Speakers

We are pleased to have the following speakers join us for Disrupt SF 2013. Please note: speakers will be announced on a rolling basis.

Speakers for Disrupt SF 2013

254586v1-max-250x250Michael Abbott
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Senior Partner

Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2011. He focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data.” He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment.

An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Mike led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft before he joined KPCB. Mike is also an expert in “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software. Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Mike led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter’s infrastructure, growing the engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in less than a year and a half, and scaling Twitter’s architecture to support 250 million daily tweets. Before joining Twitter, Mike led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform.

Earlier in his career, Mike was the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. He was also co-founder of Passenger Inc. Mike has advised and invested in numerous software companies throughout his career, including Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Jawbone and Saynow.

Mike holds a bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic State University and has completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at the University of Washington.

heatherHeather Adkins
Manager of Information Security, Google

Heather Adkins is an 11-year Google veteran and founding member of the Google Security Team. As Manager of Information Security, she has built a global team responsible for maintaining the safety and security of Google’s networks, systems and applications. The Google Security Team, now numbering in the hundreds, is involved in every facet of the business, including launching new products, mergers and acquisitions, building security infrastructure, responding to security threats, and evangelism.

She has an extensive background in systems and network administration with an emphasis on practical security, and has worked to build and secure some of the world’s largest infrastructure for web information systems. She now focuses her time primarily on the defense of Google’s computing infrastructure and working with both the Google Incident Response Team and outside entities to tackle some of the industry’s greatest security challenges.

12794v6-max-250x250Michael Arrington
CrunchFund
General Partner

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news.

Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He also co-authored a book on initial public offerings.

In 1999, he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP of Business Development and General Counsel. In 2000, he cofounded Achex, an online payments company, that was later acquired by First Data Corp for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.

Arrington worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner-backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including Verisign.

In May 2008, Time Magazine named Michael Arrington as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

jamesJames Bamford
Author and Journalist, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to The Eavesdropping on Americans

James Bamford is an American bestselling author and journalist widely noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the highly secretive National Security Agency. His most recent book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to The Eavesdropping on Americans became a New York Times bestseller and was named by The Washington Post as one of “The Best Books of 2008.” It is the third in a trilogy by Bamford on the NSA, following The Puzzle Palace (1982) and Body of Secrets (2001), also New York Times bestsellers. The Puzzle Palace was the first book ever written about the NSA.

Following its release Bamford spent nearly a decade as the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings where he won a number of journalism awards for his coverage of national security issues. In 2005, Bamford released A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq and The Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies, an examination of the intelligence community from the attacks of September 11 to the war in Iraq and was also distinguished as a Washington Post bestseller.

Bamford has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley as a distinguished visiting professor and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Harpers, and many other publications. In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his piece “The Man Who Sold The War,” published in Rolling Stone. He also writes and produces documentaries for PBS, including The Spy Factory, based of his most recent book, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010. A native of Massachusetts, Bamford served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, and he later used the GI Bill to earn his law degree.

18394v3-max-250x250Cyan Banister
Zivity
CEO & Editor-in-Chief

Cyan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Zivity, a prolific angel investor with her husband Scott Banister (Tagged, SpaceX, Uber and others (See AngelList for full list), board member, advisor and also a contributing writer for TechCrunch.

Cyan co-founded the controversial website Zivity.com, which is a subscription based social networking site for creators and fans of beautiful and tasteful glamour photography. She currently serves on the board of directors for Mimoco, best known for their MIMOBOT line of designer USB storage devices.

Cyan has held many leadership roles throughout her career, from leading technical operations teams in an enterprise software company to helping women master technology as CTO of a nonprofit organization.
As a side note, Cyan donates money every year to the world juggling federation, women’s division.

16470v6-max-250x250Rich Barton
Zillow
Co-Founder, Executive Chairman

Rich Barton is an entrepreneur and investor with a knack for disrupting and transforming industries. He is currently co-founder and executive chairman of Zillow, Inc., a real estate marketplace he co-founded in 2005 that went public in 2011 (NASDAQ: Z). Prior to Zillow, Rich founded Expedia inside Microsoft in 1994 at the age of 26, pioneering a new model that gave consumers more control over their travel and demonstrated how powerful e-commerce could be. He built the original Expedia team then spun out the company in a successful IPO in 1999, serving as President, Chief Executive Officer and Board Director through the company’s acquisition by IAC Corp in 2003. He co-founded Zillow with many of his former Expedia compatriots with the goal to bring the same level of transparency to real estate that they brought to travel a decade earlier. Today, Zillow has expanded beyond its trademark Zestimate® to become the largest real estate and home-related marketplace on mobile and the desktop.

Rich has also taken pages from his “power to the people” playbook and in 2007 co-founded Glassdoor, a social career and jobs community, where he currently serves as non-executive chairman. He is also co-founder of Trover, a mobile app helping people find and share their “discoveries” around the world. He is a Venture Partner at Benchmark and is also on the boards of Nextdoor, Netflix, RealSelf, Avvo and non-profit, YearUp. His angel investments include stakes in such innovative startups as Hotel Tonight, Hipmunk, Room 77, Front Desk, Decide, Qliance, Duetto, Seattle Bank, and Revinate.

Rich holds a Bachelor’s of Science in General Engineering: Industrial Economics from Stanford University.

marcMarc Benioff
Salesforce
Founder, Chairman & CEO

Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Benioff is now regarded as one of the pioneers of cloud computing and has been instrumental in driving businesses to transform by embracing social and mobile cloud technologies to connect with customers, partners and employees in new ways.

Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the leader in enterprise cloud computing. For its revolutionary approach, salesforce.com has been recognized by Fortune as one of the Fastest Growing Companies and one of the Best Places to Work and was selected by Forbes as the World’s Most Innovative Company for two years in a row.

Benioff has been widely recognized for his visionary leadership and for pioneering innovation. In 2012 he was named a Businessperson of the Year by Fortune, one of the Best CEOs in the World by Barron’s, one of the Best CEOs in America by Forbes, and he also received an Innovation Award from The Economist. In 2010 he was awarded the David Packard Medal of Achievement and was named by Fortune one of the Top 50 People in Business as well as one of the Smartest People in Tech.

Throughout his career, Benioff has been committed to using information technology to produce positive social change. In 2000, he launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization—which established the “1-1-1 model,” whereby the company contributes one percent of product, one percent of equity, and one percent of employee hours back to the communities it serves. Acknowledging his commitment to building partnerships between business and society to improve the state of the world, the members of the World Economic Forum named Benioff as one of its Young Global Leaders and the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy presented Benioff with the coveted Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy Award.

Benioff is a member of the board of directors of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, serves on the Board of Trustees at the University of Southern California and is on the board of directors at Cisco. Benioff is also the author of three books, including the national best seller Behind the Cloud.

Prior to launching salesforce.com, Benioff, a 30-year veteran of the software industry, spent 13 years at Oracle Corporation from 1986-1999. In 1984, he worked as an assembly language programmer in Apple’s Macintosh Division. He founded entertainment software company Liberty Software in 1979 when he was 15 years old. Benioff received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Southern California in 1986.

139217v2-max-250x250James Beshara
Crowdtilt
Co-founder

James has been pushing the group-funding envelope since 2007.

Before co-founding Crowdtilt, he studied Development Economics in undergrad and then went on to build dvelo.org, a site for group-funding poverty-alleviation organizations in developing countries.

James hopes that people will eventually use Crowdtilt to change the world.

But for now, he’s totally ok with them using it to facilitate late-night parties and tailgates.

194974v4-max-250x250Niko Bonatsos
General Catalyst Partners

Niko is a Principal at General Catalyst and GC Seed, the firm’s seed investment vehicle. Niko focuses on investments in IT (mobile, education technology, consumerized IT business applications & consumer health) as well as seed-stage opportunities with an outlier potential. He is particularly interested in working with first time founders, who have a strong perspective about solving big problems their way.

