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 Software 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.
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.
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Tim Draper
Founder and Managing Partner of Draper Associates
Timothy Draper is founding partner of leading venture capital firms Draper Associates and DFJ. Tim’s original suggestion to use “viral marketing” in web-based e-mail to geometrically spread an Internet product to its market was instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and other web-based email providers and has been adopted as a standard marketing technique by hundreds of businesses. Tim launched the DFJ Global Network, an international network of early-stage venture capital funds with offices in over 30 cities around the globe. Tim founded or co-founded DFJ ePlanet (global), Draper Fisher Jurvetson Gotham (NYC), Zone Ventures (LA), Epic Ventures (Salt Lake City), Draper Atlantic (Reston), Draper Triangle (Pittsburg), Timberline Ventures (Portland), Polaris Fund (Anchorage), DFJ Frontier (Sacramento and Santa Barbara), DFJ Vina Capital (Vietnam), Draper Nexus (Tokyo), and DFJ DragonFund (Shanghai). Tim recently launched “Six Californias,” a statewide initiative to create six new states and dissolve a failed one in California. Previously, Tim served on the California State Board of Education. In November of 2000, Tim launched a statewide cyber-initiative on school choice for the California General Election. Tim was a Member of Singapore’s International Economic Council and Ukraine’s Orange Circle. Tim was on the Board of U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Tim was ranked 52 on the list of the 100 most influential Harvard Alumni, and seven on the Forbes Midas List. Tim was named Always-On #1 top venture capital deal maker. Tim was awarded the Commonwealth Club’s Distinguished Citizen Award for achievements in green and sustainable energy. To further encourage entrepreneurship, Tim started BizWorld.org, a non-profit for children to learn entrepreneurship, Draper University of Heroes, a school for entrepreneurs 18-28 and he leads SixCalifornias, an initiative to improve the governance of California. Tim has a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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About Bancor, DDF, DFJ DragonFund, DFJ VinaCapital, Draper Associates, Draper Athena, Draper Dragon, Draper University Ventures, ePlanet Capital, Gotham Ventures, SpeedUPAfrica, Threshold, VenturesLab, Zone Ventures: Draper Associates is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in industry-transforming companies.
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
Siqi Chen
Co-Founder of Runway Financial
Siqi Chen is the Co-Founder of Runway and a Member Board Of Directors at Sandbox VR. Siqi holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego.
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About Newco, Runway Financial: Runway is a ground up rethink of the role of financial data inside modern businesses.
Jack Mardack
Co-Founder of Oyster®
Jack Mardack is the Co-Founder of Oyster.
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About Oyster®: Oyster is a Distributed HR platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for talented teammates regardless of location.
Rahul Vohra
Founder & CEO of Superhuman
Rahul Vohra is the Founder and CEO at Superhuman. He is also the Technical Advisor at BOLDstart Ventures and Investor & Advisor at Partender and Investor of sendwithus and EasyPost. Rahul Vohra is a former CEO and Co-Founder of Rapportive and Game Designer at Jagex. Rahul received a bachelor of arts in Computer Science at the University of Cambrigdge.
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About Clubhouse, LinkedIn, Rapportive, Superhuman, The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund: Superhuman is a software platform that weaves social insights into a workflow.
Conrad Irwin
Co-Founder & CTO of Superhuman
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About Superhuman: Superhuman is a software platform that weaves social insights into a workflow.
Urmas Purde
Co-Founder of Pipedrive
Co-Founder of Pipedrive.
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About Pipedrive: Pipedrive is the global sales-first CRM and revenue platform for small businesses
Duke Chung
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of TravelBank
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About TravelBank: TravelBank is the modern all-in-one business travel and expense management platform.
Reid Williams
Co-Founder & CTO of TravelBank
Reid Williams is CTO at TravelBank. He is an entrepreneur and full stack technologist. Prior to joining TravelBank, Reid worked at Parature as senior software engineer. Reid Williams holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems specializing in systems integration from DeVry University and a master’s degree in Information Systems Technology from The George Washington University – School of Business.
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About TravelBank: TravelBank is the modern all-in-one business travel and expense management platform.
Dustin Moskovitz
CEO & Co-Founder of Asana
Dustin Moskovitz is a Co-Founder and CEO at Asana. He is also the Co-Founder of Open Philanthropy Project and Good Ventures. Mr. Moskovitz is a former Co-Founder of Facebook.
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About Asana, Good Ventures, Open Philanthropy Project: Asana is a computer software company that specializes in the fields of work management and productivity.
Brynne Kennedy
Founder and Chairwoman of Topia
Brynne Kennedy is the Founder and former CEO of Topia, the talent mobility suite that helps companies move their employees between locations. Brynne founded Topia after working in investment banking and private equity. She has raised more than $100 million in venture capital funding for Topia and grown the company to operate worldwide. Topia contributes a % of revenue to support refugees and at-risk populations, and Brynne has pledged a % of personal exit proceeds to charity. Brynne holds an MBA from London Business School and a BA from Yale, where she was a Division 1 gymnast.
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About Mobility4All, Topia, Topia: Topia is a talent mobility platform that enables employees to work remotely.
Parker Harris
Co-Founder, EVP Technology of Salesforce
Parker Harris founded salesforce.com along with Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez in the spring of 1999. As Executive Vice President, Harris oversees the development of all software for salesforce.com. Prior to founding salesforce.com, Harris developed web application and salesforce automation expertise at Left Coast Software, a private consulting company he co-founded, as well as at Metropolis software, an early pioneer in field sales force automation subsequently acquired by Clarify. Harris has over twelve years of software engineering and management experience. He graduated from Middlebury College with a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature.
