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 Founder operating in the Apps space. If you think a Founder 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.
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.
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Eric Friedman
Co-Founder & CTO of Fitbit
Eric is our Co-Founder and has served as a member of our board of directors since March 2007, and most recently as our CTO. Previously, Eric served as an Engineer Manager at CNET Networks, as a Co-Founder of Wind-Up Labs, a founding engineer of Epesi Technologies, and a technical member of the Real-Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft Corporation. Eric holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. 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 and CTO.
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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
Laurent Perrin
CTO and Co-Founder of Front
Laurent Perrin is the CTO and co-founder at 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
Suhail Doshi
Founder of Mightyapp
Founder at Mighty.
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About Mightyapp: Mighty makes Google Chrome faster & use 10x less memory.
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.
Rohan Seth
Co-Founder of Clubhouse
Rohan Seth is the Co-founder at Clubhouse and Lydian Accelerator.
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About Clubhouse, Clubhouse, Lydian Accelerator: Clubhouse is an audio-based social app that allows users to spontaneously join group chats.
Scott Banister
Founder of IRL
Scott is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of IronPort and an early advisor and board member at PayPal. Scott Banister started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was Founder and VP of Technology at ListBot, the largest ASP for business email list hosting. ListBot was acquired by Microsoft. After ListBot, Scott spent his time working with other start-ups as a board member and investor. These start-ups include eVoice, creator of the first email-enabled home voicemail service, which was acquired by AOL in 2001. He served as VP of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed numerous innovations, including the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture. In December 2000, with Scott Weiss, Banister co-founded IronPort, an email appliance provider that was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million. Scott Banister is co-founder and Chairman of [Zivity](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zivity), a social networking site co-founded with his wife, [Cyan Banister](http://www.crunchbase.com/person/cyan-banister). He was an early investor in [Powerset](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/powerset), a startup building a natural language search engine, and sits on the company’s Board of Directors. He also sits on the Board of Directors for Slide, a start-up founded by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Other private equity investments include Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, and Causes.com. Banister attended University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from which he dropped out in 1996 to move to Silicon Valley. He currently lives in Half Moon Bay, California with his wife Cyan.
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About IRL: Groups, Chats, Events
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
Henry Khachatryan
Co-Founder of IRL
Henry Khachatryan is the Co-Founder of IRL App. He is a former Co-Founder of Sponge. Mr. Khachatryan graduated from Boston College with a BS in Finance & Information Systems.
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About IRL: Groups, Chats, Events
Kevin Chou
Founder of Rally
Kevin Chou is co-founder and CEO of Kabam, a world leader in AAA mobile free-to-play games. Kevin is an entrepreneur who has guided Kabam’s explosive growth, which started with a handful of people working above a dim sum restaurant and catapulted to $400 million in revenue, sustained profitability, and a valuation of more than $1 billion in 2014. Since co-founding a company in 2006 that became Kabam in 2009, Kevin has led the disruption of the video game industry by revolutionizing the way players access and pay for games. He has secured partnerships with leading game platforms, as well as with Hollywood studio giants such as Disney, Lionsgate, MGM, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Brothers for games based on some of the world’s most beloved movie franchises. Under Kevin’s leadership, Kabam has raised more than $240 million from venture and strategic investors, including some of the world’s largest entertainment and internet companies such as Alibaba, Google, Intel and Warner Brothers. Before co-founding Kabam, Kevin worked at the global venture capital firm Canaan Partners, which is Kabam’s initial investor and where he invested in 14 consumer technology and online media companies. Earlier, Kevin advised public technology companies on M&A and corporate finance as part of Deutsche Bank’s technology investment banking practice. Kevin graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley with a BS in Business Administration. At UC Berkeley, Kevin was admitted to the inaugural class of Gates Millennium Scholars. In 2014 Kevin was named one Fortune magazine’s prestigious “40 Under 40” and, in 2012, was identified by Fortune as one of the “Smartest People in Tech.” The Los Angeles Times called Kevin “absurdly accomplished.”
