Speakers
Graphing Social Patterns 2007 featured the following speakers:
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Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over fifteen years as a developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd. He is the founder of 500 Hats LLC, and advisor / investor for Mint Software, Spock Networks, Mashery, Simply Hired, TeachStreet, Oortle, CrazyEgg, Eventvue, SlideShare, RichRelevance, HealthUnity, and Canopy Financial.
Dave is the conference chair for Graphing Social Patterns, and co-chair for O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. He is also a guest lecturer at Stanford University for a new course on building Facebook Apps. Dave is a board member for microfinance accelerator Unitus, advisor to microfinance lender Kiva.org, and a co-founder of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network.Previously Dave was Director of Marketing at PayPal where he founded & ran the PayPal Developer Network, and later VP Evangelism at Simply Hired. Before coming to Silicon Valley, Dave barely graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a BS in Mathematical Sciences Engineering and a minor in frisbee, billiards, & foosball. His interests include microfinance and economic innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital, ultimate frisbee, cartoons and animation, and an ever-growing collection of funny-looking hats. For more info on Dave, visit his blog: Master of 500 Hats. |
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Adam Rifkin is an entrepreneur in Redwood City who spends most of his time working on Renkoo.com and on a Facebook application called Booze Mail. Renkoo helps a group of friends decide on a place and time to get together, and Booze Mail offers Facebook users a platform for sending drinks to each other.Before Renkoo, Adam worked several years on KnowNow, which sells RSS solutions to companies; before that, he worked at Microsoft and Hewlett Packard.Adam went to the College of William & Mary in Virginia as an undergrad, and Caltech for graduate work.> |
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Ari Steinberg is a software engineer at Facebook where he focuses primarily on development for the Facebook Platform. In addition to working on Platform, he has helped create and code projects such as the Facebook Toolbar for Firefox, Profile Badge and the Facebook Query Language (FQL). Ari joined Facebook after graduating from Stanford University where he received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Computer Science, while specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. While at Stanford, Ari also worked at Flock, MSN Search, and VMware. |
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William Grosso has been doing startups for a long time now. He’s currently at Engage where he runs Engineering and, for entertainment, thinks hard about things like widgets, reputations, spam of all types, and how the web is changing underneath our feet. In prior lives, he was the VP of Engineering for Echopass, wrote two O’Reilly books, and translated a fundamental text on hyperbolic group theory from the original French. In his spare time, he frequently volunteers at SDForum (where he serves on the Board of Directors and helps to run the Emerging Technology SIG) and does his best to be a good father. |
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Blake is a Founder, VP of Engineering & CMO at Mogad.com. Blake is also the creator of the superviral Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves games on Facebook. Prior, he led the development of the Causes on Facebook application. Blake was also an early engineer on Plaxo’s client team and a founding engineer at BuildForge (acquired by IBM). He has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Rice University. |
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Brady Forrest is Chair for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 and Emerging Technology conferences. Additionally, he co-Chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Berlin and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He previously worked at Microsoft on Live Search (he came to Microsoft when it acquired MongoMusic). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds cars for Burning Man and runs Ignite. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey.. |
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Chamath Palihapitiya is the Vice President of Product Marketing and Operations at Facebook and is responsible for overseeing new monetization and advertising products, all business aspects of Facebook Platform, fbFund, customer operations, corporate communications, marketing, privacy and public policy. Chamath joined Facebook from The Mayfield Fund, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley where he was focused on Consumer Internet, advertising and media investments. Prior to Mayfield, Chamath spent five years with AOL, most recently as the Vice President and General Manager of AIM and ICQ, with complete responsibility and oversight of two of the biggest and most popular brands on the Internet. Chamath began his career as a derivatives trader before leaving finance to work for Internet music pioneers Spinner.com and Winamp. Chamath grew up in Canada and graduated First Class Honors in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo. |
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Charlene contributes to Forrester’s offerings for the Interactive Marketing professional. She is a driving force behind Forrester’s Social Computing and Web 2.0 research, and examines how companies can use technologies like blogs, social networking, RSS, tagging, and widgets for marketing purposes. Charlene also blogs on these topics at her Groundswell blog and plans to publish a book by the same name in spring 2008. During her eight years at Forrester, Charlene has also led the Marketing and Media research team, and run Forrester’s San Francisco office. Prior to Forrester, Charlene was publisher of interactive media for the Community Newspaper Company in Massachusetts. Charlene also served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Before that, Charlene was at the San Jose Mercury News, where she managed new product development. Charlene is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts and has appeared in outlets like The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, CNN, NPR, and BBC, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and BusinessWeek. She is also an accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, and has appeared at Web 2.0 Expo, Ad:Tech, Search Engine Strategies, and AlwaysOn. She has delivered keynote speeches at many events, including Forrester’s Consumer Forum and Television Forum. Charlene is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. |
