Avvey Peters is Chief Strategy Officer with Communitech. She focuses on strategic planning, communications, advocacy, and partnership development to advance the Waterloo Region tech sector. Avvey is also cross appointed as Managing Director of the Canadian Digital Media Network – a group of 26 innovation hubs across Canada, which focus on supporting the growth and success of small and mid-sized digital companies across the country.

Eva is a well-respected entrepreneur-turned-investor in Canada. Before starting Two Small Fish Ventures, she was Wattpad’s Head of Community and Content. She helped nurture and scale the Wattpad community from its infancy to become one of the largest online communities with tens of millions of monthly users around the world. Eva is also involved in many incubators and accelerators, such as Creative Destruction Lab at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery, Ryerson’s DMZ, University of Waterloo’s Velocity and Techstars.

Jevon MacDonald is Co-Founder and CEO of Manifold. He is also an experienced entrepreneur and angel investor who has founded six companies. In 2013, Jevon co-founded Volta Labs; in 2011, he co-founded co-browsing startup GoInstant, which sold to Salesforce.com in 2012; and in 2007, he co-founded Startupnorth.ca. Jevon is a Fellow of Creative Destruction Lab Atlantic, a Board Member of npm, Inc. and a former entrepreneur-in-residence at Innovacorp.

Patrick Keefe is General Partner with Build Ventures. He has more than 15 years of investment and entrepreneurial experience, previously working with Innovacorp as Vice President of Investment. In this role, Patrick oversaw the organization’s seed and early-stage venture capital activities and worked with portfolio companies to assist them in accelerating their growth, achieving milestones and securing additional financing. In 2004, Patrick founded CVAI to launch Starbucks Coffee in Atlantic Canada, which was acquired by Starbucks Corporation in 2008. Patrick has also held senior positions with Boston-based venture capital firm Atlas Venture and the Boston Consulting Group, which provides strategic advisory services for leading companies around the world. Patrick holds an M.Phil from Oxford University and an MBA (Distinction) from Harvard Business School.

A native of New Brunswick, Rhiannon has over 22 years of experience as a leader in international business spanning Europe, Asia, South and North America. Rhiannon believes in the need to support entrepreneurship and innovation to deliver meaningful change in business, community and social development. She actively supports this belief by serving as a mentor and angel investor. Rhiannon recently returned to Canada to live in Halifax and is working with a group of women to build a venture fund in the region to promote diversity in the early-stage ecosystem.

Matt is Volta’s Chief Executive Officer and is responsible for leading initiatives to directly support Founders and the growth of their companies. Matt has been developing and marketing products for over 20 years, and most recently served as the Director of Product at QRA. He was the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Swept, an innovative software for commercial cleaning companies. He holds certifications from Pragmatic Product Management, Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Hubspot Inbound Marketing. An alumni of both Propel and 500 Startups, Matt will be leveraging his unique experience in Product, Marketing and Growth Operations to help Startup teams uncover insights and drive growth by building solutions for their customer’s most important problems.