We’re excited to share that Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com, will be joining us at Pioneers’18 to deliver a keynote on the future from the perspective of the global retail and services giant. The man responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision will share his passion for helping young businesses reach global scale at our flagship event, which takes place May 24th-25th at the Hofburg in Vienna.

As one of the forces behind Amazon's approach to cloud computing, Vogels shows great interest in transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations. Before joining Amazon in 2004, Vogels held technology leadership positions in various companies handling the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Vogels describes himself as an ‘engineer, architect, scientist, programmer, troublemaker, executive, revisionist, investor, mentor, advisor, analyst, academic, sales guy, entrepreneur, data analyst, system administrator, product owner, evangelist, debater, father, musician and biker.’

With all that on his plate, along with the massive role of leading technological innovation at one of the world’s leading e-commerce services, we’re proud that he has chosen to join us at our flagship event!

And with just a few weeks to go until the greatest innovative minds and brightest new ideas gather at the Hofburg, we now have 200 of our startups selected to attend the event as part of the Pioneers500 program.

Stay tuned for news of the complete Pioneers500 selection in the coming days. Thereafter we’ll announce the 50 seed startups chosen to pitch on stage as they bid to win the Pioneers Challenge Award. Seed startups are defined as those with a prototype or product ready, and which have raised up to €3m in funding. In due course we’ll also be sharing the 50 Series A startups invited to Pioneers’18. These are startups who already have a product on the market and are generating revenues, validating their business model and have raised up to €15m in funding.