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 San Francisco, California based Founder operating in the Social 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.
Edward Lando
Co-Founder & CEO of Goody
Edward Lando is the Managing Partner at Pareto Holdings.
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About Alpha, Catalina Crunch, CodeCombat, Conduit, Goody, Horizons School of Technology, Overtime, Pareto Holdings, Svrf: Goody makes sending gifts as easy as sending a text.
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Falon Fatemi
Co-Founder and CEO of Fireside
Falon Fatemi is Founder and CEO of Node and Fireside.
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About Fireside, Forbes Magazine, Node: Fireside is where the world’s greatest creators go to bring the audience into the story through live, interactive, virtual shows.
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
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
Biz Stone
Co-Founder of Twitter
Biz is a co-founder of Twitter, Medium, and Jelly. A progenitor of social media, and early Google employee, Biz has been developing large scale systems that serve the global conversation for twenty years. As an investor, Biz has backed Square, Pinterest, Slack when it was called Speck, Nest, Intercom and Beyond Meat (where he remains on the board as Chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee), among others. In 2016, Stone’s Jelly, a “human in the loop” AI search service, was acquired by Pinterest. After the sale, Twitter requested Biz return full time to lead the company’s strategic vision, brand, and internal culture objectives alongside co-founder Jack Dorsey. Biz has been recognized as INC Magazine Entrepreneur of the Decade and one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. He is also an author, filmmaker and Fellow at both Oxford University and Berkeley.
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About Biz & Livia Stone Foundation, Jelly HQ, Twitter, Twitter Ventures: Twitter is a social networking platform that allows its users to send and read micro-blogs of up to 280-characters known as tweets.
Mark Weinstein
CEO, Founder of MeWe
Mark Weinstein is the Founder and CEO of MeWe, the Next-Gen Social Network. Mark is a leading privacy advocate, one of the visionary inventors of social networking, and an award-winning author. He founded SuperFamily and SuperFriends, precursors to today’s social and chat networks, at the turn of the millennium. Both became PC Magazine “Top 100” sites for multiple years. Mark sold them and then authored the “Habitually Great” book series endorsed by the late Dr. Stephen Covey, (2x Indie Book awards), and became an influential technology consultant/advisor. A few years ago when Mark Zuckerberg declared, “privacy is a social norm of the past,” that comment angered Weinstein greatly. It sparked him to create the Sgrouples beta project, hiring an engineering team to design and build the world’s first social network with privacy-by- design for its members. The 3-year beta project served as the testing platform for the launch of MeWe. Making its official launch during SXSW 2016 (South by Southwest), MeWe was honored as the 2016 Start-Up of the Year Finalist for “Innovative World Technology.” World renowned thought leaders and executives proudly serve on MeWe’s Advisory Board, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web; Raj Sisodia, the founder of Conscious Capitalism; Professor Sherry Turkle, leading technology expert; Professor Phil Rogaway, award-winning cryptographer; Cullen Hoback, award-winning documentary film-maker on privacy; Colin Sebastion, leading internet analyst; Simon Mainwaring, founder of WeFirst; Marci Shimoff, NYT Best-Selling author; Jack Canfield, co-founder of Chicken Soup for the Soul; and several others. Mark is one of the world’s foremost privacy advocates, and he is listed as one of the “Top 8 Minds in Online Privacy.” He was a Steering Committee Member of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) – where he strongly argued against any “national identity system,” calling the idea a complete violation of the human right to privacy. The Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada has named Mark “Privacy by Design Ambassador.” Mark has written about privacy and the social media industry in well-known publications such as USA Today, InfoSecurity Magazine, Daily Mirror (UK), Dark Reading, HuffPo, and many others. He has been interviewed on many media outlets, including PBS, BBC, FOX, FORBES, CNN, and ABC. Mark is often a featured speaker and social media/privacy expert on the stage at many conferences, including EY’s Strategic Growth Forum, the 16th Annual Privacy and Security Conference, Global Security Conference, GMIC Silicon Valley, and he was a recent keynote speaker at GMIC New York, Security BSides Vancouver, and the Customer Experience Asia. Mark received his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz; and his MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He resides in Los Angeles.
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About MeWe: MeWe is the rapidly growing high integrity alternative to Facebook. No Ads, No Targeting, No Newsfeed Manipulation, NO BS!
Andrew Gazdecki
Founder and CEO of MicroAcquire
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About Altcoin.io, Bizness Apps, MicroAcquire: MicroAcquire is a startup acquisition marketplace that helps startups find buyers and get acquired.
Ruben Harris
CEO and Co-Founder of Career Karma
CEO of Career Karma Co-Host of the Breaking Into Startups Podcast Previously at: AtlSchool, Honor, and Hustle Prior to Tech: Investment Banker and Professional Cellist
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About Career Karma: Career Karma helps people find career advice and job training to navigate their careers.
Artur Meyster
Founder and CTO of Career Karma
Artur Meyster is the CTO of Career Karma (YC W19), an online marketplace that matches career switchers with job training programs. After graduating from a coding bootcamp, Hack Reactor, he joined Funding Circle as a full stack software engineer. This led him to start the Breaking Into Startups podcast featuring people with non-traditional backgrounds who broke into tech which reached over 3 million people. In 2019, Artur was one of the first bootcamp grads to graduate from Ycombinator, a startup accelerator that helps companies scale to millions of users.
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About Career Karma: Career Karma helps people find career advice and job training to navigate their careers.
Timur Meyster
Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Career Karma
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About Career Karma: Career Karma helps people find career advice and job training to navigate their careers.
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.
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.
