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 based Founder operating in the Advertising 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.
Rob Fan
Founder & CTO/COO of Sharethrough USA
Rob leads all product and technology strategy for the company. He is a practitioner, student and teacher of the “lean startup” methodology. In his spare time, Rob, hacks and plays with new technology and advises early-stage startups about the successes and pitfalls he has learned thus far. Prior to Sharethrough, Rob worked as a technology consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton advising various three-letter government agencies. As an early adopter of the Facebook platform, Rob was one of the teaching assistants for the first-ever “Facebook Class” while at Stanford. Rob holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a MS in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.
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About Sharethrough USA: Sharethrough is one of the top global independent omnichannel ad exchanges
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Dan Greenberg
Founder & President of Sharethrough USA
Dan Greenberg is the founder and CEO of Sharethrough, a 150+ person SF-based software company that powers in-feed, native ads for premium publishers like Time Inc, Hearst, People and brand marketers like Pepsi and P&G. Dan also acts as the co-chair of the IAB Native Advertising Committee. Dan comes from a research background at Stanford in persuasive technology, and regularly teaches classes in brand content, modern monetization, and viral engineering. Dan was recently named to the Inc “35 Under 35” list, the Forbes “30 Under 30″ list and has been honored as an Ad Age Media Maven. He organizes and hosts the Sharethrough Native Ad Summits, is a regular speaker at advertising and technology conferences, and contributes to industry publications including Forbes, AdAge, and TechCrunch.
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About Sharethrough USA: Sharethrough is one of the top global independent omnichannel ad exchanges
Farhad Massoudi
CEO & Founder of Tubi
Farhad Massoudi founded adRise with a vision that the future of TV advertising will be targeted, measurable and interactive ads, just like the web on TV. Farhad holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
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About Tubi: Tubi is the world’s largest ad-supported video on demand (VOD) service. Available on Connected TV devices, Mobile, and the Web.
Aykut Karaalioglu
Founder & CEO of Mobile Action
Aykut Karaalioglu is the founder of Mobile Action, a company specialized in mobile discovery and optimization. He also co-founded Marro.ws, a clipping tool for intellectual people, and Shoppe, a shopping application. Karaalioglu holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Bilkent University. He obtained his master’s degree from Santa Clara University. Karaalioglu currently lives in San Francisco, California.
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About Mobile Action: Leading mobile intelligence company empowering app marketers to thrive in the market.
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.
Oren Kaniel
Co-Founder and CEO of AppsFlyer
Oren Kaniel is the CEO & co-founder of AppsFlyer, the market leader in Mobile Attribution Analytics. Oren holds a BA in Computer Science, Cum Laude, from the Technion, and an MBA from IDC, as part of an exchange with the Wharton Business School.
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About AppsFlyer: The world’s top brands use AppsFlyer to build great products, create exceptional experiences, and preserve customer privacy.
Reshef Mann
Co-Founder & CTO of AppsFlyer
Reshef Mann is Co-Founder & CTO at AppsFlyer.
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About AppsFlyer: The world’s top brands use AppsFlyer to build great products, create exceptional experiences, and preserve customer privacy.
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.
Vlad Kachur
Co-Founder, Director of Promolta
Vlad Kachur create strong marketing directions to help musicians be seen and establish new fans. Promolta’s co-founder believes every musician deserves to be recognized for his or her talent and hardwork.
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About Promolta: A self service advertising platform to promote videos in targeted blogs, websites, mobile apps, games and social networks.
Anjit Anand
Founder of Promolta
Anjit Anand is eager and passionate about helping musicians get discovered through social media and deep publisher network. Promolta’s co-founder takes her mission seriously in helping people reach their dream.
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About Promolta: A self service advertising platform to promote videos in targeted blogs, websites, mobile apps, games and social networks.
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.
Vishnu Prasath Devarajan
Founder & CEO of Bright Bridge Info-tech Pvt Ltd
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About Bright Bridge Info-tech Pvt Ltd, Pulse Pharmacy: Bright Bridge Info-tech Pvt Ltd is a digital marketing company specializing in delivering Internet advertising solutions.
Jeremy Bloom
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Integrate
Jeremy Bloom is the only athlete in history to ski in the Olympics and get drafted into the NFL. He is a three-time WorldChampion, two-time Olympian, eleven-time World Cup gold medalist and the youngest member ever inducted into The United States Skiing Hall of Fame. He was also an All-American football player at the University of Colorado and played professional football as a wide receiver and return specialist in the National Football League for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. While playing with the NFL in Philadelphia for the Eagles, he completed a business entrepreneurship program at Wharton Business School where he studied real estate and finance. Today, he is Founder/CEO of the Marketing Technology company, Integrate and founder of Wish of a Lifetime, a nonprofit organization that grants lifelong wishes to senior citizens. Through Jeremy’s vision and leadership, Integrate is transforming global marketing. The company has raised over $40M of venture capital from Comcast, Foundry Group and Liberty Global. Integrate was named as the “Best New Company” at the American Business Awards in New York City. Jeremy was named by Forbes as 30 under 30, tech executives under the age of 30 making waves in the technology space and in 2013 Jeremy was a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Outside of business, Jeremy has continued to maintain his name within the sports world. He does commentary for college football and is an Olympic Sports Television Analyst and has worked for ESPN, Fox, NBC, and The Pac-12 Network.
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About Integrate, United States Ski & Snowboard Association, Wish of a Lifetime, Wish of a Lifetime: Integrate provides a hub for managing and measuring demand generation programs.
Lucas Moraes
Co-Founder of Olivia
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About Olivia: Olivia is an AI financial assistant that learns your spending patterns, predict your purchases and recommend ways to get more for your money
Paolo Privitera
Co-Founder and CEO of Evensi
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About Doochoo, Evensi, Lombardstreet Ventures: Evensi is a platform to discover, experience, ideate, and promote events.
Maran Nelson
Founder and Chairperson of Interact
Maran Nelson is the co-founder and CEO of Clara Labs. Prior to launching Clara Labs, Maran serves as founder and chairperson at Interact ATX, Inc.