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Craig Ulliott, a UK-born computer programmer and builder of the Facebook travel application Where I’ve Been, spent the majority of his childhood just forty minutes south of London, in the beach city of Brighton. Always having a precocious understanding of electronics, Craig began experiementing with computers at aged ten. By the time he reached fifteen, Craig had built a piece of commercial software that is today still sold internationally.After completion of his primary education, Craig and his five best friends spent a year travelling around South America, Oceania, and Asia. During his travels, Craig met his future wife, an American, and returned to Great Britain with her. At age nineteen, Craig was accepted into the University of Sussex where he began a degree in Computer Science. Shortly thereafter, Craig dropped out to incorporate a successful web development and new media firm called Ohaso Limited.Craig and his wife moved to America in 2005. He began freelance programming for various companies, including SingleFeed, where he acted as head developer for their cutting edge AJAX application. In 2006, after having lived in both Denver and Chicago, they moved to Philadelphia, where Craig headed the programming department for Blueye, a Chicago-based web development corporation. Finally, in 2007, he solely built Where I’ve Been, Facebook’s mot popular travel application, which combines Craig’s love of travel and technology. Craig is now pursuing the transformation of Where I’ve Been into a successful Internet travel company. |
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Dan Fernandez is the Lead Product Manager for Non-Professional Tools in the developer division at Microsoft. He has been with Microsoft since July 2001, working in multiple roles including being the C# Product Manager and as a Developer Evangelist in the Mid-Atlantic district. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked as a developer at several consulting firms including IBM Global Services specializing in web-based and mobile application development. |
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Widely considered a leading “search engine guru,” Danny Sullivan has been helping webmasters, marketers and everyday web users understand how search engines work for over a decade.Danny’s expertise about search engines is often sought by the media, and he has been quoted in places like The Wall St. Journal, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, The New Yorker and Newsweek and ABC’s Nightline. Danny began covering search engines in late 1995, when he undertook a study of how they indexed web pages. The results were published online as “A Webmaster’s Guide To Search Engines,” a pioneering effort to answer the many questions site designers and Internet publicists had about search engines.The positive reaction from both marketers and general search engine users caused Danny to expand the guide into Search Engine Watch, where he served as editor-in-chief through November 2006. Now he heads up Search Engine Land as editor-in-chief, taking it into the next generation of search coverage. Danny also serves as Third Door Media’s chief content officer. |
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David Gentzel is VP Consumer Products at SocialMedia. He is also a top Facebook app developer and the creator of several apps with more than one million users, including Happy Hour and Food Fight. According to David, “I make viral apps.” |
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Dave Morin is the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, where he is responsible for platform strategy and the Facebook developer community. Prior to Facebook, Morin held multiple positions at Apple including Manager, Creation & Collaboration and Worldwide Manager of Student Marketing. Previously he founded two technology companies; Viadi, a web technology and marketing company and DM Design Studios, a design consultancy. Dave has served on the advisory boards of several Silicon Valley startups, and his focus on innovation, vision, and technology strategy has involved extensive interaction with the global market at large.Morin received a BS in Economics and Business Administration from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and currently lives in San Francisco, California. |
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David Young is the founder and CEO of Joyent, Inc. Before Joyent, David worked at Moody’s Investors Service in the Structured Finance, International, and Digital Media groups as General Manager and corporate Vice President. He helped found and was CTO of manageStar, an enterprise services management software company whose customers included TimeWarner, Sodexho, and Global Signal. David was the principal architect of manageStar’s Harmony platform for service deliver and managed a team of 80+ developers in San Francisco and Bangalore, India. David founded Joyent (http://www.joyent.com) in 2004 to provide a comprehensive suite of internet-delivered software and on-demand infrastructure for small to medium organizations. David has served as a trustee of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA, which the “National Review College Guide” called “one of the most rigorous curriculums of any school in the country”. David holds a BA in Classics (Greek), cum laude, from Indiana University. He lives the joyent lifestyle in Marin County, CA with his wife Maria and two daughters. |
