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 Internet 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.
Raj Chowdhury
Co-Founder and CEO of HashCash Consultants
Raj Chowdhury is the CEO of HashCash Consultants and a Blockchain pioneer. He is the author of the book The Dark Secret of the Silicon Valley. He is the co-founder of several high tech and web based companies. Chowdhury is an eminent voice in Blockchain and cryptocurrencies globally. He is a contributor to Economic Times, Business World and advises industry leaders in adoption of Blockchain. He is a member of Asha Silicon Valley chapter, a non-profit committed to the spread of education for children in emerging countries.
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About Bitrump, HashCash Consultants, Satoshi Angels: HashCash Consultants is a software company offering Blockchain, AI, Big Data and IoT products, platforms and services.
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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.
Joshua Browder
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DoNotPay
Joshua Browder is the Founder and CEO of DoNotPay.
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About DoNotPay: DoNotPay is an online robot lawyer that allows anyone to automatically claim asylum in the U.S, U.K, and Canada for free.
Omoju Miller
Technical Advisor to the CEO of GitHub
Omoju Miller is the Technical Advisor to the CEO at GitHub.
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About GitHub: GitHub provides code hosting services that allow developers to build software for open-source and private projects in organizations.
Daniel Curran
Founder & CEO of CustEx
57%+ / yr. liquid returns >>> https://danielcurran.substack.com/ Forbes #7 rank: bit.ly/2Oh7XhF **Only interested in start ups OVER $40k MRR w/o competition! Eqvista #5 rank: https://eqvista.com/top-100-active-angel-investors-list-for-startups/ Media/PR: https://billionairechronicle.com/daniel-curran-super-angel/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvAUJzDCa3Q&t=2s https://angelconnect.libsyn.com/investor-connect-episode-122-daniel-curran-of-silicon-valley https://thesyndicate.vc/angel-investor-hit-4-unicorn-companies-using-simple-investment-framework-super-angel-daniel-curran/ https://borsen.dk/soeg/daniel%20curran Bad Ass x-Rocket Scientist Rock Star! Read my 110+ Founder recommendations below. We share deal flow with billionaire Family Offices, Midas List VC’s, and other Forbes superangels. Passions: stopping/reversing human aging/immortality/parabiosis, bci, brain emulation/download, quantum teleportation, & cryonics. CustEx launches website/app soon to help Biden Admin get voters’ demands right. Benefits corp innovation, BLM, prevents civil unrest, as THE place for ads and co-creation. 2020 EBRD-led B round: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/31/allset-series-b/ 2017 Greycroft deal: bit.ly/2ylWbLB 2016 A16Z deal: bit.ly/2d67xJc Fortune 500 $16B WDC pivot from $2.20 to $114/share! Relentless, visionary Tech entrepreneur builds $B companies that improve world. Founded 14 startups, invested cash in 178+, created 1k+ jobs, personally netted investors $170M in exits. Startups I endorse get oversubscribed by top vc’s fast! As Angel Investor: $1B+ cash exits < 1 year @decacorn Cruise @DollarShaveClub: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/daniel-curran https://angel.co/dcurran-custex-com https://fundersclub.com/danielcurran/ Claims to Fame: -Founder/CEO, USLab NASDAQ IPO in 1998: raised $130M -VP & acting COO@Western Digital Silicon Valley sub [$40M sale to Brocade/PMCS/Snap, 2001], -Founder/CEO of 1st company [AlaStor, 2003] to converge IP+FC SAN, adopted by Cisco Systems [Andiamo], -Founder/CEO of CustEx Internet Platform [2012] Experienced ramping up companies using innate ability to quickly size up a company’s position & execute pro-customer action + cash-flow results. Began career at large companies as a software engineer and morphed into a business entrepreneur/CXO at startups with responsibility for up to 250 teammates Made sales ramp from $2M to $100M in 8 months as VP & acting COO of Western Digital’s Silicon Valley Connex Unit. Earned multiple top eng. school master's degrees (Illinois-PhD dropout, USC-cert, Penn State)
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About CustEx: If Google’s a nice-to-have, CustEx is a must-have. Try living without a voice.
Terry McGinnis
Chief Executive Officer of Online Shop
Terry McGinnis originally born in Lithuania to an American father and Lithuanian mother is a British-American entrepreneur best known for being the founder and CEO of British-based Online Shop, as well as being co-founder of Miami and Los Angeles based venture capital and asset management company, Veriaty.
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About Beyonk, Online Shop: Online Shop offers the recent and innovative items at the most competitive rates from UK and EU-based sellers.
Richard Socher
CEO of you.com
Richard Socher is the CEO and Founder of you.com.
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About you.com: You.com is a search engine that helps users find what they’re looking for by prioritizing real results.
Sam Parr
Co-Founder & CEO of The Hustle
Sam is the founder & CEO of The Hustle – one of America’s fastest-growing media companies with a focus on millennials, tech, and culture. He also runs Hustle Con, an annual conference in San Francisco that showcases non-technical startup founders.
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About Hustle Con, The Hustle: The Hustle is helping young professionals make better decisions throughout their day starting with business news.
Guru Gowrappan
CEO of Verizon Media
Guru Gowrappan is CEO of Verizon Media, a powerhouse of trusted media and technology brands, including Yahoo, HuffPost, and TechCrunch. Prior to this role, he was Global Managing Director of Alibaba where he focused on international expansion and e-commerce for key consumer and enterprise products. Gowrappan began his career co-founding two start-ups in India and has since held multiple leadership roles at Quixey, Zynga, and Overture. He has an M.S. in computer science from the University of Southern California and was in the business bridge program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
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About Verizon Media, Verizon Media: Verizon Media offers services in content, advertising, and technology with its brands such as Yahoo, TechCrunch, and more.
Ali Partovi
Founder & CEO of Neo
Ali Partovi heads Neo, a mentorship community and VC fund that brings together tech veterans to invest in the diverse leaders of tomorrow. Ali invests in people smarter than himself and has backed Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, & Uber. He co-founded Code.org (Hour of Code) to bring Computer Science to classrooms. Ali grew up in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, attended Harvard, and sold his first startup, LinkExchange, in 1998. He’s passionate about sustainable food and loves climbing, guitar, puzzles, and family.