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About Aftershock, Forte, Gen.G Esports, LUMA Capital Partners, Rally: Rally provides a blockchain platform for the development of video streaming and gaming apps.
Mahesh Vellanki
Co-Founder & VP, Growth of Rally
Mahesh Vellanki is an Associate with Redpoint Ventures where he focuses on early-growth investment opportunities in the internet, digital media, mobile, e-commerce, gaming and online education sectors. Prior to joining Redpoint, Mahesh was an Analyst in the technology investment banking division of Citigroup where he focused on internet, digital media, software, hardware and semiconductor companies. He advised a variety of clients on equity and debt financings, as well as strategic business development, M&A and LBO transactions. At Citigroup, Mahesh worked with companies such as Zillow, Groupon, AutoTrader, Synacor and Equinix. Mahesh earned a bachelor’s degree in Finance with honors from the University of Maryland.
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About Rally: Rally provides a blockchain platform for the development of video streaming and gaming apps.
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.
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.
Russell Belfer
Co-Founder and Engineering of Chatterbug
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About Chatterbug: Chatterbug building a new way to help you master language skills through adaptive courses.
Liz Clinkenbeard
Co-Founder and Chief Communications Officer of Chatterbug
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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.
Mitja Simcic
Co-Founder Chief Technology Officer of GlobaliD
Building and empowering people with portable, user controlled identities. Entrepreneur since college. Computer Science and MBA background.
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About GlobaliD, Kupi, Qloud.io: Create and manage your own portable, digital identity with globaliD.
Sean Parker
Founder & Chairman of Causes
Sean Parker is the Co-Founder & Executive Chairman at Brigade.
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About Airtime, Brigade, Causes, Economic Innovation Group, FWD.us, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy: Causes.com is an online campaigning platform for people who support a common cause.
Ron Zuckerman
Co-Founder of StandWith
Ron Zuckerman is an angel investor. Mr. Zuckerman was a founder and CEO of Sapiens International Corporation and currently serves as its non-executive Chairman. In addition, Mr. Zuckerman was a founder and the Chairman of Precise Software Solutions prior to its sale to VERITAS in 2003.
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About StandWith: STANDWITH is a mobile app that allows communication between Caregivers and Supporters
Parag Chordia
Founder & Chief Technology Officer of HOOKED
Parag Chordia is the director of the Georgia Tech Music Intelligence Lab, and CTO of Khush. Parag is Chief Scientist at Smule. He is the former director of the Georgia Tech Music Intelligence Lab, a research institute funded by the National Science Foundation to build intelligent systems that are musically creative. Parag was recently the recipient of the competitive NSF CAREER Award for his research in music prediction. He received a PhD in artificial intelligence and music at Stanford University and a BS in Mathematics from Yale. He has extensive experience managing commercial software development, and is also the founder of BolRecords, an Indian classical music record label. Parag is an actively performing Indian classical musician and electronic music composer.
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About HOOKED, Telepathic: HOOKED is redefining entertainment for the Snapchat generation.
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.
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.
Ankur Bulsara
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Scopely
Ankur Bulsara co-founded Scopely, Inc. in 2011 and serves as its Chief Technical Officer. Ankur Bulsara oversees all aspects of technology and engineering at Scopely. He has experience in building large-scale and robust systems used by millions of people across multiple platforms. Ankur Bulsara has over 10 years of experience in technology, development, and architecture. He was the Founder of Brainwave Software Inc. While consulting, he held several different positions with his clients, including Architect of Revenue and Inventory Optimization at uSamp, Architect/Lead Developer at Internships LLC, and Architect at Freedom Speaks. Since 2007, he was the Lead Software Developer on Myspace’s Developer Platform, where he was responsible for the developer website and the portal dashboard for developers to create and managed Myspace apps. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Cornell University.
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About Scopely: Scopely is a global leader in interactive entertainment and mobile-first video games.
Prince Boakye Boampong
Founder of Dash
Prince Boakye Boampong is the Founder and CEO of Dash.
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About Dash: Dash builds an alternative payment app where users can send, spend, and receive money, pay for goods and services, save, and invest.