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David Recordon is Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, the largest independent blogging company in the world. Recordon has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies such as OpenID. In 2005, Recordon collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the original development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the web. During a year and a half at VeriSign, Recordon played an active role in refining and evangelizing OpenID, bringing it from an experimental technology to one that’s been endorsed by major companies ranging from AOL to Microsoft, and implemented for over 120 million identities on the web. Recordon’s history with open source software and open standards stretches back to the beginning of his career, when as a sophomore in high school he volunteered his time to lead an open source message board project with over forty members worldwide. This interest led to his co-founding of a message board hosting provider that still services tens of thousands of users around the world, and that he has since sold. Recordon was recently recognized by Google and O’Reilly as the recipient of a 2007 Open Source Award for his efforts with OpenID and is the youngest recipient in the history of the award. |
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George Zachary joined Charles River Ventures in 2004. He brings more than 17 years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. George’s focus is on building great services and software technology companies. George led CRV’s investments in Areae, Geni.com, GoTV, Skyrider, Twitter and is on each company’s board of directors. Previously, he was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV). His directorships included: Accrue Software (Nasdaq:ACRU), Andale, Critical Path (Nasdaq: CPTH), Ovation Entertainment, Sandcastle (acquired by Adobe, Nasdaq:ADBE), Securify (acquired by Kroll-O’Gara, Nasdaq: KROG), Shutterfly, Supertracks (acquired by Centerspan) and Telebot (acquired by Z-Tel, Nasdaq: ZTEL). Prior to MDV, George led the Nintendo 64 development business at Silicon Graphics, managed sales and marketing for virtual reality pioneer VPL Research, and served as a product marketeer at CATS Software. He is a board advisor at the MIT Sloan School of Business and Stanford BASES. He is also an advisor to X PRIZE. George earned a joint BS from MIT and MIT Sloan School of Business. Visit George’s Blog. |
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Giles Goodwin is Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Widgetbox, and has over 10 years experience building innovative software products. Prior to co-founding Widgetbox, Giles Goodwin was Chief Portal Suite Architect and Director of Engineering at Vignette, a content management company, with responsibility for the management and development of composite application and web services technology. Prior to his role at Vignette, Giles was Director of Engineering at Epicentric which was acquired by Vignette. Prior to this, Giles was lead developer and architect at Application Park, an online web application builder and portal company which was acquired by Epicentric. Giles holds a BS in Physics from the University of California at Riverside. |
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Gregg Spiridellis co-founded JibJab Media Inc. with his brother Evan in 1999. In addition to his role as CEO, Gregg is also JibJab’s head writer. In 2004, his lyrics helped spark an international sensation with the release of JibJab’s election parody, “This Land.” The two-minute short and its follow up, “Good To Be In DC!” were viewed more than eighty million times online on every continent, including Antarctica. In 2004, the late Peter Jennings named Gregg and his brother “People of the Year.” Since the election, JibJab has premiered ten videos on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, formed distribution partnerships with Yahoo! and MSN Video, and produced branded entertainment sponsorships for Anheuser-Busch and Verizon Wireless. Prior to JibJab, Gregg was an investment banker with Bear Stearns and Goldman Sachs in New York. He graduated from the MBA program at the Wharton School of Business in 1999 and received his BS from Rutgers University. |
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Hooman is the founder & CEO of Clearspring Technologies, the leading provider of online widget syndication services. At Clearspring, he is actively involved in shaping product and marketing initiatives. He was recently named one of Tech’s Best Entrepreneurs in BusinessWeek and was nominated for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year. Hooman is a frequently requested speaker in the areas of social networks, syndication, and digital media. When he is not busy building a better web, you can find him writing his blog Widgify. Radfar graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in Economics and Computer Science. He holds an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University where he researched Social Networking Theory. |
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Jason Beckerman is Founder and CEO of Teach The People, and also founder and consultant to Dank Apps, makers of the Facebook application The Lotto. Since the age of 16, he has been heavily involved with application development and hosted internet applications, and has a deep knowledge of Web 2.0 and ways to use the social graph to execute complex business models. Jason has worked for various financial institutions and startups throughout his career including Merrill Lynch, Paytrust, Island ECN, Instinet, Albridge Solutions, Siebel, and Salesforce.com. In his time at Salesforce.com, Jason managed the release process for the largest on-demand CRM roll out in the history of SAAS. Jason holds a BS in Entrepreneurship and Information Systems from Quinnipiac University and a Masters in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University. |