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About Code.org, Neo: Neo is a mentorship community and VC fund that brings together a diverse group of tech veterans to accelerate tomorrow’s leaders.
Kong Pham
CEO & Founder of Jumpcut
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About Jumpcut: Jumpcut creates captivating online courses.
Sanjit Biswas
CEO of Samsara
Sanjit Biswas is the Founder and CEO at Samsara. He is a former CEO and a co-founder of Meraki, where he managed day-to-day operations from inception through the $1.2 billion acquisition by Cisco in 2012. He now serves as the Vice President and General Manager of the Cisco Cloud Networking Group, headquartered in San Francisco. Sanjit has been recognized as a TR35 honoree by MIT Technology Review, Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, and has received awards for academic research in computer networking.
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About Samsara: Samsara helps businesses in harnessing IoT data to develop actionable business insights and improve their operations.
Matthew Gould
Co-Founder & CEO of Unstoppable Domains
Matthew is a co-founder of an Ethereum startup working to put domain names on the blockchain. Matthew is a serial entrepreneur building among other things the first consumer rating system on Bitcoin (Forum) and Verified News, an ethereum app to validate the truthfulness of news stories on the blockchain. Matthew is also a alumni from YC startup Talkable, helping grow the company from 5 to 50 people. Recently his company was awarded a grant from the Ethereum Foundation to build a batteries included front end library for ethereum development (Browseth). Additionally Matthew is a mentor with the ENS foundation annual hackathon which is building the protocol layer for blockchain based domain names on Ethereum.
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About BuyETHdomain, Unstoppable Domains: Unstoppable Domains launches domains secured by blockchains and builds uncensorable websites.
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
Garrett Camp
Founder and CEO of Expa
Garrett Camp is the Founder of Aero.
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About Aero, Eco, Expa, Operator, Uber, Uber Eats, Uber India: Expa supports early-stage startups through expertise, access, and funding.
Abraham King
Chairman and CEO of Immortal Machines
Abraham King is a co-Founder and CEO of Immortal Machines, a stealth mode startup headquartered in Palo Alto. Immortal Machines is building the next generation Cloud platform for Fortune 500 enterprises. Earlier, he was an entrepreneur in Aerospace and Defense working in partnership with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon. King’s prior work is used by the U.S. Navy to build mission critical integrity verification platforms in Submarine Combat Systems, and by the U.S. Air Force to build Situational Awareness Systems to autonomously manage real time complex networks of Space based assets and Ground Control Systems. King was one of the creators of CERN’s Planet scale Cloud platforms — the pioneering Cloud fabric behind Large Hadron Collider, spanning across forty nations — usage of which has resulted in multiple Nobel Prizes. He led the international group which created the original technology blueprint in the United States, and later held multiple leadership and executive roles. King began his career with U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories, Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, and European Organization for Nuclear Research — working on Artificial Intelligence, Planet scale Distributed Computing, Cryptography, and Supercomputing.
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About Immortal Machines: Immortal Machines is building the next generation Cloud platform for large enterprises and Fortune 500 corporations.
Tim Chen
Founder and CEO of NerdWallet
Tim Chen is the founder and CEO of NerdWallet. A former hedge fund equity analyst specializing in payment processing companies, credit card networks, and technology companies, Tim also worked as an equity research analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston. He is a graduate of Stanford University with a degree in economics. In addition to writing for NerdWallet, Tim regularly contributes to several major personal finance publications.
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About NerdWallet: NerdWallet develops a financial platform to help people find the right credit cards and mortgage rates.
Susan Wojcicki
CEO of YouTube
Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube. Previously, she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce at Google. She oversaw 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.
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About YouTube: YouTube is a video-sharing platform, allows users to upload, view, and share videos, including movie and music clips and amateur content.
Shawn Fanning
Chief Executive Officer of Rupture
Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and angel investor. He developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing platforms, in 1999. The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The site in its initial free P2P incarnation was shut down in 2001 after the company’s unsuccessful appeal of court orders arising from its encouraging the illegal sharing of copyrighted material. A paid subscription version of the site followed, and was purchased by Rhapsody on December 1, 2011. Following his involvement with Napster, he joined, and invested in, a number of early-stage technology startup companies.
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About Airtime, Electronic Arts, Helium, Rupture: Rupture is an online social network that allows gamers to connect and share with one another.
Marcy Boyle
Co Founder, CEO of Hot Bit VR
Marcy Boyle is the CEO and co-founder of Hot Bit VR, a upcoming webVR marketplace of experiential social shopping. Hot Bit VR has been featured on ZDnet, Entrepreneur, Fox News, and listed as one of the “30 Best Virtual Reality Companies to Change Your World Soon.” She and her co-founder’s VR experiences have been featured in art galleries, universities, conferences, and festivals including FIVARS in Toronto and VRUK in London. Hot Bit VR was selected for the first class of the AR/VR/XR accelerator at the Green Screen Institute, and Silicon Valley’s Women’s Startup Lab. Prior to working in VR, she co-directed the feature film, NOBODY CAN COOL, which was released internationally. Marcy is a graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University and is a member of Women in VR, Women in Film, and on the Board of the Alliance of Women Directors.
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About Hot Bit VR, Oculus: An experiential marketplace in virtual reality.
Arie Trouw
CEO & CTO & Founder of XYO
Ten years before Elon Musk wrote his first line of computer code, another young prodigy from South Africa was busy writing software on his TRS-80 Model I. In 1978, at the age of 10, Arie Trouw started developing software on the TRS-80 Model I, moving on to Atari, Apple, and PC. He then ran a series of bulletin boards centering on game-theory modification. Arie is an accomplished serial entrepreneur with a rich history of technological breakthroughs and business successes involving multiple 8-figure exit events. He is a strong believer in decentralization and the creation of the integrated owner/user model. Arie founded XY in 2012 (incorporated as Ength Degree, LLC before it was converted to a C Corporation in 2016). He currently serves as Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors. Prior to starting XY-The Findables Company, Arie was CEO and Chairman of Pike Holdings Inc and Chief Technology Officer of Tight Line Technologies LLC. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the New York Institute of Technology. Fun Fact: He is a member of one of the first Afrikaans speaking families to emigrate to the US from South Africa in 1976.