Roland Ligtenberg
Co-Founder and SVP Growth & Innovation 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.
Reza Olfat
Co-Founder, VP of Engineering 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.
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.
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
Ranveer Kunal
Co-Founder of Meemo
Ranveer Kunal is a co-founder 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.
Wisam Dakka
Co-Founder of Meemo
Wisam Dakka is a co-founder 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.
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.
Robson Araújo
Co-Founder of Meemo
Robson Araújo is a co-founder 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.
Marina Sidorko
Founder of glitchi
Founder at glitchi
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About glitchi: glitchi is an app that protects you from getting hacked remotely.
Rajan Annadurai
Founder of glitchi
Founder at glitchi
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About Deserve, glitchi: glitchi is an app that protects you from getting hacked remotely.
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
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.
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.
Jesse Venticinque
Co-Founder, Product Head 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.
Uri Raz
Founder & Executive Chairman of Tango
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About Tango: Tango Live is a leading global social media platform connecting influencers and their followers through live mobile video engagement.
Amit Agrawal
Founder & Chief Operating Officer of Cyber Infrastructure (p) Ltd
Mr. Amit Agrawal directs CIS’s Operations Quality & Process initiatives that are instrumental in driving major Financial and Operational benefits to CIS and its clients. He plays a vital role in establishing key alliances and building competent teams who are quite adept in using Latest Technology, Frameworks and Techniques; giving CIS a competitive advantage. He is also responsible for providing direction to strategic initiatives at CIS and building up CIS’s technical capabilities.As a technology veteran since 2002, he is leading and managing multiple projects, while maintaining budgets and meeting deadlines. He also steers the development lifecycle of all our web initiatives, mentors the research and implementation of innovative Web/ Mobile & Cloud Solutions. He is responsible for assimilation and adoption of latest technology in the company. Prior to CIS, Mr. Agrawal has served in various managerial roles in global IT companies in the US, Europe, and India. He possesses a number of certificates in Programming Languages, Project Management, Quality Control and Innovation Straategies.He holds a Bachelor’s Degree (BE) in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of RGPV and graduated in 2002 and is an MDP alumnae of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), 2007.
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About Cyber Infrastructure (p) Ltd: Cyber InfraStructure Pvt. Ltd. or CIS is a IT and consulting company in Central India.
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.
Weina Scott
Founder of Handy
Weina Scott graduated with a degree in Computer Science and minor in Economics from Harvard College in 2011. She first gained attention as the founder of several successful technology companies including a company she sold (Switchpod.com) just a year after launch, when she was just 15 years old. Before it’s acquisition, Switchpod.com was the second largest podcasting network in the world. Weina’s entrepreneurial endeavors were featured in Inc Magazine, Red Herring, Yahoo News, New York Post, NBC News, TechCrunch, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, Silicon Republic, New York Times, Irish Times, Mashable, and Business Insider. She and Ignacio Leonhardt are the technical founders of venture-backed, Handy.com. At the young age of 21, she helped the company raise $2,000,000 (initial funding) from top venture capital firms (Highland Capital and General Catalyst) in less than three months. Handy, which has raised over $100Million dollars from renowned investors, was sold to ANGI Homeservices Inc in October of 2018. Weina actively advises and invests in technology companies that help empower people. Through her work as a founder and investor, Weina has become an advocate for technology and community initiatives that empower creative people and help businesses leverage the creative potential of their people. Weina currently works for a top Fortune 400 company in San Francisco, California. She is Haitian American. You can reach her at wnscott@post.harvard.edu
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About Handy: Handy, formerly Handybook, is an app through which users can book cleaners, plumbers, handymen, and other household service providers.
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.
Igor Barinov
Founder of Block Notary
Igor Barinov co-founder of Oracles Network, the first Ethereum-based public network with Proof of Authority consensus, reached by independent validators.
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About Block Notary, Donate Your Data, itsbeta, POA Network: BlockNotary is an app that allows users hash and timestamp their media files in public ledgers from their phone.
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.
