Karl Freund
Karl Freund is the founder and principal analyst of Cambrian AI Research. Prior to this, he was Moor Insights & Strategy’s consulting lead for HPC and Deep Learning. His recent experiences as the VP of Marketing at AMD and Calxeda, as well as his previous positions at Cray and IBM, positions him as a leading industry expert in these rapidly evolving industries. Karl works with investment and technology customers to help them understand the emerging Deep Learning opportunity in data centers, from competitive landscape to ecosystem to strategy.
Karl has worked directly with datacenter end users, OEMs, ODMs and the industry ecosystem, enabling him to help his clients define the appropriate business, product, and go-to-market strategies. He is also recognized expert on the subject of low-power servers and the emergence of ARM in the datacenter and has been a featured speaker at scores of investment and industry conferences on this topic.
Accomplishments during his career include:
- Led the revived HPC initiative at AMD, targeting APUs at deep learning and other HPC workloads
- Created an industry-wide thought leadership position for Calxeda in the ARM Server market
- Helped forge the early relationship between HP and Calxeda leading to the surprise announcement of HP Moonshot with Calxeda in 2011
- Built the IBM Power Server brand from 14% market share to over 50% share
- Integrated the Tivoli brand into the IBM company’s branding and marketing organization
- Co-Led the integration of HP and Apollo Marketing after the Boston-based desktop company’s acquisition
Karl’s background includes RISC and Mainframe servers, as well as HPC (Supercomputing). He has extensive experience as a global marketing executive at IBM where he was VP Marketing (2000-2010), Cray where he was VP Marketing (1995-1998), and HP where he was a Division Marketing Manager (1979-1995).
Mo Elshenawy
With more than 25 years of engineering and leadership expertise, Mo is the President and CTO at Cruise, a self-driving car company. Over the last six years, he has played a pivotal role in driving Cruise's engineering advancements, while scaling the team from hundreds to thousands of engineers. Mo currently leads Cruise’s engineering, operations, and product teams – those who are responsible for all aspects of our autonomous vehicles development and deployment, including AI, robotics, simulation, product, program, data and machine learning platforms, infrastructure, security, safety, operations, and hardware.
Prior to Cruise, Mo led global technologies for Amazon ReCommerce Platform, Warehouse Deals, and Liquidations: a massive scale global business that enables Amazon to evaluate, price, sell, liquidate, and donate millions of used products daily. In addition, over the past decade, Mo was a technical co-founder and CTO for three tech startups, the latest of which is a cloud-based financial services development platform used by top financial institutions.