Best Startup
At Best Startup US we track over 1,000,000 US startups and over 3 million people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top California based CEO’ operating in the Apps space. If you think a CEO’ is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.us.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Othman Laraki
Co-founder & CEO of Color
Othman Laraki, MS, MBA, is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Color, a health technology company building public health infrastructures such as scaled and efficient testing to contain the COVID-19 pandemic or using genomics for population health. Previously, Othman co-founded Mixer Labs and developed its GeoAPI platform, a powerful location engine for developers. After the company was acquired by Twitter in 2009, he served as the social media network’s Vice President of Product and helped expand its user base from 50 to 200 million unique accounts. Before this, Othman spent several years at Google, where he played an integral role developing front-end products, including the Chrome browser. Othman is a long-time investor and advisor to leading companies such as Pinterest, AngelList, Slack and Instacart, and serves as a board member for ESI Group and Frontier Medicines. He holds degrees in computer science and management from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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About Color: Color is a population health technology company that enables the delivery of advanced healthcare through clinical genetics.
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James Park
CEO and Co-Founder of Fitbit
James is our Co-founder and has served as our Chairman since May 2015, as a member of our board of directors since March 2007, and as our President and CEO since September 2007. Previously, James served as a Director of Product Development at CNET Networks, as the President and a Co-founder of Wind-Up Labs, Inc. (an online photo-sharing company acquired by CNET Networks in April 2005). He was also CTO and Co-Founder of Epesi Technologies, Inc., a software company. James attended Harvard College where he studied Computer Science. He was selected to serve as a member of our board of directors due to the perspective and experience he brings as our Co-Founder, President, and CEO.
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About Fitbit: Fitbit offers compact, wireless, wearable sensors that track a person’s daily activities in order to promote a healthy lifestyle.
Guillermo Rauch
CEO & Founder of Vercel
Before starting ZEIT in November 2015, Guillermo was the CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. He’s the creator of several popular Node.JS open source libraries like socket.io, mongoose and slackin. Prior to Node.JS, he was a core developer of the MooTools frontend toolkit.
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About Vercel: Vercel is a platform that enables users to develop, preview, and ship Jamstack sites.
Mathilde Collin
CEO and Co-Founder of Front
Mathilde Collin is the co-founder and CEO of Front.
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About Front: Front is the leader in customer communication that brings teams together to offer tailor-made service at scale
Paul Davison
Co-Founder and CEO of Clubhouse
Paul Davison is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clubhouse. Davison is a San Diego native who graduated from Stanford and then earned his MBA from Stanford Business School. He had an internship at Google between degrees. Davison worked at consulting firm Bain and Co. before joining database startup Metaweb, which was acquired by Google in 2010. Previously he was an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.
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About Clubhouse, Clubhouse: Clubhouse is an audio-based social app that allows users to spontaneously join group chats.
Abraham Shafi
Founder and CEO of IRL
Abe attended UC Berkeley and studied the intersection of computer engineering, business, cultural anthropology and sociology before starting his first company, getTalent, a highly acclaimed social recruiting platform, prompting him to leave school. The platform was born of out a personal experience while job hunting and realizing there was improvements to be made with the resume-sorting process. The platform leveraged data science to take away the biases from the hiring process, thus helping organizations hire the best talent. getTalent had global clients including Walmart, JetBlue and Viacom, and was later sold to Dice in 2013. In 2018, Abe founded IRL because he was personally driven to build an app that would bring people together. He found his addiction to social media was related to his own depression and left him close to quitting social media all together. This propelled him to make a social product that could help people feel connected in a way that felt healthier and less addictive. Since inception, the app has brought friends together over 600M times. IRL has eleven employees and is based in San Francisco, California. In Abe’s spare time, he likes playing piano and composing music. Currently, he is most interested in merging electronic music with classical leveraging deep folkloric music from around the world, blending with archeologic tunes of humankind’s musical history.
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About IRL: Groups, Chats, Events
Trevor McFedries
Co-founder & CEO of Brud
Trevor McFedries is the Founder and CEO of Brud.
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About Brud: Brud is a group of problem solvers specializing in robotics, artificial intelligence, and their applications to media businesses.
Brad Bao
Co-founder & CEO of Lime
Brad Bao is a Co-Founder and CEO at Lime (formerly LimeBike), the largest and leading micromobility company. He also currently serves as the Managing Director of Kinzon Capital (Fosun Group), a cross-border fund that investing in early-stage technology companies in both US and China, focusing on mobile and internet-related investments. Believing in the synergy between the two largest market and innovation of US and China, Kinzon Capital is positioned to bridge the gap and bring them together. Investments include: Volta Discord Doc.ai AirMart Alcove Cabana Circle (smart gym) ePal Firefly Flex (Female product) Founders Suite Zero & (Zero And, previous EnjoyFuji.com) Gotit Kiwi Drop Lyte (powerbank sharing) Made Renovation On Deck Shackle Spout Clinic TellUs (real-estate investing & saving) Velo Bikes (adam’s startup) Visdom (financial planning saas) WorkStream Prior to joining Kinzon Capital, Brad served as the General Manager of Tencent America, and VP of BD of Tencent Games for over 8 years, during that time Brad built the Tencent US branch from scratch, and was responsible for the overall P&L including investments, strategy, globalization, BD, and overall operation. He led and participated in investments including Hi-Rez, Fireforge, Zam, and more, and served as board member of several. Brad obtained bachelor degree in International Marketing from Wuhan University, and received his MBA from Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
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About Lime: Lime helps people move around their cities in an affordable and convenient way while eliminating their carbon footprint.
Wayne Ting
Chief Executive Officer of Lime
Wayne Ting is Lime’s Chief Executive Officer. Wayne joined Lime in October 2018 as Global Head of Operations and Strategy and has been instrumental in the company’s drive towards operational excellence and path to profitability. Before joining Lime, Wayne spent more than four years at Uber, serving in various roles including Chief of Staff to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, and General Manager of Uber’s Northern California business. Wayne previously served as a Senior Policy Advisor on the White House’s National Economic Council under President Obama where he focused on housing finance reform. Prior to the White House, Wayne worked at Bain Capital and at McKinsey & Company. Before that, he co-founded CampusNetwork.com, the first college-based social networking site (started close to 6 months before Facebook). Wayne is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Business School.
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About Lime: Lime helps people move around their cities in an affordable and convenient way while eliminating their carbon footprint.
Toby Sun
Co-Founder and CEO of Lime
Toby Sun is the CEO and Co-founder of Lime, the leading global micromobility company that has revolutionized the first and last-mile transportation challenge. Lime has raised $777 million and is backed by world-leading investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, GGV, IDG, DCM, Franklin Templeton, Section 32, AME Cloud Ventures, Stanford Start-X, Kevin Durant, etc. Prior to Lime (formerly LimeBike), Toby was an investment director at Fosun Kinzon Capital, a $400M US-China cross-border venture fund backed by Fosun Group, focusing on early and growth-stage investment in consumer internet and IoT space. Toby invested in Tapingo, Grubmarket, Usens, Ding’Ding Smart Lock, and was involved in the board duties. Prior to Fosun, Toby was a Product and Marketing Manager at PepsiCo and managed a large US-China cross-border team, where he launched Gatorade in China and managed 7UP ($300M annual sales). Toby also worked as a management consultant at Monitor Group and Deloitte Consulting’s San Francisco office. Toby holds an MBA from Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, and is a frequent guest speaker.
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About Lime, Lime: Lime helps people move around their cities in an affordable and convenient way while eliminating their carbon footprint.
Timi Ajiboye
CEO & CTO of Buycoins
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About Buycoins: Buycoins is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows Africans buy and sell cryptocurrencies instantly using their local currency.
Arsen Tomsky
CEO & Founder of inDriver
Arsen Tomsky is the founder and CEO of inDriver. He leads the company’s global team of more than 1500 employees and over 100 million-user inDriver ecosystem in 34 countries around the world. Arsen founded inDriver in 2013 and developed the business into the world’s fastest growing ride-hailing services. Arsen grew up in Yakutsk, Russia, and received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yakutsk State University. He is a passionate runner and finisher of the Chicago and Tokyo Marathons.
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About inDriver: inDriver is the world’s fastest-growing ride-hailing service.
Sunmeet Jolly
Founder & CEO of GROTU
Founder and Patent holder – GROTU mobile app @ 101 Islands LLC. Angel investor in 40 pre-IPO technology startups. Frequently invited by accelerators and angel forums to Judge startup competitions and discuss technology innovation. Former IT Consulting industry executive who sold hundreds of millions of dollars in consulting services to Fortune 500 companies working for Cap Gemini, HCL, L&T, NTT data.