Nick Bilogorskiy
Founder and Co-Chairman of Nova Ukraine
Nick Bilogorskiy is a founding team member at Cyphort, a next-generation anti-malware startup, and is currently leading security research there. He came to Cyphort from Facebook where he was the chief malware expert and a security spokesperson for the company, keeping 1 billion active users safe and secure. His Facebook focus was on annihilating botnets that targeted Facebook (e.g., Koobface) by developing countermeasures, remediating victims and working with law enforcement agencies on bad actor attribution and enforcement. Prior to joining Facebook, Nick managed virus research teams at SonicWALL and Fortinet. Nick is skilled in reverse engineering, analysis, writing patterns and tracking malware, frequently quoted in the media. He presented and published research papers at major security conferences. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computing science and philosophy from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and a GIAC Reverse Engineering Malware (GREM) certification. He holds several patents in computer security. Nick has been an angel investor since 2012, investing into 2-3 seed stage companies per year, focusing on cybersecurity, AI and IOT. He invested in Petcube, Cymmetria and Uber, among others. Nick Bilogorskiy is also the founder and a Director of the largest Ukrainian charity in California, Nova Ukraine, helping Ukraine by fighting corruption, providing humanitarian aid, and increasing awareness about Ukrainian culture in the US.
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About 408 Ventures, Alchemist Accelerator, Google, Nova Ukraine: Nova Ukraine is a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening civil society in Ukraine.
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.
Evan Sharp
Founder of Pinterest
Evan Sharp is the co-founder of Pinterest, where he leads all design efforts. A former architect, Evan finds inspiration from pinning interesting maps, science facts, architecture, vacation plans, and fonts for his design projects. Before Pinterest,Evan worked at Facebook as a product designer. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Chicago and studied architecture at Columbia University. Evan hails from York, Pennsylvania, and currently resides in San Francisco, California.
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About Pinterest: Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool for saving and discovering creative ideas.
Ann Shepherd
COO and Co-Founder of Him For Her
Ann Shepherd is co-founder of social impact venture Him For Her. She serves on the board of fintech startup HoneyBook. Previously Ann was the Senior Vice President of Marketing at OpenTable.
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About Him For Her: Him For Her is a social venture that accelerates the diversity on corporate boards.
Tom Impallomeni
Co-Founder of SuperAwesome
Co-founder & CEO, Tribe VR
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About SuperAwesome, Tribe XR: SuperAwesome offers kid-safe tools and technology for the children’s digital media ecosystem.
Eric Grossberg
Co-CEO & Co-Founder of Brilliant Earth
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About Brilliant Earth: Brilliant Earth is a luxury jewelry company that offers ethically sourced jewelry.
Beth Gerstein
Co-CEO & Co-Founder of Brilliant Earth
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About Brilliant Earth: Brilliant Earth is a luxury jewelry company that offers ethically sourced jewelry.
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.
Graham Gaylor
Co-Founder of VRChat
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About VRChat: VRChat is a virtual reality social platform that allows users to easily build social virtual reality content.
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.
Vishal Gurbuxani
Co-Founder of Captiv8
Vishal Gurbuxani has been involved with Technology for the past 15 years and sits right at the Intersection of Technology & Business. He is working on his 6th startup called Captiv8. Prior to Captiv8, Vishal co-founded TeamInResidence, which is an incubator based in San Francisco and has invested in companies such as: Zenefits, Instacart, Dr. Chrono, SoHo House, and 12 others. He was the Chief Technology Officer of Velti and managed 650 product and engineers across 35 countries. Vishal Gurbuxani was the co-founder of Mobclix, the Largest Mobile Ad Exchange, which was acquired by Velti in October of 2010. Previously, he has worked at Accenture as part of a select group of 150 researchers and consultants out of 250,000 employees, focusing on Digital Media, Mobile, Big Data, Content Optimization, and Predictive Analytics. He has filed numerous patents on Predictive Monitoring, Remote Monitoring, Diagnostics, Advertising, Mobile Analytics and Monetization. Vishal Gurbuxani has been involved with Technology for the past 15 years and sits right at the Intersection of Technology & Business. He has worked in 5 startups and been through 3 successful exits, he has seen the differences between what makes a company great versus what makes a company fail. Vishal Gurbuxani has made numerous Angel Investments that span from innovative advertising companies, medical enablers, hospital 3.0, and companies promoting social good. He graduated with Honors with a Bachelor of Science and Masters in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University.
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About Captiv8: Captiv8 is an internet platform that allows influencers to own, promote and monetize their audience.
Loren Appin
Co-Founder & COO of Fishbowl
Cofounder & COO of Fishbowl, a social network that connects professionals within companies and industries. Every day employees come to Fishbowl to stay informed about workplace topics, share professional advice, and learn from both peers and senior leadership. Fishbowl has captured more than 25% of the professionals in the select industries the platform is open to, with almost half of users engaging the app daily.
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About Fishbowl: Fishbowl is a social network that connects professionals within relevant communities to have candid and relevant conversations.
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
John R. Adler
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Scribd
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About Scribd: Scribd is an unlimited reading subscription that offers access to books, audiobooks, magazine articles, documents and more.
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.
Dmitry Shapiro
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Koji
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About Koji: Koji is the world’s most powerful Link in Bio platform. With hundreds of free apps created by Koji and its community of independent developers, the Koji Link in Bio gives leading creators on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media platforms new ways to engage audiences, connect with supporters, and monetize. Koji launched in March 2021 and has raised $36 million in venture capital.
Jonathan Ellman
Co-Founder & President / CBO of Flip Fit
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About Flip Fit: Flip is a social shopping app that connects customers to beauty products through video reviews.
Alex Beckman
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of GameOn Technology
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About Elastic Holdings, GameOn Technology: Our technology powers intelligent chat applications across multiple platforms for some of the world’s largest brands.