Concurrent with his academic career, Niko worked on lean manufacturing for Yokogawa Electric Corp, biomedical signal processing at Harvard Medical School/MGH, cloud computing at Stanford University and as a founding team member of myLinkpower, a social networking start-up.

Niko is a graduate of Stanford University, earning an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering as a Fulbright Scholar; the University of Cambridge, earning an M.Phil. in Manufacturing Engineering and Management; and the National Technical University of Athens, earning an engineer’s degree (Dipl.-Ing) in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

38020v3-max-250x250 (1)Roelof Botha
Sequoia Capital
Partner

Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital, and works with a broad range of companies. Some democratize technology access (Square, Eventbrite, Unity, Nimbula); some create global user communities (YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram); and others disrupt markets through innovative business models (Evernote, Weebly, Xoom). Roelof also sits on the boards of Aliph, Mahalo, and TokBox. Roelof is a champion of consumer Web plays and considers himself as “just another consumer.”

Roelof led the initial financing of YouTube on behalf of Sequoia Capital in 2005.
Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal, where he led the company through its IPO in 2002, and the acquisition by eBay before joining Sequoia Capital in 2003.

Roelof loves to hear a founder recount what inspired them to strike out on their own and to gain an understanding of how the founder is uniquely solving a customer pain point.

180500v1-max-250x250Tracy Chou
Pinterest
Infrastructure Engineer

Tracy is currently a backend/infrastructure software engineer at Pinterest.

She was previously at Quora, where she joined as the second engineer.

She holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Electrical Engineering, both from Stanford University.

10552v2-max-250x250Jeff Clavier
SoftTech VC
Founder and Managing Partner
Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most established seed VC firms in Silicon Valley, having closed 150 investments since 2004. An early angel investor in Web 2.0, Jeff and his team have backed successful startups like Mint (Intuit), Kongregate (GameStop), Brightroll, Milo (eBay), Wildfire (Google), Bleacher Report (Turner), Fitbit, Eventbrite, Sendgrid, Fab, Poshmark and Class Dojo. The portfolio has also seen acquisitions by Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL. The firm is currently investing out of its $55M Fund III, making 20 commitments of $500K per year in mobile/cloud saas, monetization infrastructure, marketplaces and e-commerce.

Born, raised and educated in France, Jeff graduated with a MS in Computer Science and a degree in Distributed Computing. He joined Effix, a financial services startup, as one of the initial developers while still at school and eventually led it as CTO. After 5 years, Reuters acquired the company and Jeff expanded his remit to several product and development organizations in Europe and the USA. In 2000, he moved to Silicon Valley as General Partner for RVC, the $450M venture fund affiliated with Reuters.

In 2004, Jeff left RVC to start SoftTech VC and invest in the early pioneers of Consumer Internet. Within a couple of years, he was being recognized in the media as one of the “super angels”, and in 2007, he subsequently raised one of the first micro-VC funds, $15M Fund II. After three years, and 60+ investments closed on his own, Jeff built a team and raised a larger, $55M Fund III.

One of the early VC bloggers in 2004, Jeff is now a popular conference speaker and social media/TV commentator. When he is not spending time with SoftTech’s portfolio companies, Jeff enjoys traveling, skiing, scuba diving, collecting wine and hanging out with friends and family.

Rob Coneybeer - Shasta Ventures
Rob Coneybeer
Shasta Ventures
Founder and Managing Director

Rob started his career as an aerospace engineer and automotive engine tester, then became an investor in early stage technology companies. He co-founded Shasta Ventures in 2005.

Rob is looking to work with entrepreneurs who are creating disruptive new approaches to mobile and networked devices, as well as technology applications that leverage novel infrastructure technologies in creative ways. He is particularly interested in high-risk startups that are rapidly scalable, impact the lives of millions of people and connect the “real world” to the Internet, whether via smart phones, low-cost sensors, or other innovative new devices. He focuses on smartphone-based businesses, collaborative consumption and The Internet of Things. His current companies include Nest, Mocana and Relay Rides.

11128v14-max-250x250 (1)Ron Conway
SV Angel
Founder & Investor

Ronald Conway has been an active angel investor for over 15 years. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds (1998-2005) whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail.

Ron was previously with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions from 1973-1979, and Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President and CEO from 1979-1990. He eventually took Altos public in 1982 and served as CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) from 1991-1995. PTS went on to be acquired by SmartForce/SkillSoft. Ron has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Twitter, Digg, Brightmail, Ask Jeeves, Rupture (acquired by EA), Associated Content(acquired by Yahoo!), Facebook, RockYou, ScanScout, Zappos, Trulia, StumbleUpon, Plaxo (acquired by Comcast), Photobucket (acquired by Fox), and Anchor Intelligence (co-founder).

Ron was recently named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “deal-makers” in 2008 and is actively involved in numerous philanthropic endeavors. Ron is Vice Chairman of the UCSF Medical Foundation in SF, Board Member of The Tiger Woods Foundation, and SF Homeless Connect, and on the Benefit Committee of Ronald McDonald House, College Track, and the Blacked Eyed Peas-PeaPod Academy Foundation.

Conway is also featured in Gary Rivlin’s book The Godfather of Silicon Valley: Ron Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms, described as ‘the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone else in Silicon Valley.’

costoloDick Costolo
Twitter
CEO

Since October 2010, Dick has been the Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, where he is responsible for the growth and management of the overall business. Previously, as Twitter’s Chief Operating Officer, he oversaw monetization and day to day operations.

Before joining Twitter, Dick was co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner, a digital content syndication platform that was acquired by Google in 2007. While at Google, Dick was Group Product Manager on the Ads team responsible for social media ads.

Previously, Dick lived and worked in Chicago, where he founded and ran two digital media companies: SpyOnIt, a web page monitoring service, and Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development consulting company. Dick was also an improv performer with the acclaimed Annoyance Theater.

He graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Computer Science. He is @dickc on Twitter.

57403v3-max-250x250 (1)Chris Dixon
Andreessen Horowitz
General Partner

Chris Dixon is a Partner at and co-founder of Founder Collective. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch.

He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. In addition to his work with Founder’s Collective, Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.

Legendary Investor John Doerr Will Take The Stage At Disrupt SF | TechCrunchJohn Doerr
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Partner

John Doerr is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Since joining KPCB in 1980, John and his partners have backed some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt of Google; Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Scott Cook and Bill Campbell of Intuit; and Mark Pincus of Zynga. John’s passion is helping entrepreneurs create the “Next Big Thing” in mobile and social networks, greentech innovation, education and economic development. Ventures sponsored by John have created more than 200,000 new jobs. John serves on boards in the areas of Internet technologies and greentech, including Amyris, Bloom Energy, Coursera, Essence Healthcare, Flipboard, FloDesign Wind Turbines, Google, iControl, mCube, Quantumscape, Renmatix, Upthere and Zynga. He also led KPCB’s investment in Twitter.

John’s technology career began in 1974 at Intel, just as the chipmaker was inventing the groundbreaking 8080 microprocessor. During his Intel years, he held roles in engineering, marketing, management and sales. John also learned about operating excellence from Intel co-founder Andy Grove — insight that he continues to share with entrepreneurs today. He later founded Silicon Compilers, a VLSI CAD software company, and co-founded @Home, the nationwide broadband cable Internet service.

Outside of KPCB, John supports entrepreneurs focused on the environment, public education and alleviating global poverty. These include NewSchools.org, TechNet.org, the Climate Reality Project and ONE.org. John earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Rice University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He also holds several patents for computer memory devices. John is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

162159v2-max-250x250Erik Douglas
Co-founder and CEO, CellScope

Erik Douglas is a scientist and hardware hacker turned entrepreneur. As co-founder and CEO of CellScope he is bringing diagnostic imaging to the mobile platform, taking advanced tools beyond the clinic to enable high quality care from anywhere.