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About Interact: SaaS zero party data platform: The easiest way to convert curious people into loyal customers and happy clients.
Christopher Wendel
President and Co-Founder of Volta Charging
Chris is a global finance executive with 20 years of experience running large sales teams and raising capital in equity markets. The bulk of this time was with Goldman Sachs in the United States, Germany, and Japan. While on sabbatical in Hawaii, Chris stumbled upon Volta stations at the Kailua Whole Foods. He soon after became an investor and joined Volta as partner and CFO in 2012. Chris lives in Napa with his wife and three children, loves flying, and will challenge you to a tennis match any day of the week. He and his wife each drive a Tesla Model S in fire engine red and metallic blue.
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About Volta Charging: Volta Charging designs, installs, and maintains a network of electric vehicle charging stations.
Scott Mercer
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Volta Charging
Scott Mercer is the founder and CEO of Volta, an electric vehicle charging network with the most-utilized stations in the US. An entrepreneur fascinated by both cars and future-focused technology, Scott founded Volta to bridge the gap between electric vehicles and the mainstream. The network delivers free electric vehicle charging in areas where stations are most needed, as determined by Volta’s proprietary machine learning algorithms. Under Scott’s leadership, Volta is experiencing consecutive 3x year-over-year revenue and footprint growth. Scott launched Volta in 2010 in Hawaii, where he was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Hawaii Venture Capital, 40 Under 40 by Pacific Business News and Hawaii Business’ 20 for the Next 20. Previously, Scott ran a business buying, restoring and selling vintage cars in his early 20s. He sold a restored 1967 Jaguar XKE to seed the beginnings of Volta, which has now raised $62 million in funding. Scott currently rides an electric motorcycle, drives an electric Fiat, and occasionally, a 1971 Alfa Romeo.
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About Volta Charging: Volta Charging designs, installs, and maintains a network of electric vehicle charging stations.
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.
Co-Founder, CEO of Samba TV
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About Carrot Capital, i/o Ventures, Samba TV: Samba TV enables the next-generation TV experience powered by its first-party data and helps viewers engage with relevant media.
Brendan Eich
Founder of Basic Attention Token
Brendan Eich joined Brave Software as CEO in 2015.
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About Basic Attention Token, Brave: The Basic Attention Token is the new token for the digital advertising industry.
Jim McKelvey
Founder & CEO of Invisibly
Jim co-founded Square, where he now serves as a Director. Jim is also a General Partner at FINTOP Capital and Green Visor Capital. He serves as a Director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve and as a Trustee to Washington University in St. Louis. Jim’s first venture was co-founding Mira Digital Publishing in 1990, which is a leader in electronic publishing for scientific conferences. In 2013, he founded the LaunchCode Foundation, currently bringing free computer education and jobs to 5 US cities. In addition to his businesses and philanthropy, Jim is a glassblowing artist and co-founded one of the nation’s top glass centers, Third Degree Glass Factory. He has published two books on computer programming and one on glassblowing. He is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis.
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About Arch Grants, FINTOP Capital, Invisibly, LaunchCode, Mira Smart Conference, Square, Third Degree Glass Factory, Washington University in St. Louis: Invisibly puts the power of your data back in your hands.
Kaan Gunay
Co-Founder & CEO of Firefly
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About Endeavor, Firefly: Firefly is a mobility based advertising and data platform that allows rideshare drivers to make money through digital advertising.
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.
Rajeev Goel
Co-Founder & CEO of PubMatic
Rajeev co-founded PubMatic in 2006, based on the belief that publishers are underserved from a technology and services perspective, and set out to build an automation software company focused on publishers. Under his leadership, the company has grown and matured into a major enterprise provider with more than 400 employees and 13 locations around the globe. The high pace of revenue and profit growth, is fueled by Rajeev’s commitment to help publishers protect, monetize and manage their most valuable asset – the relationship between consumers, content and brands. Rajeev is a serial entrepreneur who has raised more than $250 million in funding throughout his career. Rajeev serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the IAB. He holds a master’s degree in Computer & Information Technology from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in economics, political science and Spanish from the Johns Hopkins University.
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About PubMatic: PubMatic is an automation solutions company for an open digital media industry.
Craig Newmark
Founder, Chairman & Customer Service Rep of Craigslist
Craig Newmark is an American internet entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairman of [Craigslist](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/craigslist), a classified advertisements website for jobs, personals, for-sale and wanted items, services, resumes, and discussion forums. He is also the founder of Craigconnects. In 2013, Newmark was named “Nerd-in-Residence” by the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Center for Innovation in recognition of his volunteer work to enhance services to veterans. He uses the Craigconnects platform to support effective organizations working for veterans and military families, the open government, public diplomacy, journalistic ethics and accountability, fact-checking, consumer protection, election protection, and voter registration. Newmark serves on the board of directors of the Poynter Institute Foundation, Center for Public Integrity, Sunlight Foundation, Consumers Union/Consumer Reports, and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. He also serves on the Board of Overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review, and as an advisor to nearly 20 other renowned non-profit organizations. Newmark communicates regularly through his own blog on craigconnects.org and through the Huffington Post, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. He also travels around the country speaking about issues, appearing on behalf of organizations he supports and delivering his Craigconnects message to audiences nationwide. Born in Morristown, New Jersey in 1952, Newmark received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Case Western University. He currently lives in San Francisco, California.
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About Craigslist: Craigslist is a classified advertisements website for jobs, personals, for sale and wanted items, services, résumés, and discussion forums.
Raghu Kodige
Founder & Chief Product Officer of Alphonso
Raghu Kodige is the co-founder of Alphonso.
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About Alphonso, LG Ads, Microsoft, Yahoo: Alphonso is a software company that offers TV data and measurement services for brands and agencies.
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.
Kelvin Cheung
CTO, Founder of LeanData
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About LeanData: LeanData is a platform that enables revenue teams (marketing, sales, customer, and partner ops) to manage all go-to-market motions.
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.