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Jason McCabe Calacanis is the founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine focused on the top English-language search terms. Previously Calacanis was co-founder and CEO of Weblogs, Inc., a network of popular weblogs that was sold to AOL in November 2005. Upon joining AOL, he was appointed senior vice president. In addition, he was named general manager of AOL’s Netscape and was responsible for the July 2006 relaunch of the iconic browser as a social bookmarking news site. Prior to forming Weblogs Inc., Calacanis was the founder of Rising Tide Studios, a media company that published the magazines Silicon Alley Reporter and Digital Coast Reporter. The flagship publication later became Venture Reporter, a venture capital database, and was sold to Dow Jones. Calacanis received a B.A. in psychology from Fordham University. Calacanis can be read daily on his own blog, www.calacanis.com and heard weekly on “CalacanisCast,” a new show on The PodTech Network. |
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As Senior Web Services Evangelist, Jeff Barr is focused on furthering awareness among software developers of the opportunity to innovate and build businesses using Amazon Web Services. Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes Amazon.com technology and product data that enables developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own. Barr meets regularly with developers in the U.S. and internationally to introduce Amazon Web Services and to help them build businesses and applications with the program’s services. He joined Amazon in August 2002 as a Senior Software Developer on the Associates team.Applications built using Amazon Web Services range from enhanced Associates sites that advertise products from the Amazon.com Web site to integrated solutions for retailers selling merchandise through Amazon.com. Developers make money by earning referral fees from their Associates sites or by charging users for the applications they build.Barr has a longstanding interest in Web services and programmatic information interchange. He has held development and management positions at KnowNow, eByz, Akopia, and Microsoft, and was a co-founder of Visix Software. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from American University and completed graduate work in computer science at George Washington University. |
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Jeff Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, and an active seed stage investor in over 20 Web 2.0 startups since 2004, five of which have been acquired. In 2007, Jeff was recognized as one of the 13 “Web 2.0 King Makers” by Business 2.0, His initial investments have been in search, social media, online communities and application infrastructure; and more recently gaming as well as other emerging categories.A popular speaker and moderator, Jeff participates in dozens of industry events throughout the year in Silicon Valley and around the world. Jeff has also produced a number of technology conferences and is a founding co-chair of the SDForum Search SIG. Jeff also writes on his blog Software Only about social media, search, online communities and investing.Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff spent more than 16 years in the enterprise software world as an entrepreneur, senior executive and venture capitalist. In 2000, Jeff became President of RVC Capital, which managed the Reuters Greenhouse Fund with $600M invested in 82 companies, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com and Infoseek. Jeff joined Reuters through the acquisition of Effix Systems, a Paris-based startup company he helped develop in 1989.Jeff was born, raised and educated in France, earning a MS in Computer Science and a research degree in Distributed Computing. He has been happily living in Silicon Valley since 2000 with his wife Bernadette and their two children. |
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Jeff Nolan, vice president of corporate development, NewsGator. Based out of Silicon Valley, Nolan is managing corporate development across the company’s line of award-winning Enterprise 2.0 and widget solutions, which are used by more than 100 businesses including USA Today, Procter & Gamble, the Discovery Channel, Biogen Idec, Rohm and Haas, Spencer Stuart and the New York Times Regional Media Group. Prior to joining NewsGator, Nolan led Teqlo, a high-profile startup that develops platforms for mashups and other user-assembled applications, and was also a general partner at SAP Ventures and later led the strategy team for the Apollo Group at SAP. Nolan will continue to author the popular Venture Chronicles blog. |
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Jeremy Liew joined Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2006 as a Partner. Previously Jeremy was with AOL, first as SVP of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to the CEO, and then as General Manager of Netscape. He joined AOL from InterActiveCorp (originally USA Networks) where he was VP of Strategic Planning. While there he was responsible for acquisitions and investments in TV Networks, consumer internet companies and online travel companies. Jeremy started working in the consumer internet industry as an early employee of CitySearch in 1996 where he held a variety of sales management, operational and business development roles. He was also a management consultant at McKinsey and Company. Jeremy holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA/BSc(Hons) from the Australian National University in Linguistics and Pure Mathematics. |
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Jeremiah Robison is a founding member of the management team at Slide.com. As CTO, Jeremiah heads technology strategy and development for the company’s network of more than 134 million monthly unique viewers. An early pioneer in mobile web technologies at Openwave, Jeremiah architected and built the first HTML browser for mobile phones. Under his leadership, the browser development team shipped more than a billion handsets worldwide and established Openwave Mobile Browser as the industry standard. Previously, Jeremiah worked at Apple on hand-writing recognition for the Newton. He holds a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he also competed on the NCAA championship water polo team.td> |