He earned a PhD in bioengineering at Berkeley and UCSF, where he created lab-on-a-chip tools for personalized medicine and developed mobile imaging technology as a postdoctoral scholar.

Erik has also held research positions at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, earned a BS in electrical engineering from Purdue, and served as a policy fellow at the National Academy of Sciences.

Josh Elman of Greylock PartnersJosh Elman
Greylock Partners
Partner

Josh is a partner at Greylock. He joined the team in 2011 and invests in entrepreneurs building new consumer products and services. His areas of focus include social networks and platforms, mobile apps, new media, and marketplaces. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to over 100 million users.

Before joining Greylock, Josh spent 15 years in product and engineering roles at leading companies in social, commerce, and media. Most recently, Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Earlier in his career, Josh was an early employee at LinkedIn and helped establish early models for user growth and launched the first version of LinkedIn Jobs. Josh also held roles leading product management for Zazzle, and leading product and engineering for RealJukebox and RealPlayer at RealNetworks.

Josh holds a BS in Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University.

51604v2-max-250x250Josh Felser
Freestyle Capital
Co-Founder

Josh founded and sold two successful Internet businesses for a combined $400mm and is now making early stage investments through Freestyle Capital.

Josh is a founding partner in Freestyle Capital, an early stage venture fund focused on the Internet and technology sectors. Mr. Felser was the CEO and co-founder of Crackle (formerly Grouper), an Internet video community, acquired by Sony for $65 million in 2006. Until February of 2001 he was General Manager of AOL Time Warner’s music brands’ Spinner, Winamp and Shoutcast.

In October 1997 he became co-founder and President of Spinner.com, a leading Internet music destination until its 1999 purchase by America Online for $320 million. From 1994 to 1996 he was Head of business and product development in Qwest/U.S. West’s Multimedia Group. From 1990 to 1994 he was an executive with News Corp., working with Fox Inc. in Los Angeles and BSkyB in London.

Mr. Felser obtained a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Duke University in 1986 and an M.B.A. in Marketing from Duke’s FUQUA School of Business in 1990.

151945v1-max-250x250Patrick Gallagher
CrunchFund
General Partner

Pat has 17 years of technology investing, operations and finance experience.

Prior to starting CrunchFund, Pat was a Partner at VantagePoint.

Before that Pat worked at Morgan Stanley Venture Partners.

His experience cuts across many different IT sectors and stages and he has made dozens of initial and follow-on investments.

Before joining Morgan Stanley, he held management roles at RealNames, an internet services company, and Toyota Motor Corporation. Pat is a graduate of Claremont McKenna College (BA).

39351v2-max-250x250Logan Green
Zimride / Lyft
Co-Founder & CEO

Logan Green, co-founder and CEO of Lyft, has long been fascinated by innovation in transportation, having grown up in Southern California and spending much of his childhood stuck in traffic. Lyft, the on-demand ridesharing platform, was founded in 2007 with Zimride as its first of two products built to create a more social, sustainable and affordable transportation system. The idea for Zimride (and ultimately Lyft) struck while Logan was studying in Zimbabwe during college, where carpooling is a common form of transportation among neighbors and communities.

Prior to starting Zimride in 2007, Logan created the first car-share program at UC Santa Barbara and served on the board of the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District. Logan was recognized in 2009 as one of Businessweek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 and holds a B.A. in Business Economics from UC Santa Barbara.

As a Lyft driver himself, Logan has a vision to fill the 80 percent of empty seats on the road and ultimately transform the face of transportation around the world. Since unveiling the product in June 2012, Lyft has quickly become one of the fastest-growing tech companies with more than $80 million raised from leading investors Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund and has been featured in The Economist, the New York Times and on NBC’s TODAY Show. Lyft is currently available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C., with more than a million rides shared on the platform to date.

47129v2-max-250x250Julia Hartz
Eventbrite
President & Co-Founder

Julia spends her day focusing on the happiness, productivity, and growth of the team at Eventbrite (aka the Britelings). She strives to foster the culture that has defined Eventbrite, and that has placed the company among the Top 5 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area two years in a row, according to the SF Business Times.

Prior to co-founding Eventbrite with her husband, Kevin Hartz, Julia enjoyed a career in Television Development at MTV Networks and FX Networks. She was fortunate enough to be a part of acclaimed shows such as Jackass, Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Rescue Me, and Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days.

Julia graduated from Pepperdine University with a B.A. in Telecommunications. She has served on the board of The Village Well, a non-profit organization that supports slow parenting, and has been active in The Full Circle Fund.
Julia has participated in several keynotes and panels to discuss ticketing, social commerce, and entrepreneurship including 2011 SF MusicTech, 2010 SXSW, 2011 Women in Business Conference, 2010 Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference, and 2010 Women 2.0 Founders Lab and Pitch Night.

Julia lives in San Francisco with her handsome husband, adorable daughter, and a pretend dog.

22515v7-max-250x250Reid Hoffman
Greylock Partners, Partner

Reid Hoffman is a Partner at Greylock, and Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at LinkedIn.

Reid joined Greylock Partners in 2009. His areas of focus include consumer Internet, enterprise 2.0, mobile, social gaming, online marketplaces, payments, and social networks. Reid likes to work with products that can reach hundreds of millions of participants and businesses that have network effects.

An accomplished entrepreneur, executive and angel investor, Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behavior and the dynamics of viral businesses as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive growth.

Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in 2003. LinkedIn is thriving with more than 160 million members in 200 countries around the world and a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising and software licensing. Hoffman led LinkedIn through its first four years and to profitability as Chief Executive Officer,
Prior to LinkedIn Hoffman served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. At PayPal he was responsible for all external relationships, including payments infrastructure, business development, international, government and legal. Reid was instrumental to PayPal’s acquisition by Ebay and responsible for partnerships with Intuit, Visa, MasterCard and Wells Fargo.

Reid is a board observer at Airbnb, Gowalla, and Swipely, an advisor to Groupon and a director at Zynga, Mozilla Corp., Six Apart, Shopkick, and Kiva.org. He is an angel investor in numerous influential Internet companies, including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Ning, Six Apart and Zynga.

Hoffman earned a Master’s degree in Philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where he graduated with distinction. In 2010 Reid was the recipient of an SD Forum Visionary Award and named a Henry Crown Fellow by The Aspen Institute.

20758v3-max-250x250David Hornik
August Capital
General Partner

David joined August Capital in 2000. He invests broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on enterprise application and infrastructure software and consumer facing software and services. Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group, Cravath Swaine & Moore, and Perkins Coie LLP. In his legal practice, David represented high tech startups in all aspects of their formation, financing and operations, including Yahoo, When.com (AOL), Sonique (Terra Lycos), Pure Payments (Excite@Home), BuyDirect (Beyond.com) and Ofoto (Kodak).

David has an eclectic technology background. At Stanford, he studied and taught the impact of technology on music, earning a degree in Computer Music. At Cambridge, England, he explored the power of technology in tracking and combating bias crime, receiving an M.Phil. in Criminology. At Harvard Law School, from which he received a J.D., magna cum laude, David focused upon the convergence of technology and the law, serving as an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and publishing papers on digital audio and software piracy.

David has taught business and law internationally and is a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. He currently sits on the board of directors of Blippy, Gravity, OhaiNomis Solutions, PayCycle, Six Apart, Splunk Technology, StumbleUpon, and VideoEgg. He previously served on the board of Evite which was acquired by Ticketmaster and was a board observer with Tickle Inc. which was acquired by Monster and Actional which was acquired by Progress Software.

houstonDrew Houston
Dropbox
Founder & CEO

Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service used by millions around the world.

Before founding Dropbox, Drew received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2006. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer at various startups.