Carl Sjogreen
Co-Founder & CPO of Seesaw
Carl Sjogreen is the Co-founder and CPO of [Seesaw](http://web.seesaw.me). Before founding Seesaw, Carl was the Director of Product Management for Facebook Platform and Facebook mobile. Carl joined Facebook via the acquisition of nextstop.com, a social travel guide he founded in 2008. Before nextstop, Carl was a Group Product Manager at [Google](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/google) where he started [Google Calendar](http://www.crunchbase.com/product/google-calendar) and helped it grow into the #1 online calendar product. Carl holds a bachelors degree in Computer Science from Harvard University.
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About SeeSaw, 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
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.
Jason Smith
Founder of Glide
Jason Smith is the co-founder of Glide. He is a former principal software engineer at Microsoft. Jason studied computer science at Western Michigan University.
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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.
Naama Alon
Co-Founder and Chief of Creative & Vision of HoneyBook
Naama Alon is the Co-Founder and Chief of Creative & Vision of 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.
Carson Kahn
Co-Founder & Board Director of Spindle (www.spindle.app)
Named a Goldman Sachs 100 Entrepreneur for his innovations across AI and Natural Language Processing, Carson Kahn is currently the co-founder of Spindle (www.spindle.app), a no-code AI startup backed by Accel Partners (Slack/Dropbox/Facebook), Caffeinated Capital (IFTTT/Notion/Airtable), and diverse Fortune 100 executives. Previously, he served as President of Brainspace AI (acquired by Reveal with $200 million from K1 Capital), the world’s leading natural language analytics engine, originally backed by the CIA. Mr. Kahn is also a Member of the Board of Advisors for Computer Science at the University of Colorado; Stanford University AII; UC Santa Cruz Center for Excellence in Data Science Research; and Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC); and advises venture-backed startups in AI/ML, PaaS, FinTech & InfoSec as a Techstars Mentor and angel investor. Mr. Kahn also invests with the $100 million Pandemic Impact Fund (PIF), Thiel-backed VC firm SI Capital, and Transpire Ventures. His work has been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, and elsewhere; and he has been tapped for expertise in AI, cybersecurity, and Future of Work by members of the Congressional Caucus on AI & National Economic Council. Previously, Mr. Kahn served as CEO (promoted from CTO) of JPMorgan In–Residence business Volley ML, saving Fortune 500 firms >$52 million in real labor annually with the first fully autonomous training & sales enablement platform for financial & health services. Named a Goldman Sachs 100 Entrepreneur for Volley’s innovations, Mr. Kahn designed, built, and sold Volley’s machine learning platform alongside an NLP team from Google, the NSA/CIA, Carnagie Mellon, and Goldman Sachs, seeded by $10 million from JPMorgan, Silicon Valley Bank, Zuckerberg Ventures, and execs from Goldman, Apple, and Facebook; before being recruited to lead Brainspace AI prior to its acquisition. Formerly, as Head of Product and co-founder at Keystone Learning Systems (KLS), the first LMS to offer cloud-native analytics and ML features for U.S. secondaries supporting >355,000 accounts, Mr. Kahn helped pioneer its now widely-imitated “extended enterprise” deployment model, before co-leading the entity sale to SPPEF Stirup Partners. On the heels of an externship at Google (via the ATLAS Institute), he formerly spanned product & technical marketing on the founding team at Vetica.com, whose real-time collaboration product Draftboard garnered users like Adobe & AOL while generating revenue from day 1. When the product was acquired by UK investors, Vetica launched Chalk.com, today the one of the 10 most popular learning analytics platforms in North America. A Black Belt in Karate and avid sportsman, Mr. Kahn can frequently be found training in a racquetball court or behind the wheel of an ATV. In his spare time, Mr. Kahn also moonlights behind a jazz piano near his home in the East Cut, San Francisco. Media Contact: Stacey Murray (stacey.murray.consulting@gmail.com) Press Kit: carsonkahn.com/press-kit
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About Spindle (www.spindle.app), Stanford University, Techstars, University of Colorado: An intelligent Decision Analytics platform for generating apps that simulate the ROI of business decisions without statistics or code.
