Disrupt is where you’ll find innovation for every stage of your startup journey. Whether you’re a budding founder with a revolutionary idea, a seasoned startup looking to scale, or an investor seeking the next big thing, Disrupt offers unparalleled resources, connections, and expert insights to propel your venture forward.
Mark Wahlberg is a globally recognized actor, producer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist whose career spans more than three decades. Renowned for his versatility and excellence in entertainment, he has earned two Academy Award nominations and built an enduring legacy both on-screen and behind the scenes.
Beyond entertainment, Wahlberg is a Co-Founder of MUNICIPAL, a performance apparel and lifestyle brand, and an active entrepreneur and investor. His business ventures reflect his commitment to innovation, identifying opportunities, and building enduring brands.
Committed to giving back, Wahlberg founded the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation in 2001 to support inner-city children and teens. Through his entrepreneurial and philanthropic efforts, he continues to pursue meaningful opportunities that create lasting impact.
Mark's Sessions
Beyond the Check: The Power of Access
Mark Wahlberg built his career by spotting opportunities before others did. Now, alongside Bruce Lee, Senior advisor to the Wahlberg family office and business affairs, he’s applying those same instincts to venture investing while learning the discipline required to compete at an institutional level. Join them for a conversation about what influence can and can’t buy, how intuition complements data in investment decisions, and why they’re betting on health technology as the next chapter of their investing journey.
RJ Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009 to redefine the future of transportation through high-performance electric vehicles designed to enhance grid stability and long-term energy efficiency. He has led the company to establish vertically integrated technology platforms, build multi-program manufacturing capabilities, and set forth a strategic vision that will drive profound change in the transportation industry.
Today, Rivian’s consumer products include the software-defined R1S, R1T, R2, and Rivian Commercial Van. In the commercial space, Rivian is fulfilling Amazon’s historic order for 100,000 electric delivery vans and recently partnered with Uber to deploy up to 50,000 autonomous robotaxis.
In 2025, RJ expanded this vision beyond traditional automotive by founding Mind Robotics, an AI-enabled industrial robotics company building a world model and robot platform capable of performing complex industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale. Earlier in 2025, he co-founded ALSO, an electric mobility company spun out of Rivian to build right-sized vehicles for the autonomous delivery era.
Across these organizations, RJ operates from the belief that the only way to build the kind of world our kids’ kids deserve is by building teams obsessed with tackling hard problems and fostering collaboration across industries and society.
RJ's Sessions
Building the Impossible
Building a breakthrough software company is hard. Building one that also designs, manufactures, and delivers world-class hardware is even harder. Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe joins us to discuss what it takes to build an enduring company at the intersection of AI, software, robotics, manufacturing, and transportation.
Alexa founded Inspired Capital because she deeply understood the unique challenges of the founder journey. Before Inspired, she dropped out of Harvard Business School to launch LearnVest, one of the first fintech companies aimed at making a financial planning software accessible to millions. Discouraged by the capital partners available in NYC at the time, Alexa promised herself she would one day become the kind of investor she wished had existed. In 2015, LearnVest was acquired for nearly $400 million, marking one of the decade’s largest fintech acquisitions. Alexa went on to establish herself as an industry authority and New York Times bestselling author, with three books on financial planning.
Born in Kentucky and raised in Florida, Alexa attended Harvard College, where she earned an AB in Psychology with Honors. Her career began on Morgan Stanley’s Proprietary Trading Desk, before helping to build Drop.io, an early-stage startup that was later acquired by Facebook.
After LearnVest’s acquisition, Alexa became Northwestern Mutual’s first-ever Chief Digital Officer, leading product and technology strategy as the company achieved $30 billion in annual revenue. She later became Chief Innovation Officer, overseeing Northwestern Mutual’s venture arm.
Alexa is a 2016 Henry Crown Fellow and an inaugural member of President Obama’s Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship, where she first met her co-founder, Penny Pritzker. Her achievements have earned her numerous accolades, including a Forbes cover, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Most Powerful Women, Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30, and the title of World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Financially Fearless, Financially Forward, and Money Matters.