Scott Rafer
Co-Founder of Delivr
Scott Rafer is the Advisor at Technicolor Ventures since July 2014. After 20 years running software startups, Scott is focusing on being the sidekick to a few great founders in marketing automation, marketplace seller services, and e-commerce delivery. There is a business plan at the intersection of those three burning in his brain, but he’s got that under control for now. Startup-wise, Scott was most recently Senior Vice President of Corporate Development at Nanigans, which is pioneering the SaaS evolution of media buying with its predictive lifetime value SaaS platform. Until its 2013 acquisition by Nanigans, Scott ran Lumatic, where the team believed that cities are humanity’s future — so they’d better get a lot easier to love. We made smartphone maps for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users. Lumatic was preceded by Lookery, one of the first ad networks on Facebook, portions of which were sold to Adknowledge in 2008; and MyBlogLog, a social network of bloggers, which Yahoo! acquired in 2007. The list goes downhill from there for a decade. Before most of the startup work, Scott headed-up the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company. Scott graduated from the Management of Technology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Scott is also Co-Founder and a Member of the Board of Directors at Mashery (acquired by Intel), ShopPad, Boomset, Boostable, Delivr and Zemanta. Check out @rafer and rafer.net for more.
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About Delivr, PANTASTIC: QR Code & NFC Management and Tracking
Kyle Wong
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Pixlee
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 is a user-generated content marketing platform that helps brands to market and sell by using real customer photos and videos.
Raju Sagiraju
CEO/Founder of Dime Development
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About Dime Development: Digital Agency to help brands
Eric Mathewson
Founder & CEO of WideOrbit
Eric Mathewson is the Founder and CEO of WideOrbit, the leading provider of advertising management solutions for media companies. Since its founding in 1999, WideOrbit has grown to be the media management platform of choice for over 70% of US television stations.
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About Prescient Capital, WideOrbit: WideOrbit provides advertising management software for major media companies.
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.
Maria Sipka
Co-Founder, VP Brand Strategy and Chief Evangelist of Linqia
Maria is the Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist at Linqia, the first performance-based influencer marketing platform whose turnkey programs are guaranteed to deliver concrete business results. 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.
Gadi Eliashiv
CEO & Co-Founder of Singular
After leading a team of Technologists for 8200, the most elite intelligence unit of the Israeli Army, Gadi founded Singular with the belief that simplified and unified marketing data is the key to unlocking growth. Prior to Singular, Gadi was Head of Research at Onavo, a mobile analytics company acquired by Facebook in 2013.
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About Singular: Singular, a marketing intelligence platform, unifies marketing analytics, giving marketers actionable insights from previously siloed data
Jim Steyer
Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media
Jim has spent more than 20 years as one of the most respected experts and entrepreneurs on issues related to children’s policy and media in the United States. As CEO, he is responsible for the overall leadership of Common Sense Media, the nation’s leading nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the media lives of kids and families. Prior to founding Common Sense, Jim was Chairman and CEO of JP Kids, a respected family media company. Before that, he served as President of Children Now, a leading national advocacy and media organization for children, which he founded in 1988. Jim began his career as an elementary school teacher and then became a public interest lawyer. He served as a law clerk for the California Supreme Court, as a deputy district attorney, and as a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In addition to his duties at Common Sense, Jim teaches popular courses on civil rights, civil liberties, and children’s issues at Stanford University, where he has taught for the past 22 years in the School of Education and Department of Political Science. During that period, he has received a number of Stanford’s highest teaching honors. Jim is also the author of the widely acclaimed book The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media’s Effect on Our Children, which draws upon his extensive experience as a leading child advocate, educational media expert, and dad. Over the past decade, Jim has appeared regularly on a variety of national television and radio programs, including The Today Show, Good Morning America, Oprah, CNN, The O’Reilly Factor, and Larry King. He hosts a regular weekly segment, “Kids and the Media,” on CBS-5 TV in San Francisco, and his work has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. Jim grew up in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford. He received his JD from Stanford Law School, where he founded the East Palo Alto Community Law Project. Jim is the father of four children and lives with his family in the Bay Area.
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About Common Sense Media: Common Sense Media provides information and education to help kids and families thrive in a world of media and technology.
Todd Khozein
Founder & Co-CEO of SecondMuse
Todd Khozein is the Founder & Co-CEO ,Director of Secondmuse Foundation.
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About SecondMuse, Secondmuse Foundation: SecondMuse is an innovation and collaboration agency.
Sean Fannan
CTO & Co-Founder of Chartboost
Sean Fannan is co-founder and CTO of Chartboost, a technology platform for mobile developers to find new users and monetize their games. Chartboost works with over 32,000 games, serves over 12 billion game sessions per month and has raised $21M from Sequoia Capital and other investors. Prior to Chartboost, Fannan was one of the early employees at Tapulous, that was acquired by Walt Disney in 2010 to become Disney Mobile.
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About Chartboost: Chartboost is one of the largest mobile-games only marketplace to increase revenue and discover new players.
Tyson Quick
Founder & Chief Growth Officer of Postclick
Serial Entrepreneur, Advertising/Marketing Innovator, Postclick & Instapage Founder/CEO
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About Instapage, Mesiab Labs, Postclick: The world’s leading solution for improving digital ad conversions-creating digital experiences that optimize and increase return on ad spend
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.
Tuomo Riekki
Founder & CPO of Smartly.io
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About Smartly.io: Powering beautifully effective ads
Zafar Jafri
CEO & Founder of Inprintz, Inc.
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About Inprintz, Inc.: Inprintz is a large format printing company.
Lauren Nagel
Founder, CEO of Scale It For Me
Lauren Nagel is a data-driven marketer specializing in growth for internet businesses. Lauren’s core expertise is in driving rapid customer, traffic, and revenue growth. Lauren is CEO and Founder at SIFM. She works with each business to establish high-performance, scalable, multi-channel marketing programs to help companies exceed their goals. Throughout her marketing career, she has acted as Chief Marketing Officer for multiple internet businesses.
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About FindKeep.Love, Scale It For Me: Scale It For Me, LLC is a full service marketing consulting firm.