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.
Greg Burrell
Co-Founder, VP of Clinical Product & Strategy of Carbon Health
Greg is co-founder and Director of Medicine at Carbon Health. He brings to Carbon a long-standing passion for using smart technology to overhaul the health system and improve the quality of care to patients. He has been advising and leading Bay Area healthcare startups for a number of years and most recently served as Director of Content and Clinical Solutions at CareMessage, Inc. Greg received his medical degree from the University of Chicago, completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco and maintains a faculty appointment as Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at UCSF.
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About Carbon Health: Carbon Health is a tech-enabled healthcare company that delivers a virtual care experience.
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.
Ada Chen Rekhi
Founder & COO of Notejoy
Ada Chen Rekhi is Founder & COO at Notejoy, a better way to organize your team documents. She is an entrepreneur and marketer with over a decade of experience in productivity, SaaS and data-driven marketing leadership roles. Previously, she was Senior Vice President, Marketing at SurveyMonkey, the leading provider of online surveys. Prior to this, she founded Connected, a contact management startup acquired by LinkedIn in 2011. At LinkedIn, she was responsible for the integration and re-launch of Connected as the new LinkedIn Contacts and also held marketing leadership roles on LinkedIn’s Growth and Sales Solutions teams. Ada holds a BS Economics from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She writes on marketing and startups at adachen.com and on Twitter @adachen.
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About Notejoy: 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.
Maijid Moujaled
Co-Founder & President of Chipper Cash
Maijid Moujaled is a co-founder and president at Chipper Cash.
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About Chipper Cash: Chipper Cash is a fintech platform that offers mobile, cross-border money transfer services.
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.
Chrys Bader-Wechseler
Co-Founder of Vidly
Chrys was previously the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Secret. Prior to Secret, Chrys was a Product Manager at Google where he launched the photo-sharing community Photovine and contributed to Google+ and YouTube. He has built and launched several social products such as Fliggo, TwitVid, Vidly and Treehouse. Chrys was born and raised near Boston and is a Y Combinator alumni.
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About Ikaria, Vidly: Vidly is an online platform that enables video hosting, transcoding, device detection, content delivery, security, and analytics 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.
Alex Yurkowski
Co-Founder & CTO of ClickUp
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About ClickUp: ClickUp offers a customizable workplace productivity platform that serves all departments across an organization.
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
Rui Maranhao
Co-Founder of Rows
Rui Maranhao is Co-founder and Head of Engineering at dashdash.
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About Rows: Rows is a platform that allows users to create applications using only spreadsheet skills.
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
Satish Raghunath
CTO / 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.
Nic Novak
Co-Founder of Magic
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About 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
Lucas Moraes
Co-Founder 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
Luke Kathol
COO & Co-Founder of Urgently
Luke Kathol is a Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Urgently, Inc
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About Urgently: Urgently features a roadside assistance industry to the benefit of global brands and roadside assistance professionals.
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.
Charu Noheria
Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Practically
Charu Noheria is a Co-founder and Chief Operating Office at 3RDFLIX Visual Effects Pvt. Ltd.
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About Practically: Practically is India’s first experiential learning app designed to make learning immersive for students of classes 6-12
Ilya Pozin
Co-Founder (acquired) of Pluto TV
Ilya Pozin is an entrepreneur, writer and investor. He is the founder of Pluto TV, Open Me (acquired), and Coplex. He is a columnist for Forbes and Inc. In 2012, Inc. Magazine recognized Ilya as a ’30 Under 30′ Entrepreneur. In 2013, LinkedIn selected Ilya as one of 100 Top Influencers, along with the likes of Richard Branson, Barack Obama, Tony Robbins and Mark Cuban. An early immigrant from Russia, Ilya founded his first company Coplex (formerly Ciplex) when he was 17-years-old. Coplex is a multi-million dollar interactive agency that has been behind the build of thousands of websites and applications, as well as management of millions of dollars of marketing and media buys. After stepping down from the CEO role at Coplex, Ilya founded Open Me, a consumer-focused social greeting and gifting company. After partnering with Threadless and successfully raising capital for the business, the company quickly grew to millions of users. Open Me was acquired by Rowl in 2015. In 2013, Ilya co-founded Pluto TV, an OTT television platform that combines digital and traditional content into 100+ linear channels. Pluto TV raised $13M led by US Venture Partner, Sky, Universal Music Group, UTA, and other prominent investors. The service is available for free on connected TV devices, PC and Mac, mobile platforms (iOS and Android) as well as on the web at http://pluto.tv Ilya resides in Los Angeles where he works, writes, invests, mentors and on occasion, attempts to golf. Follow Ilya on Twitter (@ilyaNeverSleeps) and LinkedIn.