Kalin Stanojev
Founder & CPO of GameOn Technology
Founder and CPO of GameOn.
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About GameOn Technology: Our technology powers intelligent chat applications across multiple platforms for some of the world’s largest brands.
Nate Simmons
Founder & COO of GameOn Technology
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About GameOn Technology: Our technology powers intelligent chat applications across multiple platforms for some of the world’s largest brands.
Jerome Ternynck
Founder and CEO of SmartRecruiters
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About SmartRecruiters: SmartRecruiters is an end-to-end recruiting platform that helps companies with talent acquisition.
Josh Newman
Co-Founder and CTO of Spectrum Labs
A former Software Architect at Salesforce, Josh began his career at a research center of Middlebury College. After transitioning to tech, Josh spent a decade developing scalable data management and distributed systems at Vodori, Syapse, and Krux (acquired by Salesforce). Sales: sales@getspectrum.io | Blog: getspectrum.io/blog
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About Spectrum Labs: Spectrum Labs helps consumer brands recognize and respond to toxic behaviors happening within their online communities.
Justin Davis
Co-Founder & CEO of Spectrum Labs
Currently Spectrum’s Co-Founder & CEO, Justin previously managed and scaled Salesforce’s Data Studio platform as a Product Director. He’s worked for numerous industry stalwarts – including Krux, Adobe, SAS, and Microsoft. Sales: sales@getspectrum.io | Blog: getspectrum.io/blog
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About Spectrum Labs: Spectrum Labs helps consumer brands recognize and respond to toxic behaviors happening within their online communities.
Stanley Adrianus
CEO & Founder of Gamenauts
Stanley is currently the founder & CEO of Gamenauts, a games developer/publisher in San Francisco Bay Area. The company has remained profitable and 100% self-funded since its founding in 2005. Gamenauts maintains a portfolio of several Top 10 titles in the App Store and over 16 million mobile downloads. Prior to Gamenauts, Stanley was Lead Designer at Yahoo! Games, where he was responsible for the UI/UX when the site grew to be #1 games portal on the web.
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About Gamenauts, Plato: Gaemnauts is a game developer and publisher of applications for mobile devices.
Sahil Jain
Co-Founder and CEO of AdStage
Sahil Jain is the CEO and Co-founder of AdStage. Prior to founding AdStage in May 2012, Sahil co-founded his first company, Y-Combinator backed Trigger.io at 20. He dropped out of UC Berkeley, where he studied Philosophy and Econ, to join AOL Corp Devt. at 19, dropped out of High School to join Yahoo! Mobile as an automation engineer at 17 and worked in the professional video game industry before that.
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About AdStage, inresto: AdStage is an advertising technology startup powering paid marketers to understand the business impact of their campaigns.
Matt Ivester
Co-Founder & CEO of Hotshot
Matt Ivester is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, author and speaker. He is currently CEO of Kindr Inc., a company dedicated to making online kindness fun and easy. In 2011, through Serra Knight Publishing, he published lol…OMG!: What Every Student Needs to Know About Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying. And in 2012, he published the high school edition of the same. Since its release, lol…OMG! has become Amazon’s top-selling book on the topics of digital citizenship and cyberbullying. He has spoken at various institutions around the country on these topics. Prior to writing lol…OMG! he started several companies, including a concert ticket auction site, a multi-million dollar investment fund, and a college gossip site. In 2005, Ivester graduated from Duke University with a Bachelor of Science double majoring in Economics and Computer Science. In 2012, he graduated from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business with an MBA.
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About Hotshot: Screenshot technology
Sepideh Nasiri
Founder & CEO of Persian Women In Tech
Sepideh (“Sepi”) Nasiri is an award winning serial Entrepreneur with 16 years of experience working in the Tech Industry, the Founder of Persian Women In Tech, the former Vice President at Women 2.0 and a life-time advocate for women, diversity and inclusion. Mrs. Nasiri started her career as a Co-founder and Managing Editor of a digital and print Los Angeles Magazine and later joined a number of successful startups in Silicon Valley. In 2014, she was recognized by San Francisco Business Times/Journal “40under40” and Diversity Journal’s 2014 “Women Worth Watching”. Currently, Mrs. Nasiri advises early stage startups including at global initiatives such as WeMENA (a program by the World Bank) and mentors globally many female entrepreneurs and founders in technology serving as an advisor to initiatives such as TechWomen, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).
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About Persian Women In Tech: Persian Women In Tech supports Iranian women in Tech/STEM from all across the Globe’s landscape.
Cat Lee
Co-Founder & COO of Pace
Cat Lee is the Co-Founder and COO at Pace. Her varied operating roles across people, marketing, product, and engineering enable her to help founders in many different capacities.
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About Pace: Pace is a fitness and social wellness platform that redefines mental health through groups that are effective, fun, social, and challenging.
Jack Chou
Co-Founder and CEO of Pace
Jack Chou is the Co-founder at Pace. Prior to that, he leads the team of product managers who work with the design and engineering teams to build Pinterest. Before becoming head of product at Pinterest, Jack was product manager of the search and discovery teams. He previously spent time as an entrepreneur, and he led the product team for the marketing solutions business at LinkedIn. He earned a degree in computer systems engineering from Stanford University.
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About Pace: Pace is a fitness and social wellness platform that redefines mental health through groups that are effective, fun, social, and challenging.
Michael Horvath
Co-Founder & CEO of Strava
Michael Horvath is the Co-Founder and CEO of Strava. He earned his degree at Harvard University.
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About Strava: Strava is an online network where runners and cyclists can record their activities, compare performance, and compete with their community.
Mark Gainey
Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Strava
Mark Gainey is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Strava.
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About AlterG, Strava: Strava is an online network where runners and cyclists can record their activities, compare performance, and compete with their community.
