Heather (she/her) is an associate lawyer working in the Venture Technology and Emerging Growth Companies group at Dentons. Her practice is focused on corporate finance, M&A, securities and venture capital transaction and she is engaged in the creation of corporate law services for environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters. Heather is interested in how technology and shifting priorities are driving a dynamic new economy that works better and for more people. Her intent as a lawyer is to help entrepreneurs and investors drive this change forward. Heather is a graduate of Queen’s University (JD ’20 and BAH ’16) and became involved with the Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre when she founded the Queen’s Venture Law Society.

Passionate about tackling new challenges and solving problems (3x founder, 1x exit). Experience in SaaS and enterprise software globally (North/South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East)

Sam Cox is Director of Product Management at Amazon and single threaded leader of Amazon DSP, Amazon's enterprise product for Advertisers and Agencies. He was previously Group Product Manager at Google responsible for AdX, Google’s real time Ad Exchange. At Google he created Ads.txt which eliminated over $1.6bn in annual fraud from the global advertising market, and built Exchange Bidding and Open Bidding to over $1bn in revenue in under 3 years. He was part of the executive team for the SSP LiftDNA (acquired by OpenX), and the CEO of Milabra, an early machine learning platform. He is an angel investor and Limited Partner with a focus on advertising and marketing technology companies, although his interests in off-grid applications and sustainable farming have led to investments in companies like Tivoli Mushrooms and Den Outdoors. He splits his time between NYC and his farm in upstate New York.

After graduating from Queen’s Commerce in 2019, she spent 2.5 years at OneLocal, a YC-backed and Toronto-based Series-A SaaS startup, helping grow the company from 30 to100 employees on the Operations team. Following this, Ushpreet joined the product team at On Deck, a Series A startup where top talent comes to accelerate their ideas and careers, surrounded by a world-class community. During her time as a student at Queen’s, Ushpreet was involved in a range of opportunities and continues to leverage those experiences to date. It was largely through the support of DDQIC that offered experiential learning opportunities such as QICSI, participating in the Deshpande Foundations Development Dialogue, and all on-campus startup competitions and conferences - Ushpreet discovered the budding entrepreneurial spirit and resources available that would kick start her career.

Anne’s experience with technology spans thirty years. She started by reviewing and advising about CD-ROMS for the consumer market. From there, she jumped to the nascent WorldWideWeb, joining the executive ranks at CareerPath, an employment service owned by a consortium of newspaper chains. After stints at AOL/Netscape and the IT group at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Anne joined the CleanTech Open, a California incubator/competition for early clean technology start-ups. Anne played a key role in developing and implementing a strategic plan to underwrite expansion from California across the United States and worldwide. Anne’s work gave the CleanTech Open a vision and mission, yearly goals, and a national governance structure. Anne’s professional career began as a financial journalist in London, England, spanned a quarter of a century reporting and producing for print and electronic media in England, Canada and the United States, Anne holds a B.A. (Econ) from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada and an M.Sc. (Econ.) from the London School of Economics and Political Science.