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About Salesforce, Salesforce Ventures: Salesforce is a global cloud computing company that develops CRM solutions and provides business software on a subscription basis.
Christopher Kirchner
Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Slync.io
Christopher S. Kirchner is the co-founder, chairman, and CEO at Slync.io. Prior to this, Christopher has worked as a senior vice president of sales and marketing and a director of marketing and sales at Turner Labels. Christopher holds a degree in communications, minor marketing from the University of Kentucky.
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About Slync.io: Slync.io is a provider of process automation for enterprise supply chains and the global logistics industry.
Raj Patel
Co-Founder and CPO of Slync.io
Raj Patel is the Co-Founder and CPO of Slync.io.
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About Slync.io: Slync.io is a provider of process automation for enterprise supply chains and the global logistics industry.
Peter Kazanjy
Co-Founder of Atrium
Pete Kazanjy (LinkedIn, Twitter) is a serial founder, and seasoned early stage Saas executive, advisor, and investor. Pete founded TalentBin, a category-defining talent search engine and recruiting CRM, which exited to Monster Worldwide in early 2014. Pete currently is the founder of Atrium, a proactive sales performance analysis solution, author of Founding Sales, the definitive Startup Sales Handbook, and founder of Modern Sales, the nation’s largest sales operations, leadership, and enablement community.
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About Atrium: Atrium help sales managers with its data-driven management software that provides coaching insights and continuous monitoring.
Sam Lessin
Co-Founder of Fin.com
Sam is currently the co-CEO of Fin and a General Partner at Slow Ventures. He was formerly a vice president of product management at Facebook from 2010 to 2014, where he managed the People, Places, and Things product group and the Identity product group. Prior to joining Facebook Sam founded drop.io, a file-sharing platform that was acquired by Facebook in 2010. Before drop.io Sam was an associate at Bain and Company. In his spare time Sam enjoys skiing and kite-surfing. He writes a column at The Information, where he interns.
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About Fin.com, Slow Ventures, SocialGreat, Thimble: Fin.com is a work insights platform that provides cross-applications and enterprises data insights for CX and operations teams.
Pieter Abbeel
Founder, President, Chief Scientist of Covariant
Pieter Abbeel joined covariant.ai as Co-Founder, President, Chief Scientist in 2017. Pieter Abbeel is Professor at UC Berkeley [2008- ], Co-Founder covariant.ai [2017- ], Co-Founder Gradescope [2014- ], Research Scientist at OpenAI [2016-2017], Founding Faculty Partner AI@TheHouse, Advisor to many AI/Robotics start-ups. He works in machine learning and robotics, in particular his research focuses on making robots learn from people (apprenticeship learning), how to make robots learn through their own trial and error (reinforcement learning), and how to speed up skill acquisition through learning-to-learn (meta-learning). His robots have learned advanced helicopter aerobatics, knot-tying, basic assembly, organizing laundry, locomotion, and vision-based robotic manipulation. He has won numerous awards, including best paper awards at ICML, NIPS and ICRA, early career awards from NSF, Darpa, ONR, AFOSR, Sloan, TR35, IEEE, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Pieter’s work is frequently featured in the popular press, including New York Times, BBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Tech Review, NPR.
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About Covariant, University of California Berkeley: Covariant is an AI Robotics company developing a universal AI that enables robots to see, reason, and act on the world around them.
Steve Jang
Founder & Managing Partner of Kindred Ventures
Steve Jang is a venture capital investor and technology entrepreneur. Based in San Francisco, Steve serves as founder and a managing partner of Kindred Ventures. As a generalist early stage venture fund, Kindred’s mission is to invest in brilliant and dedicated founders at the earliest stages of building their startup and, ultimately, our collective future. Over the past 12 years, Steve has backed over 100 companies across different theme areas, including Uber, Coinbase, Postmates, Tonal, Color Health, Zymergen, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Since 2009 and up until IPO, Steve has also served as an Advisor to Uber since the founding of the company, up through initial product launch, global expansion, and then IPO. Steve also serves as an Advisor at Expa, a startup studio based in SF and NY, mentoring startup teams on product development, team building, and company growth. Most recently as an entrepreneur, Steve served as co-founder of Bitski, a digital wallet and storefront service for NFTs. Previously, he was co-founder/CEO of SoundTracking, a popular mobile music service that was Apple’s Best iPhone Music App of 2011 and was acquired by Rhapsody in 2014. Prior to these startups, in 2005, he was the co-creator and founding team member of the world’s first and largest on-demand music streaming service which reached over 100 million monthly unique users before its eventual acquisition by MySpace. //Investment Theme Areas of Interest// * Online Marketplaces * Decentralized Systems and Crypto * ClimateTech & Sustainable Systems * Digital Health and Wellness * FinTech * Social Consumer Media * Developer/Creator Tools * Future of Work * Software-enabled Hardware //Representative Portfolio Companies Include// Marketplaces/Market Networks: Uber (IPO), Postmates (acq. by Uber), Poshmark (IPO), StyleSeat, Italic, Reserve (acq. by Resy), Drip (acq. Kickstarter), GrandSt (acq. by Etsy), RangeMe (acq. by ECRM) Decentralized Systems & Crypto: Coinbase, dYdX, Zora, CoinTracker, Mina Protocol, Bitski, Computable, Nervos Network, Origin Protocol, Harbor, Radar Relay, Set Protocol, Messari, Rarebits Health & Wellness: Tonal, Color Health, Heartbeat Health, Forward, Enso, Breathometer Sustainable Systems/Climate Tech: Zymergen, Linear Labs, Replenysh, Mootral, Connora Systems FinTech & LegalTech: Atrium, Bloom Credit, Coinbase, Catch Benefits Developer/Creator Tools: Red Planet Labs, Northflank, Optic, Anjuna Future of Work: Bravado, Torch, Braintrust, Fountain, Catch Food Innovation & CPG: Taika, Blue Bottle Coffee, Fort Point Beer Consumer/Social Media: Clubhouse Frontier Tech: Humane
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About Bitski, Kindred Ventures: Kindred Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital fund that supports startup companies.