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About GROTU: Patented GROTU app provides a much needed “private” collection of productivity and communication tools for friends and family social groups
Scott Chacon
Co-Founder and CEO of Chatterbug
Scott Chacon is a Git evangelist and Ruby developer currently as the Cofounder & CEO of Chatterbug. He is the author of the Pro Git book by Apress, the Git Internals Peepcode PDF as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage and the Git Community Book. [Source](http://schacon.github.com/about.html)
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About Chatterbug: Chatterbug building a new way to help you master language skills through adaptive courses.
Greg Kidd
Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer of GlobaliD
Believer that ones identity credentials should be truly portable and owned by individuals themselves rather than corporations or governments. The trade-off between security and privacy can meet the needs of both traditional institutions worried about compliance and risk, but also consumer protection advocates who care about the underserved and underbanked. Adviser/Investor via hardyaka.com for numerous startups in the exchange space including Shift, Ripple and 3taps, and previously Square and Twitter. Previously a director at Promontory Financial and a senior analyst for payments at The Board of Governor of the Federal Reserve. Senior Associate at Booz Allen. Founded and took Dispatch Management Services Corp public on the NASDAQ. Have worked as an instructor/leader for Outward Bound and the National Outdoor Leadership School. Specialties: Portable identity, digital currencies and exchange markets for goods, services, and information with functional emphasis on messaging, payments, and reputation/trust/risk. Well versed in visualizations for risk reporting and controls.
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About Apto Payments, GlobaliD, Hard Yaka: Create and manage your own portable, digital identity with globaliD.
Phil Libin
CEO of mmhmm
Phil Libin is co-founder and CEO of All Turtles, a mission-driven product studio, and mmhmm, a new app that makes video communication more clear and compelling. Previously he was Managing Director at General Catalyst, and before that he was co-founder and CEO of Evernote, which he grew to become a beloved product for hundreds of millions of users.
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About All Turtles, mmhmm: mmhmm is a virtual camera application used to create virtual rooms, backdrops, and presentations during video conferencing calls.
Phil Libin
CEO of mmhmm
Phil Libin is co-founder and CEO of All Turtles, a mission-driven product studio, and mmhmm, a new app that makes video communication more clear and compelling. Previously he was Managing Director at General Catalyst, and before that he was co-founder and CEO of Evernote, which he grew to become a beloved product for hundreds of millions of users.
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About All Turtles, mmhmm: mmhmm is a virtual camera application used to create virtual rooms, backdrops, and presentations during video conferencing calls.
David and Daniil Liberman
CEO of Product Science
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About Brothers Ventures, Product Science: Performance management platform for mobile
John Riccitiello
CEO of Unity Technologies
Since joining Unity as CEO in 2014, John Riccitiello has been a driving force in the successful launch of Unity 5 – the company’s next-generation multiplatform engine and development tools. Previously serving as CEO of Electronic Arts, John played a critical role in the company’s transformation into a mobile, online, and digital gaming leader, with subsequent revenue growth exceeding $1.6 billion during that time. John is also an active private investor, serving on Unity’s board since 2013 as well as Syntertainment, Telltale Games, and a few other higher-ed and non-profit boards. In addition, he was an investor and advisor to Oculus.
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About Unity Technologies: Unity provides multiplatform tools and services to developers of interactive content.
David Ko
Co-founder and CEO of Ripple Health Group
David Ko is the Co-founder and CEO of Ripple Health Group (RHG), an early stage healthtech startup focused on helping people experience healthier lives by connecting them to the care, support, and community they need. Prior to RHG, David was the President, COO and Board Member of Rally Health, a digital health company that develops online and mobile solutions that make it easy for consumers to take charge of their health and health care. Rally’s solutions are currently available to nearly 55 million people through health plans, care providers, and more than 200,000 employers. Prior to joining Rally, David oversaw all strategy, planning and operations as COO at Zynga, which he helped take public in December 2011. At the time of its IPO, Zynga was the largest social gaming company in the world with over 100 million daily active users. Prior to his work at Zynga, he spent 10 years at Yahoo! in various senior executive roles, including SVP of Yahoo!’s audience, mobile, and local businesses. David serves on the board of overseers at his alma mater New York University Stern School of Business where in 2016 he established the NYU Stern Venture Fellows program for aspiring entrepreneurs. He also works as an advisor and investor to a number of companies in Silicon Valley including Calm, the number one app for Sleep, Meditation and Relaxation.
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About Audax Health Solutions, Calm, Ripple Health Group: Ripple Health Group is a platform for the world’s most trusted healthcare solutions.
Alessandra Lezama
CEO of TOOTRiS
Alessandra Lezama is an entrepreneur and PE backed CEO, advocate for women pursuing careers in tech and other STEM fields, angel investor to San Diego-based early-stage companies and Founder and CEO of TOOTRiS, an on-demand Child Care technology platform that is reinventing how parents access and pay for affordable, high-quality Child Care. Passionate about technology, Alessandra has enjoyed an illustrious career of taking underperforming tech companies and turning them into scalable, high-performance powerhouses. Prior to founding TOOTRiS, Alessandra was the CEO for multiple technology companies, including AbacusNext, a San Diego-based company she stepped into with 29 employees and, in less than four years, transformed into a disruptive global technology organization with more than 500 employees across San Diego, Canada and the United Kingdom. Companies under Alessandra’s leadership have been recognized in Forbes and Inc., and in 2016 and 2017 she was named “Women Who Mean Business,” in 2018 as “Most Admired CEO of the Year” and in 2019 as “Most Influential” by the San Diego Business Journal. Alessandra is a member of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, serving on its board and management council. She serves on the board of Doors of Change, a non-profit that is helping to break the cycle and save the lives of runaway, homeless, and trafficked young people. She is a member of the California Preschool Business Advisory Council, supporting efforts to produce viable policy for high quality early education that gives a competitive edge for California’s businesses, both immediately and the future.
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About TOOTRiS: TOOTRiS is a technology platform that allows parents affordable access to high-quality Child Care, anytime, anywhere.
Prerna Gupta
Founder & CEO of HOOKED
Prerna Gupta is the Founder & CEO at HOOKED.
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About HOOKED: HOOKED is redefining entertainment for the Snapchat generation.
Todd Dipaola
CEO and Cofounder of InMarket
Veteran entrepreneur Todd Dipaola co-founded inMarket in 2010 to bring the performance and accountability of digital marketing to the realm of retail . inMarket’s platform, including apps such as CheckPoints, List Bliss, and Extra Extra, reach consumers on their smartphones as they made critical purchase decisions. In 2011, inMarket announced the world’s largest mobile shopper network reaching over 20 million consumers. Under Todd’s leadership inMarket has partnered with brands including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, among others. Todd previously co-founded and bootstrapped digital marketing agency Vantage Media at the inception of search advertising. Vantage ranked 31 on the Inc 500 and earned “The Fastest Growing Technology Company in Los Angeles” honors by Deloitte’s Fast50. In 2007, Todd exited the company at a valuation north of $100MM. Todd is also the CEO of Forefund Capital. Todd’s entrepreneurial experience is also rooted in philanthropy. In 2007, he created the Dipaola Foundation, which was featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, to work on environmental and systemic societal issues. He sits on several boards including UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and California Common Cause. As Chairman of Common Cause, the organization succeeded in reforming redistricting to eliminate gerrymandering and activating online voter registration for the first time in history. Todd graduated as a Regents Scholar from UC Berkeley in Molecular and Cell Biology with emphasis in Immunology.
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About ForeFund Capital, InMarket, The Dipaola Foundation: InMarket offers a self-service location-based platform that captures accurate consumer location data, which drives campaign performance.
James Yoder
CEO & Founder of Chat Sports
James Yoder is CEO of Chat Sports and founder of Chat Sports Studios. Prior to co-founding Chat Sports, he worked for Verizon Wireless as a Mobile Product Manager. Focusing on Verizon’s Android and iOS products, James has vast experience at the forefront of mobile industry technology. Prior to Verizon, he worked for the college sports giant, Rivals.com. James graduated with a degree in Business Management from the University of Toledo. As an angel investor, James has 4 portfolio exits. All investments to date have been consumer focused.
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About Chat Sports: Chat Sports is a live sports news network for digital platforms
Tracy Chou
Founder & CEO of Block Party
Tracy Chou is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and diversity advocate. She spent five years at Pinterest as an engineer and tech lead and was an early engineer at Quora prior to that. She is a co-founder of Project Include, a non-profit working with tech startups on diversity and inclusion, and #MovingForward, a movement working with VC firms to establish and publish anti-harassment policies; and an investment scout and advisor for several Bay Area VC firms. In her latest venture she is CEO of Block Party, with a mission to solve online harassment and abuse.