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About Coplex, Forbes, Inc.com, Pluto TV: Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service in America.
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.
Christine Lemke
Co-Founder & President of Evidation Health
As Chief Product Officer, Christine leads product management and development at Evidation Health. Previously, Christine co-founded and led The Activity Exchange, an insight and personalization platform that helps healthcare companies deliver the right digital interventions and incentives to consumers to help them achieve sustainable behavior change. Prior to her work in healthcare, Christine was the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Sense Networks, developers of the first machine learning platform for mobile phone activity data (exited to YP.com). She has also held roles at 3iGroup (Paris), Microsoft XBOX and co-founded Chicago-based Channel IQ, a product analytics platform. Christine has a BA from the University of Washington and an MBA from HEC Paris.
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About Evidation Health, Evidation Health: We enable and empower everyone to participate in better health outcomes.
Mikki Nasch
Head of Business Development & Co-Founder of Evidation Health
Mikki Nasch is responsible for business development at Evidation Health. Most recently, Mikki cofounded and led business activities at The Activity Exchange. Previously, Mikki was on the founding team of Sense Networks (exited to YP.com) and served as EVP of Business Development. Mikki has been the Vice President of Market Management at Fair Isaac, Inc. (NYSE: FIC), held leadership positions in the incubation phase of numerous startups, and led development of products, sales strategies, business models and corporate vision, leading early-stage software venture capital funds. She was a founding member of BackWeb Technologies (NASD: BWEB), and began her career as a network engineer for the US and European governments.
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About Evidation Health: We enable and empower everyone to participate in better health outcomes.
Euwyn Poon
President & Co-Founder of Spin
Euwyn Poon is a Singapore-born entrepreneur, lawyer, and engineer. He founded Spin, the micro-mobility company based in San Francisco that was acquired by Ford in 2018, and is the founding partner of the venture capital firm Moso Capital. Euwyn graduated from Cornell University in 2004 at the age of 18 with a degree in Computer Science and Cornell Law School in 2007. After earning a J.D. from Cornell Law School, he practiced M&A and securities law at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett from 2007 to 2009, then was funded by Y Combinator.
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About Moso Capital, Spin: Spin is a stationless electric scooter company that provides dockless mobility systems.
Co-Founder & SVP Products of BlueStacks
Jay Vaishnav was most recently V.P. of Engineering for the Office of the CTO at Intel and has brought several Cloud-based services for consumers and large-scale Enterprise products to market. He arrived at Intel through its acquisition of Solidcore in June 2009. Jay co-founded Solidcore, where he led R&D and Product Development. Prior to Solidcore, Jay was VP of Engineering at Chingari, Inc., an web-based consumer research company. Prior to Chingari, Jay led the foundational effort at Amazon.com for their store’s product catalog. He arrived at Amazon.com through its acquisition of Junglee. At Junglee, Jay was Director of Technology and led the development of the company’s comparison shopping engine.Jay spent nearly 10 years at Tandem Computers as a key architect and technical leader for the NonStop SQL relational database management system. He began his career at ESVEL, a privately held database management startup, which was acquired by Cullinet Software.
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About BlueStacks: BlueStacks is the 2nd largest PC gaming platform in the world focused on bringing together PC gamers and the entire Android gaming library.
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”
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.
Eric Kreutzer
Founder of Lugg
Eric Kreutzer is the Founder 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.
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!