Matt Schlicht
CEO and Founder of Octane AI
Matt Schlicht is the founder and editor of Chatbots Magazine, the #1 place to learn about chatbots. He is a YC Alum, a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner, and was also previously a product manager at Ustream as well as an advisor to several other startups. Several months ago, Matt decided to launch a community dedicated to messaging and bots. Chatbots Magazine was born and now reaches over 200,000+ people per month. Matt joins us to share his story, how he got into startups and tech, how he created the opportunity to join the team at uStream, how he approaches building products, why he’s so passionate about bots and messaging, what’s next for Chatbots Magazine.
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About Chatbots Magazine, DominateFund, Hamster Pad, Octane AI, ZapChain: Octane AI provides an all-in-one platform for engaging quizzes, data collection, and personalized Facebook Messenger and SMS automation.
Allan Grant
Founder & Executive Chairman of Talkable
Allan Grant is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Talkable. Prior to that, he was the Founder of Hired. He was a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology.
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About Talkable: Talkable is a technology platform that enables marketers to run customizable Refer A Friend Programs.
Tat Ajamyan
Co-Founder of Wakie
He is founder of Wakie/Budist.
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About Beasy, ITisArmenia, Wakie: Wakie is a social app for phone calls where you set a topic and get to have a phone call with someone interested in your topic.
Lorna Borenstein
Founder & CEO of Grokker
Lorna Borenstein is the CEO & Founder ,Author at Grokker.
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About Grokker, Grokker: Netflix for wellbeing with community at its core
Christof Wittig
Founder and CEO of Hornet
Christof Wittig is a serial software entrepreneur and investor. He is Founder and CEO at Hornet Networks, the world’s queer social network, and Managing Partner at Strive Capital, based in San Francisco, CA. Prior to Hornet, Christof was founder and CEO at LiquidM, the first mobile DSP provided as a SaaS platform, which he formed in 2013 when restructuring Madvertise, Europe’s largest mobile ad network. Previously he was the founder and CEO of Servo Software, the world’s first Android middleware company, which merged with Synclore to form Kii in 2010, today a leading player in the IoT space based in Tokyo. He was also founder and CEO at db4objects, an open source, “no sql” database company, which he sold to Versant in December 2008. Before that he was the founder and CEO of Apsis Software to revolutionize real estate cost management with software and led the company through its sale to Nemetschek in 1999 and its merger with conject in 2002. Christof is an investor and/or board member in various companies, including Enish (TYO:3667), Metago, KeepSafe, VirtaHealth, Cerebral, and App Annie. He has been active in the US, Germany, and throughout Asia. Christof holds a Master of Science in Management from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he was a Sloan Fellow in the Class of 2004 and author of the case studies on MySQL and Google’s Android. He also holds a Dipl.Ing. from Technical University Munich.
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About GAY GAMES 11 HONG KONG 2022, Hornet: Hornet is the world’s gay social network with 30 million members worldwide
Diaz Nesamoney
Founder, President & CEO of Jivox
Diaz Nesamoney founder of Jivox has had two prior successful ventures. He was previously co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer at Informatica (NASDAQ:INFA), which he took from a startup to a publicly Diaz Nesamoney is an accomplished technology entrepreneur who founded three successful technology companies, all harnessing the power of data to power enterprise and consumer applications. Currently Diaz is Founder, President, and CEO of Jivox, a company that provides a technology platform for data-driven personalized advertising and marketing. He was previously Co-founder, President, and Chief Operating Officer at Informatica (NASDAQ:INFA), which he took from a startup to a publicly traded company in 1999. Informatica pioneered data integration software as a category and is now the market leader with more than $1 billion in revenue and a $5 billion market capitalization. Before founding Jivox, he founded Celequest and served as its CEO until early 2007, when the company was acquired by Cognos/IBM. Celequest introduced the market’s first business intelligence and analytics appliance, a disruptive innovation that led to its acquisition. Diaz holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in India and is the holder of seven technology patents. Diaz is also the author of the first book on using data and technology to personalize digital advertising.
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About Jivox: Jivox offers a cloud-based, data-driven omnichannel platform that personalizes digital advertising and marketing experiences at scale.
Darren Lachtman
Co Founder of Brat
Darren was previously the senior director of business development for Bedrocket Media Ventures. He has an extensive background in digital media and marketing, working alongside brands like ESPN, EA and Google.
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About Brat: Brat is a teen-leaning digital production company.
Christopher Lien
Founder & CEO of Marin Software
Mr. Lien is Marin’s founder and Chairman of the Board, and rejoined the Company as Chief Executive Officer in August 2016. From September 2015 to August 2016, Mr. Lien has served on boards of private companies as well as Marin Software. From May 2014 until September 2015, Mr. Lien served as executive chairman of Marin Software, and from the founding of the Company in 2006 to May 2014, he served as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Lien has been a member of the Board since 2006. Previously, Mr. Lien served as Chief Operating Officer of Adteractive, Inc., an online performance marketing company, from 2004 to 2005. In 2001, Mr. Lien co-founded and served as Chairman and Chief Financial Officer of Sugar Media, Inc., a broadband services platform, until its acquisition in 2003 by 2Wire, Inc., a leading supplier of DSL equipment and services, which was subsequently acquired by Pace plc in 2010. Prior to that, Mr. Lien served in various capacities at BlueLight.com, LLC, Kmart Corporation’s ecommerce and Internet service provider subsidiary from 2000 to 2001, including as Chief Financial Officer and acting Chief Executive Officer. Prior to BlueLight.com, Mr. Lien spent 10 years at various investment banks, including Morgan Stanley and Evercore Partners, with his last role as Managing Director. Mr. Lien holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College, where he was elected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Mr. Lien’s presence as a member of the Board brings his thorough knowledge of the Company into the Board’s strategic and policy-making discussions. He brings his extensive experience in finance, digital marketing and executive roles in the information technology industry into deliberations regarding the Company’s strategy and operations.