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Jia is the CTO and co-founder of RockYou, and has focused extensively on graphic design and usability throughout his professional web development career spanning over 10 years. Prior to RockYou, Jia has held management roles leading the user interface and technical solutions teams at Open Harbor, and managing the majority of engineering at Iconix. Jia started working on scalable consumer applications at shopping tools internet provider Bluedog, a Stanford based startup, and was part of the original team at Bell Laboratories which developed the VoiceXML format into the W3C standard. In addition, Jia’s experience has spanned enterprise sales and professional services functions, as he closed transactions and integrated with large multi-national corporation customers like Mitsubishi, Tyco, Flextronics, and DHL. Jia has a double major in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. |
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Joe Hurd is VP Business Development at VideoEgg. Before joining VideoEgg, Joe was the VP BD and GM, International at Friendster and also spent 3 years building AOL’s business development teams in Japan and Australia. He first entered the world of technology and business practicing corporate law in London with Linklaters and in Palo Alto with Wilson, Sonsini. Joe received AB in East Asian Studies and Government and a JD from Harvard University and a masters in International Affairs from Columbia. |
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Joseph Smarr is Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. He is currently leading Plaxo’s “Open Social Web” initiative to put users back in control of who they know when using socially-enabled sites by using open data-sharing standards. An active participant in the Web 2.0 community, Joseph has built web applications for many years, including Plaxo’s online address book, web widgets, and was architect and lead developer of the Plaxo 3.0 rich AJAX address book, calendar, and sync tool. Joseph has a BS and MS from Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence. |
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Justin Smith is the editor of InsideFacebook, the first Facebook-focused blog, covering the business of Facebook and the Facebook Platform. Justin is also the Product Manager at Watercooler, a developer of sports and television entertainment Facebook applications. Millions of Facebook members have joined Watercooler’s applications since their launch three months ago. Justin has a degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford University. |
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Keith Rabois is Vice President, Strategy & Business Development at Slide.com and is responsible for Slide’s strategy and partnerships. Under his leadership, Slide has become the leading application developer on Facebook with more than 45 million applications installed and the most active users than any other developer. Before Slide, Keith served as Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at LinkedIn and Executive Vice President at PayPal, directing the company’s competitive strategy and business development initiatives. After leaving PayPal, Keith was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Clarium Capital Management, the global hedge fund lead by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Keith currently serves on the Board of Directors of Yelp, Vendio, Xoom and Fanlq. He is also an early investor in YouTube and several other high profile early stage start-ups. Rabois holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Stanford University and a J.D from Harvard Law School. |
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Lance is CEO and co-founder of RockYou and brings over 15 years of software and management experience to the company. Prior to RockYou, Lance held Vice President & Chief Technology Officer positions in consumer and enterprise web services companies Iconix and Open Harbor, and was an early employee at Resumix, now Yahoo! HotJobs. Lance holds patents in text extraction and document categorization, with an email patent pending as well, and has received the American Association of Artificial Intelligence Award of Innovation for work on spatial text understanding. He received his Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of Hawaii, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas. |
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Lee Lorenzen is a successful entrepreneur with more than 26 years of technology & investing experience. He is currently President, CEO of Altura Ventures.Prior to Altura Ventures he founded SHOP.COM and as CEO/Chairman led the company to becoming one of the largest shopping sites on the web. Lorenzen’s first start-up was Ventura Software where he co-wrote Ventura Publisher, later licensed to Xerox. Lorenzen founded Altura Software in 1990 and created the Mac2Win software which was used to port Mac applications to Windows. Altura has generated over $15M in revenue, and reached Softletter’s Top 100 list. Lorenzen also founded Fractal Design Corporation, which went public in 1995 before acquired by Corel; and he co-founded PGSoft which was sold to Novell. Lorenzen has also worked at Xerox and Digital Research.Lorenzen graduating valedictorian from SMU with a BS in Computer Science. |
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Luke Nosek is a managing partner at The Founders Fund. Luke was a co-founder of PayPal and served as the company’s Vice President of Marketing and Strategy. While at PayPal, Luke oversaw the company’s marketing efforts at launch, growing the user base to 1 million customers in the first six months. Luke also created “Instant Transfer,” PayPal’s most profitable product. Prior to PayPal, Luke was an evangelist at Netscape. Luke has also co-founded two other consumer Internet companies, including the web’s first advertising network, and has made a number of venture investments since 2000. Luke received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. |