Matt Ocko
Co-Managing Partner and Co-Founder of DCVC
Matt has nearly three decades of experience as a technology entrepreneur, operating executive and venture capitalist, with over 20 patents granted or pending in areas as diverse as hardware systems and social games. He still reads C++ code but admits to occasional struggles with Erlang. Matt is a cofounder of Data Collective, a venture fund with a unique team of experienced venture capitalists, technology entrepreneurs and practicing engineers, investing together in seed and early stage Big Data and IT infrastructure companies. During his venture capital tenure, he has invested in and/or helped grow a variety of companies including XenSource (CTRX), Zynga (ZNGA), Impermium, Verisign (VRSN), Facebook (FB), Virtuata (CSCO), Akimbi Systems (VMW), Cotendo (AKAM), Tango.me, MetaWeb (GOOG), FlashSoft (SNDK), DataMirror (IBM), UltraDNS (NSR), Kenshoo, Metamarkets, Fortinet (FTNT), SupportSoft (SPRT), Alantro (TXN), CouchBase, Spool (FB), BranchOut, On-Ramp Wireless, and many others.
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About AngelList, Archimedes Capital, DCVC, Uber: DCVC backs entrepreneurs using Deep Tech to solve problems and multiply the benefits of capitalism for everyone while reducing its cost.
Zachary Bogue
Co-Managing Partner and Co-Founder of DCVC
Zack has over a decade of experience in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur, lawyer, angel investor and advisor for big data startups. Zack is a cofounder of Data Collective, a venture fund with a unique team of experienced venture capitalists, technology entrepreneurs and practicing engineers, investing together in seed and early stage Big Data and IT infrastructure companies. Zack also is a cofounder and managing partner of Founders Den, a shared workspace for experienced technology entrepreneurs. He was previously an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and a law partner at Virtual Law Partners, where he worked with numerous start-ups and their founders, and developed expertise in technology law and Silicon Valley business practices.
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About aWhere, Cask, Citus Data, Cotendo, DCVC, Founders Den, Montara Capital Partners, Square, The World Economic Forum, Uber: DCVC backs entrepreneurs using Deep Tech to solve problems and multiply the benefits of capitalism for everyone while reducing its cost.
Eyal Shinar
Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Fundbox
Founder and Executive Chairman of Fundbox, Eyal is an expert in financial technology, AI and technology management. Prior to Fundbox, Eyal served as VP at Battery Ventures, leading projects and investments in finance, machine learning and SaaS. Notable examples are IDI Direct Insurance, Istra Research, Cortera, cVidya, Leadspace, Champions Oncology, Relay Foods, and Sportority. Prior to his work in Battery Ventures, Eyal was one of the first employees of Old Lane, a $5.5B NYC-based global hedge fund (later acquired by Citigroup) and also worked for Castle Harlan, a leading $6B NYC-based buyout firm. Eyal graduated from the special program for outstanding students at the Hebrew University with an LLB in Law and advanced degree in Finance. He earned his MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Eyal was recently recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2016 at its Builders + Innovators Summit.
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About Fundbox: Fundbox is an AI-powered financial platform for small businesses.
Josh Felser
Co-Founder of Freestyle
Josh Felser is the Co-Founder of Freestyle.
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About climate, Freestyle: Freestyle is a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage technology companies.
Phil Black
Co-Founder of True Ventures
Phil is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He learned the venture trade and met his future True Ventures co-founder during his time at Summit Partners. He held general partner positions for eight years prior to raising and investing a small angel fund called Blacksmith Capital, which became a seminal moment in his career of managing venture fund investments. Phil believes in risk-taking at the earliest stage and that startup founders benefit most when they are supported fully, both professionally and personally. Phil is a product of Oklahoma and Stanford alumni. He loves art, wine, and travel. His favorite place outside of the San Francisco Bay Area is London.
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About True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Phil Black
Co-Founder of True Ventures
Phil is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He learned the venture trade and met his future True Ventures co-founder during his time at Summit Partners. He held general partner positions for eight years prior to raising and investing a small angel fund called Blacksmith Capital, which became a seminal moment in his career of managing venture fund investments. Phil believes in risk-taking at the earliest stage and that startup founders benefit most when they are supported fully, both professionally and personally. Phil is a product of Oklahoma and Stanford alumni. He loves art, wine, and travel. His favorite place outside of the San Francisco Bay Area is London.
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About True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Jon Callaghan
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of True Ventures
Jon is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He has been in the venture capital business since 1991 and built three companies of his own. His first was Mountain Bike Outfitters, Inc., which he created at age 18. Jon started his venture career as an associate at Summit Partners and then joined Greenhouse, AOL’s venture capital investment group and incubator. He entered the internet market early by joining CMGI’s @Ventures group in 1996. Before founding True, Jon was a managing director at Globespan Capital Partners. First as a founder and now as an investor in early-stage technology companies, Jon’s direct startup experience has allowed him to see the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes. Jon’s career has been driven by a deep belief in the power of human creativity to improve our world. Jon received a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College and an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School. He was recently the Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association. When he is not empowering the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, you can find him talking about airplanes or hanging out with his wife and four boys.