After graduating, Drew was endlessly frustrated by carrying USB drives and emailing himself files. In early 2007, he teamed up with fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi and the two began working on the project that would eventually become Dropbox.

In 2012, Drew was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list honoring the world’s top innovators under 35. He was also included in Fortune’s “40 Under 40.”

10285v2-max-250x250Vinod Khosla
Khosla Ventures
Founder

Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. Sun was funded by longtime friend and board member John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In 1986 Vinod joined Kleiner Perkins, where he was and continues to be a general partner of KPCB funds through KP X. Through the years there, with other partners, he took on Intel’s monopoly with Nexgen/AMD (the only microprocessor to have significant success against Intel, sold to AMD for 28 percent of AMD), incubated the idea and business plan for Juniper to take on Cisco’s dominance of the router market, formulated the very early advertising-based search strategy for Excite, and transformed the moribund telecommunications business and its archaic SONET implementations with Cerent (sold to Cisco for $7.4B).

In 2004, Vinod ventured out to create his own venture firm, Khosla Ventures, which invests in a broad portfolio of cleantech, healthtech and infotech startups.

Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

160245v4-max-250x250Rick Klau
Google Ventures
Partner
Rick is a partner at Google Ventures where he helps lead Startup Lab.

Rick was previously a product manager at Google where he led product initiatives on Blogger, Google+, and YouTube.

He was an early employee at FeedBurner, where he ran the publisher services team until Google acquired the company in 2007.

167975v4-max-250x250Aileen Lee
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Partner
Cowboy Ventures
Founder & Partner

Aileen Lee is an investor at StyleSeat Inc. She is also a Founder of Cowboy Ventures, a digital seed-stage focused fund founded in 2012. She is also a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which she joined in 1999.

She was also founding CEO of RMG Networks (formerly Danoo) the leading digital out-of-home media network backed by KPCB and DAG. Prior to joining KPCB, Aileen worked at Gap Inc. in various Operating roles. She has also worked for Odwalla and for The North Face in Brand and Product Marketing. Aileen began her career at Morgan Stanley in Technology Mergers & Acquisitions. She has a Bachelor of Science from MIT. An MBA from the Harvard Business School.

She is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

279070v1-max-250x250David Lee
Box
Vice President of Product Management

David Lee is the Vice President of Product Management at Box, where he is responsible for driving Box’s product strategy.

Prior to Box, David spent three years at Yahoo’s Display Advertising team. As Yahoo’s lead product manager for video advertising, he launched new ad offerings that improved the performance of video ad campaigns on Yahoo by an average of 300% and implemented a partnership deal with Comcast. Before Yahoo, David worked at WebEx and was responsible for rolling out WebEx’s MeetMeNow service, a solution targeted at the SMB segment. Early in his career, David worked as a systems engineer at Boeing’s Commercial Aircraft division.

David earned his MBA from Haas School of Business at University of California, and received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from University of Southern California.

leeJess Lee
CEO and Co-founder, Polyvore

Jess Lee is CEO and Co-Founder of Polyvore.

Prior to co-founding Polyvore, Jess was a product manager at Google, where she worked on Google Maps and launched features like My Maps and draggable driving directions.

Jess has a degree in computer science from Stanford University.

jeffDouglas Leone
Sequoia Capital
Partner

Douglas Leone is a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital focusing on mobile, internet, software and communication companies. Doug currently sits on the boards of Birst, CafePress, Hayneedle, Medallia, MedExpress, RingCentral, Service-Now and Zirmed.

Doug’s represented Sequoia in its investments in Aster Data, Aruba Networks, Meraki, Netezza, Rackspace, and Service Now. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 1988, he held sales and sales management positions at Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Prime Computer.

Screen Shot 2013-08-20 at 12.08.11 PM

Max Levchin
Affirm, Glow and HVF

A computer scientist, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor, Max Levchin focuses on building and investing in enduring technology companies.

Max’s latest undertaking, HVF, is an innovation lab focused on solving big problems and improving lives by extracting insights from the vast quantities of recordable information around us. HVF launched its first project, Affirm, in early 2013, and recently launched Glow at the end of May.

A graduate of University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (CS’97), Max co-founded PayPal and was its CTO, from founding through its acquisition by eBay. Max currently serves as the chairman of the boards of directors of Yelp and Kaggle and a director of Yahoo! and Evernote.

52677v6-max-250x250Aaron Levie
Box
CEO, Co-founder & BOD

Aaron Levie co-founded Box with friend and Box CFO Dylan Smith in 2005.

The Box mission is to provide businesses and individuals with the simplest solution to share, access and manage their information. Aaron is the visionary behind Box’s product and platform strategy, which is focused on incorporating the best of traditional content management with an easy to use user experience suited to the way people collaborate and work today. Box is one of the fastest growing companies in enterprise software, used by more than 15 million individuals and 150,000 businesses worldwide.

Aaron studied business at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California before leaving to found Box.

146274v3-max-250x250Ellen Levy
Silicon Valley Connect
Managing Director

Ellen is Managing Director of Silicon Valley Connect, working with organizations and entrepreneurs on opportunities for “networked innovation.” Additionally, she is an active angel investor, advisory board member for a number of startups, and public speaker. Last year, Ellen concluded her nine years of working with LinkedIn, including having served as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, head of Corporate & Business Development, and her original role as Advisory Board member when the company was first founded.

Prior to LinkedIn, Ellen spent two years running a groundbreaking program at Stanford University, facilitating collaboration between industry partners, Silicon Valley, and the University research community by championing questions having to do with people, technology & innovation.

Over her career, Ellen has held formal roles in venture capital (Softbank Venture Capital; NeoCarta Ventures; Draper Fisher Jurvetson), startups (WhoWhere, sold to Lycos; Softbook Press, sold to Gemstar; LinkedIn), technology think tanks (Interval Research), large corporations (Apple Computer; PriceWaterhouse Coopers), and universities (Harvard University; Stanford University).

Recently referred to as the “Most Connected Woman in Silicon Valley” by FastCompany, Ellen now focuses much of her time on the dynamics of social networks within “the enterprise”, social media and the consumer Internet, innovation ecosystems and supporting organizational models.

She has a BA from the University of Michigan, and MA/PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University.

181779v1-max-250x250John Lilly
Greylock Partners, Partner

John Lilly is a Partner at Greylock since 2011.

Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO.

Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple’s research labs.

John is currently on the Board of Directors of Citrus Lane, Clearslide, Code for America, Mozilla Corporation, and the Participatory Culture Foundation.

He is a board observer at Tumblr, and led Greylock’s investments in Dropbox and Instagram.

John holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering and an MS in Computer Science with a focus on Human Computer Interaction, both from Stanford University.

He is currently a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Institute of Design in the Engineering School. He is also an adviser to the Stanford Technology Ventures Program as well as StartX (formerly SSE Labs), an incubator with ties to Stanford University.

He is a co-inventor on seven United States patents.

17490v2-max-250x250Jessica Livingston
Y Combinator
Partner

Jessica Livingston is a founding partner at Y Combinator. She is also the organizer of Startup School, the big annual startup conference, and the author of Founders at Work, a collection of interviews with successful startup founders.

Y Combinator was the first of the new startup “incubators” that fund a bunch of startups at once. Since 2005 YC has funded over 560 companies, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit.

Marissa Mayer
CEO, Yahoo

Marissa Mayer is CEO of Yahoo.

Previously as a VP at Google, Marissa Mayer lead the product management and engineering efforts of Google’s local, mobile, and contextual discovery products including Google Maps, Google Maps for Mobile, Local Search, Google Earth, Street View, Latitude and more. At 36 years old, she was also the youngest member of Google’s executive operating committee. During her 12 years at Google, Marissa led product management and design efforts for Google web search, images, news, books, products, toolbar, and iGoogle. She started at Google in 1999 as Google’s 20th employee and first woman engineer.