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Matt Marshall is founder and editor of VentureBeat, a news site that covers innovative start-ups and the investors that back them. VentureBeat is a successor to the SiliconBeat site he started while still with the San Jose Mercury News. Matt launched VentureBeat in 2006, after he left the Mercury News, where he was a staff writer focused on venture capital and emerging technologies.Prior to Mercury news Matt worked at some of the well known names in print journalism including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington post and Los Angeles times. He has won several awards including James Madison Freedom of Information Act Award and Journalist of the Year, awarded by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. These days Matt prowls Silicon valley looking for exciting technology startup companies, the entrepreneurs who start these companies and the VC’s who fund these emerging companies.Matt received a Ph.D in government from Georgetown University and a BA in Economics and Politics from UC Santa Cruz. |
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J. Michael Arrington is the founder of the Crunch Network and editor of TechCrunch, a weblog “dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies.”Arrington founded edgeio, a classified listings system company. He is on the board of Foldera, a web-based organizer, and is an investor in Daylife, a news startup. He has served as a corporate lawyer, been involved in sales and business development at RealNames and co-founded Achex, which was sold to First Data Corp. He also founded two companies in Canada and was COO at Razorgator. He has also been a consultant for SnapNames, Verisign and Spotback.Arrington graduated from Claremont McKenna with a degree in economics, and earned a law degree from Stanford in 1995. |
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Engaged in web application development since 1994, Narendra Rocherolle was one of the founders and primary software engineers for Webshots. He served as CEO during the two years prior to the company’s sale to CNET Networks in 2004. He is Co-founder and Principal of 83 Degrees, Inc., whose first project is the critically acclaimed 30 Boxes. Most recently, he and his partners created fbExchange, and advertising and promotional platform designed for Facebook. |
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Oren Michels brings more than 15 years of experience to his job as CEO of Mashery. Michels has a proven track record with experience across multiple industries. Previously, Michels was vice president of business development at Feedster, where he negotiated partnerships with AOL, Real Networks and Mitsui, and oversaw the company’s activities in China. Prior to Feedster, Michels was president of Colt HR, a leading provider of outsourced benefits administration software and services to the mid market. He also co-founded WiFinder, an international provider of directory services for wi-fi public access hotspots; served as president of winebid.com, where he managed the company’s growth and helped establish it as a leading online wine auction market; served as COO of two manufacturing companies; and as CEO of The Groundlings, an entertainment production company in Hollywood. Michels began his career as a software designer for Hughes Aircraft and has been a consultant to companies in the management, financial, marketing and information technology industries. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial studies from UCLA’s Anderson School. |
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Patrick Harr joined Nirvanix as CEO from Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, where he served as entrepreneur-in-residence focusing on content, storage, and media services investments. His prior leadership roles include president and CEO of Preventsys Inc., a security risk and compliance management firm that was acquired by McAfee in 2006, and Vice President of the $300M Enterprise Products Group at McDATA Corp., an enterprise storage networking solutions company. Harr joined McDATA through the acquisition of Sanera Systems, a storage networking startup, where he ran marketing, business development and sales. Prior to Sanera, Harr ran worldwide marketing at CacheFlow and was the GM of Novell’s Internet and Security Services Group. Mr. Harr received a Masters in Business Administration degree in marketing and entrepreneurial studies from the University of Maryland and his B.A. from Tulane in political economy and Russian. |
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Rafe Needleman is editor of CNET Webware.com, a site covering Web-based products and startups. Rafe has been a technology editor and writer since 1988. Previously, Rafe wrote Catch of the Day for Red Herring. He has written for Business 2.0, Always On, and Release 1.0. He has also edited several publications, including Byte Magazine, where he was editor in chief. |
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Reid was the founding CEO of LinkedIn for the first four years before moving to his role as Chairman and President, Products in February 2007. While CEO, Reid built the company to over 9 million members and profitability. He now drives product and business strategy for LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, Reid was Executive Vice President of PayPal. At PayPal, Reid was in charge of all business relationships: business development, corporate development, international, government relations, and banking/payments infrastructure. During his tenure at PayPal, Hoffman was instrumental to the acquisition by eBay and was responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo. Reid also has held management roles in large technology companies, including Fujitsu Software Corporation and Apple. Currently, in addition to LinkedIn, Reid serves on the Board of Directors for SixApart and Mozilla Corporation. Reid graduated with distinction from Stanford University with a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and from Oxford University with a Master’s degree in philosophy. |
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Rogelio (Ro) Choy is vice president of Business Development for RockYou. He is responsible for recruiting and managing partner relations. Before joining the RockYou executive team, Ro managed eBay’s online parts business as a Director at eBay Motors and also was responsible for managing Market Development at eBay, including operation of eBay’s U.S. wireless efforts. Prior to eBay, Ro co-founded Cima Systems, a leading VOIP software provider for auto dealers. Ro earned his MBA from Stanford University School of Business. |