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About Block Party, Pinterest, Project Include: Block Party is a consumer app that tackles online harassment and puts you back in control.
Walter Driver
Co-Founder, Chairman & Co-CEO of Scopely
Walter Driver is the co-founder, Chairman and co-Chief Executive Officer of Scopely, one of the fastest-growing mobile-first video game companies. Scopely creates and publishes a highly-diverse portfolio of top-grossing, immersive game experiences, including: the award-winning ”MARVEL Strike Force,” “Scrabble® GO,” “Star Trek™ Fleet Command” and”Yahtzee® With Buddies,” among others, which are played by hundreds of millions of players worldwide. Fueled by a world-class team, Scopely leverages its proprietary technology platform Playgami to bring directed-by-consumer, interactive experiences to audiences around the globe. Under Walter’s leadership, the company has achieved billions of dollars in lifetime revenue and attracted more than $1 billion in financing from leading venture capital firms, tech luminaries and cultural icons.
Walter has been recognized as one of the “100 Most Influential Young Executives” by The Business Journal, “Visionary of the Year” by C-Suite Quarterly, “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Ernst & Young, a “Young Global Shaper” by the World Economic Forum, one of the “100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs” by Goldman Sachs and a “Dealmaker of the Year” by Variety. Under Walter’s leadership, Scopely has also received many recognitions, including: “Best-led Company” in 2021 by Inc. magazine, “Private Company of the Year” in 2021 by Los Angeles Business Journal, a four time “Best Places to Work” winner by Built In LA, and a two time “World’s Most Innovative Companies” winner by Fast Company. Scopely has also been recognized on top charts such as Deloitte’s “Technology Fast 500,” being named the second fastest-growing technology company in North America and in the Top 10 mobile app charts for consumer spend.
Walter is an investor and advisor to many private technology companies as well as a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Los Angeles Technology & Innovation Council. Prior to Scopely, Walter founded and served as CEO of O Negative Media where he developed online social games. Before O Negative, he co-founded Ignition Interactive, one of the first developers of third-party applications for Facebook.
Walter holds a B.A. in English Literature from Brown University.
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About Scopely: Scopely is a global leader in interactive entertainment and mobile-first video games.
Javier Ferreira
Co-CEO & Board Member of Scopely
Javier Ferreira is the co-CEO of Scopely, one of the fastest-growing mobile games companies in the West. A longtime digital media and technology executive with 15+ years of experience in gaming, Javier joined Scopely in 2014 as Chief Operating Officer to expand its business operations, strategy, slate and partnerships. In 2016, he became President, overseeing all aspects of day-to-day operations and joined the Scopely Board. In 2019, he became co-CEO with co-founder Walter Driver. Since Javier joined the business in 2014, Scopely has scaled 35x with a highly-diverse, top-grossing games slate, including the award-winning MARVEL Strike Force, Scrabble® GO, Star Trek™ Fleet Command and YAHTZEE® With Buddies, among many others. Javier’s leadership has helped Scopely achieve accolades such as recognition in Fast Company’s “World’s Most Innovative Companies” and Entrepreneur’s “30 Startups to Watch” as well as ranking #2 on Deloitte’s “Technology Fast 500” and #9 on Inc. magazine’s “Inc. 5000” as one of the fastest-growing companies in North America. In 2019, Javier was also recognized by Variety as a “Dealmaker of the Year.” Prior to Scopely, Javier served as Senior Vice President of Games Publishing at Disney Interactive, where he oversaw a large slate of mobile, console and online digital properties—helping establish the brand as a world-class publisher with over 500 million downloads and $1 billion in revenue during his tenure. Earlier in his career, Javier served as Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Europe at JAMDAT Mobile, which was acquired by Electronic Arts during his tenure for $680 million. Javier helped build the JAMDAT business into a top mobile games publisher in Europe. Following the company’s exit, Javier served as Vice President of Publishing at EA where he drove the brand’s global strategy and technology investments across the EMEA region, as well as expanded international distribution and closed a wide range of strategic partnerships with major IP holders. Javier began his career in gaming at Telefónica Mobile as Head of Product, Games. Javier holds a B.S. in Economics from the University of Warwick and a M.S. in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
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About Scopely: Scopely is a global leader in interactive entertainment and mobile-first video games.
Neel Popat
CEO of Donut
Neel Popat is the CEO and Founder of Donut.
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About Donut: Donut is the easiest way to save and earn a high yield with DeFi.
Adrian Sanders
Chief Executive Officer of Chargehound
Adrian works on Backspaces.
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About Chargehound: Chargehound is a comprehensive chargeback solution that makes handling disputes easy.
Jesse Pickard
CEO of Elevate Labs
Jesse Pickard is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Elevate.
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About Elevate Labs: Elevate is a cognitive training tool designed to build communication and analytical skills.
Ian Heidt
CEO & Co-founder of Housecall Pro
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About Housecall Pro: Housecall Pro is a developer of a mobile software platform used to connect back-end business operations and homeowners.
Michael Heyward
CEO of medialab
Serial entrepreneur Michael Heyward co-founded Whisper with Brad Brooks in 2012 with the mission of giving people a place to freely and authentically express themselves. Whisper is one of the fastest-growing media companies, generating over 17 billion content views per month. Prior to Whisper, the LA native worked in different roles related to consumer-based marketing at startup TigerText. As a teenager, Michael was an avid Formula One Racing fan and secured the United States commercial rights for the sport. In 2016, Michael was named one of AdWeek’s “Young Influentials”. In 2014, he was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30” and one of Fast Company’s “Most Creative People in Business.” Michael is a frequent keynote speaker and has spoken at a number of prominent conferences, including WSJ D, Fortune Tech Brainstorm, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Business Insider Ignition.
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About medialab: medialab is a media & technology company that engages in acquiring and growing internet brands.
Daniel Saks
Founder & Co-CEO & President of AppDirect
Daniel Saks is the Co-CEO of AppDirect, which he founded in 2009 with Nicolas Desmarais. Daniel plays a key role in the growth and development of AppDirect, from attracting a leading team, to nurturing relationships with customers and partners. Daniel’s presentation at the Under the Radar conference in the spring of 2011 resulted in AppDirect winning “Best in Show,” earning coverage in Wall Street Journal. Daniel received a BA in political science from McGill University then studied finance and accounting at Harvard. Prior to AppDirect, Daniel worked at Viant Capital, a boutique tech investment bank. In his free time, Daniel enjoys traveling, attending hockey games, and studying contemporary architecture and impressionist paintings.
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About AppDirect: AppDirect provides an end-to-end cloud commerce platform for both monetizing and managing digital customer relationships.
Nicolas Desmarais
Chairman & Co-CEO of AppDirect
Nicolas founded AppDirect in 2009 with Daniel Saks, and serves as AppDirect’s Chairman and Co-CEO. Nicolas is focused on the evolution of AppDirect’s product, investor relations, and overseeing the implementation of new marketplaces for our channel partners. Before co-founding AppDirect, Nicolas worked at Bain & Company as a management consultant focused on media and business services. Nicolas holds a bachelor’s degree with a double major in economics and political science from Amherst College. In his spare time, Nicolas enjoys outdoor activities and traveling to new countries.
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About AppDirect: AppDirect provides an end-to-end cloud commerce platform for both monetizing and managing digital customer relationships.
Hamza Zia
Founder & CEO of GitStart
Founder and CEO at GitStart (YC S19) Y Combinator-backed startup that helps engineering-focused companies be more agile, scale feature deployment faster, and reduce management complexity. Passionate about technology and programming from a very young age, I have built technology-based businesses globally and scaled high-performance teams across San Francisco, Zurich, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Worked closely on the core Microsoft Azure team at Shanghai, helping improve their cloud platform, and was recognized as an outstanding individual contributor.
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About GitStart: The modern way to scale your tech team
André Madeira
Co-Founder & CEO of Meemo
André Madeira is the Co-Founder & CEO at Meemo.
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About Meemo: Meemo is an AI-powered social finance app that lets users receive personal rewards based on recent activity and transfer money to friends.