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About XY Labs, XY – The Persistent Company, XYO: XYO is a decentralized crypto-location oracle network aiming to provide accurate location data from cars to smartphones.
Robert Nishihara
Co-Founder and CEO of Anyscale
Robert Nishihara is a fourth-year PhD student working in the UC Berkeley RISELab with Michael Jordan. He works on machine learning, optimization, and artificial intelligence.
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About Anyscale, UC Berkeley College of Engineering: Anyscale accelerates the development and productionization of any AI app, on any cloud, at any scale — with Ray.
MacLane Wilkison
Co-Founder & CEO of NuCypher
MacLane Wilkison is the cofounder and CEO of NuCypher, a Y Combinator and Polychain Capital-backed company that provides decentralized key management and cryptographic access controls for decentralized applications. He is a software engineer and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where he provided M&A and financing services to enterprises in technology, media, and telecommunications. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), and certified Financial Risk Manager.
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About NuCypher: NuCypher is a cryptography company that builds privacy-preserving infrastructure and protocols.
Christopher Rudy
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Cut.com, Inc.
Christopher Rudy is the CEO, Co-Founder at Cut.com.
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About Cut.com, Inc.: Cut makes little stories of some interest.
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.
Aakash Kumar
Founder & CEO of Shiftsmart
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About Shiftsmart: Shiftsmart is a labor-management marketplace connecting part-time workers with open shifts across multiple platforms.
Tammy Camp
Founder & CEO of Stronghold
Tammy is the CEO of Stronghold, an API platform that creates virtual payment networks that enable instant settlement and interoperability between legacy and new payment networks. Tammy served as the first Head of Growth at Stellar, helping the network grow to 4 million users in its first two months. A former partner at accelerator 500 Startups, she invested in portfolio companies and ran the growth and marketing curriculum for its flagship Silicon Valley location. She is a graduate of Singularity University’s GSP11 in Exponential Technologies at NASA Ames where she first learned about Bitcoin from legendary cryptographer Ralph Merkle.
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About Action Factory, Stronghold: Stronghold creates virtual payment networks that give developers access legacy and next-generation payment networks through a simple API.
Richard Bronson
CEO and Founder of 70 Million Jobs
Richard’s story begins on Wall Street, where he worked at several large investment banks. He became a partner at the infamous Wolf of Wall Street firm, Stratton Oakmont, then went on to found his own financial services firm, which he grew to 500 people, generating $100 million in annual revenue. Unfortunately, some of his business practices were outside the law, and despite having paid everyone back, he was convicted of securities fraud, and served two years in a federal prison. Upon release, he was destitute and homeless, but got back on his feet, and became Director of Defy Ventures, a prominent non-profit in the reentry space. In 2016, he left Defy to launch 70MillionJobs, where he serves as CEO.
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About 70 Million Jobs, Commissary Club, The Yard: 70MillionJobs is the first national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records.
Jeffrey Byun
CEO, Co-Founder of BLADE
Jeffrey Byun is the CEO of BLADE – a new cryptocurrency derivatives exchange. Previously, he was the CEO of OrderAhead – a mobile ordering/payments startup that was acquired by Square. Prior to that, Jeffrey was a fixed income trader at Morgan Stanley and BofA Merrill Lynch. Jeffrey is a graduate of MIT and Penn.
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About BLADE: BLADE is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange
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.
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.
Shreesha Ramdas
CEO & Co-Founder of Strikedeck
Shreesha’s an entrepreneurial executive with a track record of launching and growing products in competitive markets. He has demonstrated experience as a GM in the areas of product conception and development, growth hacking, go-to-market strategy and execution. Shreesha is currently VP of Corp Dev & Partnerships at CallidusCloud. Shreesha Ramdas was the co-founder & COO at LeadFormix, a marketing automation platform, where he raised the initial funding, built the company and contributed to a successful acquisition by CallidusCloud in January 2012. Prior to LeadFormix, Shreesha was a co-founder of OuterJoin, an online marketing services company and an early member at Yodlee, where he held the role of General Manager of Yodlee’s offshore development center in Bangalore, India.
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About Aavenir, AccuKnox, BuyerAssist.io, Cultivate, Enact Systems, Forbes Communications Council, Fullcast.io, Medallia, Metadata, Promethium, Revv, Rocketlane, Strikedeck: Strikedeck is building a revolutionary Customer Success automation solution to deliver an outstanding customer experience.
Jonathan Matus
Founder & CEO of Zendrive
Jonathan Matus Prior to Redpoint, Jonathan Matus spent 6 years at Facebook and Google, where he’s been focused on various mobile and speech-recognition projects. At Google, one of the early Android team members, Jonathan managed product marketing for the platform’s software releases and device launches globally. During his tenure, the OS grew from zero to global best-selling mobile platform. In his role as Head of Product Marketing in Asia Pacific Jonathan lived in Tokyo and jumpstarted regional device launches and relationships all over Asia. Jonathan received the Google Founders Award and Android Founders Award in recognition for his contributions.
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About Zendrive: Zendrive leverages mobile sensor data to provide actionable insights that improve safety for passengers and drivers worldwide.
Ben Silbermann
Co-Founder & CEO of Pinterest
Ben (@8en) grew up in Iowa, where he spent a lot of time collecting bugs. Today, he helps millions of people collect and discover the things they love as co-founder and CEO of Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Ben worked at Google on AdSense and studied at Yale. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two sons. Previously, Silbermann worked at Google in the sales organization; however, after a short time with the company he left and started designing his own iPhone apps with a college friend, Paul Sciarra. After their initial application, Totte, failed to gain significant traction, the cofounders created a pinboard product and Pinterest was born. However, Pinterest saw a low user base and very little engagement in its early stages. Silbermann said the prospect of telling people he failed was too embarrassing so he and Sciarra continued to tinker and improve the site. Today, Pinterest claims over 20 million users.
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About Cold Brew Labs, Pinterest: Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool for saving and discovering creative ideas.