Marissa’s contributions and leadership have been recognized by numerous publications including the New York Times, Newsweek and BusinessWeek. Fortune magazine has listed her for the past 3 years on their annual Most Powerful Women’s list, and she was the youngest ever to appear on the list. In 2010 Marissa was honored by the New York Women in Communications, Inc. with a Matrix Award. She also been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and Woman of the Year by Glamour Magazine. Marissa serves on the board of various non-profits, including the Smithsonian National Design Museum, the New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Prior to joining Google, Mayer worked at the UBS research lab (Ubilab) in Zurich, Switzerland, and at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. Marissa received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems and her M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. For both degrees, she specialized in artificial intelligence.

pebbleEric Migicovsky
Pebble
CEO

Eric Migicovsky is the founder of Pebble Technology, the company behind the Pebble smartwatch. He helped create the largest Kickstarter project to date.

You can follow him on Twitter at @ericmigi. He lives in Vancouver and attended the University of Waterloo.

11295v5-max-250x250Michael Moritz
Sequoia Capital
Partner

Sir Michael Moritz is Chairman of Sequoia Capital where he has worked since 1986. Michael represented Sequoia in its investments in Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Flextronics, Kayak, Pure Digital and Zappos.com.

He has always had an eclectic set of investment interests and today represents Sequoia’s interests in Klarna, Green Dot, and Stripe (two banks and a payments company), LinkedIn (the world’s professional nework), Instacart (grocery delivery in an hour), PopSugar (the entertainment and fashion site for women), [24]7 (an outsourcing customer service company) and The Melt (a grilled cheese restaurant chain).

Before joining Sequoia, Michael worked as a correspondent for Time; wrote a couple of books, including the Little Kingdom, the first authoritative book about Apple’s early years; and co-founded Technologic Partners, the precursor of Venture Wire.

234051v2-max-250x250Gavin Newsom

Gavin Newsom, 45, was elected as the 49th Lieutenant Governor of the State of California on November 2, 2010. His top priorities are economic development and job creation, fighting poverty, improving access to higher education, and maintaining California’s environmental leadership. He is the author of “Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government,” which explores the intersection of democracy and technology in this ever-connected world.

Before becoming Lieutenant Governor, Newsom served as Mayor of the City and County of San Francisco. After only 36 days as mayor, Newsom gained worldwide attention when he granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples. This bold move set the tone for Newsom’s first term. Under his energetic leadership, the economy grew and jobs were created. The City became a center for biotech and clean tech. He initiated a plan to bring universal health care to all of the City’s uninsured residents. And Newsom aggressively pursued local solutions to global climate change.

Newsom is married to Jennifer Siebel Newsom. They have three children: Montana, Hunter and Brooklynn.

12941v4-max-250x250Ali Partovi
Dropbox
Advisor
Viagogo
Advisor

Based in San Francisco, Ali is an angel investor, startup advisor, and serial entrepreneur. Ali is also a co-founder of computer education non-profit Code.org, and an active investor in sustainable food systems.

Ali co-founded and sold two high-profile startups: iLike, acquired by MySpace in 2009, and LinkExchange, acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1998. His portfolio as an investor / advisor has included such successes as Zappos, Facebook, and DropBox, as well as newer ventures such as Viagogo and OPOWER (see complete Partovi portfolio). As a visionary, he was among the first people to see the potential of the Facebook Platform (in 2007), and among the earliest to grasp the business opportunity of search (in 1997). His current passion is sustainable food and agriculture, based on his articles Food is the New Frontier in Green Tech and Hacking the Food System: Focus on the Supply Chain, and related angel investments in Farmigo and BrightFarms, and serves on the board of school food non-profit FoodCorps.

Ali co-founded iLike with his twin brother, Hadi, serving as CEO and President respectively. They created iLike in an effort to reinvent GarageBand.com, which Ali ran after acquiring the assets of the company from the original owners. iLike created the first successful application on the Facebook Platform, which remains the most popular music app on Facebook today. In 2009, Myspace acquired iLike, and Ali served as Head of Business Development at MySpace until transitioning to a strategic advisory role in April 2010.

Ali originally established himself as an entrepreneur by co-founding LinkExchange, which was acquired by Microsoft for $265 million in 1998. From 1998-2000, Ali worked at Microsoft and created “Keywords,” a pilot project to develop pay-for-placement, keyword-targeted text ads on alongside MSN Search results (essentially equivalent to Google AdWords, but many years earlier). Ali left Microsoft when the Keywords pilot program was shut down.

Ali also co-founded “DrinkExchange,” a monthly social event that spread from San Francisco to Washington, London, Tokyo, and Sydney.

picTom Perkins
Co-founder, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers

Tom Perkins is one of Silicon Valley’s pioneers, with a career spanning entrepreneurship, the management of major corporate activities and most importantly, venture capital. In 1972 he formed America’s premiere venture capital business with co-founder Eugene Kleiner. The partnership and the follow-on Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers series of partnerships have created some of the most interesting and innovative businesses in the world.

Prior to Kleiner Perkins, he started a company in the mid-1960s (University Laboratories) to manufacture lasers based upon his original inventions in optics. The company was successful and merged into Spectra-Physics becoming a major part of that firm’s growth. Later he was the first General Manager of the Hewlett Packard Company’s computer divisions and is credited with establishing the foundation for the enormous growth which that business has enjoyed.

16233v7-max-250x250Michelangelo Volpi
Partner
Index Venture Management U.S.

Mike Volpi has been a partner at Index Ventures since 2009. He is focused on investments in the enterprise software infrastructure and consumer Internet sectors. Mike led the investment by Index Ventures in Cloud.com (CTRX) and StorSimple (MSFT) and is currently a director of Sonos, Soundcloud, Lookout, Path, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Hortonworks, Pure Storage, and Elasticsearch.  Mike also serves on the board of EXOR SpA (EXO:IM)

Mike performed in various executive roles for 13 years at Cisco Systems from 1994.  He served as the company’s Chief Strategy Officer, where he was responsible for Cisco’s corporate strategy as well as business development, strategic alliances, advanced Internet projects, legal services, and government affairs. During this tenure, Mike was instrumental in the creation of the company’s acquisition and investment strategies, as Cisco acquired more than 70 companies during his tenure. He then became Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Routing and Service Provider Technology Group, where he led Cisco’s business for the Service Provider market, and was also responsible for all of Cisco’s routing products. In 2007, this was an $11 billion business for Cisco.  Mike began his career as a product development engineer Hewlett Packard’s Optoelectronics Division.  Prior to Index, he was the CEO of Joost – an innovator in the field of premium video services delivered over the Internet.

Mike has a B.S in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. on Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  He is a trustee of the Stanford Business School Trust and he also serves on the board of WITNESS, a non-profit organization focused on human rights.

19149v6-max-250x250Shervin Pishevar
Menlo Ventures
Managing Director, Venture Advisor

Shervin is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sherpa Global, a newly-minted startup foundry and fund, and a venture adviser at Menlo Ventures. He was a managing director at Menlo from 2011 to 2013. He has worked closely with the teams at Uber (where he is a strategic adviser), Fab, Warby Parker, Cinemagram, Getaround, Poshmark, Baby.co.br andled Menlo’s investment in Tumblr. He helped launch the Menlo Talent Fund, Menlo’s $20m seed fund, in September 2011.

Prior to joining Menlo, Shervin was chief application officer and GM at Mozilla after a career as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He founded Webs.com (sold to Vistaprint for $117.5m in cash), Social Gaming Network (merged with Mindjolt) and Hyperoffice and is a co-founder of 1% Of Nothing. He has angel invested in over 40 companies including Taskrabbit, Klout, Milo.com (sold to ebay), Aardvark (sold to Google), Socialcam (sold to Autodesk), Blackjet, Science, Dollar Shave Club and Rapportive (sold to LinkedIn). Shervin serves on the advisory board of Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR).

