Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur and the Chairman of VaynerX, a modern day communications parent company, as well as the CEO and Co-Founder of VaynerMedia, a full-service digital agency servicing Fortune 500 clients across the company’s 4 locations.

His fifth book “Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too” is available in stores now!

Gary rose to prominence in the late 90’s after establishing one of the first ecommerce wine sites, WineLibrary helping his father grow the family business from 4 to 60MM in sales.

Gary is also one of the most sought after public speakers alive today. He is a venture capitalist, 5-time New York Times bestselling author, and an early investor in companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Venmo and Uber. Gary has been named to both Crain’s and Fortune’s 40 Under 40 lists.

Rand Fishkin is the founder of SparkToro and was previously cofounder of Moz and Inbound.org. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. When Rand’s not working, he’s most likely to be in the company of his partner in marriage and (mostly petty) crime, author Geraldine DeRuiter. If you feed him great pasta or great whisky, he’ll give you the cheat code to rank #1 on Google.

Leland Melvin was 25 feet under water in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, a 6 million gallon pool, training to perform spacewalks as a NASA astronaut when he called the test director and asked him to turn the volume up in his headset. He never heard a reply and was immediately hoisted out of the pool to learn that he was deaf. Emergency surgery resulting in only partial recovery to his hearing led him to being medically disqualified to fly in space by NASA flight surgeons.

This is just one of the many career ending challenges Leland has overcome in his life. Before becoming an astronaut Leland was drafted by the Detroit Lions in the 1986 College Draft to play professional football but a hamstring injury thwarted his NFL career with Detroit and then later with the Dallas Cowboys. Hear his fascinating story of perseverance and how he ultimately traveled off-planet twice on Space Shuttle Atlantis to help build the International Space Station.

Julie Rice is an entrepreneur best known for co-founding the fitness phenomenon, SoulCycle. Rice served as Co-CEO at SoulCycle from 2006 to 2015 before joining WeWork in November 2017.

Rice’s life’s work has been about building community and these days she brings that focus to her new role at WeWork. At WeWork, Rice is approaching everything through the lens of community – she is focusing on WeWork’s brand and the experience WeWork provides its members, and seeking new and innovative ways to grow and share the WeWork experience around the globe.

Rice lives in NYC with her husband, Spencer, and their two daughters, Phoebe and Parker.  She is a board member of the Public Theatre and WeightWatchers, as well as an advisor to the women’s club, The Wing.

Valarie Bastek is currently the Director of Product Management and Business Solutions for Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, the world’s largest hotel franchise company with iconic brands such as Howard Johnson, Days Inn, and Super 8.  Valarie began her career with Wyndham Hotels and Resorts in 2011 as a content writer for the company’s brand Web sites.  Today, Valarie is responsible for search engine optimization, tag management, and large-scale digital brand integrations, such as La Quinta and AmericInn.  In 2016, Valarie was responsible for coordinating a cross-functional team of agencies and internal team members to re-launch all of the Wyndham Hotels and Resorts brands on a new, responsive platform, overhauling back-end technology, front end design, and organizational processes to achieve a true digital transformation.

Since founding the company, Seth has led Conductor through multiple financing rounds and extraordinary growth, including being ranked Inc’s 13th fastest growing software company and Crain’s Best Place to Work for 7 years running. Seth drives Conductor’s vision to transform marketing departments into customer-serving, result-driving teams. Today, a growing list of the world’s greatest companies, like Citibank, SAP, and CVS partner with Conductor to deliver greater value to their customers.

Seth speaks at industry events & universities as an expert in customer-first marketing, people-first culture and entrepreneurship. You can watch his most recent keynote here, follow him on twitter or get to know him better on Instagram. You can read his point of view on a variety of topics here including his recent post on modern leadership.

Jon is a 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list maker, an expert digital, growth, and product marketer, and a recognized global educator and keynote speaker. He’s currently an IBM Watson product marketer and New York University Adjunct Faculty of Social Media and Web Analytics. Jon further demonstrates his passion for marketing by teaching at General Assembly, while also advising the education non profit Exploration Summer Programs. Previously at Kickstarter, Stack Overflow, and MakerBot.