Martin Anazco
Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Jampp
Martin co-founded Jampp in 2011 – a mobile app marketing platform that combines advanced technology (Big Data, Real Time Bidding and Machine Learning) with a team of mobile marketing experts to deliver millions of users to iOS and Android apps globally. Previously, in the year 2000, he co-founded and ran Livra.com (Livra Panels) which became the leading online market research company in Latin America. In 2008, after continuous growth the company was acquired by publicly listed IPSOS – one of the top market research organisations world-wide. Martin was born in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina. He graduated in Economics from the University of San Andres in Buenos Aires (Honors Thesis: “Selling Information Good on the Internet: Give before you sell”).
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About Jampp, Livra Panels: Jampp is the growth platform of choice for on-demand apps worldwide. We unlock programmatic UA and RTGT to drive incremental performance
Diego Meller
Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Jampp
Diego co-founded Jampp in 2013 – The company is a performance marketing platform for retargeting and acquiring app customers. The company combines behavioural data with predictive and programmatic technology to generate revenue for advertisers by showing personal, relevant ads that inspire consumers to purchase for the first time, or more often. Jampp’s 90 people team serve a global client base from offices in San Francisco, Singapore, London, Berlin, São Paulo, Cape Town and Buenos Aires. Previously, in the year 2000, Diego co-founded and ran Livra.com which became the leading online market research company in Latin America. In 2008, after continuous growth the company was acquired by publicly listed IPSOS – one of the top market research organisations world-wide.
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About Jampp, Livra: Jampp is the growth platform of choice for on-demand apps worldwide. We unlock programmatic UA and RTGT to drive incremental performance
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.
Guy Yalif
Co-Founder & CEO of Intellimize
Guy is the CEO and co-founder of Intellimize. Prior to Intellimize, he held a number of senior marketing positions at major media and technology companies, including Vice President of Global Marketing at BrightRoll and Head of Global Product and Vertical Marketing at Twitter, as well as leadership roles at Yahoo, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, and Tradeweave. Guy is a recognized marketing expert who has written for various industry publications and has spoken frequently at industry conferences internationally. Guy holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a BSE in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University where his thesis was coding artificial intelligence for airplane design.
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About Intellimize: Intellimize is a startup offering tools for marketers to drive conversions by personalizing websites.
Jin Lim
CTO & Co-Founder of Intellimize
Jin is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Intellimize. Prior to Intellimize, Jin held various senior engineering positions at Yahoo, including most recently the VP of Engineering role where he led the Personalization Platform group responsible for building large-scale personalized recommendations across the Yahoo network. Prior to Yahoo, Jin co-founded and sold Blue Tiger Networks, a startup that specialized in peer-to-peer trading platform. Jin has a BA in Computer Science from Cambridge University.
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About Intellimize: Intellimize is a startup offering tools for marketers to drive conversions by personalizing websites.
Brian Webb
Chief Architect & Co-Founder of Intellimize
Brian is the Chief Architect and co-founder of Intellimize. Prior to Intellimize, Brian was a senior principal architect at Yahoo where he was actively involved in building web-scale personalized content recommendation systems for some of the company’s core properties. Brian also founded Sportasy, a fantasy sports site which was acquired by Yahoo. Brian brings 20 years of experience designing and implementing large-scale systems that produce quantitatively better results by combining humans and intelligent systems. Brian did graduate studies in Computer Science at UC San Diego and has a BS in Mathematics from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
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About Intellimize: Intellimize is a startup offering tools for marketers to drive conversions by personalizing websites.
Abhijit Shanbhag
Founder & President & CEO of Graymatics
Abhijit Shanbhag leads the day-to-day operations of Graymatics. Previous to founding Graymatics, he was the CTO of Scintera, which he co-founded in 2001, and continues to serve on the Board of Directors. Under his leadership and vision, Scintera developed the industry’s first programmable RF signal processor, the lowest power multi-Gigabit signal processor in industry and is emerging to be a leading semiconductor player in the communications space. Previous to Scintera, Shanbhag held key technical and management roles at Qualcomm, Ericsson and Morphics. He holds a BS from IIT-Bombay and a PhD from University of Southern California, where he continues to be closely involved as an Advisory Board member.
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About Graymatics: Graymatics, a cloud platform, provides digital video and image recognition technology to products within images or video content.
Chris Kelly
CEO & Co-Founder of Upwave
Chris Kelly is currently the founder of Survata, a startup in Silicon Valley. He previously did marketing and business development for SavvyMoney, a financial service startup. Before SavvyMoney, Chris was an associate in the Silicon Valley office of Matrix Partners. He focused on early stage Internet and mobile companies. Earlier, Chris worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Co., where he served media and telecom clients on various strategic, financial, and operational issues. Prior to McKinsey, Chris co-founded multiple web startups, including an online college textbook market and a same-day delivery service for consumer goods. Chris graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in Finance and Economics.
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About Upwave: Upwave is a marketing analytics company providing brand marketing measurement tech to the world’s leading brands, agencies, & publishers.
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.
Brian Wong
Founder and CEO of Kiip
Brian Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Kiip (pronounced “keep”), a category-creating mobile rewards network that is redefining mobile advertising through an innovative platform that leverages “moments of achievement” in games and apps to simultaneously benefit users, developers and advertisers. Backed by Relay Ventures, Interpublic Group, Hummer Winblad, True Ventures, Digital Garage and others, the company has raised $15.4 million in funding to date. Kiip has been named one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company, listed by Forbes as one of the 4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Put on Your Watch List and included on the Dow Jones FasTech50 List. After skipping four K-12 grades, Brian received his Bachelor of Commerce from the University of British Columbia at age 18, and shortly after became one of the youngest people to ever receive venture capital funding. He has been recognized with many awards for his accomplishments and leadership, including: the Top 20 Under 20 awards for all of Canada; Business Insider’s Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley, 30 Under 30 in Advertising and 18 Most Important People in Mobile Advertising; Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in 2011 and 2012; Mashable’s Top 5 Entrepreneurs to Watch; iMedia 25; One of AdWeek’s Seven Would-be Mobile Titans; and the AdAge Creativity Top 50. Before starting Kiip, Brian led key publisher and tech partnerships at the social news website Digg.com, where he accelerated the company’s mobile presence by launching the Digg Android mobile app.