Ruzwana Bashir
Founder & CEO of Peek
Ruzwana Bashir is Co-founder & CEO of Peek.com. She is a travel junkie, having navigated her way through 40 countries. She previously worked at Gilt Groupe, Art.sy, the Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs. Ruzwana has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Fulbright Scholar, and a BA in Economics from Oxford University, where she was President of the Oxford Union.
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About Peek: Peek is a booking software and marketplace for delightful things to do such as wine tours, watersports, skydiving, and art classes.
Rajeev Shah
Founder and CEO of Celona
Rajeev Shah is the Founder/CEO of Celona.
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About Celona: Celona accelerates adoption of digital automation and critical apps on enterprise wireless.
Ariel (Xingxin) Liu
CEO of Himalaya Media
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About Himalaya Media: Himalaya builds a podcast platform, audio content network, and original production studio for podcasters.
Cory Baldwin
Chief Executive Officer of sensemetrics
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About sensemetrics: sensemetrics is the IIoT company transforming sensor data into real-time business intelligence to enable productivity and safety solutions
Cory Baldwin
Chief Executive Officer of sensemetrics
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About sensemetrics: sensemetrics is the IIoT company transforming sensor data into real-time business intelligence to enable productivity and safety solutions
Jaxon Klein
CEO, Co-Founder of Keyo
Jaxon Klein is an American businessman, entrepreneur, investor and startup advisor. Klein is currently CEO of Keyo, Inc., where he is a co-founder and former CTO. Prior to his role at Keyo, Klein founded two companies in hosting technology and web services.
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About Keyo: We place people’s identities in the palm of their hands.
Nicola Munarini
CEO and Co-Founder of PKRS.AI
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About PKRS.AI: The future of personal coaching. AI powered, human enhanced.
Raullen Chai
CEO, Co-Founder of IoTeX
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About IoTeX: IoTeX is the leading decentralized network to power billions of machines at scale, drive the machine economy (machinefi) applications.
Anurag Goel
Founder and CEO of Render
Founder and CEO at Render.
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About Render: Render provides a cloud for developers and startups to host all their apps and sites.
Jay Larson
Chief Executive Officer of Optimizely
Jay Larson is Optimizely’s CEO. Previously, Jay worked as chief executive officer of Birst. Jay holds a BA degree from Harvard University and an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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About Optimizely: Optimizely is a platform that provides digital experience solutions.
Jeff Green
CEO of The Trade Desk
Jeff Green is founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, Inc., a demand-side platform that powers the desks of the world’s most advanced buyers in online advertising. Green built The Trade Desk as second-generation demand-side platform, positioning it at the center of online advertising’s trading future by offering efficient, transparent technology. Since its inception in 2009, the company has grown on pace with the now-$3B RTB industry, having been included as an alpha partner in Facebook’s launch of the Facebook Exchange, and having been recently being named one of OnMedia’s “35 [Private Companies] to Watch.” By focusing on the technology of the buy-side, Green has shaped The Trade Desk into one of the fastest growing companies in ad tech. He was a finalist for the Ernst & Young 2013 Entrepreneur of the Year award for Greater Los Angeles. Prior to The Trade Desk, Green founded AdECN, which he built in 2004 as the world’s first online advertising exchange. As COO, he led all strategy, product, and business development. AdECN was acquired by the Microsoft Corporation within three years of launch. At Microsoft, Green not only oversaw the AdECN exchange business, but also all reseller and channel partner business. Additionally, he advised the all-up strategy for the Online Services Division. In 2009, Green left to launch The Trade Desk. Green has also played a leadership role in the ad tech industry, having served on the Networks and Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines Committee for the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) from 2011-2012. Green led working groups that established rules and best practices for acquiring inventory, and set data transaction standards.
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About The Trade Desk, Trade Desk Inc.: The Trade Desk is an online demand-side platform that provides buying tools for digital media buyers.
Matt Marshall
Founder and CEO of VentureBeat
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded \”Journalist of the Year\” by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
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About VentureBeat: VentureBeat is an online technology news platform that is engaged in technology publication and events business.
Randy Chou
Founder and CEO of Nubeva
Randy Chou is the Founder and CEO of Nubeva. Randy’s experience spans 15 years of technical and management leadership in the security, networking, and application acceleration fields. Prior to co-founding Panzura, Randy was a member of the founding software team at Aruba Networks, where he managed the architecture and development of the company’s security software. The combination of his technical expertise and business acumen helped Aruba become the leader in the enterprise Wi-Fi security market. Prior to Aruba Networks, Randy led the development of SSL security and load balancing software at Alteon WebSystems. Randy holds a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley.
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About Nubeva: Nubeva is a cloud security software company that provides decryption solution for real-time, historical or on-demand decryption.
Ryan Chan
Founder and CEO of UpKeep
Founder @CEO at UpKeep. Angel Investor
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About UpKeep: UpKeep is a platform developed for technicians and maintenance workers that provides them with a computerized maintenance management system.
Russell Krauss
co-Chief Executive Officer of China Rapid Finance
Russell Krauss has served as co-Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman since September 2018. Prior to taking on the current co-CEO position, Mr. Krauss has served on the XRF Board since 2016 as an independent non-executive director. Mr. Krauss was Senior Vice President and Managing Director at Hewlett-Packard (“HP”, then “Hewlett Packard Enterprise”), where he oversaw business operations for one of HP’s largest businesses and drove significant value for both clients and shareholders through major transformation initiatives. He also served as Senior Vice President, overseeing Accounts and Business Operations for DXC Technology, where he led the enterprise-wide client operations, and oversaw top accounts for the $20 billion business. Previously, Mr. Krauss was the Chief Information Officer and Vice President for the New York Power Authority, the largest non-federal utility in the U.S., where he was a leader of one of the nation’s “Top 10 Critical Infrastructure” entities and led the $1.4 billion divestiture of the Nuclear Generation business—the largest transaction of its kind in U.S. history. Mr. Krauss also served as a CIO both at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and United Technologies Corporation divisions. He received his MBA from University of New Haven and his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY).
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About China Rapid Finance: China Rapid Finance is an online consumer lending marketplace serving online users and China’s emerging middle class.