46612v8-max-250x250Brian Pokorny
Managing Partner, SV Angel

Brian Pokorny is a Managing Partner of SV Angel.

Prior to this, he was at Airbnb, where he joined via an acquisition of DailyBooth/Batch. DailyBooth was a venture backed start-up that Brian led for 3 years as their CEO.

Before this, Brian was a partner at [SV Angel] with David Lee and Ron Conway upon the launch of the firm. He focused on investments within the consumer Internet, specifically within social media, mobile, and real-time data companies.
Prior to SV Angel he was a founding team member and partner at [Baseline Ventures], a leading seed-stage investment firm.

Prior to joining Baseline, Brian spent 3.5 years at [Google] within various positions in the Content Partnerships team and Direct Sales Organization.

Brian graduated with a degree in Operations and Management Information Systems from Santa Clara University.

307609v1-max-250x250Dr. Katherine Pollard
Gladstone Institutes
Research Scientist, Bioinformatics

Dr. Katherine Pollard harnesses statistics and computational biology to analyze massive genomic datasets. Her research focuses on the evolution of the human genome, in particular how genetic differences are associated with human health and disease.

Currently, Dr. Pollard focuses on two major areas: 1) identifying the genetic basis for traits specific to humans, such as our susceptibility to AIDS, and 2) analyzing the genetic make-up of the human ‘microbiome’—the vast array of microorganisms that dwell in or on the human body. As a member of the National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, Dr. Pollard and her colleagues hope to use the data to understand the precise relationship between the microbiome, health and disease.

Dr. Pollard earned her master’s degree and PhD in biostatistics from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she developed computationally intensive statistical methods to analyze genomic data, with applications for cancer biology. She implemented these approaches in Bioconductor, an open-source software program. As a comparative genomics postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dr. Pollard participated in the Chimpanzee Genome Project, in which she identified fast-evolving genetic sequences unique to humans that reveal new insight into the evolutionary history of both humans and our closest living relatives—chimpanzees.

148746v1-max-250x250David Prager
Revision3
Co-Founder

David Prager is an advisor and investor in consumer Internet, enterprise, and media technology companies including Yardsale, XDN (acquired by Fortinet), Zuckerberg Media, and Simplehoney (acquired by OpenCoin).

He runs a production company called G4 Media with hundreds of hours of live daily production, documentary and field productions under his belt.

Read more: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/david-prager#ixzz2eVVha6C5
Follow us: @crunchbase on Twitter | crunchbase on Facebook

284002v2-max-250x250 (1)Amy Pressman
Medallia
President

Amy initially developed the idea for Medallia as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group while working on marketing strategy and competitive benchmarking projects. Serving BCG clients, she discovered a near-universal mandate for better understanding of current and prospective customers as well as competitors.

Amy has also worked as an independent consultant for technology-based companies in Silicon Valley, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and a legislative aide on Capitol Hill. Amy completed a 4,200-mile transcontinental bike trip “a long time ago,” but she’s still proud of it because no one ever thought she was very athletic.

MBA, Stanford University. AB, Harvard College.

32715v4-max-250x250Tom Preston-Werner
GitHub
Co-Founder / CEO

Tom Preston-Werner is a software developer and entrepreneur who co-founded GitHub in 2008, along with Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett, to simplify sharing code and make it easy to collaborate on building software. Today, GitHub is the largest code host in the world, with a community of four million people building software together.

Before founding GitHub, Tom worked as a Ruby developer for Powerset, a Wikipedia search engine that was acquired by Microsoft. Additionally, Tom invented Gravatar, a service for providing unique avatars that follow you from site to site, which he sold to Automattic in 2007.

Tom grew up in Iowa and came to the west coast to study physics at Harvey Mudd College; he left after two years when he realized that he enjoyed programming far more than the math that was the core of his physics studies. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

123469v2-max-250x250 (1)Matthew Prince
CloudFlare
CEO & Co-Founder

Matthew is the co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Inc.

Matthew wrote his first computer program when he was 7, and hasn’t been able to shake the bug since. After attending the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney for one day before jumping at the opportunity to be a founding member of a tech startup. He hasn’t looked back. CloudFlare is Matthew’s third entrepreneurial venture.

Matthew holds a degree in English and Computer Science from Trinity College. He graduated with highest honors from the Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. He earned a JD from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Illinois Bar. He teaches technology law as an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School where he serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law.

He is also the co-founder of Project Honey Pot.

16103v2-max-250x250 (1)Keith Rabois
Youniversity Ventures
Partner
Khosla Ventures
Venture Partner

Keith Rabois is a member of the Khosla Ventures investing team, joining in March 2013.

Most recently, Rabois was Chief Operating Officer at Square where he oversaw the company’s business operations including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management. Keith specializes in transforming early-stage startups into successful businesses and has deep expertise in the financial services industry and government affairs.

An accomplished executive, entrepreneur and angel investor, Keith has held leadership roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and began his career practicing law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Keith was an early investor in several high-profile Internet companies including YouTube and currently serves on the board of directors of Yelp and Xoom.

Keith holds a JD from Harvard Law School and an undergraduate degree in political science from Stanford University.

11125v3-max-250x250Naval Ravikant
AngelList
Founder, AngelList

Naval Ravikant is the founder of AngelList.

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. Previously he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (largest white-label classifieds marketplace). Previously, he was a Venture Partner at August Capital and led investments in Scintera, Neopath, Technorati, Microdisplay, DeviceScape, and Mimosa.

Startups Naval has advised in areas ranging from founding to product design to fundraising including iPivot (sold to Intel), Intrinsic Graphics, Andale, XFire (sold to Viacom), HedgeStreet, Engage, Photo.net, LoyaltyLab, Jaman, Hive7, Dulance (sold to Google), Bix (sold to Yahoo!).

rogersMatt Rogers
Founder and VP of Engineering
Nest Labs

Matt Rogers is founder and VP of Engineering at Nest Labs, creator of the Nest Learning Thermostat. By applying modern design and technology, Nest has made the thermostat sexy and revitalized a stagnant – yet very important – industry. Matt is responsible for all product development at Nest, ranging from mechanical design to software to web services, and everything in between. Most recently, Matt led the creation of the second-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, which was released in early October – less than a year after the launch of the first-generation Nest thermostat. Matt also serves on Nest’s board of directors.

Prior to Nest, Matt was responsible for iPod software development at Apple, from concept to production. He was one of the first engineers on the original iPhone, and involved in the development of 10 generations of iPod, 5 generations of iPhone, and the first iPad. He earned his BS and MS degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.

59834v7-max-250x250Ruchi Sanghvi
Dropbox
VP of Operations

Ruchi Sanghvi is the Head of Operations at Dropbox. Prior to joining Dropbox, Sanghvi served as the co-founder and CEO of Cove, a collaboration, coordination and communication product for organizations and communities.

Sanghvi holds the distinction of being the first female engineer at Facebook and was instrumental in implementing the first versions of key features such as News Feed. She then led product management and strategy for Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. She was also responsible for core product areas such as privacy and user engagement.

Sanghvi is also the recipient of the prestigious TechFellow award for engineer leadership and was interviewed by Huffington Post regarding the challenges of being a female engineer.

She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

266597v1-max-250x250Ted Schlein
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Partner

Ted Schlein is the Board Director at Jive Software.
Ted Schlein, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, joined the firm in 1996 with a focus on early stage technology companies in the enterprise software and infrastructure markets; including ventures within the network and consumer security arena.

Ted has led KPCB’s involvement in a number of successful investments, including Corio (CRIO), sold to IBM, Extensity (EXTN), sold to GEAC, Internet Security Systems (ISSX), sold to IBM, Oakley Networks, sold to Raytheon, Fortify Software, sold to HP, ArcSight (ARST), IPO, sold to HP.