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About Kiip: Kiip is a rewards network and mobile application that offers rewards from brands and companies for virtual achievements.
Joel Andren
Co-Founder, CEO of PressFriendly
Joel Andren grew up wanting to be a reporter for the New York Times and was editor of his college newspaper. He was finally dissuaded from being a reporter by writing more than 100 obituaries during a stint as a summer intern at the Times-Herald in Norristown, PA. After receiving an MA in Communication with a PR focus, Joel worked at the third-largest PR firm in Seattle. Joel has worked at numerous early-stage startups and was a co-founder at Bitcasa. Most recently, Joel was Head of Marketing for YCombinator company HelloSign, where he worked with his current co-founder, Paul Denya.
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About PressFriendly, Protypical: PressFriendly is a startup intent on helping other startups get press.
Arash Hassibi
CEO & Co-Founder of joinedapp
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About joinedapp: Leader in Conversational Commerce: Sell on Text, Voice and Touch Channels
Dhawal Mujumdar
Product + Co-Founder/President of Polymorph
Dhawal founded AdsNative. Dhawal’s day to day responsibilities at AdsNative include leading product team and providing overall strategy to organization. Dhawal graduated from UC Berkeley with masters degree and holds bachelors in Computer Science. Additionally, Dhawal has taught web programming at UC Berkeley.
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About Polymorph: Polymorph is a white-label SaaS monetization platform for publishers to maximize revenue, reduce costs and deliver better ad experiences.
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.
Valerie R. Coffman
CTO and Co-Founder of Swayable
Valerie is a graduate of Johns Hopkins and received a PhD in Physics from Cornell where she wrote software for studying the fracture properties of materials. After graduation, she spent 5 years at the National Institute of Standards and Technology writing open source software for materials science research. For the past three years she has been providing data science consulting to startups, specializing in natural language processing and search engine technology.
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About Swayable: Swayable is a data platform that predicts changes in consumer opinion and intentions
Josh Dorward
CEO and Co-Founder of Indivio
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About Indivio: Indivio enables brands, and retailers of all sizes to create, test, and optimize Facebook ads using video.
Kenji Hashimoto
CTO and Co-Founder of Indivio
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About Indivio: Indivio enables brands, and retailers of all sizes to create, test, and optimize Facebook ads using video.
Asif Ali
Founder of Reduce Data
Founder of Reduce Data.
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About AccuKnox, Reduce Data: Data optimized advertising platform
Logan Welbaum
Founder of Plai
Logan Welbaum is the Founder at Plai.
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About Plai: Plai is a digital marketing application platform that provides advertising tools to small teams and creators to make marketing easier.
KoAnn Skrzyniarz
Chief Executive Officer & Founder of Sustainable Life Media
KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz Prior to launching Sustainable Life Media in 2004, KoAnn founded and lead a boutique management consultancy called Organizations That Work, focusing on helping enable breakthrough financial performance through purpose – driven leadership and improved organizational alignment. she served in positions of increasing responsibility launching and leading media properties including magazines, conferences, trade shows and more for a wide range of markets, starting with natural resources (timber, paper, and mining, and ending with a variety of emerging technology sectors including digital video, computer game development and the web.During her tenure she garnered extensive experience in launching and growing countless product brand strategy and integrating it with a global product brand strategy and integrating it with a global product brand portfolio spanning many market sectors. She completed her media tenure as Senior Vice President of a multinational division of United Business Media, overseeing a $ 50 million division with 150 person team.
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About Sustainable Life Media: Sustainable Business Social Network
Shiv Singh
Founder and CEO of Savvy Matters
Shiv Singh is the Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Marketing Transformation at Visa. Shiv was formerly the Global Head of Digital for PepsiCo Beverages (across paid, owned and earned media). Shiv was responsible for all digital engagement across brand marketing, shopper marketing and foodservice marketing. Shiv also lead the company’s foray into real-time marketing and is playing an instrumental role in establishing new consumer insights and measurement methodologies for the business along with new forms of transmedia consumer engagement. Prior to PepsiCo Shiv worked at Vivaki and Razorfish Inc for over twelve years in their New York, London and San Francisco offices serving in his last role there as the Global Social Media Lead. During his tenure there, Shiv worked with companies like Mercedez Benz, Philip Morris International, Citigroup, Microsoft, Victoria Secret and Ford Motor Company. Shiv is the author of the book, “Social Media Marketing for Dummies” and has written for the Harvard Business Review online, Ad Age magazine, Mashable and other publications. Shiv has also served on the Grand Jury of The Effies Worldwide among other global marketing award juries. Shiv sits on the advisory board of Buddy Media and a few startups currently in stealth mode. Shiv got his Bachelors in Business Adminstration from Babson College and his M.Sc. from the London School of Economics.
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About LendingTree, Savvy Matters: Savvy Matters LLC advises startups and Fortune 500 companies alike on marketing and digital transformation.
Ryan Koonce
CEO & Founder of Mammoth Growth
Ryan Koonce is the Founder & CEO at Mammoth Growth
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About Attribution, Mammoth Growth, Roaring Bull Studios, Whopping Ideas: Mammoth Growth provides data analytics and growth marketing services
Mark Forster
Founder & CEO of Adello Inc
Mark is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and digital space veteran. Before founding Adello, Mark co-founded several companies, including OnEmotion, a mobile marketing development company, which was acquired by Goldbach. Before, Mark assumed general management positions at Minick, pioneer in interactive mobile applications, and Masterfoods, leading consumer goods company. Mark is regularly invited to speak at digital events and universities about mobile and its future. Mark holds an MBA from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
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About Adello Inc, AirSage, GeoCTRL, P-MV digital momentum, Venture Kick: Adello uses programmatic media-buying platform at Big Data scale that uses the power of machine learning to deliver marketing ROI.