Kevin Leland
Founder & CEO of Halo
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About Halo, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Village Global: Halo is a market network that moves science forward by connecting companies directly with scientists for research collaborations
Shaun Cooley
President & CEO of Mapped
Shaun Cooley is the Founder and CEO of a Mapped, a Los Angeles based startup in the Internet of Things (IoT) space. In his prior role as VP.CTO for Cisco’s Internet of Things (IoT) Business, he was responsible for Cisco’s long-term IoT technology strategy. This included shaping product architecture, security, privacy, and technology partnerships, as implemented by Cisco’s IoT business, advising governments on IoT regulation, driving Cisco’s participation in IoT related standards bodies and consortia, and championing innovation to solve existing or anticipated industry needs. Before taking on the role of CTO for IoT, Shaun was a Distinguished Engineer, responsible for the security of Cisco’s collaboration infrastructure, cloud, and endpoint technologies. Shaun is particularly focused on ensuring security is either transparent or extremely usable – something that is typically overlooked in enterprise products. Prior to joining Cisco, Shaun was a Distinguished Engineer for Norton, by Symantec, where he was a driving force in Norton’s shift from utilities to security. Over his 18-year tenure, Shaun contributed to the creation and advancement of offerings in the Norton portfolio, including Norton Internet Security, Norton 360, Norton One, Norton Antispam, Norton’s cloud management platform, and Norton Home, a consumer IoT security offering – a product portfolio that produces over $2 Billion in annual revenue. Shaun has over 25 years of industry experience, holds a master’s degree in computer science from University of Illinois, and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). He is named inventor on 120 issued United States patents with over 100 more pending. He is an active angel investor and a start-up mentor through Acceleprise SF and advisor for Deep Angels. Shaun was previously a director of the Open Connectivity Foundation and former board member of Attivo Networks.
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About Mapped: Data infrastructure for IoT
Alex Alpert
Founder & CEO of Shyft
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About NFX, Shyft: Shyft transforms the moving and relocation industry by introducing technology, customer service, and lead management solutions.
Charles Meyers
Chief Executive Officer & President of Equinix
Charles J. Meyers is the President and the Chief Executive officer at Equinix. He joined Equinix in 2010 as President, Equinix Americas, leading the company’s largest P&L through a time of significant growth and strong operating performance. Mr. Meyers then served as the Chief Operating Officer at Equinix, where he led the Global Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Success teams. For the past year, he was President, Strategy, Services, and Innovation (SSI) leading Equinix’s strategic business teams including Corporate Strategy, Technology Innovation, and Product Management and Engineering. Under Mr. Meyers’ leadership, SSI worked to optimize the company’s position as a cloud enabler, identify key growth areas, and evolve our services portfolio in response to market, competitive and technology trends. Mr. Meyers has built a distinguished 25-year career in the high-tech industry. Before joining Equinix, Mr. Meyers served as Group President at Verisign where he led a P&L portfolio including the company’s Security, Communications and Mobile Messaging businesses. Prior to Verisign, Mr. Meyers held various executive positions at Level 3 Communications, including Group Vice President of Global Marketing, President of IP and Data Services, and Senior Vice President, Softswitch Services. During his tenure, Mr. Meyers helped Level 3 emerge as a premier global provider of Internet and VoIP services.
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About Equinix: Equinix is an internet company that provides data center services for companies, businesses, and organizations.
Peter Ferris
Sr. Vice President, Office of the CEO of Equinix
Pete Ferris serves in the Office of the CEO at Equinix. Peter has held several senior-level positions with Equinix since July 1999 and was appointed Sr. Vice President of Global Partner Programs and Strategic Customer Development in 2013. From 2010 to 2013, he served as Chief Sales Officer. From 2007 until 2010, Mr. Ferris served as President, Equinix U.S. where he was responsible for strategy and growth of the company’s operations throughout the region. Prior to that, he served as the Vice President of Sales for Equinix. Mr. Ferris has more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications industry. Prior to Equinix, he held senior management positions at Frontier Global Center, Genuity and MFS Datanet. Mr. Ferris holds a degree in Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University and lives in San Francisco.
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About Equinix: Equinix is an internet company that provides data center services for companies, businesses, and organizations.
Konrad Feldman
Co-Founder & CEO of Quantcast
Konrad Feldman, CEO, co-founded and launched Quantcast in 2006 along with Paul Sutter to transform the effectiveness of online advertising through the use of science and scalable computing. Prior to co-founding Quantcast, Feldman co-founded Searchspace (now Fortent) the leading provider of terrorist financing detection and anti-money laundering software for the world’s financial services industry. As CEO of Searchspace’s North American business, he established the business in the US and directed its rapid growth to become a market leader. Prior to Searchspace, Feldman was a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at University College London. Feldman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University College, London.
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About Quantcast: Quantcast helps create a more personalized digital world.
Weiting Liu
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Codementor
Weiting Liu is the founder & CEO of Codementor, a live help marketplace for developers. Weiting is a serial entrepreneur and an alumnus of both Y Combinator (YC ’07 SocialPicks, ’12) and Techstars (Seattle ’13 Codementor).
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About Arc.Dev, Codementor, Global Social, Peeridea: Codementor is an online marketplace connecting developers with experts for on-demand 1:1 help via screen sharing, video, and text chat.
Ronak Trivedi
Founder & CEO of Pietra
Ronak Trivedi is the founder and CEO of Pietra.
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About Pietra: Pietra is a business-in-a-box platform that provides Creators all the tools they need to build a business.
Natalie Gordon
Founder and CEO of Babylist
Natalie Gordon is the founder and CEO of Babylist.
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About Babylist: Babylist is an online universal baby registry that enables parents discover, request and buy products for newborns.
Paramesh Gopi
President and Chief Executive Officer of Applied Micro Circuits
Dr. Paramesh Gopi joined us as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer in June 2008 and was promoted to President and Chief Executive Officer in May 2009. On April 29, 2009, Dr. Gopi became a member of our Board of Directors. From September 2002 to June 2008, he was with Marvell Semiconductor, a provider of mixed-signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits to broadband digital data networking markets, where he most recently served as Vice President and General Manager of the Embedded and Emerging Business Unit. At Marvell, Dr. Gopi held several executive-level positions including Chief Technology Officer of Embedded and Emerging Business Unit and Director of Technology Strategy. From June 2001 to August 2002, Dr. Gopi was Executive Director of Strategic Marketing and Applications at Conexant Systems, Inc., a mixed-signal processing company. He joined Conexant Systems, Inc. as part of its acquisition of Entridia Corporation in 2001. Dr. Gopi founded Entridia, a provider of Network Processing ASICs for Optical Networks, in 1999. Prior to Entridia, Dr. Gopi held principal engineering positions at Western Digital and Texas Instruments where he was responsible for the development of key mixed signal networking products. Dr. Gopi holds a PhD in Electrical and Computing Engineering and a Masters and Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Irvine.