Amanda Garcia recently joined the Slack content team as an editor, helping to usher in SEO content and various stories for the blog. When she’s not searching for the perfect emoji for a Slack message, she’s packing her bags for her next travel adventure or exploring the amazing food scene in the San Francisco Bay Area.

A self-proclaimed marketing geek, Murilo de Favari is the Marketing Director for Omega Engineering, a pioneer in the sensing, monitoring, and control market. An experienced customer-advocate and business strategist, Murilo joined Omega in 2014 via the company’s expansion into Latin America, eventually holding marketing leadership positions in Canada and in the United States. His objectives include driving acquisition, lifetime value, and satisfaction through digital-first customer-centric programs.

Enthusiastic about storytelling, Murilo takes pride in architecting the best brand experience possible through digital initiatives that connect customers and their challenges to real solutions. In addition to his primary functions, Murilo is keen on developing creative data-driven talent.

His passion for marketing can be traced back to his years of experience on both the agency and client sides, where he helped brands grow their influence, awareness, and value in B2B and B2C verticals – from fashion to finance. Murilo holds a Bachelor of Social Communication degree from ESAMC, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Waseem Kawaf leads digital marketing at STANLEY Healthcare North America, a division of Stanley Black and Decker. He has driven digital innovation and transformation strategy for many leading companies such as Bose, Dell and Rite Aid. His focus and passion is to stay on the cutting edge of how transformative technology interacts with marketing.

Lakshmi Rengarajan is the Director of Workplace Connection at WeWork, where she is focused on keeping human connection at the heart of WeWork’s global community and member offerings. As companies of all sizes come to WeWork to enhance their employee experience, Lakshmi helps members create a connective workplace environment.

Previously, Lakshmi was Director of Event Design at Match.com working to develop methods for singles to go from simply meeting to actually connecting through intentional event and conversational design. Prior to Match, Lakshmi worked in brand strategy at FCB Chicago during which time she founded event forum, Me So Far, which tried to humanize the process of dating as the category moved to mostly online options. Lakshmi believes that the ability to help connect people is one of the most important leadership skills to develop as it allows us to then fully embrace all technology has to offer.

Lakshmi has a BA from the Johns Hopkins University and an MS from Northwestern University.

Duane Forrester is the Vice President of Industry Insights for Yext, leading industry outreach, evangelism and authorship for the company.  Between Microsoft and Yext, he was the VP, Operations with Bruce Clay, Inc, where he lead the operations for organic and paid search, social, content and design.

Prior to moving to BCI, he was a Sr. Product Manager responsible for Bing’s Webmaster Program, focused on helping small, medium and enterprise businesses improve their digital marketing efforts. Previously, he was an inhouse SEM running the SEO program for MSN in the US & Americas. He’s also the founding co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee, was formerly on the Board of Directors for SEMPO and is the author of two books: How To Make Money With Your Blog & Turn Clicks Into Customers.

Duane has written for publications ranging from SearchEngineLand and DuctTape Marketing, to Entrepreneur Magazine, the New York Times and Inc. He actively advises startups and large corporations, and even spent time advising the staff who maintain the White House’s websites.

Claudia Higgins (INFP, Ravenclaw) is the Natural Search Insight & Technology Manager at Argos, the largest non-marketplace retailer in the UK.

She fell into SEO – and found it a perfect fit for her – 5 years ago, after trying out careers as everything from ‘elementary school teacher’ to ‘tattoo artist’. She went on to specialise in the data and analytics side of SEO in early 2016.

With tens of thousands of products across hundreds of categories, millions of indexed pages and millions of organic search visits each week, Argos’ website provides her with huge amounts of data to play with and glean insights from.

Perhaps due to her teaching background, she is particularly interested in how understanding natural search insights can benefit teams across the business and influence how they can better understand user search behaviour in their approach to their jobs (for example content authors and trading teams).

To this end, she is conscious of time and experience obstacles and is always striving to help make complicated SEO data readily available and easy to interpret.

Kevin Rowe is Founder & CEO of PureLinq  an enterprise link building solution that leverages their proprietary technology to build scalable link building campaigns. PureLinq is a blog and influencer prospering tool with an existing database of over 60,000 bloggers and influencers that the PureLinq team has a relationship with, which they can actively distribute content to. PureLinq is a revolution in the SEO industry that is driving unprecedented predictability in link building.

