Attendee interaction is probably the most important part of This Next Thing and the schedule is optimised for that: lots of group meals, travelling together, everyone-under-one-roof, lots of moving and chances to start conversations and come back to conversations later.

That said, to kindle the conversation, we feel it’s important to have conversation starters. To facilitate this, we will host a series of stories and talks from three reciprocal pairs.

For each pair, we asked a patron to choose and fund a reciprocal who didn't look like them, so that the two could give back-to-back talks from their different perspectives.

This year, we’re delighted to host the following reciprocal pairs:

Michael Lopp and Priya Shah
NB Due to other commitments, Michael will join via video this year.

Chad Fowler and Sudharshan Sundaramahalingam

Anil Dash and Molly White

Additionally, returning this year as MC is our venerable host Saron Yitbarek.

• Saron Yitbarek

  Saron Yitbarek is a 2x founder, developer, podcaster, and mother. She's the founder of CodeNewbie (acquired) and is currently building Disco, a startup building tools for people with multiple streams of income.

   

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• Michael Lopp

  Michael is an engineering leader at Apple.

  He is the author of a number of engineering leadership books, blogger at Rands in Repose, and curator of the Rands Leadership Slack.

  Unfortuately, due to Massive Life events, Michael won’t be able to join in person this year, but will participate via video.

• Priya Shah

  Priya Shah is a Product Manager at Siena AI, LLM-driven customer service for e-commerce. Previously, she was a senior product and program manager at Apple. She’s managed a diverse set of products from 3rd party frameworks like CoreML and SharePlay to consumer apps like Phone and FaceTime. She’s played a key role in launching headline features like Contact Posters, Live Voicemail, and many more to a global audience.

  Priya is passionate about creative problem solving and leveraging technology to have a positive impact on people’s lives.

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• Chad Fowler

  Chad is CTO & General Partner at BlueYard Capital and has worn many hats over his career, including co-creating RubyGems, co-founding and organising RubyConf and RailsConf, and keynoting countless conferences around the world.

  Chad Fowler, CTO & General Partner and BlueYard Capital, has had a long and impactful career as a software developer, best-selling author, conference speaker and open source contributor. He co-created RubyGems, the package manager for Ruby which set the standard for pip, npm and others. He co-founded and organized both RubyConf and RailsConf for over a decade. He has been invited to keynote at countless conferences worldwide. Professionally he's led large teams, served as CTO for multiple startups, and led developer advocacy for Microsoft.

  He authored Rails Recipes, the second book ever published on Ruby on Rails and The Passionate Programmer, one of the industry's go to books on career development for software developers.

  Chad is currently focused on investing in deeply technical teams in the crypto and web3 industry. He is co-host of The Privacy Podcast, where he and his co-host explore topics as diverse as privacy's role in the coming AI boom, privacy-preserving blockchain technology and government policy.

• Sudharshan Sundaramahalingam

  Shan is the co-founder and CTO of Epiph Inc, a stealth startup developing silent speech interfaces with the goal of making AI feel like an extension of the mind. Shan started Epiph to build the positive future he was promised in the sci-fi books he read while growing up, and is passionate about all things cybernetic.

  Previously, he has worked on other frontier tech, published a paper on swarm robotics when he was 16, developed predictive healthcare systems with bio-signals, and written software for modular miniature bioreactors.

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• Anil Dash

  Anil is the Head of Glitch and VP of Developer Platforms at Fastly. He is a tech entrepreneur and writer trying to make the technology world more thoughtful, creative and humane. He has been creating Internet technologies for two decades, focused on ensuring that technology's transformative impact on society, media, the arts, labor, government and culture is as positive as possible.

• Molly White

  Molly White is a writer and software engineer who dreams of a better web. Known for her critical writing about the cryptocurrency industry and the Web3 is Going Just Great project, Molly also writes about the much broader technology landscape. Years spent in free and open access communities like the Wikimedia projects have shaped her perspectives on and passion for the web, which can be far more open, equitable, and joyful — if we want it.