Ted was the founding CEO of Fortify Software, a pioneer in the software security market and now an HP Company.
Additionally, he serves on the board of directors of 3VR, 41st Parameter, Chegg, Hara Software, IronPlanet, Jive Software, Reputation Defender and Verdiem.

He also oversees KPCB’s investments in Endgame Systems, LifeLock and Bit9.

Prior to joining KPCB, Ted served as Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Symantec. He joined the software company as one of its early employees and played an instrumental role in Symantec’s growth and dominance as a global software leader.

Ted led Symantec’s successful move into the software utilities market, as well as the launch of its commercial anti-virus solution, an offering that quickly emerged as the industry gold standard.
Ted holds a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

119270v4-max-250x250Bryan Schreier
Sequoia Capital
Partner

Bryan Schreier is a partner at Sequoia Capital. Bryan currently sits on the board of Dropbox, Hearsay, Qualtrics, MindSnacks, and Inkling and is a board observer for Trulia.

Previously, Bryan was Senior Director of International Online Sales and Operations at Google. He also launched Google’s Europe headquarters and was interim President of Sales in China.

Prior to Google, Bryan worked in Morgan Stanley’s Technology Investment Banking Group. Bryan has a Computer Science degree from Princeton University.

borisBoris Sofman
Anki
Co-Founder, CEO

As an engineer and researcher with experience in building diverse robotic systems—from consumer products to off-road autonomous vehicles and bomb-disposal robots—Boris is making it his life’s work to create products that people would not expect to be possible. Prior to founding Anki, Boris worked at iRobot and Neato Robotics. He earned a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Unfortunately Anki doesn’t allow him to play tennis as often as he’d like.

Boris debuted Anki’s vision to bring robotics out of the labs and into people’s lives at Apple’s WWDC event in June 2013.

evabEvan Spiegel
Snapchat, CEO

Evan Spiegel studied Product Design at Stanford University while building Snapchat, a real-time picture messaging app.

Snapchat users have shared over five billion unique images through the service since January 2012, making Snapchat one of the Top 10 apps in the iTunes AppStore.

291991v1-max-250x250Balaji S. Srinivasan
Counsyl
Co-Founder and CTO

Balaji S. Srinivasan is the co-founder of Counsyl, a genomics startup that began in a Stanford dorm room and now tests more than 2.5% of all US births.

Counsyl won the Wall Street Journal’s Innovation Award for Medicine, was named one of Scientific American’s Top 10 World Changing Ideas, raised more than $65M in funding from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund among others, and has become one of the largest clinical genome centers in the world.

Prior to co-founding Counsyl, Dr. Srinivasan taught data mining, statistics, and computational biology in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. He holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford. He was an NDSEG, NSF, and VIGRE fellow and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Reviews Genetics.

250463v2-max-250x250Ilya Sukhar
Parse
Co-Founder

Ilya is a generalist’s generalist.

Whether it’s through product design, architecting large scale systems, or building a company — he’s all about creating products that people love to use.Most recently Ilya was the first employee at Etacts (acquired by Salesforce) where he worked on all things product and engineering.

Before that he built a ton of stuff as an early engineer at Ooyala. His boss from those days is now an investor in Parse.

Ilya holds a BS and Master’s in Computer Science from Cornell where he did distributed systems research and graduated with honors.

67713v6-max-250x250Mikkel Svane
Zendesk
CEO

Mikkel Svane is the CEO and founder of Zendesk. He started the company with Morten Primdahl and Alexander Aghassipour to make great customer service available to everyone and create software that people love to use. Today, he leads Zendesk’s global operations and business strategy with those same goals in mind.

A Dane-turned-San Franciscan, Mikkel in 2009 moved the company from Copenhagen to San Francisco. He keeps Zendesk’s Danish design roots at the center of the product while growing the number of people using it to hundreds of millions worldwide.

During his earlier time in Denmark, Mikkel led a service-management consulting group, founded a software company for online community and launched Denmark’s first community portal.

20282v3-max-250x250David SZE
Greylock Partners, Partner

David joined Greylock Partners in 2000. His areas of focus include consumer Internet and services, media convergence, wireless data, and technology-assisted marketing services.

Before coming to Greylock, David was SVP of Product Strategy at Excite and then Excite@Home. As an early employee at Excite, David also held roles as GM of Excite.com and VP of Content and Programming for the Excite Network. Before Excite, he was in product marketing and development at Electronic Arts and Crystal Dynamics, respectively. He started his career in management consulting for Marakon Associates and The Boston Consulting Group, and also spent time at HBO.

David’s investments include Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Revision3 (acquired by Discovery Communications), Digg (Acquired by Betaworks), LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), Nextdoor, Oodle (acquired by QVC), Pandora (NASDAQ: P), Path, SoftCoin (acquired by You Technology), SEVEN, SGN (acquired by MindJolt), ToyTalk, VUDU (acquired by Walmart), New Edge Networks (acquired by EarthLink) and WhoSay.
David was ranked #4 (2012) & #10 (2013) by Forbes Midas List, the Top Tech Investors. He holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Stanford University.

Adi TatarkoAdi Tatarko
CEO and Co-founder, Houzz

Adi Tatarko is the CEO and co-founder of Houzz, a platform for home remodeling, bringing together both professionals and homeowners via mobile, local and social tools. Adi and her husband and cofounder, Alon Cohen, started Houzz out of challenges that they faced during their own remodeling process. Tired of cutting pages out of magazines for their inspiration file and limited by word of mouth recommendations for professionals to help them with the renovation process, they decided to create an online photo database and gathering place for people in the process of building, remodeling and decorating.

Today, millions of homeowners and more than 250,000 architects, designers, contractors and other remodeling professionals are connecting through Houzz.com and its mobile apps every month, sharing their photos, advice and product recommendations. Earlier in her career, Tatarko founded a software company which developed products and services for the high tech industry. She worked in NYC before moving to Palo Alto, where she worked in an investment firm. Adi lives with her husband and two boys. In her spare time, she still enjoys looking at inspiring home design and renovating the rest of her own house one room at a time.

139902v4-max-250x250Halle Tecco
Rock Health
Co-founder & CEO

Halle Tecco is the Founder and CEO of Rock Health, the first seed accelerator for health startups. She recognized the potential and the need for supporting digital health developers while working at Apple’s App Store covering the health vertical.

Tecco has been named as one of “12 Entrepreneurs Reinventing Healthcare” by CNN, one of “15 Women to Watch in Tech” by Inc. Magazine, and was a L’Oreal “Woman of Worth” Honoree. Tecco has written for Harvard Business School Publishing, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Glamour.com and ForbesWoman.

She has a Bachelor of Science degree from Case Western Reserve University and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

182454v3-max-250x250Sebastian Thrun
Udacity
Co-Founder, CEO
Google
Google Fellow and VP

Sebastian has set his sights on democratizing higher education. Co-founder and CEO of Udacity, Sebastian is also a Research Professor at Stanford University and a Google Fellow, as well as the inventor of the autonomous car and project lead on Google Glass.

Thrun is a former Director of the Stanford AI Lab. He led the development of the robotic vehicle Stanley which won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, and which is exhibited in the Smithsonian.

His research focuses on robotics and artificial intelligence.

10201v5-max-250x250Don Valentine
Sequoia Capital
Founder

Don Valentine is a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital focusing on semiconductor, systems and software investments. Don founded Sequoia Capital in 1972 and was one of the original investors in Apple Computer (AAPL), Atari, Cisco Systems (CSCO), LSI Logic (LSI), Oracle (ORCL) and Electronic Arts (ERTS).

Prior to starting Sequoia Capital, Don was a Founder of National Semiconductor and a senior sales and marketing executive with Fairchild Semiconductor.

IconHunter Walk
Homebrew
Partner

Hunter Walk is a partner at seed stage venture fund Homebrew.

