Gender: Female

Kara Swisher

Kara Swisher is the host of On with Kara Swisher and co-host of the Pivot podcast. She’s editor-at-large at New YorkMagazine and a CNN contributor. Swisher is the co-founder of the technology website, Recode, and tech conference, Code, which is the country’s premier conference on tech and media.

Considered the top reporter in the tech game, Swisher has been reporting on the industry since the early 1990s. She was there when Amazon was looking for its first headquarters in Seattle, when Google was in its garage and when Netflix was just a small startup. Once called “Silicon Valley’s most feared but revered journalist” by New YorkMagazine, Swisher has established herself as the oracle of the tech world with unrivaled access to the industry’s most significant leaders.

In 2024, Swisher will publish Burn Book: A Tech Love Story — part memoir, part history, and ultimately a witty, scathing, but fair accounting of the tech industry and its founders who wanted to change the world but broke it instead. Burn Book includes soaring tales of innovation and brilliant entrepreneurs, as well as Silicon Valley’s much more complex history of striving, success, and failure. The book details how the commercial internet came into being and how, for all it has given the world, it now sits at the center of global power, creating a clear and present danger to humanity. Yet despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

She is also the author of aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web, published by Times Business Books in July 1998. The sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future, was published in the fall of 2003 by Crown Business Books.

Swisher was named to The Hollywood Reporter’s list of “Podcast Power Players” in 2022 and 2023, and to the 2023 Out 100. She also received the “Pioneer Icon” award at the 2023 iHeart Podcast Awards. Additionally, Pivot was named one of the “Best Podcasts of 2022” by the New York Times and “Best Thought Leadership Podcast” at the 2022 AdweekAudio Awards.

She was previously a contributing New York Times opinion writer and former host of the podcasts, Sway and Recode Decode. She co-founded the technology website, Recode, and, before that, co-produced and co-hosted The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference series (now called the Code Conference) with Walt Mossberg starting in 2003. It was, and still is, the country’s premier conference on tech and media, with interviewees such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla Technoking Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, and many other leading players.

Swisher worked in the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau and as a reporter at the Washington Post. She was also a contributor to NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC. Swisher played herself  on HBO’s Silicon Valley and Fox’s The Simpsons, and is a regular guest on national broadcast programs. She also hosted HBO’s Succession podcast, which was named Adweek’s 2023 “Podcast of the Year.” For many years, she wrote the column BoomTown, which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and online at WSJ.com. Previously, Swisher covered breaking news about the web’s major players and internet policy issues, and she also wrote feature articles on technology for the paper. Earlier in her career, Swisher worked as a reporter at The Washington Post and as an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C.

She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and her graduate degree at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Kate Darling

Dr. Kate Darling is a leading expert in robotics and society and the author of THE NEW BREED: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots. After 1.5 decades of studying human-robot interaction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, Kate now leads the Robotics, Ethics & Society research team at the RAI Institute. Her writing and research seek to influence technology design and policy direction, anticipating difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades.

Forever interested in how technology intersects with society, Kate has a background in law & economics and intellectual property. She has researched economic incentives in copyright and patent systems and has taken a role as intellectual property expert at multiple academic and private institutions. She formerly served as intellectual property policy advisor to the director of the MIT Media Lab and also helped establish the MIT-BU Technology Law Clinic.

Her passion for technology and robots has led her to interdisciplinary fields. After co-teaching a robot ethics course at Harvard Law School with Professor Lawrence Lessig, she began to work at the intersection of law and robotics, with a focus on legal and social issues. Kate is a former Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and the Yale Information Society Project, and is an affiliate at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. She’s a senior co-chair for We Robot, the leading conference on legal and policy questions relating to robots.

At MIT, Kate investigated social robotics and conducted experimental studies on human-robot interaction to explore the emotional connection between people and life-like machines. Her work has been featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, PBS, The Boston Globe, Forbes, CBC, WIRED, Boston Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, Die Zeit, The Japan Times, and more. She has written a monthly column for BBC’s Science Focus magazine and has also been a contributing writer to Robohub and IEEE Spectrum.

Kate graduated from law school with honors and holds a doctorate of sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and honorary doctorates of sciences from Claremont University and Middlebury College. In 2017, the American Bar Association honored her legal work with the Mark T. Banner award in Intellectual Property. She is the caretaker for several domestic robots, including her Pleos Yochai, Peter, and Mr. Spaghetti.

Henna Pryor

Henna Pryor, CSP is a dynamic Workplace Performance Expert who speaks and writes about performance mindset, interpersonal dynamics, high-impact communication, and embracing bumps in a world that keeps optimizing for smoothness.

She’s a regular Expert Columnist for Inc. Magazine, 18x award-winning author of Good Awkward, and an in-demand global keynote speaker. Her playful personality and insightful talks blend 2 decades of working with corporate leaders and teams with a fresh, science-based approach to taking more strategic risks and boosting social and mental fitness for success at work.

She’s been invited to speak twice for TEDx in NYC and Wilmington, DE, and brings her expertise to a variety of global organizations, including Google, Workday, Johnson & Johnson, and JPMorganChase. She’s frequently sought after for her insights by top media outlets like TIME Magazine, WSJ, INSIDER, NBC, The Washington Post, Fast Company, Business.com, HuffPost, and more.

Henna founded Pryority Group – a fast-growing performance growth firm – to expand on her belief that the key to most people’s success is learning to strengthen mental and social muscles in order to boost risk-taking, maximize influence, and be braver in the work that we do.

She’s also a SUCCESS Magazine Woman of Influence, LinkedIn Learning and CNBC Instructor, Glassdoor WorkLife Pro, and two-time SXSW Workplace track speaker, and her bestselling book was endorsed by NFL Quarterback Russell Wilson and former HBR Editor Karen Dillon, and was named a Kirkus Reviews’ Best Book of the Year.

Kate Vitasek

Kate Vitasek an international authority on how to build – and sustain - highly collaborative business relationships. Thinkers50 2025 Breakthrough Idea Award Recipient and lauded by World Trade Magazine as one of the “Fabulous 50+1” most influential people impacting global commerce, she has been featured on CNN International, Bloomberg, NPR, Fox Business News, and Forbes.

Vitasek – a Distinguished Fellow and Graduate & Executive Education Faculty at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business – is passionate in her quest to help companies transform their business relationships. Her award-winning research on the Vested® business model has been adopted by over 150 organization such such as bp, Intel, EY and the Canadian government for its ability to create true win-win business relationships.

Vitasek is the author of eight books and over 400 articles in publications including Harvard Business Review, Chief Executive Magazine, The Economist, FAST Company, Information Week, CIO Magazine, World Financial Review and Supply Chain Management Review.

She is in both the Sourcing Industry Group and the International Association of Outsourcing Professional’s “Hall of Fame,” and is a World Commerce and Contracting “Fellow.” Prior to making the shift to academia, Vitasek held positions on all of the business table: the buy side (Microsoft), the sell-side (Stream International and Modus Media) and the consulting side (Accenture).