Sarah Friar is Chief Financial Officer of Square (NYSE: SQ). Sarah joined Square in July 2012 from salesforce.com, where she served as SVP of Finance & Strategy. Prior to salesforce.com, Sarah worked at Goldman Sachs for over 10 years. She previously worked for McKinsey in both London and South Africa.

Sarah sits on the Boards of Walmart (NYSE: WMT), Slack, a business communications platform, and is the vice-chair of the Board of Spark, a nonprofit passionate about changing the lives of at-risk middle schoolers through mentorship. Sarah is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Finance Leaders Fellowship Program and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

She earned her MEng in Metallurgy, Economics, and Management from the University of Oxford and her MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she graduated as an Arjay Miller scholar.

 As Pre-Acceleration leader at NDRC, an early stage investor in technology start-up companies, Helen has overall responsibility for the design, development, sourcing, delivery and evaluation of venturing support at pre-seed investment stage. A passionate advocate of female entrepreneurship, she led the delivery of the NDRC Female Founders six-month accelerator programme in partnership with Enterprise Ireland. She has recently completed a national study of the value of peer support in female business venturing across Enterprise Ireland sponsored female entrepreneurship programmes.

Prior to joining NDRC she was General Manager with ClubCorp in Beijing, China, having worked with the organisation
in the United States as a General Manager, Regional Manager and as a member of the corporate revenue team. She
received numerous accolades for operational excellence and customer experience transformation. She attributes
much of her success to an ability to unite teams around a shared, user-centered, vision.

 Mary Harney held a number of different Ministerial positions in the Irish Government for 18 years, including Environmental Protection, Industry, Trade, Research & Innovation and Health. She was Deputy Prime Minister for 10 years. She retired from politics in 2011 and now acts as a consultant and is involved in several charitable organisations.

She is an independent director of several companies, including Biocon Ltd. (India), Leaseplan Insurance (Dutch, but based in Dublin) and Diona Technology (Ireland), and is chair of the Pharmed Group (Ireland) and of Videodoc (UK/Ireland). Until her appointment as Chancellor of the University of Limerick In January 2018 she was Chair of Amber (Advanced Materials and Bio-engineering Research Centre) in Trinity College Dublin. She also chairs a European-wide initiative on Sustainable Healthcare and is a board member of the Irish Hospice Foundation and of the European Board of Vital Voices.

Anne Heraty is CEO of Cpl Resources plc., a recognised leader in workforce solutions, specialist recruitment, managed services and outsourcing.  With an annual turnover in excess of €455 million, the company has over 670 permanent employees. In any one week Cpl also has over 12,400 temp/contract staff under management in customer sites.  

Her company has grown through both strong organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Anne won the Business & Finance ‘Business Person of the Year 2014’ and her company was ranked as ‘Best Place to Work 2017’ in the large organisation category.  Anne is the Chair of judging panel for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in Ireland and former President of IBEC. 

Co Founder of Voxpro, Linda Kiely, is a strategic, award-winning business woman with considerable talent and reckoning. Queen of reinvention, Linda’s astute commercial sense recognises potential, in both people and opportunities. Her adaptability & diversity turns this potential into certain success. Linda has fostered a Chameleon like culture within Voxpro and it is this culture that has forged long lasting partnerships with the world’s greatest brands. In Voxpro, they have found their home.

At the heart of Linda’s formidable entrepreneurialism is her fundamental belief in the art of Customer Service. Driving Voxpro upwards from 6 to 3,000+ people, the value placed on delighting customers has remained a fixed focus. Measured, creative & intuitive, Linda’s strategic directorship advances Voxpro toward new transformations with firm client-centric values.

Maeve Kneafsey, Co-Founder and CEO of CloudKPI, is an entrepreneur. CloudKPI is her forth start-up. Maeve co-founded Ireland’s first dedicated digital marketing agency in 2001 (Amas, exit 2003). She went on to found and successfully build digital strategy and analytics agency Elucidate over a 15 year period before launching her first SaaS Fintech solution, Marketfinder.

In 2016 Maeve and her co-founder Brenda Jordan made their first move into the US market which resulted in CloudKPI launching an analytics solution to automate the formulation of cross-business data driven insights. Initially targeting fast growth SaaS businesses based in Silicon Valley, CloudKPI plans to expand into key technology hubs across North America and Europe. Maeve is co-founder of the eGovernment Awards and Centre of Excellence.  

A former chair of the Irish Internet Association (IIA), she regularly speaks internationally on digital marketing strategy, customer journey mapping and revenue growth. Prior to founding her own business she worked with VNU (now Nielsen) and numerous publishing groups in roles including CEO, Marketing and Sales Director and General Manager. Maeve is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin.