Simon is a Strategic Account Director for the Organic Agency, a boutique agency in the UK, with a reputation for hitting well above its weight.

Previously a pro guitarist, his first foray in marketing was promoting bands and events. Ten years later, he now works with some of the largest and best-known brands in the UK.

Simon is responsible for the strategy and relationship for large organizations, and has developed a unique style to bring out the most of the agency/client partnership. Passionate about empowerment, his philosophy is to share knowledge as much as possible, and that by ensuring the right people are doing the best work, everyone benefits.

Rich is a first-generation American, an avid skier, a huge Arsenal fan, and he just so happens to make the best sheets ever. After graduating from NYU in 2003, Rich spent four years working through the ranks in the finance industry until the pesky Recession redirected his path. Rich decided to go back to the drawing board, returning to NYU to hone his entrepreneurial chops within the Stern School of Business — on a full-ride scholarship, no less. 

Lima Al-Azzeh has the privilege of being a senior editor on the content team at Slack. Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, reading, and contemplating how strange it is to write about oneself in third person.

Sachin is Senior Director, Global Head of Performance Marketing for StubHub (an eBay company), where he manages performance channels across all sites and apps, worldwide. In addition, Sachin oversees all customer acquisition efforts across performance and brand marketing, including data science, analytics, product and engineering for key channels.

In the current role, Sachin is responsible for optimizing media, message and customer journey across online channels to drive revenue growth. Sachin has established an in-house model for innovation at scale, running 30+ A/B test pilots every month, thereby continuously improving ROI across all channels. His efforts ensure that the last dollar is spent on the most effective customer acquisition channel via mix of in-house and available machine learning models.

Prior to this, Sachin served as the Director of Digital Media Strategy & Operations at HP Inc., where he cofounded the Media & Data Science Center of Excellence, and established AdTech and Programmatic practice.

Sachin holds his MBA from University of Michigan where he was inducted into Beta Gamma Sigma society; and his B.S. in engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Upasna, more commonly referred to as Pas, is the Search Lead at Ziff Davis, where she architects and executes the organic search strategies for PCMag and Mashable. Holding a degree in Biomedical Laboratory Diagnostics from Michigan State University, she started her career as a Clinical Research Scientist, but her love for data drew her into the field of SEO several years ago. Pas’ unique experience in science and search has allowed her to bring a logical and analytical approach to search and technical product management. Pas has employed these pragmatic strategies in her work for several Fortune 100 brands (including Ford Motor Company, Valvoline, Mars Corporation, Intel, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, and Kimberly-Clark) to increase their web visibility and authority while maintaining brand integrity to drive greater conversion.

Ali Harris is the Worldwide Head of Global Digital Marketing for Bitdefender, an industry leading cybersecurity company. Responsible for user journey, marketing automation, personalization, nurture, lead gen, and overall go-to-market strategy, Ali has an amazing team of digital pro’s that ensure the ever evolving landscape of digital optimization remains a playground rather than an adversary.
Ali started experimenting with SEO and digital tactics in the days when keyword density was cool and users were a distant consideration to search engine robots. Through the decades of algorithmic changes, one thing has remained her constant mantra: “If you make great content that the user is looking for, you will be found and you will be successful”.

Matt is Vice President of Digital Services at MoreVisibility, a full-service interactive marketing agency.  Matt oversees the Optimized Services and Analytics departments at MoreVisibility. With a focus on providing a truly customized approach, he is responsible for ensuring the long-term success of our clients’ organic digital marketing efforts and the use of analytics to improve all digital initiatives. Building on his years of experience in SEO, Content Strategy and measurement, Matt is uniquely suited to lead the team members responsible for enhancing and measuring our clients’ efforts. Matt holds a Bachelor’s of Business Administration with a major in Marketing from the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University.

Stephan Bajaio joined Conductor in March of 2008 and in has built three teams within the organization during his tenure. Currently, as VP of Professional Services, Co-Founder at Conductor, Bajaio has built the team from scratch to one with over 50 search experts globally. He devises and executes services and strategies which his team provides and guides clients through: site migrations/relaunches, technical audits, account configurations and a myriad of potential SEO issues and opportunities.