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About Applied Micro Circuits, Starthub Nation: Applied Micro provides computing and connectivity solutions for cloud infrastructure and data centers.
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.
Vishnu Prasath Devarajan
Founder & CEO of Bright Bridge Info-tech Pvt Ltd
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About Bright Bridge Info-tech Pvt Ltd, Pulse Pharmacy: Bright Bridge Info-tech Pvt Ltd is a digital marketing company specializing in delivering Internet advertising solutions.
Raghu Kulkarni
CEO of IDrive Inc.
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About IDrive Inc.: IDrive is a backup unlimited PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads and Android devices into a single account.
Matt Mahan
CEO & Co-Founder of Brigade
Matt is responsible for the strategic and operational leadership of Brigade. He served as CEO of Causes and has previous experience in political campaigning and community organizing. In 2004, Matt ran the first political campaign to leverage Facebook data when he was elected Student Body President at Harvard.
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About Brigade, City of San Jose, University of Southern California: Brigade wants to make civic engagement easy, effective, and enjoyable — and in so doing, restore political power back to the people.
Sue Khim
CEO and Co-founder of Brilliant.org
Sue Khim is the CEO and Co-founder of Brilliant (brilliant.org) since Oct, 2012.
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About Brilliant.org: Brilliant delivers digital interactive STEM learning experiences to students, professionals, and lifelong learners around the world.
Amee Devani
Co-Founder and CEO of WellBeam
Amee Devani is the Co-Founder and CEO at WellBeam.
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About WellBeam: WellBeam is an operator of a connected care platform intended to help hospitals connect with third-party clients.
Daniel Machock
CEO of Outspoken
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About Appetize, Outspoken, Outspoken: Outspoken is the most experienced SMS and MMS messaging platform in the US.
Drew Perkins
Co-Founder and CEO of Mojo Vision
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About Mojo Vision: Mojo Vision is developing Mojo Lens, the world’s first AR smart contact lens with a built-in display that delivers Invisible Computing
Joshua Seims
CEO of TrustedCoin
After earning a Bachelors in Computer Science from Harvard, Joshua worked with Industrial Light and Magic and Seven. He then founded Hitplay, a platform for large-scale video distribution. He lives in San Francisco, with his wife and two daughters.
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About MetaStable Capital, TrustedCoin: TrustedCoin provides foundational APIs that make it easy to build higher-level services on top of the Bitcoin protocol.
Matthew Glotzbach
CEO of Quizlet
Matt is the CEO of Quizlet. He joined Quizlet from 12 years at Google, where he was VP Product Management at YouTube. Prior to YouTube, he was on the founding team of Google Apps. Matt studied mechanical engineering at Cornell and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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About Quizlet: Quizlet is a learning platform that uses activities and games to help students practice and master what they’re learning.
Austin Smith
CEO of Racket.com
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About Coughdrop Capital, LAUNCH, Racket.com: Let’s make a racket.
Adam Rymer
Chief Executive Officer of Envy Gaming
Adam Rymer is the Chief Executive Officer of Envy Gaming. He was the President of Nerdist Industries before that. Before joining Nerdist in March 2014, Rymer was COO/CFO of Lava Bear Films and executive produced the feature film The Rover releasing in 2014. Prior to Lava Bear, he spent eight years at Universal Studios Motion Picture Group, most recently as Senior Vice President, Universal Pictures Digital Platforms, where he spearheaded the studio’s distribution and new business initiatives through emerging channels including mobile, broadband, interactive and digital cinema.
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About Envy Gaming, Omnislash: Envy Gaming is an Esports entertainment organization that competes, streams, and produces content across multiple online games.
Isaac Silverman
CEO & Founder of Daydream
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About Daydream: Democratizing the financial model. Stealth.
Stuart Landesberg
Co-Founder & CEO of Grove Collaborative
Stuart Landesberg is the Co-Founder & CEO of Grove Collaborative, the leading digital-first brand & ecommerce platform for natural home and personal care. Stu has long been passionate about sustainability. He founded Grove, which has been a Certified B Corp since its founding, after learning that offline distribution meant that just a small percentage of families were choosing healthy, sustainable home care products. Grove now serves hundreds of thousands of households in the U.S. every month and has raised over $100 million in total capital. Stu was previously an investor at TPG Growth, where he was involved in over $400 million in consumer and technology investments. Stu and his wife Caitlin live in San Francisco with their daughter and dog, and spend as much time outside as possible.
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About Grove Collaborative: Grove creates and curates high-performing, planet-first home and personal care products and is the leader in zero-plastic CPG.
Matt Sunbulli
Co-Founder & CEO of Fishbowl
Matt Sunbulli is Cofounder, CEO and Chief Product officer of Fishbowl, a a social network that connects professionals within companies and industries to have workplace conversations. Fishbowl was acquired by Recruit Holdings Co., which also owns Indeed.com and Glassdoor, in 2021. Previously he was CEO and Cofounder of Social Amp, the first CRM platform optimizing Facebook’s Open Graph for business. Social Amp was acquired by Merkle Inc., a leader in CRM database marketing, in February 2012. Matt’s work has been showcased at the Direct Marketing Association Conference and Exhibition, ad:tech Digital Marketing Conference and Facebook’s F8 Developers Conference. Social Amp’s work with Levi’s, Estee Lauder and 1-800-Flowers.com has been widely showcased in the social commerce industry. Prior to Social Amp, Matt served as a digital product manager at Viacom MTV Networks where he pioneered the release of new digital and social technologies and launched the first video blog. He is a graduate of Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
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About Fishbowl, Fishbowl: Fishbowl is a social network that connects professionals within relevant communities to have candid and relevant conversations.