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About NexPrise Corporation, True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
Jon Callaghan
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of True Ventures
Jon is an early stage venture capitalist and co-founder of True Ventures. He has been in the venture capital business since 1991 and built three companies of his own. His first was Mountain Bike Outfitters, Inc., which he created at age 18. Jon started his venture career as an associate at Summit Partners and then joined Greenhouse, AOL’s venture capital investment group and incubator. He entered the internet market early by joining CMGI’s @Ventures group in 1996. Before founding True, Jon was a managing director at Globespan Capital Partners. First as a founder and now as an investor in early-stage technology companies, Jon’s direct startup experience has allowed him to see the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes. Jon’s career has been driven by a deep belief in the power of human creativity to improve our world. Jon received a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College and an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School. He was recently the Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association. When he is not empowering the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, you can find him talking about airplanes or hanging out with his wife and four boys.
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About NexPrise Corporation, True Ventures: True Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage technology startups.
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!
Ion Stoica
Co-Founder of Anyscale
Ion Stoica is a Co-Founder at Anyscale. he is also the Executive Chairman and co-founder of Databricks. Ion also serves as a professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, and as a co-director of the AMPLab. At AMPLab Ion has been leading the software systems effort, which included the development of Apache Spark, as well as two other high profile open source projects: Apache Mesos and Tachyon. In 2006, he co-founded Conviva, a startup to commercialize technologies for large scale video distribution, where he is serving as a CTO. Ion is an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the SIGCOMM Test of Time Award (2011), and the ACM doctoral dissertation award (2001). Ion holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in Computer Science and Control Engineering from Polytechnic University Bucharest.
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About Anyscale, Conviva, Databricks, Databricks, Opaque: Anyscale accelerates the development and productionization of any AI app, on any cloud, at any scale — with Ray.
Bobby Yazdani
Founder & Partner of Cota Capital
Bobby Yazdani is a Founder and Managing Partner at Cota Capital. Bobby works full-time on the development and support of entrepreneurs through Cota Capital and was ranked #1 out of 2000 angel investors for successful follow-on funding by CB Insights in 2014. Bobby founded Saba in 1997, taking the company public in 2000. Saba was the pioneer in learning management and talent management systems addressing all aspects of acquiring, developing, and retaining talent serving over 30 million users within 2,000 enterprise customers across 195 countries and in 37 languages worldwide. Prior to Saba, Bobby served in various R&D roles at Oracle. Since making his first investment in Masimo Corporation (NASDAQ: MASI) in 1989, Bobby has successfully mentored entrepreneurs and invested in more than 100 early-stage companies, including: Aardvark (acquired by Google), AddThis (acquired by Oracle), Addepar, Atheer Labs, Baarzo (acquired by Google), Berkeley Lights, Bina Technologies (acquired by Roche), Bioniz, Blueprint Genetics (acquired by Quest Diagnostics), Bonobos (acquired by Walmart), Bossa Nova, Clear Labs, CleverSense (acquired by Google), CloudLending (acquired by Q2 Holdings), Dropbox (NASDAQ: DBX), FundersClub, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Greensmith Energy (acquired by Wartsila (HEL: WRT1V)), Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), InstaEdu (acquired by Chegg), Klout (acquired by Lithium Technologies), Mission Bio, Movandi, NextBio (acquired by Illumina), OpenGov, PassBan (acquired by EMC/RSA), Purigen Biosystems, Qwiki (acquired by Yahoo!), RecVue, Rollbar, Roostify, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), Smartfrog Canary Group, SoundHound, SweetGreen, ThinkBig Analytics (acquired by Teradata), Tubi (acquired by Fox Corp), Uber (NYSE: UBER), Webs.com (acquired by VistaPrint), Zymergen, and more. Bobby has a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.
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About Compliance.ai, Cota Capital, Signatures Capital, Signatures Capital: Cota Capital is an SEC-registered multi-stage investment firm focused on private and public enterprise technology companies.
Babak Poushanchi
Founder & Managing Partner of Cota Capital
Babak Poushanchi is a Founder and Managing Partner at Cota Capital. Babak is responsible for leading public investing activities across the Firm’s funds. As Portfolio Manager of the Cota Growth Fund, he is directly responsible for the management of the investment team covering sourcing, evaluation, and portfolio/risk management of the Firm’s public investments. Babak also serves on the Firm’s Investment Committee, overseeing investments across its private and public portfolios. Babak and Bobby Yazdani founded Cota Capital in 2015. Leveraging Bobby’s early stage investing and operational expertise, and Babak’s late stage and public investing expertise, Cota was designed to invest across all the stages of the lifecycle of a company. Their investment platform is built around the desire to create a research and knowledge platform, and to deploy their own capital into the multi-decade theme of the digital transformation of the enterprise technology stack. Prior to Cota, Babak served as Co-Founder and Co-Portfolio Manager of Newbrook Capital, a global equity long/short fund focused on public investments across the technology, media, consumer, and industrial sectors. Babak was also a Venture Partner at Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a leading technology accelerator based in New York. Previously, Babak was on the investment teams at Karsch Capital, a global equity long/short fund focused on public investments across all sectors, and Indosuez Capital, a leading middle market merchant banking group focused on equity and debt private investments across the capital structure and a broad range of sectors. Babak has a B.A. in Economics from Northwestern University.
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About Cota Capital, Fanatic Sports Corp.: Cota Capital is an SEC-registered multi-stage investment firm focused on private and public enterprise technology companies.
Domm Holland
Co-Founder & CEO of Fast
Domm Holland is the co-founder and CEO of Fast, the world’s fastest online login and checkout platform. An entrepreneur and self-taught engineer, Domm has founded and scaled companies in the logistics, transportation and technology sectors. He previously founded and served as CEO of Tow, an on-demand vehicle towing platform in Australia that processed more than $50M in transactions. During his tenure there, Domm was awarded the top spot on the Deloitte Tech Fast 50 and recognized as the Brisbane Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Domm has worked across Australia and the U.S., working in national and multinational telecommunications and technology companies, including Dell, with deep cross-function experience. Domm’s background provides him with a unique perspective that spans R&D, sales and operations, all of which have contributed to his vision for Fast.
