AFN Board Member, Geoff McQueen, joined David Brown from Austrade's San Francisco Landing Pad, and Anastasia Volkova, for an 'ask me anything' style webinar about US market entry and building a successful tech company in the US.

Alisdair is a technology visionary, with two decades at the forefront of innovations in cybersecurity, machine learning and analytics. Since co-founding ThreatMetrix in 2005, he has been the driving force behind developing the world’s largest Digital Identity Network. He has pioneered and patented seminal technologies for Internet security. He is frequently cited by global press, including CNBC, Forbes, BBC News, and the South China Morning Post and his quarterly Cybercrime Report has garnered worldwide coverage for its data-driven insights on fraud, payments and cybercrime. Prior to ThreatMetrix, Faulkner was Founder and CPO at NetPriva, and he has held senior management positions at Accenture. He holds a MS from Adelaide University.

Originally from Sydney, Ash started the money side of AngelList – the most successful startup investing platform in the world that now manages over $1B. Following his success at Angelist, Ash started Zetta Ventures, the first fund in the world focused on intelligent systems. He has invested in Aussie companies Canva and Kaggle, as well as others including Clearbit and Numerai. Ash also co-founded Topguest, a Founders Fund-backed company that built customer analytics technology for companies like United and sold in for eight figures only 18 months after starting.

A thought-provoking discussion on the Future of Gender Equity in Tech.

The panel included inspiring leaders:
- Aubrey Blanche, Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Atlassian
- Alexa Dennett, Head of Marketing and Communications at Wing
- Delyn Simons, Director of Product Marketing, Platform at Shopify
- Elizabeth Kinsey, Developer Marketing Manager at Slack

AFN Partner, Ben Wood of McCullough Robertson recently interviewed Founder and CEO of SurePact, Megan Avard. Megan was working in the infrastructure division of the Brisbane City Council, where she got the insight needed to help launch her business. SurePact is an enterprise SaaS solution that allows project and contract managers to identify, mitigate, and manage risks of deliveries from before early innovation, to the tender stage right through to closeout. This interview explores Megan's journey as a non-technical female founder and how she found success along the way.

Al is co-author of "Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Develop and Dominate Categories" (2016). Lauded by the likes of Marc Benioff and partners at Sequoia, Floodgate, and other Silicon Valley luminaries, Al's work focuses on helping companies succeed by designing - and then dominating - their category.

Prior to Play Bigger, Al started in the '80s, building real-time analytics engines for big steel manufacturers and brewing companies. In the early '90s, he applied data science to Australia's America's Cup - an innovation in sports performance analytics. In 1995 he co-founded Quokka Sports, which pioneered data-intensive sports immersion on the Internet and revolutionized the way people experienced sport. While the dot-com crash killed Quokka, the innovations pioneered live on in every online sports experience today. Al later joined Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe), where he led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design.

The disruption that excites founder Andrew Lacy is the key essential driver of many successful startups! We spoke to Andrew in July 2017 about co-founding Tapulous, one of the earliest, big mobile games makers for the iPhone which he sold to Disney in 2010.

Cathy is a founder and entrepreneur specializing in mobile and algorithmic big data products. Many Aussies in tech will also recall Cathy co-founded Chomp, an app search engine, which was acquired by Apple in 2012.

Cathy then became Director of Engineering at Apple for iTunes, the App Store and Maps. She's now the Director of Image Search at Google, and runs both product and engineering, after Google preemptively acquired her prelaunch search startup, code named Undecidable Labs. Cathy has degrees in computer science, pure mathematics and linguistics from the University of Western Australia.

Larry has fascinating founder insights to share; having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over twenty years during which time he founded six startups and accrued twenty patents to his name!

Enjoy the Fireside Chat with Larry where he talks about deep tech innovation and the new markets it creates. He also shares insights into what made his companies succeed, the natural cycle of deep tech companies and what to be aware of, CSIRO's commitment to funding early stage deep tech, what the big opportunity for CSIRO is and more!