Mayur Rustagi
Co-Founder and CTO of Sigmoid
Mayur is a renowned leader in data engineering, big data, and analytics. He has worked with some of the largest data producers in the world, enabling enterprises to be digitally transformed and building modern data architectures that deliver millions of dollars in business value. Under his leadership, Sigmoid’s business has grown by 10x, and team size has quadrupled in the last four years. An avid open-source enthusiast since his IIT days, Mayur regularly contributes to the Apache and cloud ecosystems, such as the first deployment of Spark on GCP, Pig on Spark, and others. As a thought leader, he is a frequent guest speaker at technical conferences and has also been mentoring hundreds of budding data engineers across technologies.
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About Sigmoid: One of the fastest growing data and analytics companies in The Americas, Sigmoid combines data engineering and AI consulting to help enterprises gain a competitive advantage through effective data-driven decision-making.
Anand Kishore
Founder / CEO of Aspire
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About Aspire: The influencer marketing platform empowering ecommerce brands to build and cultivate influential communities.
Suhaas Prasad
CTO / Founder of Aspire
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About Aspire: The influencer marketing platform empowering ecommerce brands to build and cultivate influential communities.
Ayyappan Sankaran
Co-Founder & CTO of YuMe
Ayyappan Sankaran is the Co-Founder and CTO of YuMe, Inc.
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About YuMe: YuMe is a provider of digital video brand advertising solutions that drives inventory monetization and more.
Emre Fadillioglu
Co Founder and CEO of AppSamurai
Emre combines a successful corporate career with serial entrepreneurship as a co-founder of multiple companies. Currently, he leads AppSamurai as the CEO and Co-founder to create a global mobile technology company. AppSamurai is a venture capital-backed startup with mobile growth as its passion.
Having been featured in Europe’s Top 100 Hottest Startups list recently, AppSamurai continues to be a product driven company with its namesake mobile acquisition platform AppSamurai and the first mobile user engagement tool that brings the well-known, mobile native story format into mobile apps and websites; Storyly.
Before AppSamurai, he co-founded Netvent (2013), a digital marketing agency that still operates today, and Growth Tower (2015), a mobile marketing agency. Previously, he worked in finance, sales, and business development roles at PwC, Inta Spaceturk, Enerjisa, and Oracle. His educational background includes a degree in Business Administration from METU (in Turkey) and an Executive Leadership degree from UC Berkeley. Right now, he is focused on scaling AppSamurai with an amazing team of talented people.
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About AppSamurai: AppSamurai is a mobile marketing technology company providing pinpoint solutions with in-house technologies.
Matevz Klanjsek
Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Celtra
Matevz Klanjsek is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Celtra.
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About Celtra: Celtra is the Creative Management Platform that empowers agencies, media suppliers, and brand leaders
Joseph Reth
Founder & CEO/CTO of RethDigital
Joseph Reth is the Founder & current CEO/CTO at RethDigital, one of the nation’s fastest-growing digital agencies.
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About Martha5 Agency, RethDigital: RethDigital is a global creative digital agency
Tuhin Roy
Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Fanzy
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About 8tracks Radio, Fanzy, Proxima Media: Fanzy is a social loyalty and referral platform enabling brands to attract and reward social fans who create buzz.
Duncan Seay
Founder of Fetch It
Co-Founder and CEO of Fetch It
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About Early Growth, Fetch It, Luminy Bioscience, LUVmeToo: A mobile advertising network & bidding exchange for geo-delivered rewards to tourists
Dave Bell
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Gummicube
Dave Bell is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gummicube. He is responsible for overseeing the business strategy, including driving growth and market development. Dave is a pioneer of the mobile entertainment industry with more than 15 years of experience publishing, marketing and distributing mobile applications and games across carrier, direct to consumer and app store channels.
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About Gummicube: Big Data Anlytics for Mobile & App Store Optimization
Hetong Li
Co-Founder and CEO of BearBuzz
Hetong Li is the co-founder and CEO at BearBuzz. She was head of growth engineering at Instacart. She was also the founding engineer for both Twitter Ads Performance and various ads products at Instacart.
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About BearBuzz: BearBuzz builds an influencer marketplace that moves things along much more quickly than today’s negotiation slog.
Rick Farman
Co-Founder of Superfly
Rick Farman is Co-Founder @ Superfly Presents.
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About 1906, Bloom Farms, Dreamscape Immersive, Empirical Spirits, Flow Cannabis Co., Liquid Death, Lord Jones, Mixhalo, Realife Tech, Satisfi Labs, Shape Matrix, Sunday Goods, Superfly, Sweetgreen, TILT, Wave: Superfly is an entertainment company and creative agency with offices in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago.
Jeremy O’Briant
Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Torch
Jeremy OBriant is the Chief Executive Officer at Torch.
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About Torch: Torch is a agile growth marketing agency based in San Francisco.
HP Jin
Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Telenav
HP co-founded Telenav in 1999 and has led the company to become a global leader in location-based services (LBS), automotive navigation and location-targeted mobile advertising. Telenav was the first company to launch GPS navigation services for mobile phones to the world, and today its product reaches more than 100 countries on mobile phones and within vehicles. Telenav was also the first LBS company in the USA to IPO when it began publicly trading on NASDAQ in May 2010. Telenav has subsidiaries in US, China, Europe and South America. Prior to starting Telenav, HP served as a Senior Strategy Consultant for the McKenna Group and a Business Strategy and Management Consultant at McKinsey & Company. HP has also served as a Technical Director at LINCSS/Loral Space Communication. HP holds a Ph.D. in Guidance, Navigation and Control (Aeronautics and Astronautics department), a Ph.D. minor in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science from the Harbin Institute of Technology in China.
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About Telenav: Accelerating towards a connected car future with smarter, easier, safer innovation.
Derrick Butler
Co-Founder & CEO of Krisspi Inc.
Tech Entrepreneur with a passion for building teams and explosive profitable businesses. Derrick is originally from Columbus, Georgia and moved to California for college. Derrick graduated from UOP with a Bachelor of Science in Business/Marketing and an St Mary’s College of California where he earned his Executive Master of Business Administration. Derrick spent 15 years in corporate america, in various leadership positions, including quality assurance, sales and marketing. Derrick is a third generation entrepreneur, and has owned and operated (2) two multi-million dollar businesses. Derrick currently serves as the Founder & CEO of Krisspi Technologies, Inc. an application based on demand marketplace connecting clients with vetted/licensed barbers and hair stylists. Derrick is passionate about helping others, and serves on multiple Non-Profit Boards.
