Kirthiga Reddy brings over twenty years of experience leading technology-driven transformations to her role as Co-founder & CEO, Virtualness. She is Founding Investment Partner of F7 seed fund. She serves on the Board of Directors for WeWork and Pear. Previously, she was the first female Investing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers (SBIA), manager of the $100B+ SoftBank Vision Fund. At SBIA, Kirthiga focused on frontier, enterprise and health tech investments and managed a portfolio of $5B+. She served on the Board of Directors for Collective Health and Fungible. She also served on the Investment Committee for Emerge, global accelerator for brilliant companies led by underrepresented founders. Prior to SBIA, she was Managing Director, Facebook India and South Asia for over six years, starting as their first employee in India. Her subsequent experiences at Facebook focused on emerging and high-growth markets including Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and the Middle East. She has also served as Chair, Stanford Business School Management Board. Kirthiga holds an MBA from Stanford University, where she graduated with highest honors as an Arjay Miller Scholar, an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a B.E. in Computer Science from Marathwada University, India. She has been recognized as Fortune India’s “Most Powerful Women” and as Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business” among other recognitions.

David Higley, Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co.: Dave Higley is a Managing Director in the Interactive Media & Technology group. Dave provides a broad range of advisory services, including M&A, capital raising and strategic advisory for public and private digital media and interactive entertainment companies. His clients have included large cap companies such as Activision and The Walt Disney Company, as well as emerging companies such as Bungie (in its pending acquisition by Sony), inXile (acquired by Microsoft), OneTwoSee (acquired by Comcast), Miximo (acquired by Adobe) and multiple transactions for Unity Software. Prior to joining Lazard, Dave was the founder and managing partner at Bond Lane Partners, a boutique investment bank focused on digital media and interactive entertainment. Before that he was a managing director and global head of digital media at UBS Investment Bank, where he helped form and scale its global technology group and established its digital media coverage effort. Over his career, has completed over 150 M&A and financing transactions for digital media and interactive entertainment companies. Dave received a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Southern California and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehigley/

Adam Friedman is an Executive at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the world’s leading entertainment and sports agency, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, London, Nashville, and Beijing, among other locations globally. In this role, Friedman works across the agency to maximize value, generate revenue, and drive key business development activity for the agency’s most prolific and entrepreneurial clients. Friedman leads a cross-departmental group of agents and executives focused on the evolving landscape of NFTs and web3.  He works with such web3 endemic clients as former Major League Baseball player-turned-artist Micah Johnson, 13-year-old TIME Artist-in-Residence Nyla Hayes, the Cool Cats NFT collection, the metaverse Virtua, and Tally Labs’ Jenkins The Valet, to bring new forms of content and IP to the masses, in addition to advising the agency’s traditional clients, helping bridge the gap between web2 and web3. Friedman is an investor at Connect Ventures, an early-stage investment partnership between CAA and global venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), through which he serves as a Board Director for Mojito, a web3 platform for NFT commerce, finance, and community engagement; Jomboy Media, a sports and entertainment digital media platform; and GHIA, a non-alcoholic aperitif.  While at CAA, Friedman has worked extensively with clients across film, television, music, and sports to build and incubate new business ventures, as well as identify and execute on strategic opportunities for long-term asset value creation. He has also advised numerous corporate clients, including CJ Entertainment, Cirque du Soleil, Cumulus Media, Econet Media, EverFi, IMAX, and Opry Entertainment Group. Prior to joining CAA, he worked in Media Strategy at The Madison Square Garden Company, sitting on a small team overseeing media and marketing strategy for the $1 billion transformation of Madison Square Garden.  Friedman was named to Forbes’ 2018 30 Under 30 list, serves on the Board of the Entertainment, Media & Communications Network for The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, and is a member of the University of Pennsylvania's Benjamin Franklin Society. Friedman graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania.

Ken Lagana is the Executive Vice President of Digital Sales of Audacy. Audacy is a leading multi-platform audio content and entertainment company with the country’s best collection of local music, news and sports brands, a premium podcast creator, major event producer, and digital innovator. Audacy engages 200 million consumers each month, bringing people together around audio content that matters to them. In this role, Lagana leads sales strategy for the company’s large and rapidly growing digital business, including the Audacy app and Audacy’s Podcast Network, which includes Cadence13, an industry leader in podcast creation and distribution and Pineapple Street Media, an award-winning, renowned independent producer of top-rated podcast content. Prior to joining Audacy (then Entercom) in 2019, Lagana served as Head of Sales and Marketing for Megaphone, the leading provider of breakthrough podcast technology for publishers and advertisers. He played a key role in developing and promoting Megaphone Targeted Marketplace (MTM), the company’s game-changing advertiser-driven targeting and measurement solution. Previously, Lagana was Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing for CBS Digital Media where he oversaw revenue generation and integrated marketing for the company’s entertainment, news and sports properties globally. His media career spans over 20 years and also includes sales and management positions at Turner Broadcasting and planning and strategy roles at Grey Advertising. Lagana earned a Bachelor of Science degree in strategic communications from the University of Delaware.

Seth Shapiro, Emmy® Award winner, Chairman, Web3 Advisory Council, NAB: Seth Shapiro is a two-time Emmy® Award winner and a long-time pioneer at the intersection of media, technology and finance. He has worked with partners including AT&T, Betfair, Comcast, DIRECTV,Disney, Goldman Sachs, Intel, IPG, IBM, NBC, Telstra, Turner, Universal and Warner Bros. Currently the Founding Chair of the NAB's Web3 Advisory Council, Mr. Shapiro has served as a five-year Governor at the Television Academy, and as a member of its Executive Committee; an Adjunct Professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts; Head of Interactive Production at DIRECTV; and Senior Games Producer at the Walt Disney Company. He has been a Consulting Expert in major media cases before both the Department of Justice and the FCC. A trained equity options trader and advocate of blockchain technology, Shapiro was CEO of Alpha Networks (with IBM), founder of Artaku NFT, and an EIR at Alphabit Fund, a blockchain-based hedge fund in the UAE. Mr. Shapiro sits on the Advisory Councils of the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts and the Moody College of Communication (University of Texas-Austin)..