Faculty

Deirdre Mahon

Deirdre is a marketer that loves to build, grow and measure. She's led marketing and GTM teams at numerous startups that have grown, been acquired and even went public. She loves to deeply understand the problem set, get close to users and tell stories through engaging content to motivate action and purchase. Deirdre's industry knowledge spans Data movement, Martech, Observability, Databases and more recently AI. She thrives on taking innovative products to market, disrupting the status quo, and always focuses on creating user value.

Adam Frankl

Adam Frankl is the best-selling author of The Developer Facing Startup. He has co-founded or been an early executive at a dozen VC-funded startups, including three developer-facing unicorns: Neo4j, Sourcegraph, and JFrog. As chair of the developer-facing track at Alchemist Accelerator, he has advised and coached hundreds of early-stage startups.

Find Adam's course for founders here: The Developer-Facing Founder's Academy.

Kenan Rappuchi

Kenan Rappuchi is the Founder and Chief Growth Officer of Sellerant, a leader in B2B startup and small business growth services. Working closely with founders, executive teams, partners and investors since 1995, Kenan specializes in helping startups navigate GTM (Go-To-Market) launch, acquire new customers, increase sales, implement scalable revenue operations and create sustainable growth throughout launch, scale and emerging enterprise business stages.

Jono Bacon

Jono Bacon has been building communities now for over 22 years. He has worked with over 200 businesses to help them build productive communities...from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. He is the author of five books, including the award-winning 'People Powered' (Harper Collins) and 'The Art Of Community' (O'Reilly) and he writes for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and others. He is also the creator of the Stateshift.

Bob Abbott

As a seasoned venture capital and technology executive with over 25 years of experience, I have watched dozens of Entrepreneurs struggle with these challenging decisions and more. I serve as a trusted confidante and/or board member to CEOs and founders, helping them navigate their most challenging business decisions. Whether it's strategic pivots, financial structuring, go-to-market execution, or leadership challenges, I provide the experienced perspective and guidance that leaders need through the ups and downs of company-building.

John Mark Walker

John Mark has been a leader in enterprise open source communities and ecosystems for over 25 years. Focusing on people and process over technology, he implements high-performing, cross-functional collaborations with key stakeholders. John Mark has built many communities and product rollouts and has spoken at numerous conferences on the subject of community engagement and business strategy. He wrote "There is no Open Source Community" in 2006 about economic trends driving open source adoption and publishes his industry thoughts at osenetwork.com.

Jenneviere Villegas

Jenneviere has spent 20+ years helping technical companies figure out how to talk to the people they're trying to reach. She was the first employee at CircleCI, where she built everything from operations to brand voice to DevRel, and later led community programs at Shopify that connected tens of thousands of users worldwide. Today, she consults for brands on go-to-market strategy, content, and community, helping technical founders bridge the gap between what they've built and why anyone should care.

Rosie Pongracz

Rosie is an engineer by training, a builder by nature, a full stack marketer by practice. She has lead go to market at startup and public companies (IBM, Salesforce, Intel, Carl Zeiss); with 20+ years of experience across platforms for cloud, data, AI, mobile. Rosie served on the board of NumFOCUS, which supports open source projects. Her passion is articulating value props and positioning for innovative technology; she is an instrument rated pilot, underwater photographer, and scifi junkie.

Melody Meckfessel

Melody Meckfessel is a founder, CTO, and builder at the frontier of AI, infrastructure and developer tools who believes building technology is a team sport. With over 25 years scaling engineering organizations—from early-stage startups to one of the world's largest technology companies—she has led engineering teams building systems that serve billions worldwide. Currently, she is the founder of an AI startup and works closely with early stage founders. Melody is a voice of engineering leadership and an advocate for women in technology and underrepresented founders.