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About Krisspi Inc.: Krisspi is an On Demand application that allows a user to request an office, home, or hotel grooming session by a highly rated stylist.
Stephanie Wongsoredjo
Co-Founder of YuKepo.com
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About YuKepo.com: Online humor media that provides credible information, inspiration, and fun content for Indonesian young generation
Michael Rucker
Co-Founder & COO of OmniVirt
Michael Rucker is the Co-Founder and COO of OmniVirt, a 360° VR advertising and distribution platform. Prior to OmniVirt, Michael spent 7 years at YouTube holding a variety of different leadership positions. Michael led YouTube’s content strategy across its 5 main verticals: Entertainment, Music, Sports, News, and Education. Joining YouTube in 2007, Michael helped drive YouTube’s growth from its early days, launching YouTube’s first monetization products to leading consumer marketing for the site across Asia-Pacific. Michael has touched both the consumer and business side of the digital video business.
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About OmniVirt: Leading Immersive Advertising (VR/AR) Platform
Colette Nataf
Co-Founder & CEO of Lightning AI
Colette Nataf is the CEO and Co-Founder at Lightning AI.
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About Lightning AI: Performance advertising software for finding target audiences and automating advertising tasks on Facebook, Google, and Instagram.
James Bartlett
Co-Founder & COO of Lightning AI
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About Lightning AI: Performance advertising software for finding target audiences and automating advertising tasks on Facebook, Google, and Instagram.
Guido Meak
Founder and CEO of Nembol
In 2014 Guido founded Nembol, Inc., a software company headquartered in San Francisco with a development team in Italy. In 2015 Nembol put to market its first product: Nembol App, the ultimate user-friendly online advertising tool for traditional retailers. Nembol App enables brands to share their catalogue and advertising content with retailers and the latter to use such content seamlessly on the Internet in their multi-channel posts and listings. Guido previously co-founded Bizcash in 1999, an online payment company, and Zerogrey in 2000, a company enabling e-commerce for brands. At Zerogrey Guido has been MD and CEO between 2002 and 2013 and lead the company from $200k to $9M in revenues and into a team of 50 people from 15 different nationalities with offices in Dublin, Turin and Shanghai. Before becoming and entrepreneur, Guido worked in corporate finance at Ernst & Young and in the consumer goods at Diadora. Guido is also a former athlete: he raced with the Italian National Ski Team, won at the national level and represented Italy over two seasons at the Europa Cup. Guido earned his Master’s Degree in Economics at the London School of Economics, on a scholarship issued by the Italian Government, and was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University on a scholarship issued by ENI. Finding a value in life-long learning, Guido also served as a university lecturer for business students at USAC, the Unites States Study Abroad Consortium.
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About Nembol: Nembol moves a retail product from a shelf in a store onto multiple online selling and advertising channels in 5 seconds.
Jonathan Mildenhall
Co-Founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand
In 1990 Jonathan joined Mccann London as a graduate trainee – the first ever ethnic minority to join the agency as a graduate trainee. Over the next 16 years Jonathan broke through many glass ceilings by working at several of the world’s hottest ad agencies and by running some of the world’s most value creating and creatively awarded accounts. In 2006, having spent a summer at Harvard Business School, Jonathan joined The Coca-Cola Company as VP, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative. In 2007 he led the team that introduced the world to Coca-Cola’s global marketing platform “Open Happiness”. This platform contributed to Coke’s most profitable growth period in 20 years, became the brand’s most awarded marketing platform ever, helping the company secure the prestigious 2013 ‘Creative Marketer Of The Year’ award at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In 2014 Jonathan met the Airbnb co- founders Brian, Joe and Nate, and decided that it was his mission to help them, as CMO, transform the industry disrupting property rental platform into the next global iconic superbrand. Injust three and a half years Airbnb grew from having 400,000 homes on the platform to having over 4,500,000 homes in 191 countries. each home helping to make the world a place where anyone can belong anywhere. The Airbnb brand is now one that defines popular culture and the business is valued at over $3lbn. At the end of 2017 Jonathan decided to step down as Airbnb’s CMO to focus on launching his own marketing and practice called TwentyFirstCenturyBrand. Just as he did at Airbnb, through TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, Jonathan will partner with some of Silicon Valley’s most influential founders and CEOs in order to drive transformational growth through purpose driven marketing and world class excellence in global brand stewardship. TwentyFirstCenturyBrand will open its doors for business in Summer 2018.
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About TwentyFirstCenturyBrand: TwentyFirstCenturyBrand partner with innovative companies to realize transformation growth through excellence in marketing.
Zachary Chen
Founder/CEO of Impressions Holdings LLC
Zack Chen is the CEO of Impress3 Media, a multifaceted business that includes both a rapidly growing publisher of digital news and online industry magazines, as well as a lead generation software that helps local service providers reach their target customers. As the leader of Impress3 & parent organization Impressions Holdings, Zack’s businesses have been recognized among the top 50 startups on Entrepreneur Magazine’s E360, on Inc. 5000 within the 20 fastest growing software companies, and Zack himself was inducted as a member of the Forbes Technology Council — among numerous other accolades. Impressions was once described by Forbes as “a method of publishing that could help media properties to monetize their content more effectively.”
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About Impress3 Media, Impressions Holdings LLC: Impressions Holdings is a diversified company which owns businesses in a variety of industries, specifically software & media creation.
