Negar Conrad
Negar Conrad is the co-founder, partner, and CEO of Layer 9 Technologies and a results-driven senior leader with over 20 years of experience and expertise in program and project management, strategic vision planning and implementation, talent acquisition and empowerment, performance analysis, problem solving, and business process development.
Having earned her Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, Negar went on to gain experience at various for-profit and non-profit organizations, where she deepened her understanding of global challenges and opportunities.
Negar excels in coordinating multistakeholder initiatives, managing budgets and resources, and ensuring the timely delivery of results. Her collaborative approach and strong communication skills have enabled her to build effective partnerships and mobilize support for development initiatives at the local, national, and international levels.
Throughout her career, Negar has been at the forefront of steering multifaceted projects that intersect both technical intricacies and policy frameworks. Her extensive experience encompasses spearheading collaborative efforts to promote inclusivity and diversity within the internet ecosystem, advocating for the rights of underrepresented communities and ensuring their voices are heard in policy discussions, and fostering productive relationships with diverse stakeholders across cultural and geographical boundaries.
Negar has a proven track record of building and leading high-performing teams, achieving consensus among stakeholders, and successfully delivering results-driven programs that address critical challenges in the global arena. Whether it's driving initiatives to enhance digital infrastructure, promote data privacy and security, or facilitate cross-border cooperation, she consistently demonstrates a keen ability to translate vision into actionable strategies.
David Conrad
David Conrad has been involved in many aspects of the Internet since beginning his career in 1983 including protocol development and implementation, network operations, and the administration and governance of the Internet system of unique identifiers. Working full-time at the University of Maryland, David was the leader of the team that developed IBM’s TCP/IP for the IBM PC feature for their mainframe TCP/IP product. Following the successful completion of that project, David helped in the deployment of a pilot implementation of the OSI protocol suite for the University, learning the advantages TCP/IP brought for multi-vendor interoperability along the way.
In the early 1990s, David helped in the establishment of the Internet in the Asia Pacific region, first as a researcher with US NASA and NSF-funded Asia/Pacific regional research networks, then, after being invited to Japan, was an early employee of one of the first Japanese commercial ISPs, co-established and became the first Director General of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), and co-founded the Asia Pacific Rim Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT).
Returning to the US from Japan in 1998, David’s roles included being the Executive Director of the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), co-founding and becoming the CTO and co-Vice President of Engineering for ISC’s commercial spinoff, Nominum, Inc., joining the Board of Directors of the American Registry for Internet Numbers, becoming the General Manager of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), acting as senior advisor at Cloudflare, Inc., and providing consulting services to organizations that included the Internet Society and the US FBI.
In 2014, David returned to ICANN as CTO where he established ICANN’s Office of the CTO and became a Board member of Public Technical Identifiers, which now provides the IANA functions. Since leaving ICANN in 2021, David is co-founder, partner, and CTO of Layer 9 Technologies which provides consulting services on Internet technologies, policy, and governance to industry, non-profits, and government agencies. David has participated in the IETF since 1992 and is co-author of five RFCs, is currently a member of ICANN’s Government Advisory Committee Public Safety Working Group and has been a past member of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory and Root Server System Advisory Committees. David has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with minors in Sociology and Astronomy from the University of Maryland.
Paul Ebersman
Paul Ebersman has been designing, building, and maintaining key Internet infrastructure since the ARPANET era. He started in the US Air Force at the Pentagon, was employee number ten at UUNET, the first commercial Internet Service Provider, built the first two generations of the ALTER.NET backbone (still run by Verizon), designed and built the modem network for the Microsoft MSN project (largest dialup pool in the world), and architected and built the DNS infrastructure for Comcast NBC Universal (second largest in the world at the time).
Paul has been an active participant in various Internet standards and protocol efforts, involved in protocol design and development, implementation, and wide spread adoption. This includes protocols like the OSI standards, IPv6, DNS, DNSSEC, SNMP, SMTP, DANE, and BGP. He has done work with software/vendor developers on these protocols, done technical support, built NOCs/SOCs to monitor them, and given classes and technical talks on these protocols.
He participates in many industry groups in support of these technologies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), network groups like NANOG/RIPE/LACNIC/APNIC, DNS-OARC, M3WAAG, and the Internet Society (ISOC). He has been on conference program committees, as well as serving on the board of DNS-OARC and ISOC.
Paul has also been an SME, done program and project management (Agile & SAFE), and reverse-engineered existing systems and infrastructure, both as a consultant and as an FTE for companies like Microsoft, NTT America, Comcast, and Salesforce.
Whether you need white papers on the real-world impact of various technologies or threats, reports on protocol trends, training or interactive sessions on various technical topics, a technical assessment of comparable technologies, or a risk/benefit analysis, Paul is happy to help with what you need.