KLP Summit: Speaker Bios

Ryan Williams 

J. Ryan Williams is a San Francisco-based executive coach trusted by CEOs, US Navy SEALs and almost everyone in between. 

As a sales leader, Ryan has seen multiple companies from $0-$100M+ from the inside.  His work at InVision App launched the enterprise sales team that has landed over 90% of the Fortune 500 logos.  As an early employee at AdRoll, Ryan built a $58M mid-market sales team in under 22 months and created a sales training program for 350 sales reps. Later as VP of Sales at a Y Combinator-backed data startup, he grew bookings from $4M to $12M and supported a $15M Series B fundraise from top investors. 

As a keynote speaker, Ryan’s talks have taken him to 13 countries to mentor at 16 startup accelerators where he has coached founders backed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Techstars and Andreessen Horowitz.  His workshops have been hosted at top universities such as University of Chicago, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and Singapore Management University as well as corporate institutions such as Adobe, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Lyft, Salesforce, and Boston Consulting Group. 

Ciara Peter

Ciara is best known for bringing consumer grade experiences to enterprise products at scale.

As VP of Product at Gainsight, she leads vision and strategy for Gainsight PX, the Product Experience platform focused on delivering insights, enabling data driven in-app customer engagement, and instantly evaluating ROI of product investments.
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Prior to Gainsight, Ciara held Product & Design leadership positions at InVision, Box, BetterWorks, and Salesforce. She lives in downtown San Francisco with her rescue cat, Wesley.

Emilie Davis

Emilie Davis has a passion for building and scaling customer facing teams and processes from the ground up, having joined early stage startups as the first CS member three times over. She co-organised the Customer Success meetup in San Francisco and geeks out on all things data and customer growth. Outside of that, you’ll find her running, cycling or making awful puns. ​

Cath Carlsen

10+ years’ global experience across B2B and B2C marketing and revenue operations, project management, field, experiential and direct marketing, event management and sponsorship.

My expertise is developing, scaling and maintaining marketing infrastructure and alignment across all revenue departments. I’m a solution oriented, people focussed leader. I sprinkle creativity, a can-do attitude and sense of humour across everything I touch.

Ex-Director of Marketing Ops at Vend and currently running Marketing Ops at Powered by Flossie; customer frontend software for the hair and beauty industry that acts as a universal booking layer for legacy systems, creating an intuitive and customisable interface. 

Philip Fierlinger

Philip Fierlinger is co-founder of Xero, where he was Head of Design for nearly 10 years. He’s an investor and advisor to a variety of startups including Milanote, Deputy, Storypark and Atomic. Philip’s career started in Silicon Valley in 1992, designing smart phones at General Magic. For ten years he ran a digital design agency in San Francisco doing groundbreaking work for clients like Apple, Beastie Boys, Disney, Dreamworks, Palm and Playstation.