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About Heron Partners, Marin Software, Marin Software: Marin Software Incorporated (NYSE:MRIN) provides a leading cross-channel performance advertising platform used by advertisers and agencies.
Liron Shapira
Co-Founder & CEO of Relationship Hero
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About Relationship Hero: Relationship Hero connects people with a relationship expert in a private chatroom or over the phone.
Lior Gotesman
Founder & COO of Relationship Hero
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About Relationship Hero: Relationship Hero connects people with a relationship expert in a private chatroom or over the phone.
Antony Taylor
Founder and CEO of Lyte
Ant Taylor is the founder and CEO of Lyte. Lyte powers mobile ticketing solutions for event owners and fans, providing both a mobile-first alternative to resale websites. Since 2014, Lyte has partnered with over 300 top sports and entertainment brands, including BottleRock Music Festival, Newport Folk Festival, Arkansas Razorbacks Athletics, Mumford & Sons, Stagecoach Music Festival and more. Major ticketing platforms such as Eventbrite, Ticketfly, and Gingerbread Shed, owned by Goldenvoice, have integrated Lyte into their offering. Ant founded Lyte after observing the impact of the secondary ticket market on fans at the London Olympics. Hundreds of thousands of fans have since benefited from the Lyte solution. Before Lyte, Ant was an executive at ad technology pioneer Right Media, acquired by Yahoo in 2007 and ad cofounder of Moat, acquired by Oracle in 2017; two of the top five venture-backed exits in NYC history.
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About Lyte: Lyte is a technology platform that makes it easy for fans to buy, sell, and exchange tickets to live events.
Kyle Wong
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Pixlee TurnTo
Kyle Wong is the CEO & Co-Founder of Pixlee, a visual marketing platform that helps brands market and sells with customer photos and videos. The company works with more than 150 brands such as Kenneth Cole, Gaiam, Levi Strauss and Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants to develop a more authentic marketing experience and create stronger relationships with their most passionate customers. Apart from that, he is currently working as a contributor with Forbes magazine and as a leadership council with Ad Council. Kyle attended Stanford University where he studied engineering and co-founded Pixlee out of his dorm room in 2012. He is a mentor for the Stanford Accelerator (StartX) program, where he advises several early-stage VC backed tech startups. Kyle has been featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List and is a regular speaker and domain expert on influencer marketing and driving consumer engagement through social media. He is also an active contributor for Forbes and Fortune Magazine where he writes on digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and various leadership and career topics.
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About Ad Council, Forbes Magazine, Pixlee: Pixlee TurnTo ia a Social UGC, Influencer Marketing, and Ratings & Reviews company.
David Zeng
Co-Founder of Beacons
David Zeng is the Co-Founder of Beacons.
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About Beacons: Beacons is a link-in-bio website builder for creators.
Xochi Birch
Co-Founder of Peak Steal Buildings
Xochi Birch is the Co-Founder of Birthday Alarm, LLC
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About Birthday Alarm, Peak Steal Buildings: Peak Steel can help you with the strongest, most economical, low-maintenance custom steel buildings you’ll find anywhere.
Vlada Bortnik
CEO & Co-Founder of Marco Polo
Vlada Bortnik is the Founder at Joya Communications.He is Co-Founder & CPO at Happy Bits Company.
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About Happy Bits Company, Marco Polo, YPO: Marco Polo is a video communication application designed to help foster closeness between friends and family.
Julia Enthoven
Co-Founder and CEO of Kapwing
Julia Enthoven is the Founder of Kapwing.
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About Kapwing: Online editor for modern videos, GIFs, and images
Victoria Ransom
Founder of Wildfire
Founder & CEO at Prisma.
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About Bowie Capital Management, Dare Co., Prisma, Wildfire: Wildfire is a provider of enterprise social media marketing software.
Arjita Sethi
Co Founder of Equally
Arjita is a teacher and a serial entrepreneur since 2004. She is currently the co-founder of Equally. Equally is building learning experiences using Augmented Reality adn Camera Vision that bring children closer to real world. She is currently serving on the Young Executive Advisory Board on the Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center. She is also the co-founder of Startupindia.in , a startup based out of India that is providing tools and resources for entrepreneurs in India to create impactful startups Arjita is a passionate Social entrepreneur who completed her masters in social entrepreneurship from Hult international Business School. She works on projects which give social entrepreneurs & women entrepreneurs around the world an ecosystem of impact metrics, resources and right stakeholders to create maximum impact. She hopes to create awareness of social entrepreneurship globally. Leveraging her theatre background, she gives talks around her experiments with entrepreneurship. She was a speaker at TEDx San Francisco in 2015.
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About Equally: AR game platform for kids to learn and grow.
Tong Zhang
Co-Founder & CTO of Timecros
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About Timecros: Digital life sharing
Maria Sipka
Co-Founder, VP Brand Strategy and Chief Evangelist of Linqia
Maria is the Co-Founder, EVP Brand Strategy at Linqia. Home of the first performance-based influencer marketing platform with fully managed services, Linqia merges science and storytelling to optimize creator content at scale. Prior to Linqia, Maria was part of the founding team and COO at XING, Europe’s leading business network, where she led XING’s communities and premium group offerings, exiting shortly after its IPO. Maria also founded the content marketing agency Cherry Communications at age 18 and grew the agency to be one of the most respected consultancies in Australia. Additionally, Maria has been recognized as one of the leading women in technology by Forbes.
