Lina M. Khan was sworn in as Chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on June 15, 2021. Prior to becoming head of the FTC, Chair Khan was an Associate Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She also previously served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, legal adviser to FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, and legal director at the Open Markets Institute. Chair Khan’s scholarship on antitrust and competition policy has been published in the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. She is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School.

Hillary Greene is Special Counsel for Competition Policy in the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition. She is on leave from the University of Connecticut School of Law where she is the Zephaniah Swift Professor of Law. She also served as the Inaugural Director of the law school’s Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship Law Clinic. Hillary was co-principal investigator for an NSF grant that led to an article in Science concerning government-sponsored research. Her prior service at the FTC includes serving as project director for intellectual property. Prior to that, Hillary practiced First Amendment and antitrust law at Cahill Gordon & Reindel. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Yale College (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa).

Alex Gaynor is Deputy Chief Technologist at the FTC. He was most recently at the United States Digital Service where he worked on site reliability engineering for COVID-19 vaccine and testing websites and improving Afghan Special Immigrant Visa and refugee processing. Prior to his current government service Alex was Chief Information Security Officer at Alloy and before that tech lead for one of Firefox’s security teams. From 2015-2017 Alex also served at the United States Digital Service, working on responding to security incidents at federal agencies such as OPM, improving veterans disability benefits processing, and meeting the President’s goal of admitting 125,000 refugees. Alex has served as a member of the board of directors of both the Python and Django Software Foundations and in many other capacities in the open source ecosystem. Alex lives in Washington, DC and likes bagels and delis.

Event Panelists

Salil Deshpande is the founder of Bain-backed Uncorrelated Ventures which focuses on open source and infrastructure software, both traditional and decentralized. Over 18 years as a venture investor, he invested $500M+ into 50+ companies early, including MuleSoft, DynaTrace, Buddy Media, SpringSource, Redis, SysDig, Quantum Metric, Astranis, and Philz Coffee, and DeFi projects Compound, Maker, Cosmos, and Crusoe. Salil was on the Forbes Midas List of the 100 best-performing venture investors worldwide in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, and 2023. Salil has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University (1989) and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford (1991).

Frédéric Jenny has written extensively about trade, competition and economic development and has served as an adviser to many developing countries on competition and trade issues. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University (1975), a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Paris (1977) and an MBA degree from ESSEC Business School (1966). He is professor of Economics at ESSEC Business School in Paris. He is Chairman of the OECD Competition Committee (since 1994), and Co-Director of the European Center for Law and Economics of ESSEC (since 2010).  He was previously Non-Executive Director of the Office of Fair Trading in the United Kingdom (2007-2014), Judge on the French Supreme Court (Cour de cassation, Economic Commercial and Financial Chamber) from 2004 to August 2012, Vice Chair of the French Competition Authority (1993-2004) and President of the WTO Working Group on Trade and Competition (1994-2003). The research he will be presenting was funded by Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE). CISPE is a non-profit trade association for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud providers in Europe.

Abby Kearns is a veteran tech executive as well as a board director and angel investor. Her career has spanned executive leadership, product marketing, product management, and consulting across Fortune 500 companies and startups alike, including Puppet, Cloud Foundry Foundation, Pivotal Software, Verizon, and Totality. Abby currently serves as a board director for Stackpath and Lightbend.

Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Nagle’s work frequently explores the domains of crowdsourcing, open source software, cybersecurity, and generating strategic predictions from unstructured big data. He is the co-director of the HBS/Linux Foundation Core Infrastructure Initiative and is a senior fellow at the Omidyar Network. He He serves on the advisory boards of multiple big data analytics startups and advises governmental organizations including the European Commission, the United Nations, and the OECD. Prior to his academic career, Frank worked at a number of startups and large companies in the information security and technology consulting industries. Frank earned his DBA in Technology and Operations Management from Harvard Business School. He also earned a BS and MS in Computer Science from Georgetown University and an MS in International Business Economics from City University, London.

Steven Weber is Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and a partner at Breakwater Strategy in Washington DC. Weber founded the Berkeley Center for Long Term Cybersecurity and served as its director for seven years. His research, teaching, public interest, and advisory work focus on the political economy of knowledge intensive industries, with special attention to information technology, finance, health care, and global political economy issues relating to competitiveness. His best-known book, The Success of Open Source, was one of the first extensive studies of how the open source software community works. His most recent book is Bloc by Bloc: How to Organize a Global Enterprise for the New Regional Order (2019) explains how economic geography is evolving around machine learning, and the consequences for multinational organizations in the post-Financial and Covid crises world.