Filip Victor
Founder, CEO of MetaMap
Filip Victor is the Founder and CEO at Mati.
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About MetaMap: MetaMap is a digital trust management platform that empower service providers to reach more customers through customizable trust workflows.
Federico Pomi
CEO of Fabrica
Federico Pomi is the CEO of Fabrica. Federico is a former partner at iStarter, the founder of Phone.id, the innovation manager at Vodafone IT, and the founder and CEO of Tonight.eu.
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About Fabrica: We make real estate programmable
Brady Brim-DeForest
CEO of TheoremOne
Brady Brim-DeForest is the Chief Executive Officer of Theorem.
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About Codex, Halmos Ventures, International Academy of Web Television, International Academy of Web Television, TheoremOne, TheoremOne: We are an engineering and innovation firm. We solve complex business problems through optimization of process, technology, and culture.
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.
Shola Akinlade
Co-Founder and CEO of Paystack
Shola Akinlade is the Co-founder and CEO at Paystack.
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About Paystack: Paystack lets businesses accept payments via credit card, debit card, money transfer and mobile money on their websites or mobile apps.
Alex Hofmann
CEO and Co-Founder of 9 Count
Hofmann most recently held the role of musical.ly’s President in North America, where he led expansion efforts to build the world’s fastest growing entertainment social network. Within three months of Hofmann joining the team, app downloads increased from 200 to 400,000 per day. musical.ly hit the top of the app chats in 21 countries and has grown to over 200 million users globally. During his time at musical.ly, Hofmann helmed the company’s global content, brand, entertainment, and talent partnerships, in addition to heading all corporate functions for North and South America. He oversaw the closure of deals with all three major music labels and publishers. Under his leadership, the company closed its largest product partnership with Apple Music, as well as original content partnerships with Viacom, NBCU, and Hearst Digital. Hofmann also orchestrated partnerships with top artists like Bruno Mars, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Jason Derulo and 250+ other artists worldwide. In early 2018, Hofmann announced he was moving on from musical.ly to pursue new ventures following the company’s successful merger with Chinese tech giant, Bytedance. He is currently investing in and advising new startups. He remains an ally and advisor to musical.ly. In 2017, Hofmann was chosen by Variety as one of “30 Execs to Watch” for its Digital Entertainment Impact Report and featured by Billboard on its Digital Power Players List: Guiding the Future in Music and Tech. Most recently, he accepted the WSJ Technology Innovator Award. A German native, Hofmann currently resides in Los Angeles.
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About 9 Count: 9count exists to create products that help and connect people
Nick Weaver
Co-Founder and CEO of eero
Nick Weaver is Co-founder of eero inc. and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Nick Weaver is an Associate at Menlo Ventures. Nick Weaver joined Menlo in 2012 and focuses on investments in mobile, consumer internet, digital media, and enterprise software. Prior to this, Nick Weaver worked at McKinsey & Company and advised technology and private equity clients on ecommerce, go-to-market strategy, and acquisitions. While at Stanford, he was involved Stanford Student Enterprises and helped found StartX (formerly, SSE Labs).
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About eero: Eero offers a Wi-Fi system for household use.
Arvind Patel
CEO and Co-Founder of Rowzzy
Seasoned Silicon Valley executive and CEO with direct experience in managing multi-million dollar companies. Wide range of experience in tech management, raising capital, revenue growth and M&A. Tenure in technology has spread across many verticals to include Hardware, Contract Manufacturing and Software. His multilingual skills leverage his wide network. Current activity is to lead a next-gen AI platform to funding, product launch and rapid growth.
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About Rowzzy: Innovators of NVU™ a PaaS /A.I. Voice-to-Display solutions for eCommerce and beyond.
Adam Jackson
Founder & CEO of Braintrust
Adam is a serial technology entrepreneur and investor that has spent his career creating and deploying capital into software systems that make complex tasks simple and intuitive. He’s started 4 VC-backed companies and an asset management company over the last 16 years. Since August, 2017 he has served as Managing Partner & CTO of Cambrian Asset Management, a blockchain asset management company. He is also co-founder and CEO of Freelance Labs, Inc., the company building a new tokenized talent network called Braintrust which raised a $5m seed round in 2018. In 2012, he co-founded and served as CEO of Doctor On Demand, a healthcare service that provides Video Visits with board-certified physicians and psychologists. Doctor On Demand delivers services through employers, health systems, health plans, and directly to consumers and has raised $165M in VC. His previous business, DriverSide was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Advance Auto Parts in September of 2011. His first venture-backed business, MarketSquare, founded in 2004, was the first online local shopping destinations on the Internet. It was acquired by Intuit in September of 2006. He is an angel investor in 45+ companies/projects, including: LTSE, Seated, Bolt, Placer, Aktana, Skale Labs, Protocol Labs, JCTurbo, Apero Health, Rapportive, MyTime, Automatic, Womply, Superhuman and Zenefits.
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About Braintrust, Cleanshelf, Womply: Braintrust is a blockchain-powered freelancer marketplace that connects skilled tech experts with clients.
Gaurav Singh
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Verloop.io
Gaurav Singh is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Verloop.io. He attended Jabalpur Engineering College.
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About Verloop.io: Verloop.io is the world’s leading customer support automation platform.
Ravi Vadrevu
Founder & CEO of Kriya AI Labs
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About Kriya AI Labs: AI labs for future of work
Howard Love
Founder and CEO of LoveToKnow Corp.
Howard Love is aFounder and CEO of LoveToKnow, Angel Investor and Author.
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About DealBase Corporation, FlexJobs Corporation, LoveToKnow Corp.: LoveToKnow Corporation, an online media company, owns and operates a family of Websites.
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.