Sophia Li
Founder & CEO of ClearMob
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About ClearMob: ClearMob is an innovative mobile startup focused on delivering efficiency, transparency and performance for digital marketers
Mike Chang
Co-Founder CEO of Calltend
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About Calltend, OJO Labs: Lead Generation, Lead Conversion Platform
Jerome Naidoo
CEO, Founder of THINK thenlive
Jerome Naidoo’s entrepreneurial mindset and the technological knowhow to envision new ideas and steer them from concept to delivery have been nurtured and refined through a multi-disciplined approach to business. Equipped with a big picture vision and a sharp eye for detail, Jerome transforms business concepts from ideas to reality — accommodating budget limitations, tight time frameworks, and critical business image. His career has spanned the successful development of four thriving start-up companies across four diverse industries, with two emerging from out-of-the box thinking and a creative approach to problem solving, need, and demand. Jerome has more than 15 years in the technology and startup space, with an extensive background in physics, computer science, and business development. Jerome founded THINKthenlive (beta: Saybubble) in 2014 and has invested more than two years of his time in personally developing its revolutionary AI architecture based on Python — the same AI software used by Amazon and Netflix. Not only has Jerome created this technology from the ground up, he also singlehandedly manages all facets of the company. From recruiting employees, training staff, and leading team meetings to assisting in the development of the app, building the website, and creating stunning graphics, Jerome successfully executes all of these duties. Before founding THINKthenlive, Jerome was the CEO of Solarworld WA — the fastest growing solar company in Western Australia. In 2013, Jerome led the company to produce a turnover of $2 million dollars in the first year of trading. At Solarworld WA, Jerome supported the local community by focusing on hiring local employees instead of outsourcing the work to offshore call centers. From 2010 to 2013, Jerome was the CEO and Managing Director of FBM R9 Building Material — the world’s strongest insulated building material. At FBM, Jerome was responsible for inventing the industry-changing building material. He used his extensive structural engineering, chemical engineering, and building knowledge to invent, design, test, and certify the product for the building industry. Jerome demonstrated his ability to build strong relationships and develop new partnership and business opportunities in his work at FBM. Jerome’s first startup venture was in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa in 2004 where he was the CEO and Managing Director of KZN Supastraight Panel and Paint. KZN modified factory-produced automobiles to add custom finishes while still maintaining warranty for their customers. This business was centered on a community-focused business model that enabled weekly food and milk donations to be made to homeless children living in the community. Jerome began his professional career as a Computer Network Technician with IPEX Information Technology Group (IPEX ITG) in 2001. IPEX ITG was Australia’s largest Australian-owned Information Technology Computer Systems Company, with 800 staff located worldwide. Jerome left this company to start his own business as a contractor in the Education sector, where IPEX ITG contracted him in 2002. Jerome has a proven track record of startup success, utilizing his entrepreneurial mindset, engineering knowledge, and marketing strategy to take new ideas to market, refine them through a multi-disciplined approach, and steer them from concept to delivery. Over the span of his career, he has proved that his vast skillset and his drive to succeed produces tangible results.
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About THINK thenlive: Location-based social media
Amir Manji
Co-Founder & Head Barista of Tenjin
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About Tenjin: Tenjin brings transparency and insight into your mobile marketing.
Santiago Ortiz
Founder, Chief Data Officer and Senior Interactive Designer of DrumWave
Santiago Ortiz is the Senior Interactive Designer at DrumWave.
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About DrumWave, Moebio Labs, RedDrummer: Data platform focused on monetization and powered by extreme data-value engineering and visualization.
Jenny Wolfram
Chief Executive Officer & Founder of Brandbastion
Jenny Wolfram is the CEO and Founder of Brandbastion, a company that protects companies’ ad performance, brand reputation and intellectual property rights on social media 24/7. The company has developed a proprietary machine learning natural language processing software that enables it to process millions of pieces of content in real time with 99.87% accuracy 24/7. BrandBastion serves governments and Fortune 500 companies across North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia and was recognised as one of 20 most promising start-ups in Finland (Talouselama 2016). Jenny has also been recognized as one of the top 100 female founders in Europe. The company is backed for example by Marten Mickos, Risto Siilasmaa, John Wattin and MOOR Capital.
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About Brandbastion: Real-time protection of brand reputation and ad performance on social media.
Hubert Lamela
Co-Founder of Biveo
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About Biveo, Coinbase: Business Video Production Directory and Guide
Pawan J. Mehra
Founder and President of Améredia
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About Améredia, Foreign Startups, Founder Institute, FWD.us, OneValley, The Refiners: Améredia enables multicultural marketing communications for global brands across U.S. and international markets.
Mario Martinez
CEO, Founder and Modern Sales Evangelist | Social Selling Training | Digital Sales Training of Vengreso
Mario is the CEO and Founder of Vengreso, a Keynote Speaker, Sales expert, and a Digital Sales Evangelist. In 2017, he was named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Inside Sales Professionals, the 6th most influential Social Selling Leader and the Number 1 Online Sales Guru in the world. Mario teaches marketers, sales leaders, reps, and business owners how to grow company revenues, develop an engaging personal brand, and attract today’s modern buyer using social networks and the digital sales ecosystem. He spent the last 79 consecutive quarters in Sales and Leadership, growing and managing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales revenue in the Global, Enterprise, Commercial, SMB and Public Sector segments. As a sought-after Professional Speaker, he has spoken to crowds of up to 20,000 listeners, has been featured in Forbes, INC., the Examiner.com, is a contributor to the Huffington Post, Social Media Today, Business 2 Community and has been asked to speak by brands such as LinkedIn, SAP, and Cisco to name a few.
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About Hubspot Academy, Vengreso, Vengreso, Vengreso: Vengreso is the only full spectrum service provider of digital sales transformation, enabling marketing and sales alignment.
Doug Stevenson
Co-Founder & CEO of Vibrant Media
Doug served as the CEO and co-founder of Vibrant, leading the company’s expansion from when the company began operations in 2000 up until July 2011. Vibrant started in London and grew to over $100M in revenues as a global online business with over 6,500 premium publishers, 250 million unique users per month and 300 employees located in London, New York (HQ), Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hamburg, Munich and Dusseldorf. Doug was awarded ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ from Ernst and Young and was a Distinguished Honoree for the International Business Awards, Executive of the Year in North America. Prior to founding Vibrant, Doug worked at AOL Europe as Head of E-commerce and has twenty five years of publishing, media and Internet experience with AOL, CompuServe, Netscape, Haymarket Publishing and BBC Magazines/Redwood Publishing.
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About Quintesse, Vibrant Media: Vibrant Media is dedicated to contextual marketing, advertising, content marketing and digital media.