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About Fast, FAST Group: Fast provides an online login and checkout solutions designed to provide users with a secure shopping experience.
Allison Barr Allen
Co-Founder & COO of Fast
Allison Barr Allen is the co-founder and COO of Fast, the world’s fastest online login and checkout platform. Previously, Allison was the head of global product operations for the Money Team at Uber, where she helped scale Uber from 2,000 employees to more than 26,000 worldwide. Allison’s team launched and scaled Uber’s payments, risk, and compliance products globally, including on-demand payments, cash products, debit cards and credit cards. Prior to Uber, Allison served as a healthcare strategy consultant at PwC. In addition to her role at Fast, Allison is a limited partner at Operator Collective, a venture capital firm that brings together leaders from diverse backgrounds to invest in the next generation of enterprise technology. Allison is also deeply committed to supporting entrepreneurs through Trail Run Capital, her angel investment fund. Allison graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders.
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About Fast: Fast provides an online login and checkout solutions designed to provide users with a secure shopping experience.
MacLane Wilkison
Co-Founder & CEO of NuCypher
MacLane Wilkison is the cofounder and CEO of NuCypher, a Y Combinator and Polychain Capital-backed company that provides decentralized key management and cryptographic access controls for decentralized applications. He is a software engineer and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, where he provided M&A and financing services to enterprises in technology, media, and telecommunications. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), and certified Financial Risk Manager.
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About NuCypher: NuCypher is a cryptography company that builds privacy-preserving infrastructure and protocols.
Arash Ferdowsi
Co-Founder of Dropbox
Arash Ferdowsi is the Co-Founder & CTO at Dropbox. After studying at MIT, Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox with Drew Houston. Dropbox was a TechCrunch50 finalist in 2008.
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About Dropbox: Dropbox is a smart workspace company that provides secure file sharing, collaboration, and storage solutions.
Jon Brelig
Co-Founder, CTO of Cascade
Jon Brelig is the Co-Founder and CTO at Cascade.
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About Cascade: Cascade helps operations teams automate their data workflows.
Aditya Singh
Co-Founder and Managing Director of Neotribe Ventures
Adit is a hands-on early stage company builder having helped build three startups with an operating career spanning 15 years before entering venture capital. From 2013 to 2017, he led the b2b/enterprise practice at Foundation Capital as a Partner investing across the stack from enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure, analytics and cybersecurity. Adit graduated from University of Illinois (BS/MS in Computer Engineering) and from the University of Chicago (MBA). He started his career as an engineer at Growth Networks (a NEA/Lightspeed company) which was acquired by Cisco for $355m. At Cisco, he led the datacenter infrastructure team as a senior technical leader and delivered several products (converged servers, switches and edge routers) for data center infrastructure. He co-founded a networking appliance company, Bitsplay Systems that streamed video from data centers, out of the EIR program at Foundation Capital. In 2008, he joined Enphase Energy (networked solar microinverters), a Series A startup as their first product manager through IPO on the NASDAQ in 2012. When Enphase went public, Adit was Senior Director of Product Management and responsible for the main microinverter business. He is extremely connected in the the deeply technical circles of silicon valley and has the reputation of building companies from the bottom up by working hand in hand with founders.
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About Bloomreach, Cockroach Labs, Neotribe Ventures, Phantom: Neotribe Ventures is an early stage-venture capital firm which invests in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination.
Steven Bragonier
CFO and Co-Founder of Neotribe Ventures
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About Gainspeed, Neotribe Ventures: Neotribe Ventures is an early stage-venture capital firm which invests in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination.
Jessica McKellar
Founder and CTO of Pilot
Jessica McKellar is a founder and the CTO of Pilot, a bookkeeping firm powered by software. Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle. Jessica is also a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America’s Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2013.
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About Pilot: Pilot is a platform that offers bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing businesses.
Waseem Daher
Founder & CEO of Pilot
Waseem Daher is a Founder and CEO at Pilot.
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About Pilot: Pilot is a platform that offers bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing businesses.
Vlad Shmunis
Founder, CEO, Chairman of RingCentral
Vlad Shmunis founded RingCentral in 1999 and launched RingCentral’s cloud business phone service in 2003. He developed the service based on the need he saw among businesses for an alternative to inflexible and expensive hardware-based phone systems. Since founding RingCentral, Shmunis has led the company in reimagining business communications. Today, the company empowers hundreds of thousands of businesses and their employees to work with unparalleled freedom and in imaginative new ways, via a wide variety of mobile and fixed line devices in traditional as well as dispersed work environments. Shmunis has more than 25 years of industry and management experience. Prior to launching RingCentral, he founded and served as the CEO of Ring Zero Systems, a desktop software communications company. After shipping more than 25 million copies of its Windows software through partnerships with leading PC manufacturers, Ring Zero Systems was acquired by Motorola. Shmunis was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2011 Northern California Award finalist. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from San Francisco State University, and is a named inventor in a number of U.S. patents.
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About RingCentral: RingCentral, a global distributor of cloud-unified communications and collaboration solutions, offers its users with technology services.
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.
Qi Zhou
Founder and CEO of QuarkChain
Qi Zhou, Founder and CEO of QuarkChain.
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About QuarkChain: QuarkChain is a flexible, scalable, and user-oriented blockchain infrastructure by applying blockchain sharding technology.