David Zamir
CEO of Nana Academy
David Zamir is CEO and Founder of Nana Academy. David immigrated to the US from Israel in 2013. He learned how to fix appliances on youtube, then bootstrapped the company to $4M in revenue while fixing himself 2,500 appliances. With Nana — named after his mother —David aims to up-skill the 30M people who will lose their jobs because of tech automation with trade skills. Nana is a free online vocational school for appliance repair that gives graduates their first job and then helps them build their career through an AI-powered marketplace platform. Skilled trades are in high demand, but the current workforce isn’t equipped to meet it. At the same time, the U.S. is dealing with massive unemployment and underemployment caused by the pandemic. Nana is creating a pipeline of skilled tradespeople to meet the demand while also providing opportunity for millions of unemployed individuals across the country. We are backed by the Uber engineering founding team and other impressive investors. We’re excited to launch in new markets, make more investments in our in-person and online training efforts, and launch new verticals and product offerings. It’s a fun team as well — we have monthly BBQs with our technicians and are lucky to have an incredible office on the 11th floor of the beautiful and historic Oakland Tribune Tower (right off 12-street BART).
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About Nana Academy: Vertically integrated student-to-operator trade skills school, driven by an AI-marketplace.
Larry Illg
CEO of EdTech of Prosus
Larry Illg is responsible for all of Naspers’ forward-looking teams, including research and strategy, along with M&A, ensuring Naspers spots and seizes opportunities to grow or acquire new and disruptive platforms.
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About Prosus, Prosus & Naspers: Prosus is a consumer internet group and a technology investor that operates and invests in markets with long-term growth potential.
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.
Binu Girija
Founder & CEO of Way
Mr. Binu Girija is the Founder and CEO at Way.com, Inc. Mr. Binu is responsible for building products that meet the changing demands of Way.com’s users and partners. Prior to Way.com, he was an Enterprise Architect at BEA Systems, Oracle Corp and Computer Sciences Corp., and led the Enterprise Infrastructure, ERP, CRM and Database team. He has started multiple successful software companies that continue to grow and thrive today. He has a Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Computer Science.
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About Way: The No.1 Car Insuretech, Fintech Super App
Daniel Negari
CEO and Founder of XYZ
Daniel Negari is ICANN’s youngest registry operator. With offices in Santa Monica and Las Vegas, Daniel and the .xyz team are bringing choice, accessibility, and innovation to the internet with the .xyz and .College domain extensions. As both a veteran and visionary in the domain name industry, Daniel has positioned .xyz as the platform for every website, everywhere, for the next generation of internet users. Since 2008, Daniel has bought and sold over $100 million in premium domain names in the aftermarket. In addition to his domain investing activities, Daniel launched a successful third level domain registry .com.de, in 2010. Daniel has leveraged these experiences and has established .xyz as the largest and fastest growing new domain extension with over 760,000 registrations within six months of launching. Daniel graduated from the University of Southern California, where he received several prestigious distinctions, including the USC Technology Scholar Award and USC Networking Award.
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About XYZ: The go-to ending for your domain. For every website, everywhere.
Vlad Panchenko
Founder & CEO of DMarket
Volodymyr Panchenko is private merchant of digital games in the world. He is founder of skins.cash — 2nd biggest virtual items marketplace. He is also founder and CEO of Suntechsoft.
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About DMarket, DreamTeam, Suntechsoft: DMarket is a marketplace for NFTs trading and technology for building metaverses.
Nick Sutardja
CEO of Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology
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About Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology: The Sutardja Center supports new venture teams with mentoring, network connections, and Delta prize awards.
Kip Levin
CEO, Betfair US & TVG of Flutter Entertainment
Kip Levin serves as the US CEO for Betfair running business operations for all of Betfair’s businesses in the US including TVG. Before joining Betfair, Levin served as Executive Vice President of Ecommerce at Live Nation Entertainment. In that role, Levin ran product and e-commerce operations for Ticketmaster.com, Ticketmaster Resale, and Ticketmaster mobile. Prior he served as Senior Vice President of Product & Digital for Ticketmaster. In that role he led Ticketmaster’s centrally organized product and design teams responsible for global digital strategy and the creation, management and marketing of Ticketmaster’s wide range of client and consumer products. Before joining Ticketmaster, Levin served as a Senior Product Manager with Shopzilla (formerly BizRate.com), the Webs top comparison shopping site, where he managed some of the largest revenue generating product categories including computer hardware, consumer electronics, books, music, and videos. Prior to that, he worked for several years at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he was part of Forrester’s original Online Retail Strategies research team. Levin has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Vermont.
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About Flutter Entertainment: Flutter Entertainment is the world’s leading online sports betting and gaming operator.
Jasper Malcolmson
Founder & CEO of Skylight
Mr. Malcolmson is the CEO and one of the founders of Skylight – which is focused on perfecting the home renovation experience. Previously, Jasper founded Bloomspot, which was sold to JP Morgan Chase. Prior to Bloomspot, he spent five years at Yahoo! working on the most relevant information, products and deals to consumers. He served as Vice President of Product for Yahoo! Search, as well as Vice President /General Manager of the Yahoo! Commerce Division. Mr. Malcolmson received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University, and has an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
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About Skylight, Skylight Healthcare Systems: Skylight is a Fully integrated and technology-powered home renovation service.
Ryan Delk
CEO & Co-Founder of Primer
Ryan Delk is the CEO and Co-Founder at Primer. He was the COO of Omni before that.
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About Primer: Primer is an online community where 7-14-year-olds spend their time coding video games.
Krishna Kumar
CEO & Founder of App Orchid Inc
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About App Orchid Inc: The App Orchid platform helps enterprises build AI fueled apps for the energy, utilities, Insurance and healthcare industries.
Vaibhav Nadgauda
CEO of App Orchid Inc
Vaibhav Nadgauda is a partner at Moneta Ventures. Prior to joining Moneta, Vaibhav was President of the SAP Business Unit at KPIT, managing a global portfolio of over $100 Million in revenue and a team of over 1,800 employees. He was co-founder and partner at Sparta Consulting, where he served as Executive Vice President and played a key role in growing the company to $100+ Million in five years. He was Vice President of Corporate Development and Global Delivery at Fujitsu Consulting, a Fortune Global 500 company, leading a team of over 1700 consultants globally. Vaibhav started his career 21 years ago at Siemens. He holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Electronics and a Master’s Degree in Computer Management, both from the University of Pune.
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About App Orchid Inc, Moneta Ventures: The App Orchid platform helps enterprises build AI fueled apps for the energy, utilities, Insurance and healthcare industries.