Torri Shack
CEO / Co-Founder of Twella
Energetic and innovative Business Development Executive with more than 10 + years of experience in building and managing highly motivated sales and delivery teams. Flair for developing and growing market penetration through strategic partnerships, creative marketing and sales campaigns. Track record of building substantial sales and marketing teams and systems. PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY • Strong leadership skills with a proven history of building motivated and focused teams by investing in people through listening, coaching, training and mentoring. • 15 years’ experience in selling across a variety of platforms including outbound phone sales, cold calling, qualifying and converting leads, presentations, networking and managing a geographically distributed sales force. • Broad sales and business development experience across various industries including: property, mortgage, real estate, wellness, and technology. • Experienced in designing and implementing targeted focused sales and marketing campaigns with a track record of rapidly growing and maintaining market share. • Well-developed analytical and problem-solving skills. • Broad social media and technology experience with an innate understanding of what will work best on which platform. • Managed and exceeded KPI’s across various and diverse industries. • Strong financial management, budgeting and forecasting skills. • Highly organized with great time managements skills with the ability to focus on detail without losing sight of the bigger picture.
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About Tangible Movement, Twella: A mindful approach to mental wellness
Simon Parmett
CEO & GM at MuleSoft of MuleSoft
Simon Parmett is the CEO of MuleSoft. Previously Simon leads MuleSoft’s worldwide sales, services and channels organizations, responsible for the company’s growth and customer success. Simon comes to MuleSoft from Oracle where he was general manager of Oracle’s PLM Business Unit. At Oracle and previously Agile Software (acquired by Oracle) he was responsible for sales, business development, alliances and solution delivery for the Asia Pacific region. Simon holds an MBA from the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and a BA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
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About MuleSoft: MuleSoft provides an integration and API platform that makes it easy to connect data from any system to create connected experiences.
Michael Ritter
Founder & CEO of Maple Media
Michael Ritter is the Founder and CEO of Maple Media, a mobile apps and games company backed by private equity firm Shamrock Capital. Maple Media is a mobile media, advertising and technology company that acquires, manages and operates mobile applications focused on the utility, productivity, games and entertainment verticals. Popular titles include Snowboard Party: World Tour, Skateboard Party, Minesweeper Classic, Sudoku 🙂 and CalConvert. Previously he was SVP of Business & Corporate Development for Jam City, a large social and mobile game company based in Los Angeles where he oversaw mergers & acquisition activities, publishing, licensing, distribution, sales, legal and partnerships for social and mobile games. Michael was also the Founder and Publisher of Saturday Night Magazine, which at the time, he built into the largest circulated monthly collegiate lifestyle and entertainment magazine in the country.
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About Fantasy Baseball Arbitration, Maple Media: Maple Media is a mobile media, advertising, and technology company that acquires and operates category-leading, consumer apps.
Anton Bernstein
Co-founder & CEO of Highrise
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About Highrise, Lux Group, Pocket Worlds: Highrise is a creative mobile community where people create avatars, express themselves, and make friends.
Allen Chen
CEO & Co-Founder of Fitbod
Allen is the Co-founder & CEO of Fitbod.
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About Fitbod: Fitbod allows users to maximize the use of indoor gym equipment and confidence to train effectively for strength.
Joshua Gordon
President and CEO of Red Pocket Mobile
Joshua Gordon is the president and CEO of Red Pocket Mobile.
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About Democracy Council, Red Pocket Mobile: Red Pocket Mobile is a different kind of wireless company.
Brad Griffith
Chief Executive Officer of Gametime
Brad Griffith After nearly missing a San Francisco Giants NLCS game because he didn’t have access to print his tickets, Brad Griffith reimagined a simpler process for buying tickets on the go. Focusing completely on the mobile experience, Brad wrote v1.0 of the Gametime iOS application in 2012 and now leads a passionate team focused on mobilizing the ticket buying process for fans. He’s fascinated with fan experience – answering the question: How can we make it faster and easier to attend games? Brad is a Santa Cruz native and huge S.F. Giants, Golden State Warriors and 49ers fan. After earning an Engineering degree from Stanford, he followed his dreams to work in sports by helping the Colorado Rockies and Chicago White Sox (2005 World Series Champs!) build statistical infrastructure to analyze player value. In 2010, he helped launch Zappedy, which delivered customer analytics for local businesses (sold to Groupon in 2011). At Gametime, he’s able to combine his love of sports and analytics to help fans attend more games and connect with their communities.
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About Gametime: Gametime sells last-minute tickets to the most popular events in sports, music, and theater.
Sam Chaudhary
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of ClassDojo
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About ClassDojo: ClassDojo is a school communication platform that teachers, students, and families use to build close-knit communities.
Timothy Li
Founder and CEO of Fluid Credit
Timothy has been working in FinTech and Marketplace Lending industry for the past decade. He has launched various marketplace lending platforms and held c-level positions at RealtyMogul.com, loanDepot.com, Quick Bridge Funding, Think Finance and JPMorgan Chase. Timothy also co-founded LendFoundry.com, KuberFinancial.com MaxDecision.com. He also sits on various advisory boards such as Ziero Finance, Solar Mosaic, Blinker Inc., Docitt and CreditExchange.in. Timothy holds various degrees from Harvard Business School, University of Southern California and San Jose State University.
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About Alchemy, Fluid Credit, kuber, MaxDecisions, University of Southern California: Fluid Credit provides university students with credit and personal finance education.
Sanchali Pal
Founder & CEO of Joro
Sanchali Pal currently works as the Founder and CEO for Joro App. She previously worked at Tesla as the Market Access Intern.
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About Joro: Joro is an app that tracks the users’ carbon footprint and develops a climate action practice.
Colin Walsh
CEO and Co-Founder of Varo Money
Colin Walsh is the brainchild behind Varo and its mission to revolutionize banking. Colin and his team founded Varo to create a better way of banking that empowers consumers to be more in control of their financial lives. He believes too many people are not well served by the big banks, which have created a significant opportunity for innovators. Varo is building a seamless retail banking solution that addresses big pain points for the ~20 million millennial Americans (ages 22-36) who are creditworthy yet still manage their money on a month-to-month basis. These Americans are often one unexpected event away from running into financial trouble, which can prevent them from building savings and investing their money around longer-term goals. Varo has designed a product that allows its customers to see their full financial picture, understand how they’re spending, and access lending and savings products to smooth cash flow and build wealth over time. Varo’s frictionless, mobile-first banking solution does not charge overdraft fees or punitive interest rates, thereby eliminating the harmful fees traditional banks rely on to make money from this large segment of consumers. As proven in other industries, innovators who introduce products people love at lower cost often create massive disruption. We believe the time for such a change in retail banking has arrived. Understanding banking and how people manage their money is a vital part of developing such a new mobile banking platform. Walsh is perfectly positioned to do this with more than 25 years of retail financial services industry experience. His knowledge and expertise is guiding the Varo team to deliver a platform that allows users to effortlessly cover their expenses and build their wealth, so they can get on with their lives.
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About Varo Money: Varo is a digital bank that offers innovative, premium banking services wrapped in inclusive design.
Bjoern Zinssmeister
CEO & Founder of Templarbit
Bjoern is the Co-Founder and CTO of Design Inc. He is best known for his work with building community platforms like Match and Synack. Bjoern has spent more than a decade as a software engineer and built two venture backed startups from the ground up. Prior to Design Inc. Bjoern worked as a mobile lead for Match Group (Match, Tinder, OKCupid) and was instrumental in helping Match establish their labs office in San Francisco prior to their IPO and acquisition of OK Cupid. Bjoern went on to lead engineering at YCombinator backed Userfox, which was later acquired by Adroll. In September of 2013 Bjoern joined Synack as their Director of Engineering and helped to build up their engineering team from the ground up, helping the company to grow and raise successful A and B rounds. Originally from Germany, Bjoern graduated from the Trier University of Applied Sciences with a degree in Computer Science before moving out to San Francisco to pursue his work with startups.
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About Templarbit: Templarbit protects applications from malicious activity.
Adrian Graham
Co-Founder & CEO of Seesaw
Adrian handles a variety of leadership responsibilities within Seesaw, with much of his time spent overseeing new product development, engineering efforts, and the company’s overall workplace culture.
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About Seesaw, Shadow Puppet: Seesaw is a platform for student engagement.
