Meet the Speakers

Founder of HackerNoon

David is the Founder & CEO of HackerNoon, a tech publishing platform powered by its own custom CMS. With millions of monthly readers and 150k+ stories, HackerNoon helps technologists share what they’re building and learning.

David leads a small, independent team focused on quality storytelling, open access, and better publishing tools. He’s raised nearly $3M from 1,300+ shareholders and remains committed to keeping the platform ad-supported, founder-led, and free for everyone.

COO of HackerNoon

Linh Dao Smooke is the Chief Operating Officer of HackerNoon, where she works with a remote team of 20 introverts spanning across 5 continents and 3 main pillars: editorial/ marketing, product/engineering, and business development/ finance. Despite serving 3 million monthly readers, owning its own tech stack, publishing tens of thousands of writers, and having advertised pretty much every major tech company in the world, HackerNoon stays independently owned with Linh and David as majority shareholders. Linh broke the story of OpenAI’s chatGPT back in November of 2022 before AI became ubiquitous.

She is a mother of 3 young children, and runs a podcast on the side with her oldest daughter called Norah and Mama Time.

Co-founder of Lumiere Education & Leverage Assistants

Stephen is the co-founder of Lumiere Education and Leverage Assistants. A Harvard grad and former McKinsey consultant, he now writes and builds full-time. His work has appeared in HBR, The Economist, and Freakonomics.

Fluent in Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Spanish, Stephen also performs stand-up comedy in Vietnamese with “Saigon Tếu.” He’s passionate about helping people grow ideas from zero and sharing practical insights about entrepreneurship with a sense of humor.

Founder of Saigon A.I.

Andrew Schwabe is an American serial entrepreneur, A.I. researcher and public speaker with more than 30 years experience building international technology companies.  An innovator at heart, Andrew is a forward-thinker and a problem solver, and has worked with cloud, analytics, Artificial Intelligence and blockchain technologies.  He is a writer/blogger, an advocate for open software and human rights.  

Currently Andrew is an A.I. researcher with University of St. Andrews (Scotland, UK), and a founder and director at Saigon A.I. – an award winning A.I. advisory company in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

General Manager @ StoryCo

Vicky Giap is a GenZ creative and MC based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As the General Manager of StoryCo, she leads a multimedia production studio transforming Webtoons into immersive video comics, producing thousands of minutes of content for global audiences. She was nominated for the 2023 WeChoice Awards in the “Z-Face: Inspiring GenZ Figures” category. She has hosted VTV’s Zlife and emceed events for VinFuture, Vingroup, and USAID. Vicky has also lived in England, Austria, Singapore, and the US.

A storyteller at heart, she’s passionate about building creative systems that empower artists to thrive in the digital age.experience and sharp storytelling skills, she brings energy, creativity, and perspective to every project.