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About Linqia: Linqia is the only influencer marketing company that delivers guaranteed influencer ROI for the enterprise.
Daniel Singer
Founder and CEO of Panda
Daniel Singer is the Founder & CEO of Panda.
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About Panda: Panda is a camera that augments users’ conversations with friends.
Ishaan Sutaria
Co-Founder, Co-CEO of Wave Sports + Entertainment
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About Wave Sports + Entertainment: Wave Sports + Entertainment is a media company built for the next generation of digital superfans.
Guthrie Dolin
Co-Founder of Double Crown Gaming Co.
Guthrie Dolin is a seasoned design executive and a serial entrepreneur. He has founded two award-winning design innovation consultancies and partnered to launch numerous brands/businesses. Currently, Guthrie is consulting and advising early-stage companies on product, design experience and brand strategy. Guthrie also lectures at the Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school) on branding and design innovation for entrepreneurs.
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About Double Crown Gaming Co.: Purveyors of Friendly Competition
Raju Indukuri
Co-Founder of Quantela
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About FalconX, Pi Datacenters, Quantela, Swiftly: Quantela is the leading Outcomes-as-a-Service (OaaS) company in the space of IoT enabled smart cities and urban infrastructure digitization.
Thatcher Spring
Founder & CEO of GearLaunch
Thatcher Spring is the CEO & Founder of GearLaunch, which offers a sophisticated platform for E2E commerce, a rapidly emerging category that focuses on the full e-commerce value chain. Thatcher’s experience with merchandising and supply chains began when he founded a nationally distributed wholesale apparel company shortly after graduating Georgetown University. Thatcher then went on to receive his MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler and briefly worked at J.P. Morgan and Mars before his entrepreneurial drive led him to founding GearLaunch. Outside of work, Thatcher is an avid sailor, and helped lead the Georgetown University sailing team to a national championship. He also serves as a Director of the Cape Eleuthera Foundation, Class Ambassador for Georgetown University, and an Associate for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation.
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About GearLaunch: GearLaunch offers a sophisticated platform for E2E commerce, a rapidly emerging category that focuses on the full e-commerce value chain.
Sebastian Dobrincu
Co-Founder & CEO of Storyheap
Sebastian Dobrincu is a serial tech entrepreneur, engineer and music artist living in Los Angeles, CA. He is best known for being named “Silicon Valley’s Youngest Self-Made Millionaire” and one of the “30 Under 30” by Forbes. Dobrincu is also an angel investor, public speaker and songwriter. Dobrincu debuted his musical career in 2019 with the single “On Your Mind”, followed by “Halfway To The Moon”. Sebastian Dobrincu was born in Bucharest, Romania and moved to the US at 17 to scale his business. He dropped out of Stanford University after moving to Silicon Valley where he established his company’s headquarters. He was first introduced to software in 2009. He had worked with clients ranging from individual employers to startups and Fortune 500 corporations. He is currently the founder and CEO of Storyheap and helps startups as an advisor. He actively invest in promising, motivated and hardworking entrepreneurs and their early stage ventures. He is also a public speaker and featured contributor for publications like Entrepreneur Magazine and Mashable.
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About Brandmates, Shop.io, Storyheap: Analytics and marketing suite for the world’s leading brands and influencers. Reach & engage your community and maximize online performance.
David McIntosh
Co-Founder and CEO of Tenor Inc
David McIntosh is the co-founder and CEO of Tenor, which has built the largest mobile GIF sharing audience in the world, with more than 150 million people making billions of searches per month. Along with top-downloaded mobile apps, Tenor powers GIF sharing for leading mobile services like Facebook Messenger, Kik and Google’s Gboard. David was previously Founder and CEO of Redux, a video-discovery company which grew to 100M Connected TVs and consoles and was backed by Peter Thiel, Alsop-Louie, and DFJ. More on Redux (now part of CrunchyRoll): http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/12/crunchyroll-redux/ Forbes named David McIntosh one of the top 30 Entrepreneurs under 30 in 2016 and BusinessWeek named David McIntosh one of the top 25 US Entrepreneurs under 25 in 2007.
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About Tenor Inc: Tenor’s GIF search engine helps you find the perfect GIFs to express your thoughts and feelings in mobile messaging conversations.
Erick Hachenburg
Co-Founder of Tenor Inc
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About Tenor Inc: Tenor’s GIF search engine helps you find the perfect GIFs to express your thoughts and feelings in mobile messaging conversations.
Kamal Shah
Founder, CEO and CTO of fotobabble
Kamal Shah has over 20 years of experience building technology products and companies. Kamal was the Founder and President of Invu Technology for seven years. Prior to that he served as Chief Architect at enterprise software companies Wakesoft and Smashcast and started his career as a software engineer in the early ’90s. Kamal has a Master’s in Engineering from the University of Toronto where he was also the captain and nationally ranked member of the University of Toronto Swim Team.
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About fotobabble, FotoNotes, invu technology: Fotobabble is a software company providing photo- and audio-powered social marketing solutions.
Joshua Broggi
CEO & Founder of Woolf
Joshua is the founder of Woolf, a university project that makes it possible for qualified academics and institutions to create accredited courses and teach them. Previously, at Oxford, Joshua was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, a member of Wolfson College, and a member of the governing Congregation of the University. He also held a Humboldt Fellowship, during which I worked on the definition and measure of human progress.