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Robert Scoble is a technical evangelist, writer, and the author of the popular blog Scobleizer. He is currently Vice President of Media Development at video-podcast startup PodTech.net, where among other things he produces the ScobleShow, a series of interviews and stories about, as the site puts it, “geeks, technologists and developers.”Scoble is a lifelong technologist, growing up just blocks from Apple computer and playing in the garage with electronic gadgets his father brought home from work. Scoble worked for Fawcette Technical Publications, UserLand Software, NEC and TabletPC before landing a job in 2003 with the Channel 9 MSDN Video team, producing stories about Microsoft employees and products. During this period his Scobleizer blog became a favorite of technologists who valued his independence and objectivity.Robert is a popular speaker and co-author of “Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.” |
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Rodney is the Editor & Publisher of FaceReviews.com, a website that provides ratings & reviews of Facebook applications, as well as news & strategy insights. He has been involved with the Facebook f8 platform since launch. He is also Founder/CEO of a new media strategy & consulting practice that provides business and technology consulting on how to leverage the Facebook social operating system. Rodney has helped many Fortune 100 clients and hundreds of small businesses. Rodney has over 20 years experience in the technology industry, and has authored books on New Media & Business Blogging. His websites have been featured in The Wall Street Journal and Business 2.0, and the acclaimed “For Dummies” series of books. He has held senior level management positions in Fortune 100 companies and startups in the areas of Engineering, Project Management and Business Development. He sits on the board of several technology companies. Rodney currently resides in Solana Beach, CA. |
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Saar joined Charles River Ventures in 2007 with more than 10 years of experience working with entrepreneurs as a founder, investor and advisor. Prior to joining CRV, Saar was a co-founder of Brightroll, the world’s leading Internet video advertising network. Saar also acted as an angel investor and advisor to numerous companies including RockYou, Admob, Flixster, Xobni, Lotus Vodka, and Voicestar (acquired by Marchex, NASDAQ: MCHX).Prior to Brightroll, Saar was part of the senior management team of Adteractive. Adteractive is an online performance-based marketing company and one of the largest buyers of online media. Saar helped build Adteractive to over 175 employees and $120mm in revenues, with no outside capital. He was vice president of online customer acquisition and was responsible for the company P&L. Before joining Adteractive, Saar and his business partner raised approximately $12 million of equity capital to execute a complex private equity transaction. The project was sold within two years and returned over $30 million to investors.Saar started his career in investment banking and venture capital at Lehman Brothers. He graduated phi beta kappa with a biochemistry degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.He was also the co-founder of carebadges.com (acquired by Facebook Causes), an online community that enables individuals to generate market awareness for the organizations and causes that they care about. |
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Scott Rafer has been helping Internet publishers and users jump on What’s Right Now! since 1995. Today, that means delivering services for social publishing and discovery. Scott is CEO of Lookery, as well as co-founder of Mashery, and chairman of Winksite. Just before all that, he was CEO of MyBlogLog until Yahoo! acquired the company in January 2007. Lookery is building targeted advertising and other services for publishers of social applications, starting with Facebook apps. Mashery manages API and developer programs on behalf of web services providers including Facebook app providers. Winksite helps publishers large and small assemble active mobile communities around their brands based on the content they already syndicate. From 2001 to 2003, Scott was CEO of Feedster, the blog search engine and advertising network. Before Feedster, Scott co-founded WiFinder, the Wi-Fi hotspot directory; Fresher Information, a real-time search engine which was using RSS way back in 1999; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions. Before the first dotcom boom, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company, and graduated from the Management of Technology program at UPenn. Please check out http://blog.lookery.com for the latest. |
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Seth is the Co-Founder & CEO of SocialMedia.com. He is also an angel advisor to a number of Web services companies such as Aggregate Knowledge, Lijit and Downfly. He was the first investor in Web 2.0 pioneer del.icio.us (now part of Yahoo!)In 1995, he created SiteSpecific, one of the first Internet advertising companies. He was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Flatiron Partners from 1998-2000. In 2002 Seth co-founded Majestic Research, a next generation Wall Street Research firm that provides leading hedge funds with proprietary data insights. In 2005 he created Root Markets, the first financial exchange for Internet mortgage leads.He recently moved from New York City to Marin California with his wife and their two sons. |