Susan Brazer
Chief Executive Officer and Founder of LionShare Media
Susan is a commercial visionary with a 2020’s view. She’s led the successful development, launch and scale of consumer-facing platforms, apps and services for world-leading media, tech and telecom companies: Apple, DirecTV, SES Astra, FIFA World Cup, Viacom, Virgin Mobile, and Nokia. Susan is the CEO of LionShare Media, which is launching the THIN/AIR™ Metaverse, a 5G cloud-native, blockchain-enabled distribution platform for premium entertainment and immersive media. Previously, Susan was VP, Strategy and Business Development at Nokia, and VP, Corporate Development and Entertainment Services at Virgin Mobile USA). Prior to this, Susan was EVP, Corporate Development at KirchMedia’s Venture Fund for the FIFA World Cup, where she raised $50M+ for interactive TV, gaming and mobile app ventures. Susan was the SVP, Networks & Marketing for Viacom’s Showtime service in the Middle East and Africa, overseeing a P&L and operations for MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, The Movie Channel, TV Land, Bloomberg, Paramount, Style and Discovery. Susan led the launch of DirecTV as VP, Marketing at Compression Labs and the migration of 85M European TVHH to digital satellite and cable services for SES ASTRA. The genesis of Susan’s product development and UI/UX expertise began at Apple Computer, where she launched its 1st portable computer, the Newton, and Knowledge Navigator (prototype for the iPAD and Siri). She was also served as an M&A analyst at PepsiCo and International Treasury Analyst at Phillip Morris. Susan holds a B.A. in Economics from Brandeis University, an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and attended the London School of Economics. Susan is on the Board of Global Women in Blockchain, a UN Delegate for Media for Social Impact and a mentor at Princeton University’s Keller School of Engineering for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
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About LionShare Media: LionShare Media develops a media distribution platform-as-a-service to harness the power of converging and emerging technologies.
Derek Collison
Founder & CEO of Synadia Communications
Derek Collison is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Synadia Communications. An industry veteran and pioneer in large-scale distributed systems and enterprise computing, Derek founded Apcera and has held executive positions at VMware, Google and TIBCO Software. Derek created NATS.io and CloudFoundry as well as TIBCO’s messaging systems. As Chief Technology Officer and Chief Architect of Cloud Application Platforms at VMware, he co-founded the cloud computing group and designed and architected Cloud Foundry, the industry’s first open PaaS. During Derek’s time at Google, he co-founded the AJAX APIs group. Prior to Google, Derek spent more than a decade at TIBCO, where he designed and implemented a wide range of messaging products, including Rendezvous and EMS. As TIBCO’s Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Derek led technical and strategic product direction and delivery. Derek is a sought after speaker and collaborator. Derek holds more than 20 software patents and is a recognized leader in distributed systems design and architecture, as well as emerging cloud platforms. Derek earned a Bachelor’s degree with honors in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.
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About Covaxx, Heavybit, NATS, Savonix, Synadia Communications, Vicarious, Xperiel: Powering the secure connective technologies to drive cloud and edge native
Kim D. Blickenstaff
President and Chief Executive Officer of Tandem Diabetes Care
Kim joined Tandem in August 2007, bringing more than 30 years of healthcare experience in finance, marketing management, sales and strategic planning. Prior to joining Tandem, he was Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Biosite Incorporated, a medical diagnostic company that was acquired by Inverness Medical Innovations for $1.8 billion in June 2007. Prior to founding Biosite, he held various finance, operations, research management, sales management, strategic planning and marketing positions with Hybritech Incorporated and Baxter Healthcare. Kim has been active in the medical device and diagnostics industry over the last 12 years, serving on the board of directors for innovative, young healthcare companies such as SenoRx and MediVation Incorporated. He holds a Masters of Business Administration from Loyola University Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
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About Tandem Diabetes Care: Tandem Diabetes Care develops medical devices for the treatment of diabetes offering diabetic insulin pumps for adults and children.
Hao Li
CEO & Co-Founder of Pinscreen
Hao Li is Founder and CEO of Pinscreen, Inc., and Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, Director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, a visiting professor at Weta Digital and a research lead at Industrial Light & Magic / Lucasfilm. For his contributions in non-rigid shape registration, human digitization, and real-time facial performance capture, Hao received the TR35 Award in 2013, recognizing him as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35, from the MIT Technology Review. He was named Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair in 2015, and was awarded the Google Faculty Research Award and the Okawa Foundation Research Grant the same year. He won the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award in 2018. He is best known for his work on dynamic geometry processing, facial animation, and data-driven techniques for making 3D human digitization and facial animation accessible to the masses. During his PhD, Hao co-created the first real-time and markerless system for performance-driven facial animation based on depth sensors. The team later commercialized a variant of this technology as the facial animation software Faceshift (acquired by Apple Inc. in 2015 and incorporated into the iPhone X in 2017). He was brought on as visiting professor at Weta Digital to build the high-fidelity facial performance capture pipeline for reenacting the deceased actor Paul Walker in the movie Furious 7 (2015). His recent research focuses on combining techniques in Deep Learning and Computer Graphics to facilitate the creation of 3D avatars and to enable true immersive face-to-face communication and telepresence in Virtual Reality.
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About Pinscreen, University of California Berkeley: Revolutionizing digital communication and online human interactions with user-generated and personalized 3D virtual avatars.
David Siegel
Co-Founder and CEO of Glide
David Siegel is the co-founder and CEO of Glide. He previously worked at Microsoft. He also held positions at Xamarin, Futureproof, and X1 Technologies. David holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and computer science engineering.
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About Glide: Build powerful apps from spreadsheets without code, in minutes.
Oz Alon
Co-Founder and CEO of HoneyBook
Oz Alon is Co-Founder & CEO at HoneyBook.
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About HoneyBook: HoneyBook is a business management platform creating tools to help creative entrepreneurs run their business on their own terms.
Ryan Atallah
Co-Founder & CEO of Spindle (www.spindle.app)
As co-founder and CTO, entrepreneur and engineer Ryan Atallah sold his natural language analytics startup Cleargraph to Tableau for $30 million in 2017; after which Tableau was acquired by Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), where Ryan served as a senior Software Engineer Manager overseeing the NLP-powered Ask Data product now featured in Tableau’s offerings. He departed to co-found intelligent No-Code enterprise data applications platform Spindle (www.spindle.app) with his twice-cofounder Carson Kahn. Spindle is now backed by Accel Partners (Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian, Facebook), Caffeinated Capital (IFTTT, Notion, Airtable, Vercel), and diverse Fortune 100 executives who share in its mission to give teams data superpowers.
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About Spindle (www.spindle.app), Tableau: An intelligent Decision Analytics platform for generating apps that simulate the ROI of business decisions without statistics or code.
Ranj Bath
CEO of Nurosene Health
Ranj is the CEO of Nurosene, a technology-driven wellness company committed to building a generation of healthier brains, publicly traded on the CSE (CNSX: MEND). With over 20 years at the forefront of building brands across technology, entertainment and finance, Ranj is an inspirational leader that has held various senior leadership roles at companies such as Intel and Beats (Apple). As VP Corporate Strategy at Beats Music Ranj was instrumental in driving strategy and partnerships that would lead to both subscriptions and revenue, working with the Beats brand all the way through a $3Bn acquisition by Apple.
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About Nurosene Health: Nurosene Health is a technology-driven wellness company that helps healthy habits improve their brain, mind, and body.
Srinivas Balasubramanian
CEO of Photon
Srinivas Balasubramanian is Founder, Chairman and CEO of Photon, the leading Cloud to Consumer UX™ Company. Srinivas Balasubramanian has a track record of building category dominating, highly profitable companies with significant market value. Since 2007 when he took over as full time CEO at Photon, the company has worked with hundreds of customers including a significant percentage of the Fortune 100 and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Prior to taking over as CEO of Photon Infotech, Srinivas Balasubramanian was a Senior Vice President at webMethods, a Nasdaq listed middleware technology company reporting to the CEO. Prior to that, Srinivas Balasubramanian was Founder, President and CEO of Infravio Inc, a Cupertino, CA based company which was a leading provider of Web Services and SOA infrastructure software that coined the term and created the category “SOA Governance”. Infravio was acquired by webMethods for $38mn in cash in 2006. Srinivas Balasubramanian served in various capacities at Infravio – initially as founding CEO responsible for raising the initial institutional Venture capital round in 2000. Thereafter, he served as Chief Strategist of the company between 2001 and January 2005 where he was responsible for closing a strategic financing round from NetIQ Corp and for closing a large number of the early customers. In January 2005, Srinivas Balasubramanian took over as CEO of Infravio. As CEO, he replaced the executive management team and drove the company to a thought and customer leadership position in the emerging Web Services and SOA market until its ultimate sale to webMethods in September 2006, which he architected. Srinivas was earlier an equity and derivatives trader at JP Morgan and Credit Lyonnais Securities at Mumbai, India. At Credit Lyonnais, he headed the largest institutional trading in the country that won almost every award on offer at the time he ran it. Srinivas has an MBA from Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta and is a graduate from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani.
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About Photon: Photon is a technology corporation that provides Strategy Consulting, Creative Design, and Technology Services to global enterprise.