Alexa lives in New York City with her husband, Cliff Ryan, who leads Galvanize Climate Solutions’ venture and growth strategy, one of the world’s leading climate tech funds. Together, they are raising three children.
Alexa's Sessions
Startup Battlefield Final
The grand finale of TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition. Watch the final 5 teams from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup and $100,000.
What makes an investor say yes? In this audience-led Q&A, the Startup Battlefield finals judges take your toughest questions on what separates a fundable startup from the rest: team, traction, market opportunity, pitch delivery, red flags, and more. Come ready to ask and get candid answers straight from the investors making the decisions.
Garrett Langley is a technology entrepreneur who has dedicated the last decade of his career to the bold mission of eliminating crime and building thriving communities. Garrett founded and leads Flock Safety, the first all-in-one technology platform pioneering a new way for communities to think about public safety — with efficacy, affordability, transparency, and accountability in mind.
Flock Safety was founded following Garrett’s own experience with crime in his neighborhood. Upon approaching law enforcement to provide evidence and secure justice, he learned how existing neighborhood security solutions were simply not effective in providing actionable evidence that solves crime. An electrical engineer and serial technology entrepreneur, Garrett, along with co-founders Matt Feury and Paige Todd, founded Flock Safety in 2017 to transform the nascent public safety technology space with the most advanced technology, unwavering ethical commitments, and an inclusive community-forward approach.
Flock Safety’s transformative mission follows from Garrett’s experience growing successful companies that reimagined traditional sectors: Clutch, a monthly car subscription service that allowed consumers to swap their vehicle for any occasion, and Experience, a mobile-first fan experience platform that allowed users to upgrade live events. Overseeing the engineering, design, product, data science, and customer support groups at Experience, Garrett led the sale of the company to Cox Enterprises for $200 million in 2014.
Outside of work, Garrett dedicates his time to inspire future engineers to build technology that serves as a force for good. Garrett sits on several boards through his alma mater, the Georgia Institute of Technology, including the Advisory Board for the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Georgia Tech Athletic Association Alexander Tharpe Board, and the Board of Directors of Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures (GATV), which supports Georgia Tech’s economic development and innovation initiatives. He also serves on the Metro Atlanta Chamber 2023 Board of Directors, the Board of the High Museum, and the Board of the Atlanta History Center.
Garrett lives in Atlanta with his wife, Megan, his children, and his dog.
Garrett's Sessions
AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Public Safety
As AI moves from the cloud into the real world, few companies sit at the center of the debate quite like Flock Safety. Join founder and CEO Garrett Langley for a conversation about privacy, security, public safety, and the difficult trade-offs that emerge when AI becomes part of the infrastructure of everyday life.
Panos Panay joined Amazon in October 2023 as Senior Vice President, Devices, Alexa & Leo. He leads Amazon’s consumer electronics devices and the services behind them—including Alexa+, Echo, Kindle, Fire TV, tablets, Ring, eero, Blink, Bee, Amazon Photos, and more—as well as other initiatives such as Amazon Leo and Zoox.
Previously, Panos served as Executive Vice President & Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, where he led the Windows + Devices businesses.
Panos holds an MBA from Pepperdine University and a Bachelor of Science from California State University, Northridge.
Panos's Sessions
What Comes After the Smartphone?
For nearly two decades, the smartphone has been the center of our digital lives. But as AI transforms how we interact with technology, the next generation of products may look — and behave — very differently. Join Amazon’s Panos Panay for a conversation about AI, ambient computing, and the future of the devices we’ll use every day.
Anna Goldie is Founder and CEO of Ricursive Intelligence. She previously co-led the AlphaChip project, and co-founded the ML for Systems team at Google. She was an early employee at Anthropic and a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where she developed frontier models such as Claude and Gemini. At MIT, she double majored in EECS and Linguistics and earned a Masters in EECS. She also holds a CS PhD from Stanford. She was named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and her research has been widely covered in major media outlets and published in Nature, NeurIPS, ICLR, EMNLP, COLM, ISPD, ICLAD, MLCAD, MLSys, and ASPLOS.