Hunter was most recently the Director of Product Management at Google, focused primarily on YouTube.

He joined Google in December 2003 after serving as a member of the founding team of Second Life.

jeff-1Jeff Weiner
LinkedIn
CEO

Jeff Weiner is the CEO of LinkedIn, where he started in December of 2008 as Interim President. He came to LinkedIn from positions as an Executive-in-Residence for leading Venture Capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

Prior to joining Accel and Greylock, Weiner served in various leadership roles at Yahoo for over seven years, most recently as the Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division. In this position he led a team of over 3,000 employees, managing products reaching over 500 million consumers, and overseeing a P&L responsible for roughly $3 billion in annual revenue. During his tenure, Weiner helped drive the Networks Open and Social strategy as well as expansion of the company’s category-leading consumer web products, including Yahoo’s Front Doors, Communications and Community products, Search, and Media properties.

Prior to his Network role, Weiner was part of the Search leadership team that directed the acquisition and integration of Inktomi, AltaVista, and FAST as well as the development of Yahoo Search Technology. From 2001 to 2002, Weiner oversaw Corporate Development at Yahoo, where he was responsible for the development and modification of overall corporate and individual business unit strategy and M&A. Weiner is also actively involved in the non-profit sector, with specific focus on leveraging digital capabilities to broaden the reach and scale of high impact causes. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of DonorsChoose.org and Malaria No More.

47030v2-max-250x250Scott Weiss
Andreessen Horowitz
General Partner

Scott Weiss is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Formerly, he was co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. While at Cisco, Weiss was the vice president and general manager of the Security Technology Group. Previously, he was also a managing director and entrepreneur-in-residence at IdeaLab, where he met IronPort co-founder Scott Banister. Prior to IdeaLab, Weiss was employee no. 13 at Hotmail and was responsible for all partnership and revenue generating business development efforts. After Hotmail’s acquisition by Microsoft, Weiss led a business development team within the MSN division. Before joining Hotmail, Weiss was a consultant at McKinsey & Company. He also worked at EDS for five years.

Weiss holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from the University of Florida. He blogs at http://scott.a16z.com.

270667v2-max-250x250Cameron Winklevoss
Winklevoss Capital Management, LLC
Co-Founder

Cameron Winklevoss is a principal of Winklevoss Capital Management, a private investment firm that partners with a select number of early stage companies to provide not just capital, but a full service approach to driving growth. The company’s portfolio includes Hukkster, an online shopping tool for sale alerts; SumZero, an online community of investment professionals; and Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency that uses peer-to-peer technology for frictionless payments. Cameron graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Economics and received his MBA from Oxford University. He is also an NCAA rowing champion and member of the 2008 Olympic team.

270664v2-max-250x250Tyler Winklevoss
Winklevoss Capital Management, LLC
Co-Founder

Tyler Winklevoss is a principal of Winklevoss Capital Management, a private investment firm that partners with a select number of early stage companies to provide not just capital, but a full service approach to driving growth. The company’s portfolio includes Hukkster, an online shopping tool for sale alerts; SumZero, an online community of investment professionals; and Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency that uses peer-to-peer technology for frictionless payments. Tyler graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Economics and received his MBA from Oxford University. He is also an NCAA rowing champion and member of the 2008 Olympic team.

43417v3-max-250x250Susan Wojcicki
Google
Senior Vice President of Advertising and Commerce, Google

Susan Wojcicki is Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce at Google. She oversees the design, innovation and engineering of Google’s advertising, commerce, and measurement platform products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, Offers, and Google Analytics.

Susan joined Google in 1999 as the company’s first marketing manager and worked on the initial marketing programs. She also led the initial development of several key successful consumer products including Google Images and Google Books.

Before joining Google, Susan worked at Intel, Bain & Company, and several start-ups. She graduated with honors from Harvard University, holds a master’s in economics from the UC Santa Cruz, and an MBA from UCLA.

11110v2-max-250x250George Zachary
Charles River Ventures

George led Charles River’s early stage investments in Twitter, Yammer (enterprise social networking)(acquired by MSFT 6/2012 for $1.2B), Millennial Media (mobile advertising)(IPO March 2012; NYSE MM), Geni (social networking based on genealogy)(acquired by MyHeritage Ltd.), Udacity, Pebble, CoTap, Crushpath, and CloudShare. In addition, he led CRV’s investment in Metaplace (acquired by Disney/ Playdom) and in Jambool (acquired by Google) and has sponsored many seed investments through the CRV’s industry leading seed program.

George joined Charles River in 2004, bringing more than 20 years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. George’s focus is on building consumer internet and infrastructure companies. Previously, he was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and was on the boards of directors of the following companies: Accrue Software (IPO in 1999), Andale (acquired by Vendio), Critical Path (IPO in 1999), Ovation Entertainment, Sandcastle (acquired by Adobe), Securify (acquired by Kroll-O’Gara), Shutterfly (IPO in 2006), Supertracks (acquired by Centerspan) and Telebot (acquired by Z-Tel)

203565v2-max-250x250Joe Zadeh
Airbnb
Director of Product

Joe Zadeh (a.k.a. “Joebot”) is the Director of Product at Airbnb, a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world.

He has led the product team for over 2 years, overseeing all product developments on the website and mobile apps and helped Airbnb grow from 60,000 listings to over 300,000 today.

He joined the company as the third engineer when the entire product development team worked out of a bedroom in a San Francisco apartment.

In a previous life, Joe was a research scientist and holds a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from Caltech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University.

143315v4-max-250x250 (1)John Zimmer
Lyft
Co-Founder and President

John Zimmer is the co-founder and President of Lyft, the on-demand ridesharing platform, that was founded in 2007 with Zimride as its first of two products built to create a more social, sustainable and affordable transportation system.

John’s interest in peer-to-peer transportation began at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration. Upon learning that only 20% of seats in cars on highways are occupied, he began working on ways to use existing information infrastructures to solve the problem of unused empty seats. After graduating first in his class, John spent two years at Lehman Brothers before (luckily) leaving to rideshare his way from New York to San Francisco to join co-founder Logan Green in launching Zimride. John was recognized in 2009 as one of Businessweek’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25, and has spoken at top tier events such as SXSW, The Association for Commuter Transportation (ACT) International Conference and Stanford Business School.

With Lyft, John hopes to fix the current state of transportation across the country, and eventually around the world, to make cities safer, more affordable and better connected. Since unveiling the product in June 2012, Lyft has quickly become one of the fastest-growing tech companies with more than $80 million raised from leading investors Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund and has been featured in The Economist, the New York Times and on NBC’s TODAY Show. Lyft is currently available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C., with more than a million rides shared on the platform to date.

10688v39-max-250x250Mark Zuckerberg
Founder and CEO, Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is the founder and CEO of Facebook, which he started in his college dorm room in 2004 with roomates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes.

Zuckerberg is responsible for setting the overall direction and product strategy for the company. He leads the design of Facebook’s service and development of its core technology and infrastructure. Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving the company to Palo Alto, California.
Earlier in life, Zuckerberg developed a music recommendation system called Synapse and a peer-to-peer client called Wirehog. However, he abandoned both to pursue new projects.

Zuckerberg attended Harvard University and studied computer science before founding Facebook. While at Harvard, Zuckerberg created Facemash, a website that compared students’ dorm photos side-by-side in a fashion similar to HOT or NOT. Harvard administration was not amused, and Zuckerberg faced subsequent disciplinary action. Less than three months later, he launched Facebook. In September 2010, Zuckerberg donated $100 million to the Newark Public School System to help renovate and revamp the system.
Zuckerberg won the 2007 Crunchie Award for ‘Best Startup CEO.’ He was the Time Magazine 2010 Person Of The Year. He also won the 2012 Crunchie Award for CEO of the year.