Alix grew up in Belfast where her father had a shoe retail business which ran successfully before, during and after the Troubles - despite many interruptions due to violence and bombings. It instilled in Alix an entrepreneurial spirit that she fostered herself after school by studying business in Glasgow.

In her final year, she had the idea for a home fragrance business that would celebrate the natural fragrances of Ireland as no one else was doing it - in a stylish, interior-driven way. Straight after she finished college, Alix decided to put her plan into action. She went back to Belfast and started making soaps at her Mum’s kitchen table and from that, Field Day was born, one of Ireland's best-loved giftware brands which includes votive size and large candles, soaps, hand cream and more.

More than a decade later, Alix was looking to create something just a bit more luxurious, building on her knowledge of essential oils. After many iterations, a capsule collection of six stunning scents called Field Apothecary launched. Her growing business now employs 10 people and stocks all Avoca stores with Field Apothecary products as well as Anthropologie stores across the USA.

Fidelma McGuirk is founder and CEO of Payslip.

Payslip is a Global Payroll middleware that enables multi-national employers to consolidate global payrolls and enable international compliance and data protection.

Payslip enables international employers to automate their global payroll end-to-end from HR & Finance to include their payroll providers in each country. Payslip increases efficiency, reduces cost and provides a consolidated single source of truth and reporting on Global Payroll. With GDPR principles integrated by design, Payslip enhances data protection and compliance for its Global Payroll clients.

Prior to Payslip, Fidelma has over 18 years’ experience in international business. Having worked in Irish telco Eir in HR, she later led Taxback.com as Director of International Operations, growing operations across 21 countries. As CEO of Taxback.com she scaled the company from 30 staff to over 800, servicing over 300k customers per year. She founded the global mobility advisory business and US non-resident tax preparation SaaS, which she partnered with TurboTax in the US market, in 2012.

Fidelma studied her Bachelors in Business & German and Masters in Business in Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland & University of Regensburg, Germany. Fidelma trained as a certified Data Protection Officer.

Áine Mulloy is the co-founder and CMO of GirlCrew, a global social network for women. With a background in the humanities, before making the move to technology, she has a keen interest in communities that are making positive changes.

Áine recently delivered a TEDx talk, and has also been awarded with the 30 Under 30 award for Community Activism, as well as a JCI Dublin Ten Outstanding Young People award.

Nuala Murphy is a tech entrepreneur and CEO of Moment Health – a digital solution that offers early intervention to maternal mental health illnesses for insurance, employers & governments as well as direct to the consumer.

Moment Health was conceived with the aim to connect mothers and their families with the tools and knowledge they need to sustain good mental health and recover from illness. Nuala was successful in raising early stage investment to build the team and first products and is currently raising her seed round of investment to grow and scale the business.

She is characterised by energy, drive and commitment to helping women achieve their ambitions, demonstrated most powerfully through her leadership as part of the global Lean In movement. She began her career as a marketing executive and progressed rapidly to director level with experience gleaned in manufacturing, health and technology sectors both at home and internationally, becoming Chartered in 2010 and a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Most recent accolades include Sunday Times Maserati 100, Digital DNA Entrepreneur of the year, Top 40 Under 40 NI, Belfast Top 50 Business award and Young Business Ambassador Award to name just a few.

Nuala graduated with an honours degree in Applied Languages and Linguistics with French from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and studied at the prestigious Universite de Geneve followed by a year placement in Sanofi Aventis HQ in Paris.

Priscilla O’Regan is head of communications for BT Group in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Her broad remit encompasses public relations, sponsorship, events and hospitality, diversity and inclusion, internal communications and engagement, and corporate responsibility including the BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition. Since joining BT in 2003, Priscilla has held a variety of roles including Communications Manager and Head of PR.

Prior to BT, Priscilla’s roles included Account Director at Simpson Financial & Technology PR in Dublin, Communications Executive at IBM New Zealand, and a business journalist in Bucharest, Romania. Priscilla holds a B.A. in Journalism from Dublin City University. She is on the Steering Committee of Connecting Women In Technology (Ireland), the Leadership Team of Lean In Ireland and a supporter of the 30% Club Ireland.

Iseult is co-founder and CEO of the award winning social enterprise FoodCloud. In 4 years, FoodCloud has grown to have over 3,200 retail stores across the UK and Ireland, including Tesco, Aldi, Lidl and Waitrose, donating surplus food through its software platform. To date, FoodCloud has redistributed over 30million meals equivalent to 7,800 charities. The environmental impact has been equivalent to saving 74,000Tonnes of CO 2 emissions – or planting 3.7million trees.

Iseult was included on Forbes 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneurs European list, received a Humanitarian Award from the Muhammad Ali Centre in Louisville, Kentucky, was named Image Business Women of the Year in 2017 and received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Special Achievement award.