Chase Harmer
Chief Executive Officer of PayCertify
Integrity, honesty, and longevity. Those are the qualities that have shaped Chase Harmer, a successful entrepreneur, leader, speaker, and innovator. For 15 years, Chase has built businesses, led companies, created products, and helped bring the best out of his employees. As a merchant services professional, Chase has launched several companies and products—such as MLS Hotel, Power Payments, Payment Reservations, and Pay Certify—that focus on hotel and e-commerce verticals. His companies process transactions and create software products that help increase cash flow and longevity of merchant accounts in those industries.
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About PayCertify: The PayCertify Companies Inc. is an All-In-One payments co and digital wallet with a family of brands and services in the US, EU and CA.
Sachin Rekhi
Founder & CEO of Notejoy
Sachin Rekhi is Founder and CEO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for you and your team. Prior to Notejoy, Sachin founded Connected, a personal relationship manager that brings your contacts and conversations together in one place. Sachin incubated Connected during his Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Trinity Ventures and ultimately sold Connected to LinkedIn in Oct 2011. At LinkedIn, Sachin re-launched Connected as LinkedIn Contacts and then went on to incubate the all-new LinkedIn Sales Navigator product, a premium subscription for sales professionals to enable effective social selling. Before that, Sachin was a Senior Product Manager at imeem, a leading social network that enables users to share, discover and interact with music, videos, and photos. Sachin led emerging monetization efforts, including international monetization, online audio advertising, and imeem VIP, a premium subscription service. In addition, Sachin oversaw the imeem Media Platform, which allows third party developers to build media-centric applications on imeem. Prior to joining imeem in 2008, Sachin co-founded Anywhere.FM, a web music player that allows users to upload, play, and discover music online. Anywhere.FM was acquired by imeem in January 2008. In addition, Sachin held marketing, product management, and engineering roles at Microsoft, Paetec Communications, and Goldman Sachs. Sachin earned a BS in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Finance from The Wharton School.
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About Notejoy, Reforge: Notejoy is a fast and focused notes app for you and your team.
Iddo Gino
Founder / CEO of RapidAPI
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About RapidAPI: RapidAPI is an API Hub that enables developers to find, manage, and connect to thousands of APIs.
Vitaly Alexandrov
CEO & Founder of Food Rocket
Currently nominated for Forbes 30 under 30, two-time winner of the Oxford’s Fund scholarship. In 2019, together with partners, Vitaly launched the Foody startup to optimize the restaurant procurement process in the U.S. Three months later, Foody was showing a monthly growth of 20%. In 2021 due to the pandemic, the startup pivoted and launched San Francisco’s first 10-15-minute grocery delivery service called Food Rocket. Previously, Vitaly was the CEO and founder of the international CRM marketing agency Out of Cloud that provides consumer data analysis and helps companies build personalized marketing. The agency’s clients include Puma, Panasonic, Nikon, Alfa Bank and Pfizer. The agency won the Best Use of eCRM category at Tagline Awards in 2017 and Best Use of Analytics in Loyalty Programs at Loyalty Awards in 2018. At 27, Vitaliy wrote the Email Marketing Strategy book that was a bestseller at Ozon.
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About Food Rocket: Food Rocket is an application that provides customers with on-demand 10-15 minute free grocery delivery.
Chris Milk
Co-Founder, CEO and COO of Supernatural
Chris Milk is the Co-Founder, CEO, and COO of Supernatural. He is an artist, director, and technologist.He is the founder and CEO of [Vrse](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/vrse#/entity). Milk has gained recognition as a music video director, working with Arcade Fire, U2, Kanye West, Green Day, Johnny Cash, Gnarls Barkley, Chemical Brothers, John Mellencamp, Courtney Love, and Modest Mouse. He has been honored with the top industry awards for his music video and commercial work, including the Grand Prix Cannes Lion, the D&AD Black Pencil, the Grand Clio, and SXSW’s ’Best of Show’, as well as multiple Grammy nominations, MTV Moon Men, and the UK’s MVA Innovation Award. Milk’s short film, Last Day Dream, played at film festivals around the world, and he directed the second unit of A Mother’s Promise, the film that introduced Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards recognized his work in design and art in 2011. The Wilderness Downtown was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 30 Best Music Videos of all time, and was exhibited at MoMA in NY for 6 months in 2011. Milk builds multiple projects with Virtual Reality as the canvas. The collaboration with Beck called “Sound & Vision” has been exhibited in an Oculus Rift at the Future of Storytelling Summit, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and Tribeca Film Festival. Chris Milk was born in New York.
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About Here Be Dragons, Supernatural, Within (VR/AR): Supernatural is an immersive, virtual reality fitness experience that combines music, coaches, destinations, and movements.
Ham Serunjogi
Co-Founder & CEO of Chipper Cash
Ham Serunjogi is a co-founder and CEO at Chipper Cash.
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About Chipper Cash: Chipper Cash is a fintech platform that offers mobile, cross-border money transfer services.
Brian Vallelunga
Founder & CEO of Doppler
CEO @ Doppler
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About Doppler: Doppler provides an application management platform used to help developers manage their API keys across their projects.
Zeb Evans
Founder & CEO of ClickUp
Zeb Evans is a billionaire entrepreneur that’s started several software companies worth over $4 billion. He’s founder and CEO at ClickUp, a productivity platform that revolutionizes the way people work.
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About ClickUp: ClickUp offers a customizable workplace productivity platform that serves all departments across an organization.
Charles Prober
CEO, Board of Directors of Tile
Charles “CJ” Prober is CEO of Tile. He is an entrepreneurial leader who has a broad mix of operational, strategic and transactional experience with a strong track record of success over the past 20 years. I have a passion for building and operating consumer experiences that are at the cutting edge of hardware, media and technology.
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About Tile: Tile creates devices connected to a mobile app, helping users locate their personal items.
Michael Boswell
Co-Founder, CEO of Cue
Co-Founder and CEO of Cue. Previously an Entrepreneur in Residence at Khosla Ventures; Design Lead at Facebook, Google and Coatue. Founding member of several products with successful exits including Jobr, Pagemodo, and ContactMe.
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About Cue: The world’s first social calendar
Stephen Meade
Founder and CEO of MagMo
Over the course of the last decade and a half, Stephen Meade has contributed to the creation of 11 successful technology-based companies. The founder of Cenoplex, a company dedicated to more effective and intelligent customer messaging and communications for wireless operators, Stephen also serves as chairman and resident rainmaker at BigBamboo LLC, a holding company which incubates start-up companies. At BigBamboo, he guides the future of companies including MonetaPro, RONAStar, ComCom and OrionNation. His roster of successful businesses includes the founding and selling of SiteVisions.com, a website and database development company sold in 2000, and VirtualSeller.com, started in 1996, which became an innovator for an ecommerce-based transaction processing system that proved to be an early precursor to PayPal. Prior to venturing into entrepreneurial world, he was a regional vice president with Travelers Group, a fortune 500 financial services company. Stephen frequently speaks at executive leadership conferences such as CGI (Clinton Global Initiative), Founder Institute, and Opportunity Green. He is also the author of three books in the field of finance/credit improvement and business networking, a guest lecturer at universities including MIT, Harvard, Northwestern, PKI, UMKC, USC , and UCLA, and serves as an advisor to numerous companies and organizations. His “Isolation Is A Good Thing” seminar trains executives how to isolate exactly what and who they need to be for success.
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About BigBamboo LLC, MagMo: MagMo, “Magazine Moment,” is a photo sharing app that creates short stories using pictures and text for brands using social media
Chris Hulls
Cofounder / CEO of Life360
Chris is the cofounder and CEO of Life360. Before doing the whole startup thing, he did a stint in banking at Goldman Sachs and spent a few years in the Air Force. He went to college at UC Berkeley, and was about to start class at Harvard Business School when he had a last minute change of heart and decided to pioneer the trend of being an ivy league pre-dropout. In his time off, Chris likes to do anything that involves machines that move–like building drones, driving cars, flying planes, and piloting hovercraft. He is also widely credited with coining the term App Store Optimization.
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About Life360: Life360 creates a mobile app for families that helps families feel closer together.
Kartik Chandrayana
CEO / Co-Founder of Twin Prime
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About Twin Prime: Twin Prime, a company that came out of stealth this week
Mike Chen
CEO, Co-Founder of Magic
Mike Chen is the CEO at Magic
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About Bettir, Magic: Magic provides a 24/7 SMS based on-demand personal assistant service.