James Wu
Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMap
James Wu is the Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMap Inc. He is a former Principal Architect at Baidu, Inc and Principal Engineer at Upthere. Mr. Wu graduated from Tianjin University with a bachelor of science in Computer Science and received a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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About DeepMap: DeepMap is accelerating safe autonomy by providing the world’s best autonomous mapping and localization solutions.
Stella Wu
Founder & CEO of Eano Home Renovation
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About Eano Home Renovation: Delivering easy, affordable renovation and good designs to more homeowners via an end-to-end, all-in-one automated solution.
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.
Jai Pradeesh
Founder of DeepSource
Founder of DeepSource. Interested in building tools to improve developer productivity.
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About DeepSource: Deepsource is an enterprise tech startup that provides an automated tool to review codes.
Sanket Saurav
Founder of DeepSource
Co-founder of DeepSource: Helping developers ship fewer bugs.
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About DeepSource: Deepsource is an enterprise tech startup that provides an automated tool to review codes.
Lily Xu
Underrepresented Founder Startups of Amazon Web Services
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About Amazon Web Services: Amazon Web Services provides information technology infrastructure services to businesses in the form of web services.
Bill O’Connor
Founder, Autodesk Innovation Genome of Autodesk
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About Autodesk: Autodesk develops 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, and media industries.
Jacob Orrin
Co-Founder and COO of Merit
Jacob Orrin is the COO and Co-founder of Merit. Merit’s verified identity platform brings visibility, liquidity, and trust to people-data, giving organizations the clarity to make better-informed decisions, engage with individuals effectively, and pursue their mission efficiently. Merit works with trusted private, state, and municipal organizations to solve critical real-world problems in sectors such as workforce development, emergency services, licensing, education, and defense readiness.
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About Merit, Merit: Merit develops a verified identity platform to help organizations in managing personnel data.
Parin Dalal
Co-Founder & CEO of Xockets
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About Xockets: Xockets builds hardware and software acceleration into appliances for Big Data processing.
Stephen Belair
Co-Founder & CTO of Xockets
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About Xockets: Xockets builds hardware and software acceleration into appliances for Big Data processing.
Muhammet Enginar
Co-Founder, Head of Engineering of UserGuiding
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About UserGuiding: UserGuiding improves product adoption rates through ‘no coding needed’ interactive user onboarding flows.
Osman Koc
Co-Founder & CEO of UserGuiding
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About UserGuiding, YNOT Partners: UserGuiding improves product adoption rates through ‘no coding needed’ interactive user onboarding flows.
Waleed Mohsen
Founder & CEO of mynurse.ai
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About mynurse.ai: a digital health program to help seniors with chronic conditions live their best lives.
Jerry Yue
Founder and CEO of Brain Technologies
Jerry Yue is the Founder and CEO of Brain Technologies.
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About Brain Technologies: Brain Technologies is an AI company that develops a generative interface allowing software to be in sync with its users’ intentions.
Scott Irwin
Founder, Partner of Camber Partners
Scott Irwin is the General Partner at Rembrandt Venture Partners.
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About Camber Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners: Camber Partners believes modern software companies should be architected for mass distribution.
Hani Goldstein
Founder & CEO of Snappy
Founder at Snappy App.
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About Snappy: Snappy is an all-in-one enterprise gifting platform that allows companies to send gifts to their customers and team members.
Dave Garr
Co-Founder, SVP of Customer Experience of UserTesting
Specialties:A/B testing, conversion rate optimization, interactive marketing, market research, multivariate testing, product marketing, social networking, usability
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About UserTesting: UserTesting is an on-demand human insight platform designed to improve customer insights.
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.
Anurag Goel
Founder and CEO of Render
Founder and CEO at Render.
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About Render: Render provides a cloud for developers and startups to host all their apps and sites.
Rahul Jain
Founder & VP Business Development of Pendo
Rahul Jain is Founder & Biz Dev at Pendo.io.
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About Pendo: Pendo is a product-analytics app that helps software companies develop products that resonate with customers.
Armando Biondi
Co-Founder & CEO of Breadcrumbs.io
Armando Biondi currently works as the Co-Founder and CEO for Breadcrumbs.io. He previously worked at Hootsuite as the global head of growth operations.
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About Breadcrumbs.io: Breadcrumbs.io is a revenue acceleration platform that helps companies in rating and scoring current and potential customers.
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.
Dan Siroker
Co-Founder & Chairman of Optimizely
Dan Siroker is the Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Optimizely. The inspiration for Optimizely came from Dan’s work as the Director of Analytics for the Obama Presidential Campaign and Deputy New Media Director for the Presidential Transition. Before Optimizely, Dan co-founded an online math game for kids called CarrotSticks. Formerly, he was also a Product Manager for Google Chrome and AdWords. Dan graduated with Honors from Stanford University with a B.S. in Computer Science.
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About Optimizely: Optimizely is a platform that provides digital experience solutions.
Keyvan Mohajer
Founder & CEO of SoundHound
Keyvan leads the company’s management, corporate strategy and operations. He is also the principal executive responsible for SoundHound’s technology development. With more than 12 years of executive experience as a visionary entrepreneur
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About SoundHound: SoundHound is an innovator of invoice-enabled AI and conversational intelligence technologies.
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.
Spenser Skates
CEO and Founder of Amplitude
Spenser Skates is the CEO and Co-Founder of Amplitude.
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About Amplitude: Amplitude is a product intelligence platform that provides digital product tools that help teams run and grow their businesses.
Ranjan R Reddy
Founder, CEO of Bureau
Ranjan R Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Bureau.
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About Bureau: Bureau secures mobile-first enterprises against new age cyber risks.