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Susan joined Charles River Ventures with 12 years of operating experience working with early stage technology ventures. She is actively involved in CRV investments in Areae, Conduit Labs, Handipoints, iControl, Optaros, Social Media, and Twitter. Susan is a member and the former CMO of the Apache Software Foundation, one of the world’s most influential open source software organizations.Susan’s roots in the open source community stems from her long-abiding interest in how technology catalyzes social and economic change. She began her career as the chief architect of an early massively multiplayer online game and has remained active in online gaming. She was the Executive Producer of GXMod, a widely popular, award winning Quake 2 enhancement. Susan also contributed to components of the open source Nebula 3D graphics and game engine.Prior to her work at Apache, Susan was the VP of Strategic Alliances for Predictive Systems, a NASDAQ-listed security services firm that was acquired by International Network Services (INS) in 2003. Susan also served as the VP of Strategic Development for Opus360, a provider of on demand human resources and project management solutions. Susan co-authored Opus360’s business plan, led business development activities, and helped steer the company to a public offering in 2000. Prior to Opus360, Susan was the Director of Development at USWeb/CKS, where she led the development and design of some of the world’s first community-centric consumer Internet businesses.Susan received her BA from Tufts University and an MBA with distinction from Cornell University, where she was a Park Fellow and a Bristol Myers Squibb Fellow. |
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Tantek Çelik is dedicated to advancing open standards and simpler data formats for the Web. Tantek is one of the founders of both the nascent microformats.org open standards community and the Global Multimedia Protocols Group, and invited expert to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Cascading Style Sheets working group.Tantek has played a key role in the development and popularization of practical social network portability technologies such as the hCard and XFN microformats. In 2003, Tantek collaborated with Eric Meyer and Matt Mullenweg in the invention of the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), which has since become the most popular decentralized social relationship format in the history of the Web. In 2004 Tantek proposed hCard for representing people and organizations, which has since similarly become the most popular user profile format on the Web. During his years as Technorati’s Chief Technologist, Tantek played an active role in refining and evangelizing hCard, bringing it from a wiki proposal to one that’s endorsed and supported by individuals, numerous small organizations, major companies ranging from AOL to Yahoo, and implemented for over a hundred million user identities and business listings on the Web.Previously Tantek was a veteran representative to the W3C for Microsoft, where he also helped lead the development of the award-winning Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh, the first web browser to bring widespread standards compliant HTML4 + CSS1 + PNG1 support to millions of users. Tantek has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as a strong background in human interface and user-centered design from his many years at Apple Computer. He shares his thoughts at tantek.com.td> |
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Ted Grubb is UI specialist at Satisfaction Unlimited. With over 8 years experience designing and developing web applications, he currently works on prototyping and implementing key product features including the first ever hCard profile importer. Ted is an open standards evangelist, organizing events to increase the understanding and implementation of social network portability. |
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Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. The company also publishes online through the O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics. Tim is an activist for open source, open standards, and sensible intellectual property laws.Since 1978, Tim has led the company’s pursuit of its core goal: to be a catalyst for technology change by capturing and transmitting the knowledge of “alpha geeks” and other innovators. His active engagement with technology communities drives both the company’s product development and its marketing. Tim has built a culture where advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism are key tenets of the business philosophy. |
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Tim is a co-founder and partner at Hungry Machine LLC, a Washington DC-based software development and consulting firm. Hungry Machine has provided Rails consulting work for companies ranging from startup to Fortune 500, but most notably has launched several successful Facebook applications including Visual Bookshelf and Oktoberfest. Prior to Hungry Machine, Tim led the Consumer Products Group at Revolution Health and was a key contributor to the launch of www.RevolutionHealth.com, a multi-million user healthcare and wellness portal. Please see the Hungry Machine blog for more information. |
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At the age of 21, Tyler is already well known in certain circles (like this one) as the developer of Slide’s Top Friends application, by far the most popular app on Facebook with millions of loyal daily users. He also developed several other Slide apps on Facebook, including Fortune Cookie and Famous Quotes. Tyler has been developing software professionally since the age of 18, when he founded a Mac software and consulting company called bleep. He dropped out of Texas A&M University, where he studied computer engineering, to satisfy his entrepreneurial spirit. When he’s not writing code, Tyler actively contributes to the open source community and his own blog, the Unethical Blogger. Plus, he has a killer virtual backhand with a Wii Tennis score of over 2300. |
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Yi-Fang Yen is Director of Product Management at Adbrite. Yi-Fang joined AdBrite in July 2006 and leads the company’s Product Management efforts. His responsibilities include managing the product roadmap and leading product strategy, product marketing, and customer research. Prior to joining AdBrite, Yi-Fang was at eBay where he led the development of the eBay Platform and launched the first eBay APIs. He negotiated key deals with Microsoft, SAP, and major affiliates to expand the reach of the eBay Platform. He also managed global trust and safety initiatives to combat fraud. Prior to eBay, Yi-Fang held positions at Toyota, CarsDirect.com, the Walt Disney Company, Credit Suisse First Boston, and Accenture. Yi-Fang holds an MBA from the Yale School of Management and a B.A.S. in Biological Sciences and Political Science from Stanford University. |