Cristiano Oliveira
Founder + CEO of Olivia
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About Olivia: Olivia is an AI financial assistant that learns your spending patterns, predict your purchases and recommend ways to get more for your money
Jonathan Gray
CEO and Co-Founder of Encore Music Technologies
Jonathan Gray, founder and CEO of Cask, is an entrepreneur and software engineer with a background in startups, open source, and all things data. Prior to founding Cask, Jonathan was a software engineer at Facebook where he drove HBase engineering efforts, including Facebook Messages and several other large-scale projects, from inception to production. An open source evangelist, Jonathan was responsible for helping build the Facebook engineering brand through developer outreach and refocusing the open source strategy of the company. Prior to Facebook, Jonathan founded Streamy.com, where he became an early adopter of Hadoop and HBase and is now a core contributor and active committer in the community. Jonathan holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Business Administration from Carnegie Mellon University.
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About Encore Music Technologies, Orcada, The Apache Software Foundation: Encore is an interactive live music mobile-based platform aiming to help artists monetize their connections with fans.
Tom Ryan
CEO & Co-Founder of Pluto TV
Tom Ryan is CEO and Co-Founder of Pluto TV, the leading free streaming television service in America that is also available in 22 countries across Europe and Latin America. Pluto TV carries and programs more than 250 live channels and thousands of on-demand movies and TV shows in partnership with hundreds of major TV networks, movie studios, publishers, and digital media companies. Each month over 36 million viewers tune in to watch premium news, TV shows, movies, sports, live events, cartoons, and trending digital series on mobile, web, and living room devices. Pluto TV is a top free app on Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Android mobile, and also powers built-in streaming television services on Vizio LG, and Samsung smart TVs. Earlier in his career, Tom served as CEO of Threadless (a popular crowdsourced design and e-commerce company), SVP of Digital Strategy at EMI Music as well as co-founder of Cductive (an early digital music retailer company that he merged with eMusic). He holds an AB from Dartmouth College and an MBA from INSEAD in France.
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About Pluto TV: Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service in America.
Deborah Kilpatrick
Chief Executive Officer of Evidation Health
Deborah Kilpatrick is the Chief Executive Officer of Evidation Health.Prior to this role, she served as the Chief Commercial Officer of genomic diagnostics company CardioDx. Earlier in her career, Deborah held multiple leadership roles at Guidant Corporation, including Research Fellow, Director of R&D, and Director of New Ventures in the Vascular Intervention Division. She serves on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. Deborah is a co-founder of the MedtechVision Conference, now held annually in Silicon Valley. She holds BS, MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering with a bioengineering focus from Georgia Tech.
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About Evidation Health, MedTech Women: We enable and empower everyone to participate in better health outcomes.
Derrick Ko
CEO & Co-founder of Spin
Derrick Ko is co-founder at Skinny Labs, also known as Spin. Prior to this, he was a product manager at Lyft and the first employee at Kicksend.
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About Spin: Spin is a stationless electric scooter company that provides dockless mobility systems.
Brendan Falk
CEO and Co-Founder of Fig
Brendan Falk is the co-founder and CEO of Fig.
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About Fig: Fig adds visual apps, shortcuts, and autocomplete to your terminal.
Gerard Cunningham
Founder & CEO of Winistry
Gerard is a Blue Chip & Startup CEO, Board Member, Adviser and Investor. He is a former CMO, with expertise in strategy, operations, Big Data, AI, Digital Transformation, Mobile.
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About Winistry: The Intelligent Mobile App Platform: “WordPress for Mobile Apps, plus AI”
Haseeb Budhani
Co-founder & CEO of Rafay Systems
Haseeb Budhani is the CEO and co-founder of Rafay Systems, which he co-founded in October of 2016. Prior to Rafay, Haseeb spent at a year at Akamai Technologies as the company’s Vice President of Enterprise Strategy. Akamai acquired Haseeb’s previous company, Soha Systems, in October 2016. Haseeb co-founded Soha in the second half of 2013 and served as the company’s CEO. Prior to Soha, Haseeb served as the Chief Product Officer for Infineta Systems, where he was responsible for overseeing all aspects of the company’s product marketing, marketing communications and partner management activities. Prior to Infineta, Haseeb served as Vice President for NET’s Broadband Technology Group, spearheading the group’s product marketing, program management and business development functions. Previously, Haseeb held senior product management, marketing and engineering roles at Personal IT, Citrix Systems, Orbital Data, IP Infusion and Oblix. Haseeb holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
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About Rafay Systems: Rafay enables enterprise Platform teams to manage the full lifecycle of Kubernetes clusters and modern applications with ease at any scale.
Jordan Brown
Founder, CEO of Lugg
Jordan Brown is the Founder, CEO at Lugg
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About Lugg: Lugg provides anything moved with the push of a button. Download Lugg on the App store and instantly get connected to a truck and 2 movers.
Joel Simkhai
Founder and CEO of Blendr
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About Blendr: Blendr is a geo-social networking application and social discovery platform for Android, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Facebook.
Jason Meltzer
Co Founder, Chief Dog Officer & 1st CEO of Wag
Jason Meltzer Co-Founder & Chief Dog Officer of Wag! A veteran of the dog walking and pet care industry. Jason began his career at the age of 13, walking neighborhood dogs in LA’s Topanga Canyon. After graduating from Arizona State University with a degree in Psychology and Business Jason started working in software sales for a Fortune 500 company. He was later recruited for Business Development at Zumbox a later stage startup that raised $28.3M to bring Digital Postal Mail to reality. Jason is a father to his daughter Lilah and has a German Shepherd /Husky mix named Cosmo.
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About Wag: Wag is a mobile application used to instantly find trusted and certified dog walkers.
Osman Rashid
CEO & Chairman of Convo
Osman is a seasoned entrepreneur in the field of educational technology. He is currently the CEO of Convo Corp. and Founder & CEO of **Galxyz** , an intergalactic science adventure on a mission to ignite the fascination of science and unlock the true potential in every student. Previously he was the co-founder and CEO of online textbook rental leader **Chegg** (NYSE:CHGG) until early 2010, and also co-founder and CEO of **Kno, Inc.** (acquired by Intel in 2013), a digital education platform company. He is also on the Board of Trustees at a health focused non-profit, ChildLife Foundation, which provides urgent care to the poorest in Karachi, Pakistan. CLF runs Karachi’s largest children emergency rooms and is deploying satellite urgent care centers to provide critical care and prevention education. Osman has received several honors, including Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of The Year Award (CA) in 2009, which is the world’s most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs, as well as Forbes Impact 15 for 2012 and Inc.’s Immigrant Edge: 9 Wildly Successful Entrepreneurs. To find out more about Osman, check out his LinkedIn profile. You can also follow him on Twitter @osmanrashid.
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About Convo, Galxyz: Convo provides an enterprise social collaboration platform that enables easy, secure conversations between desk/non-desk workers.
Rahul Chabukswar
Founder & CEO of Homesome
Rahul Chabukswar is the Founder & CEO of Homesome, e-commerce platform for grocery stores and supermarkets, think of us as Shopify for Groderies! He previously held Engineering Management positions on Windows Azure & Windows Server teams at Microsoft.
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About Homesome: Homesome is an e-commerce platform for grocery stores and supermarkets, think of us as Shopify for Groceries!
Ronjon Nag
Co-Founder, CEO of Cellmania
Dr. Ronjon Nag is CEO/Co-Founder of Cellmania & R42 Group, a leading wireless applications company. Dr. Nag, is an acknowledged authority in the mobile industry, having been featured on the cover of Fortune and involved in the development of, and holding patents in, wireless applications, user interfaces and new m-commerce distribution methods of mobile applications and devices. Previously a Vice President and General Manager at Motorola responsible for smart mobile technologies developed in the Lexicus Division and Motorola Human Interface Laboratories worldwide, hundreds of millions of Motorola devices have shipped with technology developed under his leadership – voice recognition, handwriting recognition and predictive text key systems. Previously Dr. Nag was CEO/founder of Lexicus, a pioneer of speech and handwriting recognition technology, acquired by Motorola in 1993. Dr. Nag holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University (speech recognition research), was a Harkness Fellow at Stanford University (neural network research), has an MBA from MIT, and a 1st class Honours degree of Birmingham University, UK (electrical engineering).
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About Cellmania, MIT Alumni Angels of Northern California, R42 Group: Leading Mobile Application Ecosystems
Sean Li
CEO & Co-founder of Magic
CEO @ Magic
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About Magic: Plug and play auth that grows with you
Chris DeWolfe
CEO & Co-Founder of Jam City
Chris DeWolfe is co-founder and CEO of Jam City, a global leader in mobile entertainment that provides social gaming experiences for millions of players around the world. Prior to Jam City, Chris co-founded and served as CEO of MySpace, where he popularized social networking and revolutionized the music industry. The site, formed in 2004, became the most visited in the U.S. by 2006 with 90 million members. When Chris left the company in 2009, MySpace had more than 130 million monthly active users around the world. Chris received Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015 and the Producers Guild of America’s Vanguard award in 2009. TIME included him among its 2006 list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and Barbara Walters named him one of her 10 Most Fascinating People in 2007. He studied finance at the University of Washington and attended the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, which honored him in 2006 with its Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year award. Chris is an advisor at USC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and a board member of Uproxx Media Group. He lives in Los Angeles with his family and actively participates in animal rescue operations.