Bajaio brings a strong outspoken leadership style and an unmatched level of passion, strategy and creative industrialism, which have impacted Conductor clients and enhanced the overall company culture. Bajaio brings a wealth of SEO knowledge and outstanding customer relationship-building skills. He sits on the Board of Directors for SEMPO, Has Judged the inaugural The Drum US Search Awards in 2017, and is a evocative conference speaker, blog author and pod-caster.

Allyson is Senior Director of Digital Communications at NYU Langone Health, where she has spent six years as a leader of the organization’s digital transformation initiative for the medical center as well as two medical schools.

In her current role, she oversees a team of writers, editors, and producers focused on digital content strategy, information architecture, SEO, and analytics. She also partners with technical product management teams to design and develop new features aimed at improving user experience and conversion.

She has spent her career uniting her passions for medicine and digital content, with previous roles at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the National Institutes of Health, and abcnews.com.

Jodi is a psychotherapist at The Center for Health and Healing in NY. She is the author of the Amazon best selling book, “Mindful Is the New Skinny,” and speaks to groups and organizations on how to live a more fulfilling life using mindfulness. Jodi is partnering with “Maximize Your Talent,” an organization that teaches companies how to leverage emotional intelligence to increase productivity. She received her masters in social work from Columbia University and has trained extensively in mindfulness based stress reduction. She is a contributor to Thrive Global, Huffington Post, The Mindfulness App, Westchester Magazine and a sought after guest on many podcasts and radio shows.

Kristen ES King is a Marketing Specialist at Shoe Carnival, with a passion for search marketing. She believes SEO provides a unique opportunity within digital marketing to provide potential customers with the information they want and need, at the exact moment they need it.

Kristen leveraged her SEO knowledge and partnerships in 2018 to increase online organic search traffic by 20% and catapult search rankings on high-volume terms vital to the Shoe Carnival business.

Garth O’Brien began his Digital Marketing career in 2002 while practicing law. As the youngest attorney in the law firm he was tasked with learning and managing SEO and SEM. This rapidly expanded to blogging and engaging in the very early days of Social Media (StumbleUpon, Mag.Nolia, Digg).

In 2006, Garth left the practice of law to pursue a fulltime career in SEO and SEM. He ran the global Search Marketing program for a small technology company for several years and then worked under Duane Forrester as an SEO Manager for MSN in 2009. Garth was responsible for various MSN channels for North and South America; Money, Real Estate, Autos, Health and Lifestyle. At this point Garth focused primarily on SEO and observed the importance and cross-over with Social Media.

He then joined Catalyst Digital and for several years owned and directed the SEO programs for Hallmark, Chevron, IKEA USA, Xbox, Windows Phone and was one of four SEOs to support Microsoft.com. In this role he was the account and operations director working directly with the client and their internal teams. He also consulted on special SEO projects for Beats by Dre, Hawaiian Airlines and came full circle doing a tour of duty with MSN once more.

In March 2015, Garth joined GoDaddy becoming their Director and Global Head of SEO. Garth also drives several Social Media projects where SEO and Social converge and is one of three members responsible for the GoDaddy global content strategy. GoDaddy operates in over 40+ markets worldwide.

Garth has worked with and trained dozens of engineering, editorial, marketing, PR and executive teams about Search Engine Optimization and Social Media.

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst, has over 18 years of experience in client services, business development, and digital marketing.  A passionate digital strategist, Kerry has driven business results through search and social channels across multiple industries for many Fortune 1000. As the Managing Partner of Marketing Integration, Kerry currently leads the business development and marketing for all Search and Social business within Catalyst. Kerry’s prior experience includes VP/Group Director at DigitasLBi, where she led a team of 28 Search Marketing practitioners to successfully manage client programs across eCommerce, lead generation, and brand engagement through the use of cross channel tactics including, programmatic display, paid search, SEO, affiliate marketing, and aggregator marketing.

As the GroupM Search & Social Director of Client Development, Kerry also led a team focused on developing consumer-centric, cross-channel strategies to increase customer engagement, and providing solutions to client business challenges through customized Search and Social strategies. Her experience includes developing enterprise search and social programs integrated with digital and traditional media plans as well as global search programs.