Rod Johnson
Founder and CEO of Atomist
Rod Johnson is co-founder and CEO of Atomist, which is transforming software delivery. He is a developer (mainly in Java, Scala and increasingly TypeScript), author and investor. Rod is the creator of Java’s Spring Framework and was co-founder and CEO of SpringSource. Following the acquisition of SpringSource by VMware in 2009, Rod served as SVP, Application Platform at VMware. Rod is the author of several popular and influential books on Java and Java EE, including Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development and J2EE without EJB (with Juergen Hoeller). He sits on the board of three prominent open source companies besides Atomist: Neo Technology, Meteor, and Hazelcast.
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About Andreessen Horowitz, Atomist, Elastic: Atomist make microservice applications Easy and fun to build, through a cloud-based service.
Vinshu Gupta
Founder of Blockcluster
Being one of the early players of blockchain revolution in India, Vinshu have been on the DLT bandwagon since late 2012. Over the course of last 6 years, he has worked for 30+ big and small clients in Blockchain space across US, Europe, Middle east, SEA and India. Vinshu sits on board of one of the few profitable service companies for blockchain in India – Nonceblox. In summer of 2017, Vinshu along with the young blockchian prodigy and long term partner Mr.Narayan Prusty conceptualised the idea of Blockcluster – a turnkey automated Blockchain Management System which helps customers set up their Blockchain stack in under “15 mins”. If you have a business requiring blockchain expertise feel free to drop him a message at : vinshu.gupta@blockcluster.io
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About Blockcluster: Legos for Enterprise blockchains – Making DLTs Easier to Implement!
Matt DeBergalis
Co-Founder and CTO of Apollo
Matt founded and ran ActBlue, the largest political fundraising platform in the world. ActBlue has raised over 700 million dollars for candidates and political groups nationwide. Before that, Matt was a kernel hacker. Some of his technical credits include the NeXT port of NetBSD and work on the NFSv4 and DAFS specifications while at Network Appliance. As an undergraduate at MIT, Matt built a phone system for his fraternity, fabricating the circuit boards and writing the operating system from scratch.
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About ActBlue, Apollo: Apollo helps engineering teams build unified graphs to accelerate application development and deliver better, more cohesive experiences.
Konrad Feldman
Co-Founder & CEO of Quantcast
Konrad Feldman, CEO, co-founded and launched Quantcast in 2006 along with Paul Sutter to transform the effectiveness of online advertising through the use of science and scalable computing. Prior to co-founding Quantcast, Feldman co-founded Searchspace (now Fortent) the leading provider of terrorist financing detection and anti-money laundering software for the world’s financial services industry. As CEO of Searchspace’s North American business, he established the business in the US and directed its rapid growth to become a market leader. Prior to Searchspace, Feldman was a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at University College London. Feldman holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University College, London.
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About Quantcast: Quantcast helps create a more personalized digital world.
Weiting Liu
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Codementor
Weiting Liu is the founder & CEO of Codementor, a live help marketplace for developers. Weiting is a serial entrepreneur and an alumnus of both Y Combinator (YC ’07 SocialPicks, ’12) and Techstars (Seattle ’13 Codementor).
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About Arc.Dev, Codementor, Global Social, Peeridea: Codementor is an online marketplace connecting developers with experts for on-demand 1:1 help via screen sharing, video, and text chat.
Greg Shenkman
Founder of EIS Group
Greg Shenkman is the founder of EIS Group.
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About EIS Group, Exigen Capital: EIS Group is focused on providing IT solutions that enable companies to convert their technology into strategic assets.
Darshan Desai
Founder & CEO of Plan
Darshan Desai is the Founder & CEO at Plan, Inc.
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About Plan: Plan is a better way to manage everything you have to do and everywhere you have to be.
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
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.
Puneet Mehta
Founder / CEO of Netomi
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About Netomi: An AI-first customer service platform that enables companies to deliver the highest quality customer experiences.
Clarence Chio
President, CTO, Co-Founder of Unit21
CTO and Co-Founder of Unit 21 and a Lecturer in UC Berkeley’s School of Information.
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About O’Reilly, Unit21, University of California Berkeley: Unit21 provides a customizable, no-code platform for risk & compliance operations teams to fight fraud, money laundering & financial crimes.
Marc Piette
Founder and CEO of XWING
Marc Piette is the founder and CEO of XWING.
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About Locu, XWING: XWING develops the suite of technologies for pilotless commercial flight of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and fixed-wing aircraft.
Kirti Shenoy
CEO and Co-Founder of Zeal
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About Zeal: Zeal (formerly Puzzl) helps platforms to build custom payroll products.
Pranab Krishnan
CTO and Co-Founder of Zeal
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About Zeal: Zeal (formerly Puzzl) helps platforms to build custom payroll products.
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.
Vijay Chattha
Founder and CEO of VSC
Vijay Chattha joined VSC Consulting as Founder / CEO in 2002.
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About BlackMahal, The100kPledge, VSC, Wareness.io: We are a band of strategists, storytellers and data nerds obsessed with helping Davids crush a sea of Goliaths.
Fouad ElNaggar
Co-Founder & CEO of Array
Fouad ElNaggar is the Co-Founder and CEO at Array.
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About Array: Array is an information technology company that specializes in developing computer software.
Richard White
CEO, Founder of UserVoice
Richard White is a Co-founder and the CEO of UserVoice, purveyors of easy-to-use helpdesk and feedback solutions that have enabled over 100K web-based businesses help and understand their users and ultimately build better products. Prior to founding UserVoice, Richard was the lead designer for Kiko.com, a Y-Combinator funded company that developed one of the first Calendaring SaaS products, which sold on eBay for $258K. After Kiko, Richard founded SlimTimer, simple time tracking for freelancers, where he experimented with name-your-own-price Freemium models. The common thread throughout all these ventures is Richard’s enthusiasm for building sexy products for decidedly un-sexy markets like customer service. Richard is a huge nerd, a dual citizen and an Eagle scout. He’s proud to tell his mother that his work gives people more time to waste rather than waste more of their time.