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About Jam City: Jam City is a mobile entertainment company, connecting the world through technology, creativity, and play.
Serge Faguet
Co-founder and CEO of Mirror Emoji Keyboard
Serge Faguet is the co-founder and CEO of Mirror AI, the company using artificial intelligence and breakthrough algorithms to create the world’s most personalized emoji. Born in Russia, Serge was founder and CEO of TokBox, a leading PaaS communication infrastructure company funded by Sequoia Capital and acquired by Telefonica. After TokBox, Serge founded and served as CEO of Ostrovok/ZenHotels Group, the largest online travel company in Russia that is profitable with more than $500 million in turnover and 450 employees. Serge received his BA from Cornell, pursued an MBA at Stanford, and worked at Google. He is also a popular thought leader in the biohacking and personalized medicine community, and his articles on the subject reach millions of people.
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About Emerging Travel Group, Mirror Emoji Keyboard: Mirror uses a single selfie to instantly create hundreds of emoji that look like you and your friends.
Christopher Keene
CEO of Gigster
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About Gigster: Gigster is the first team intelligence engine, enabling software development teams to achieve 30% higher efficiency.
Jindou Lee
Founder & CEO of HappyCo
Jindou Lee is the CEO & Founder at HappyCo (Happy Inspector).
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About HappyCo: HappyCo is taking traditional paper based processes out of the dark ages.
Jeremy Stoppelman
CEO of Yelp
Jeremy Stoppelman joined Yelp as CEO in 2004.
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About Yelp: Yelp operates an online platform that connects people with local businesses.
Co-Founder, CEO of Samba TV
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About Carrot Capital, i/o Ventures, Samba TV: Samba TV enables the next-generation TV experience powered by its first-party data and helps viewers engage with relevant media.
Matt Ivester
Co-Founder & CEO of Hotshot
Matt Ivester is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is currently CEO of Kindr Inc., a company dedicated to making online kindness fun and easy. In 2011, through Serra Knight Publishing, he published lol…OMG!: What Every Student Needs to Know About Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying. And in 2012, he published the high school edition of the same. Since its release, lol…OMG! has become Amazon’s top-selling book on the topics of digital citizenship and cyberbullying. He has spoken at various institutions around the country on these topics. Prior to writing lol…OMG! he started several companies, including a concert ticket auction site, a multi-million dollar investment fund, and a college gossip site. In 2005, Ivester graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Science double majoring in Economics and Computer Science. In 2012, he graduated from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business with an MBA.
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About Hotshot: Screenshot technology
Selcuk Atli
Co-founder and CEO of Bunch
Selcuk Atli is Founder and CEO of Bunch; a group video chat app designed for live mobile games. Selcuk is a graduate of YCombinator (W14), an Endeavor entrepreneur, a Fulbright Scholar. Before Bunch, he was a Venture Partner at 500 Startups. Prior to that that he co-founded Boostable (acquired by Metric Collective) and before that he founded Manifest Commerce (acquired by Rakuten). Mr. Atli is also Co-founder of Nomadic Minds, a non-profit that connects top mentors in silicon valley with founders in emerging tech hubs around the world (acquired by TheFamily). Selcuk was recognized by Endeavor as a global high-impact entrepreneur and was the recipient of an innovation award from the World Bank. He advises several startups including StackShare, Fetcher.ai and Mobile Action. He’s also the lead singer and songwriter for The HMMS, a recording indie rock band based in New York City.
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About Bunch, Z1.VC: Bunch is the first app that allows its users to play their favorite games with friends over video chat.
Manish Rathi
Dreamer, Doer, Founder & CEO of JoyRun
Manish Rathi joined JoyRun as Dreamer, Doer, Founder, CEO in 2014.
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About JoyRun: JoyRun is a community based delivery company.
Simon Biddiscombe
President and CEO of MobileIron
Simon Biddiscombe is the president and CEO of MobileIron. Prior to becoming the CEO, Simon served as the CFO of the company.
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About MobileIron: MobileIron offers a mobile-centric, zero trust security approach that verifies user, device, application, network, and security threat.
Crystal Rose
Founder and CEO of Make Sense Labs
Crystal Rose is the CEO and Founder of Sensay Inc, DBA Make Sense Labs. Full biography can be found at http://crystalrose.me
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About DeFiance Media, Make Sense Labs: Make Sense Labs Secure Messaging with Blockchain Technology
Renee Wang
Founder & CEO of Castbox
Renee Wang is the CEO and Founder of Castbox, an award-winning global podcast platform that enables anyone to easily find, access, create and enjoy spoken audio content. Prior to founding Castbox, Renee was a global app monetization expert at Google in user acquisition, optimization, and publisher engagement where she contributed to 42% of Google’s new app revenue. Renee holds a BS degree from Peking University, with a double major in Psychology and Mathematical Statistics.
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About Castbox: Castbox is a global podcast platform that enables anyone to easily find, access, create and enjoy spoken audio content.
Niccolo De Masi
CEO of Dmy Technology Group
Niccolo de Masi joined Glu as its President and Chief Executive Officer in January 2010 and brings to Glu a strong background of senior management and executive experience in the mobile gaming and content sectors. Prior to joining Glu, Niccolo was the Chief Executive Officer and President of Hands-On Mobile, a mobile technology company and developer and publisher of mobile entertainment, since October 2009, and previously served as the President of Hands-On Mobile from March 2008 to October 2009. Niccolo was previously the Chief Executive Officer of the London-listed mobile entertainment company Monstermob Group PLC from June 2006 to February 2007. Mr. de Masi joined Monstermob in 2004 and, prior to becoming its Chief Executive Officer, held positions as its Managing Director and as its Chief Operating Officer where he was responsible for formulating and implementing Monstermob’s growth and product strategy. Prior to joining Monstermob, Mr. de Masi worked in a variety of corporate finance and operational roles within the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sector, beginning his career with JP Morgan on both the TMT debt capital markets and mergers and acquisitions teams in London. He has also worked as a physicist with Siemens Solar and within the Strategic Planning and Development divisions of Technicolor. Mr. de Masi holds an M.A. degree in Physics and an MSci. degree in Electronic Engineering—both from Cambridge University.
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About Dmy Technology Group, University of California, Los Angeles: Dmy Technology Group is a special purpose acquisition company focused on the mobile app ecosystem.
Hrish Lotlikar
Co-Founder & CEO of SuperWorld
Hrish is Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer of The Rogue Initiative (therogueinitiative.com). The Rogue Initiative is a Los Angeles-based entertainment company composed of award-winning entertainment industry professionals including alumni from Amblin Entertainment, Pixar, Dreamworks Animation, Disney and Activision Entertainment creating new AAA cinematic interactive virtual reality, digital media experiences, feature film, and television content. Hrish is Co-founder of SuperWorld (http://superworldapp.com), a social Augmented Reality app on iPhone. SuperWorld allows users, brands and influencers to tag anything anywhere in AR with photos, videos, texts, and 3D objects, and share their AR world with friends, followers and fans. Hrish is a founding Managing Partner of EastLabs, a seed stage venture capital fund based in Kyiv, Ukraine. He was the Senior Business Developer/Global Evangelist at Toptal (https://www.toptal.com/), backed by Andreessen Horowitz, providing elite talent (software engineers, designers and finance professionals) to companies globally. He is also a Director at Startup Labs, a seed stage venture capital fund based in San Francisco, California, investing in emerging markets around the world. He is also a Mentor at TechPeaks, an information technology accelerator based in Trento, Italy and and Grand Central Tech, an early stage accelerator in New York City.(https://grandcentraltech.com/). He is on the Supervisory Board of TechMinsk (https://techminsk.com/), an international technology entrepreneurship school based in Minsk, Belarus. Previously, he was in venture capital at Spencer Trask Ventures, an investment banker at HSBC Securities in New York, and at UBS Investment Bank in investment banking/M&A and in global business development at management consulting firm Aon Hewitt. Hrish earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science/Pre-Med from Rice University, a Master of Public Health and MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A U.S. Congressional Scholar, Hrish Lotlikar served as a Board Member of the New York Executive Forum, and is a member of the New York City Venture Connection and the New York Private Equity Network.
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About Diarize, Eastlabs, GLG, Growth Engine, Startup Labs, SuperWorld, The Rogue Initiative: Social Augmented Reality Platform