Anna's Sessions
When AI Starts Designing Its Own Hardware
AI’s progress depends on better chips, but what happens when AI begins designing the hardware that powers it? Ricursive Intelligence co-founders Dr. Anna Goldie and Dr. Azalia Mirhoseini discuss closing the loop between AI and chip development, building self-improving systems, and tackling one of the most consequential bottlenecks in the race toward more powerful intelligence.
Andrew is co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems. He is an entrepreneur dedicated to pushing boundaries in the compute space. Prior to Cerebras, he co-founded and was CEO of SeaMicro, a pioneer of energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers. SeaMicro was acquired by AMD in 2012 for $357M.
Before SeaMicro, Andrew was the Vice President of Product Management, Marketing and BD at Force10 Networks which was later sold to Dell Computing for $800M. Prior to Force10 Networks, Andrew was the Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development at RiverStone Networks from the company’s inception through IPO in 2001.
Andrew holds a BA and an MBA from Stanford University.
Andrew's Sessions
Can AI Keep Scaling?
The AI boom has created an unprecedented demand for compute, energy, and infrastructure. Cerebras is challenging conventional assumptions about how AI systems should be built and what comes next if today’s hardware reaches its limits. Join founder and CEO Andrew Feldman for a conversation about the future of AI at scale.
Amjad Masad is CEO and co-founder of Replit, a company that makes coding accessible to billions on the planet, from children creating school projects to enterprises running their business. Prior to Replit, Amjad worked at Meta, where he led the JavaScript infrastructure team and contributed to popular open source developer tools. In addition, he played a key role as a founding engineer at Codecademy, a prominent online coding school.
Amjad's Sessions
Everyone Can Build Software Now. What Happens Next?
AI is making it possible for millions of people to create software for the first time. Replit sits at the center of that shift. Join founder and CEO Amjad Masad for a conversation about the future of programming, entrepreneurship, and what happens when anyone can turn an idea into a product.
Toni Schneider is Chief Executive Officer of Bluesky, the company building the future of the open social web. He was previously the founding CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and has been a partner at True Ventures since 2005.
Toni's Sessions
Can Social Start Over?
Social media is entering a new era. With a new leadership team at the helm, Bluesky is betting that openness, user choice, and new technology can reshape how online communities are built. Join CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang for a conversation about the future of social media, competing with established platforms, and what it takes to build the next generation of consumer technology.
Practical insights for founders on fundraising, company building, scaling operations, and maintaining a founder-first approach while growing a business.
AI & the Physical World
Focus on how AI is expanding in software and beyond such as robotics, autonomous systems, industrial operations, energy, climate tech, and scientific discovery.
Digital Finance
Discover how stablecoins, embedded finance, and digital payment infrastructure are transforming the future of money movement.
Machines, Infrastructure & Energy
Learn how the next generation of founders is rebuilding physical-world infrastructure across energy, climate, manufacturing, and industrial systems.
The growth of AI startups has made hiring and retention more difficult for every tech company. From competing for AI talent to navigating secondary sa…
The most valuable AI deployments in the world operate where the cloud can’t reach. And building for them requires a different technological playbook. …
The definition of traction has changed. What once took years is now expected in months, and $0–$10M ARR is increasingly becoming the new early-stage b…
I would say that Disrupt is a pivotal experience when we’ve been fundraising.
Startup that gained massive investor inbound from connections made at Disrupt
First time I pitched to investors — they corrected my pitch and reviewed my presentation. It was super insightful for me.
Founder who left with new investors and actionable feedback
As an investor, I would say my experience at Disrupt has been outstanding. The hospitality in the founder and investor room was also great. I bumped into a lot of people there without planning anything.
An investor who connected with founders in the Deal Flow Cafe
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Top-tier expert judges. World-renowned past winners. Free and open participation. The world’s top early stage startups together on one stage to compete for equity free prize money, and the attention of media and investors world wide.
