More Speakers for Tech Agenda 2015: Rae, Andre, Seseri

We’re adding more amazing speakers to The Tech Agenda 2015, our year-end conference that offers an insider’s debriefing on the biggest issues facing some of our most innovative industries.

They make an already strong group even more impressive, and their resumes shine a spotlight on the diversity of topics that our experts will dive into once the program gets rolling on the afternoon of Dec. 2.

Make sure to get your tickets now to lock in the best prices possible—and don’t forget, we have special rates for all of you students and startups out there. Here’s a glimpse at our newest speakers, and what they’ll be bringing to the conversation:

Katie Rae, Managing Director, Project 11. If you’re involved with tech startups in the Boston area, you know who Rae is—or you should, anyway. She’s been helping entrepreneurs get the best start possible for years now, through work at Microsoft Startup Labs and more recently, TechStars Boston.

These days, you can find Rae with her longtime business partner Reed Sturtevant over at Project 11, an early stage venture firm that has investments in startups such as Kinvey, Codeship, and PillPack. We’ll be asking Rae to help us look out to the year ahead, and make big, bold predictions about what’s going to be affecting innovation and entrepreneurship in 2015 and beyond.

Jen Andre, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Threat Stack. The migration to cloud computing is one of the most important technology developments in recent years, and it’s still just picking up steam. The biggest names in technology are now staking a huge part of their future growth on being the dealers of online, flexible storage and computing power, including Microsoft and Amazon. Cambridge, MA-based startup Threat Stack has developed software that helps businesses keep their data secure as it moves between ever-changing “elastic” servers.

Andre is one of the big brains behind it all. A veteran of Symantec and Mandiant, Andre has helped guide Threat Stack from its founding in 2012 through the TechStars Cloud accelerator program and, earlier this year, a $2.7 million investment round led by Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. Oh, and she’s an insightful and entertaining writer as well, both on Twitter and Medium.

Rudina Seseri, Partner, Fairhaven Capital. The lack of women in the decision-making ranks of venture capital firms is a not-so-quiet embarrassment for the field in general—take a look at most staff rosters, and you’d be forgiven for thinking we were still in the 1980s. Seseri is one of the answers to that problem: with her elevation to partner in 2011, she became one of the few women occupying senior investment positions at a VC firm in Boston.

Seseri has been with Fairhaven since its start in 2007, and her investments span a variety of industries, including the next-generation Jibo personal robot and social media software startup Social Flow. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and previously worked on acquisitions and strategic investments at Microsoft. Safe to say, Seseri’s got an idea of what’s new and what’s next in the world of innovation investing.

There are plenty more speakers where these three came from, and we’re adding more in the weeks ahead as we get closer to the big date.

For now, make sure you grab your tickets to secure your spot for what we think will be the best, brightest, boldest debriefing on what really matters in technology and innovation in the year to come. We’ll see you at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology on Dec. 2.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.