J. Owen researched a wide range of tools that have helped her to live an active and healthy life.

Over the last 3 decades she has helped thousands of individuals beat stress and optimise their full potential. Her ground-breaking methods blend different therapeutic processes inspired by quantum mechanics, neuroscience, cellular biology and energy focussed interventions.

Nikki J. is an award-winning speaker and author of 5 books, including an international bestseller.

Fabian Lopez, CTSM, PMP is the Global Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Appfire, a company member of the Atlassian Ecosystem. Fabian has been an Atlassian Community Leader for the last 12 years. He founded five local chapters, two in Argentina and the three in the USA. He has organized more than 180 international community gatherings, he wrote 30+ articles and won 6 Atlassian awards for volunteer involvement. Former member of Atlassian Community Advisory Board.

Hawk (first name Sarah, but keep that on the down-low) is an expert in the UX of community platforms and is currently the COO at Discourse. Originally a software developer, she has spent the last decade in community roles and works remotely from her home in New Zealand. When away from the screen, Hawk is a gym instructor, a wine drinker, and a mother of twins.

Kenneth Refsgaard is the Community Strategy Director at inSided where he is responsible for community best practices and thought leadership while working closely with customers like Zapier, Venafi, and Unqork. Prior to joining inSided Kenneth spent 15 years building and managing community programs for major brands like TomTom and Sonos. With inSided now part of the Gainsight family, Kenneth is particularly fascinated by the intersection of Customer Success and digital engagement via communities.

My name is Etienne Nichols, and my mission is to engineer a worthwhile life.

As a MedTech Professional, Community Manager, & Podcaster I have a passion for people, building productive relationships, and delivering true quality results, on time, on budget.

My goal is to help MedTech Professionals work efficiently towards commercialization by connecting them with other MedTech pro's to improve their Design Controls and Quality Management System processes. I love helping MedTech professionals bring safe, high quality products to market.

If there's anything I do to help, reach out! People are my passion.