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About Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Oxford, Woolf: Marketplace, Market Network, EdTech, Higher Education
Tuomo Riekki
Founder & CPO of Smartly.io
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About Smartly.io: Powering beautifully effective ads
Balaji Krishnan
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of DabKick
Balaji Krishnan is working as Founder & CEO at DabKick Inc. Balaji Krishnan is Founder of Snapstick Inc. Balaji developed Snapstick’s technology in order to solve the problems he personally experienced with current Internet TV offerings. He has been creating and developing the concepts and architecture behind Snapstick for the past two years. Balaji previously worked in the core technology groups at Sun, HP and Oracle for more than 10 years. At Oracle he worked on database server technologies, with a special focus on the database transaction engine. Before Oracle, he spent three years at Hewlett-Packard where he worked on the HP UX development team, with a focus on file systems, volume management and virtual memory. He also worked in the Virtual Partitions team at HP. Before HP, Balaji spent three years at Sun Microsystems with the Solaris development team. Balaji received a Computer Science engineering degree, with honors, in India.
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About DabKick: DabKick is a real-time social entertainment platform that combines live video experiences with patented media sharing technologies.
Chris Toy
Founder of Bindle
Chris Toy is the founder of MarketerHire, the leading talent platform for elite marketers. MarketerHire is used by Fortune 500, unicorns, early stage startups and thousands more companies.
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About Bindle, MarketerHire: Bindle is an early-stage technology startup, backed by investors who also bet early on Snapchat, Instagram and Spotify.
Daniel Kraft
Faculty Chair for Medicine, Founder & Chair, Exponential Medicine Program: of Singularity University
Founder of IntelliMedicine, Daniel conceived of the personalized, printed IntelliMed and is inventor of the IntelliMedicine technology.. He is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician. He serves as faculty chair for Medicine at Singularity University, and is founder and chair of Exponential Medicine, a program that explores the cutting edge of technology and the potentials to reshape health and medicine. Daniel trained both internal medicine and pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital with further specialization in hematology/oncology and has deep clinical and biomedical research and innovation experience. As a fellow at Stanford Daniel was enrolled in the inaugural year of Biodesign Program, and developed expertise in medical device development. He is always looking to identify unmet needs in healthcare and address them through the convergence of technology and alignment with patients, clinicians and healthcare systems.
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About IntelliMedicine, Proteus Regenerative Medicine, RegenMed Systems, Singularity University, Tech Nation Health, The Aspen Institute, The Commons Project Foundation: Singularity University is a benefit corporation that provides educational programs, innovative partnerships, and a startup accelerator.
Michael E. Parker
CEO & Founder of MintShow
Michael E. Parker is the President & CEO at Value-Centered Solutions in San Francisco, California. He brings many years of relevant experience that has helped him become known as a well-respected leader. He earned his bachelor and master’s degrees in Business Administration, Operations and Procurement from California State University, Hayward.
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About 2DOLife.com, 2DOLife.com, MintShow, Value-Centered Solutions, You are a CEO: The first social network that uses gamification and habit design to help people maintain an uplifted and inspired state of mind.
Mike Kofi Okyere
Founder & CEO of Perengo
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About Perengo: Perengo is a programmatic recruitment automation and analytics platform for performance-conscious recruiters.
Artur Lapinsch
Co-Founder of Perengo
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About Dataconomy Media GmbH, Perengo: Perengo is a programmatic recruitment automation and analytics platform for performance-conscious recruiters.
Nagesh Challa
Founder & CEO of Waagu
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About Waagu: Waagu offers a collaborative customer engagement platform for content, web, and mobile customer interactions.
Jeff Nobbs
Founder of Kitava
Jeff Nobbs is the Founder & CEO at Zero Acre Farms.
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About Kitava, Rakuten Rewards, Zero Acre Farms: San Francisco’s healthiest restaurant.
Tim Lenardo
Co-Founder, CEO of Real Labs
Co-creator of Boomerang from Instagram. Formerly Engineering @ Instagram, Facebook, Amazon. Now working on something new 🙃
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About JetFuel, Real Labs: Building the next big thing in social.
Farzal Dojki
CoFounder & CEO of The DotZero
Known for his innovative ideas and commitment to social responsibility, Farzal Dojki is Founder & CEO of Next Generation Innovations, a software development, IT support and consulting firm specializing in new ventures. The company is working to establish a paradigm that focuses on “doing good for the society in which it operates” and encourages its employees to dedicate 5% of their billable hours to community service projects. Prior to that, Farzal worked at 3 start-ups in Pakistan, as well as 3 years at Merrill Lynch & BearingPoint in the US.
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About The DotZero: DotZero is a space made for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs.
Leonard Chung
Co-Founder of String
Leonard has been working in the technology industry for over sixteen years with a particular emphasis on successfully developing and delivering products and ideas from Zero to One. Previously, Leonard was Founder & CEO of Syncplicity (acquired by EMC in ’12). He has been working in the area of collaboration, data management, and internet scale applications for over 18 years and is the inventor of seven patents. Past products include Windows PowerShell, SETI@home, and internet storage company Scale Eight. Notable past collaborators include RISC/RAID inventor David Patterson and ACM Turing Award Winner Jim Gray. Leonard received a B.A. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
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About String: String is a software company that offers a cloud-based direct phone line and messaging solution for business texting and calling.
Zac Choi
Co-Founder & CEO of String
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About String: String is a software company that offers a cloud-based direct phone line and messaging solution for business texting and calling.
Nate Murray
Co-Founder of Fullstack
Nate Murray is a hacker with an emphasis on big data and scalable systems. His projects include scaling web services, web crawling, recommendation systems, and data mining. Previously Nate was an engineer for IFTTT and worked in applied research at AT&T.
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About Fullstack: From empty folder to deployment, their courses show you step-by-step how to build expert web applications.
Nick Halavins
Founder & CEO of AntiLand™
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About AntiLand™: AntiLand is a community of likeminded people. Saves people from depressions, boredom, and loneliness by anonymous talk therapy.
