Celebrate entrepreneurship at Disrupt SF 2016 with Apoorva Mehta, Emmett Shear and Sebastian Thrun

Disrupt SF will roll into town this September and the speaker lineup is absolutely amazing. As the show approaches, we’ll announce the speakers and startups that will take the Disrupt stage. Tickets are currently available at an extra early bird pricing, so save some cash and buy early.

To start things off, we’re excited to announce three entrepreneurs who are founded, launched and grew their respective companies into billion dollar ventures. There’s Apoorva Mehta of Instacart, Emmett Shear of Twitch and Sebastian Thrun of Udacity.

Apoorva Mehta founded Instacart in 2012 before the on-demand economy was an overused buzzword. Now, after delivering countless bags of groceries, the startup is a unicorn and leading the way in workers’ rights. Last summer the company turned some of its contracted workers into part time employees.

Instacart is still growing but competition is intense. What’s Instacart doing to stay ahead? Who does Apoorva fear most? There’s no doubt plenty to talk about.

Emmett Shear is the CEO and co-founder of Twitch, a startup born out of Justin.tv and acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. And yet Emmett has stayed at the helm, despite the company being owned by a massive organization like Amazon. While at Amazon, Twitch has blazed forward with new products and partnerships.

We’re curious what it’s like to grow a product like Twitch at Amazon and how Emmett sees Facebook Live’s recent move into game streaming.

Sebastian Thrun founded Udacity in 2012 with the intention of making learning more accessible. At first, Udacity worked with universities but eventually shifted to offering online courses aimed at technology workers.

The company has stood tall among other online education services and last November, raised $105M in Series D financing at a valuation of over a billion dollars. Sebastian recently stepped down as the company’s CEO, but is still the president and chairman, and says he intends to stay at the company to focus on innovation — and innovation is exactly what we want to talk about at Disrupt SF.

Tickets are currently available for Disrupt SF. Attendees can snag a pass to attend all three days or buy an exhibit table for Startup Alley to place their company in the midst of thousands who attend Disrupt SF.

This year the show is returning to beautiful Pier 48 where we’ll fill the entire 80,000-square foot venue with innovators, investors and tech enthusiasts.