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About Fathom Video, UserVoice: A single platform to effortlessly collect, analyze and close the loop on product feedback with customer bases and teams of any size.
Will Laufer
Founder and CEO of Prelude
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Will spent two years leading go-to-market strategy for ePals (School Division), where he guided the business development of a new social LMS. He then became the first sales employee at Clever, where he drives enterprise partnerships with digital learning providers. He’s passionate about building sales teams and employing creative models for scaling innovative products in education.
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About Prelude: Prelude provides a platform designed to streamline recruiting operations.
Pat Hanrahan
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist of Tableau
Pat Hanrahan is Tableau Software’s Chief Scientist. He is also the CANON Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches computer graphics. His current research involves visualization, image synthesis, and graphics systems and architectures. Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton. Pat has also worked at Pixar where he developed volume rendering software and was the chief architect of the RenderMan Interface – a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs. Pat has received two Academy Awards for Science and Technology, the Spirit of America Creativity Award, the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the SIGGRAPH Stephen A. Coons Award, and the IEEE Visualization Career Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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About Tableau: Tableau helps global organizations unleash the power of their most valuable assets: their data and their people.
David Richards
Founder, Chairman, President & CEO of WANdisco
David is CEO, President and co-founder of WANdisco and has quickly established WANdisco as one of the world’s most promising technology companies. Since co-founding the company in Silicon Valley in 2005, David has led WANdisco on a course for rapid international expansion, opening offices in the UK, Japan and China. David spearheaded the acquisition of Altostor, which accelerated the development of WANdisco’s first products for the Big Data market. The majority of WANdisco’s core technology is now produced out of the company’s flourishing software development base in David’s hometown of Sheffield, England and in Belfast, Northern Ireland. David has become recognised as a champion of British technology and entrepreneurship. In 2012, he led WANdisco to a hugely successful listing on London Stock Exchange (WAND:LSE), raising over £24m to drive business growth. With over 15 years’ executive experience in the software industry, David sits on a number of advisory and executive boards of Silicon Valley start-up ventures. A passionate advocate of entrepreneurship, he has established many successful start-up companies in Enterprise Software and is recognised as an industry leader in Enterprise Application Integration and its standards. David is a frequent commentator on a range of business and technology issues, appearing regularly on Bloomberg and CNBC. Profiles of David have appeared in a range of leading publications including the Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail.
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About WANdisco: WANdisco, the world leader in Active Data Replication™, enables the replication of continuously changing data to different environments.
Drew Perkins
Co-Founder and CEO of Mojo Vision
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About Mojo Vision: Mojo Vision is developing Mojo Lens, the world’s first AR smart contact lens with a built-in display that delivers Invisible Computing
Chris Van Pelt
Co-Founder of Weights & Biases
Chris Van Pelt joined Weights & Biases as Co-Founder in 2017.Chris co-founded CrowdFlower. He was previously a technical product manager at Powerset, Inc., a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft. Chris has worked as a studio artist, computer scientist, and web engineer, and pours his diverse background into his role as Chief Technology Officer. He combines deep design insight with crisp, minimalist coding abilities that enables him to produce anything — soup-to-nuts applications — sometimes within minutes. Chris studied both art and computer science at Hope College.
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About Figure Eight, Weights & Biases: Weights & Biases provides a developer-first MLOps platform that offers performance visualization tools for machine learning.
Shawn Lewis
Founder, CTO of Weights & Biases
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About Weights & Biases: Weights & Biases provides a developer-first MLOps platform that offers performance visualization tools for machine learning.
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.
Wen Sang
Co-Founder & CEO of Smarking
Wen Sang is the Founder and CEO of Smarking Inc., a fast growing MIT spin out technology company backed by top investors including Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Slow Ventures, and many others that solves the parking problem with data analytics. Wen is an MIT PhD 14′ in Mechanical Engineering. His major curriculum concentrated on thermo-fluid sciences and energy conversion systems, and minor on economics and entrepreneurship. Wen Sang led and founded the MIT Asian Career Fair and co-founded the MIT Ventureships Club during his three years at MIT. Wen loves running, sailing (MIT Sailing Club), and rowing.
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About Smarking: Smarking turns parking data into instant actionable insights.
Maokai Lin
Co-Founder and CTO of Smarking
Maokai Lin, MIT PhD, specializes in mathematics and programming. He has extensive experience in data analytics when working for Facebook and Morgan Stanley. Maokai would like to use technology and data science to solve parking problems for the future of urban mobility!
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About Smarking: Smarking turns parking data into instant actionable insights.
Elias Manousos
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of RiskIQ
Elias is a recognized expert in Internet security and fraud prevention. He has been developing and delivering enterprise protection technologies for more than 15 years. As CEO of RiskIQ, he has spearheaded a new approach that helps Internet, financial services, healthcare, media and consumer packaged goods companies protect their brands from online fraud. Elias is also co-chair of the Online Trust Alliance (OTA) Anti-Malvertising Working Group and is responsible for Malvertisements.com, the first and only public database documenting malvertising incidents on a continuous basis. Prior to RiskIQ, Elias was VP of R&D at Securant Technologies (acquired by RSA), which pioneered identity and access management for web applications. At Securant, he was instrumental in creating now-commonplace technologies for single sign-on (SSO) security.
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About RiskIQ: RiskIQ is a security company that provides digital threat management solutions for software vendors.
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.