Melody McCloskey
CEO & Founder of StyleSeat
Melody McCloskey is co-founder and CEO of StyleSeat, the largest online marketplace for beauty and wellness services. In 2011, after feeling frustrated that there was no easy way to book beauty appointments, Melody founded StyleSeat with Dan Levine. More than 350,000 beauty professionals in nearly 16,000 cities use the platform today and customers more than 30 million appointments each year. Melody was named by Fast Company as one of its Most Creative People in Business 2014.
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About StyleSeat: StyleSeat is an online destination that connects beauty and wellness professionals with clients.
Ron Czerny
Founder & CEO of PlayPhone
Czerny is a veteran entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of games, mobile and social networking for over 18 years. As founder, Chief Executive Officer and board member, Ron Czerny serves as the visionary and driving force behind PlayPhone’s corporate strategy. Czerny’s vast experience in the games industry has allowed him to help establish PlayPhone’s dominance in the mobile social games industry and position the company to compete and thrive on a global scale. In 2000, Czerny founded Atrativa, a online platform and games company with operations based mainly in North and South America. As chief executive officer, Czerny led Atrativa to its current status as the premier Web games provider platform, powering several major ISPs including Earthlink, UOL (South America’s largest ISP), Yahoo!? Brazil, AOL? Brazil, MSN? Brazil, Ibest (Telecom Brazil), Terra Networks (North and South America) and many others. RealNetworks, Inc. acquired Atrativa in 2006. Czerny also played a key role in Latin America’s video game industry between 1992 and 1999 as the co-founder of the Brazilian Video Game Association and Head of Capcom’s video game distribution and strategy in the region.Czerny is currently the Chairman of the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) for North America and a Board Member of MEF Global.Czerny holds a Bachelor’s degree in business administration with an emphasis in international business from San Jose State University.
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About PlayPhone: PlayPhone is a social gaming developer providing solutions to wireless carriers.
Arash Hassibi
CEO & Co-Founder of joinedapp
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About joinedapp: Leader in Conversational Commerce: Sell on Text, Voice and Touch Channels
Dmitry Dumik
Founder of Chatfuel
Dmitry Dumik is the Founder at Chatfuel.
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About Chatfuel: Chatfuel is a chatbot platform for Messenger.
Lesley Gold
Founder & CEO of SutherlandGold Group
Lesley is a master storyteller, creating market positioning and messaging innovative startups and top brands like Sony and Comcast Ventures. She has an unmatched talent for taking in a company’s facts and circumstances and crafting a story catalog that puts their key messaging into the hands of consumers via major media outlets like New York Times, Time and USA Today. Since launching SG, Lesley has helped position and market hundreds of brands, products, companies, people and ideas, leading some clients to go public and several to be acquired by major tech and consumer brands. Some of Lesley’s current clients include Birchbox, Comcast Ventures and Brightcove. Prior to founding SG, Lesley served as vice president for Blanc & Otus, the global technology practice of Hill & Knowlton, where she led breakthrough campaigns for TiVo and Sony PlayStation, among other top consumer technology brands. She also worked as a network television producer at CNN, served as the director of radio services at the Democratic National Committee, and has led positions as a campaign strategist and press secretary for former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich. Lesley is mother of two and a proud dog owner. She also lives next door to both Kevin Bacon and Mark Zuckerberg.
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About SutherlandGold Group: SutherlandGold Group is a PR agency that creates stories to motivate customers, potential acquirers, and business development partners.
Kazuki Nakayashiki
Founder and CEO/CTO of Glasp
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About Glasp, Glasp: Social Web Highlighter, Social Annotation, Social Note Taking, Web App, SaaS, Browser Extension, Mobile App, Social Bookmarking
Charles Zhuang
Co-Founder of Sparxo Inc.,
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About Sparxo Inc.,: A better way to discover events is a better way to sell tickets.
Ed Zitron
Founder & CEO of EZPR
Ed Zitron is the founder of EZPR, a West-Coast media relations firm focusing on consumer tech startups. He has been published by Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Eurogamer, PC Gamer and PC Zone. He is the author of ‘This Is How You Pitch: How To Kick Ass In Your First Years In PR’ and was recently named “Top 50 People in Tech PR” by Business Insider.
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About EZPR: EZPR is a results-focused media relations firm in New York and San Francisco.
Greg Egan
Co-Founder & CTO of The Landing
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About The Landing: The Landing is a social design platform that empowers everyone to create together.
Peter Sisson
CEO & co-Founder of Yaza
Peter is a product-focused entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in the mobile and Internet industries. He studied computer science at Cornell and earned a master’s degree from Stanford’s pioneering CSAI (Computer Science Artificial Intelligence) graduate program. After school he wrote PBX software for AT&T Bell Labs, then did volunteer work in Micronesia, after which he traveled across Asia, Africa, and South America. Upon return, Peter attended the Tuck School at Dartmouth, where he graduated with an MBA. This led to jobs in management consulting and investment banking covering the mobile and telecom equipment industries. He started his first company, WineShopper.com, in 1998, for which he raised $46M from Kleiner Perkins and Amazon.com. Wine.com acquired WineShopper in 2000. Since then, he has launched three companies. Mixonic, a profitable branded merchandise retailer; Teleo, a desktop VoIP company acquired by Microsoft for 10X the amount invested; and Line2 (aka Toktumi), which he grew from $0.5M to $7M in 18 months. The Line2 app peaked at No.3 overall in the App Store and held its ranking as a top 10 grossing productivity app for more than 4 years. He started working on AreaLive, a social augmented reality company, in 2016. Outside of work, Peter is a passionate world traveler whose adventures have taken him from 150 feet below sea level in Palau to 18,000 feet above in the Nepal Himalaya. He splits his time between San Francisco, New York, and Bahrain.
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About Yaza: See anywhere. This Fall
