Speakers
Aditya Agarwal
Aditya Agarwal is Vice President of Engineering at Dropbox. He oversees the different engineering teams including new product development, infrastructure, platform and operations. Aditya came to Dropbox via the acquisition of Cove, a company he co-founded that was focused on improving group collaboration and communication.
Prior to Cove, Aditya was the Director of Product Engineering at Facebook where he oversaw the development of core products such as News Feed, Search, Photos, Profile and Applications. Aditya was one of the first engineers at Facebook and played an important role in helping to design and build core parts of the Facebook engineering infrastructure.
Aditya holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Mariela Alfonzo
Bridging the worlds of academia and practice, Dr. Alfonzo is the Founder of State of Place, a data analytics platform that helps cities and social impact stakeholders make smarter planning, economic development, and investment decisions; the president of Urban Imprint, an urban design-behavior research and consulting firm; and an Assistant Research Professor at New York University, where she examines the links between the built environment and health in rapidly urbanizing Chinese cities.
An expert on the triple bottom line of urban design, Dr. Alfonzo focuses on how the relationship between the built environment and behavior impacts health, broadly defined to include physical, mental, social, community, environmental, and fiscal health, within the context of neighborhood revitalization. Dr. Alfonzo was awarded a Fulbright to examine walkability in China in the Fall of 2013, where she focused on the socio-cultural and policy challenges to implementing walkable development. Dr. Alfonzo has a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning with an emphasis on Urban Design and Behavior, as well as a professional Masters in Urban Planning, from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Psychology from the University of Miami.
Sheena Allen
Sheena Allen, 25, founded Sheena Allen Apps as a senior at the University of Southern Mississippi. Since then, she has built the company, as a single founder, to 6 apps and over 2 million downloads.
Cindy Alvarez
Cindy Alvarez is the author of Lean Customer Development: How to Build Products Your Customers Will Buy. She heads up product design and user research for Yammer, a Microsoft company. People trust her because she has a psychology degree from Harvard University, but her most valuable skills were honed working in tech support and posting on usenet.
Cindy has been using customer development techniques for well over a decade, across a variety of roles and organization sizes. She hates that alleged Henry Ford quote “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would’ve said ‘a faster horse’.”
She’s @cindyalvarez on twitter and blogs at http://www.cindyalvarez.com.
Dominique Aubry
Dominique Aubry, Principal of Beyond Expectations LLC., co-founder of Jubilee Healthy Snacks and Managing Director of Impact Hub Philadelphia brings a mix of entrepreneurial, educational, governmental, and non-profit experience to the Lean Startup space.
Dominique has worked as a lean practitioner providing training and services to the start-up, non-profit, social good and government sector through her work with Lean Startup Machine and Lean Impact. Her prior professional experience includes Director of Strategy, Talent and Operations for Teach for America, Facilities Contract Manager at the School District of Philadelphia, and Assistant Managing Director for the Mayor’s Office of Leadership Investment for the City of Philadelphia.
Dominique holds a B.A. in Political Science from Lehigh University and a Master Degree in Science Policy Planning & Evaluation and Education Policy from the University of Pennsylvania.
Melissa Bell
Melissa Bell co-founded Vox.com in early 2014 and became the first person at Vox Media to hold both a technology and editorial title as Senior Product Manager and Executive Editor for Vox.com. Prior to Vox, Melissa oversaw digital platforms at the Washington Post. She was also one of The Post’s most-read bloggers and a columnist for the Style section. Before joining The Post, she helped launch Mint, a Wall Street Journal subsidiary in India, where she lived for four years. She hails from San Diego, California and makes a mean banana-and-cheese quesadilla.
Tiffani Bell
Tiffani Ashley Bell pursues better living through software. She is the co-founder of the Detroit Water Project, a platform that matches donors from around the world and (currently) people in Detroit needing assistance with water bills to provide financial relief through direct payments from donors to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department on behalf of residents. Since its founding in late July 2014, the platform has paid out over $150,000 in payments to help over 1,200 residents based on $600,000 in pledges.
She is also a 2014 Code for America Fellow working with the City of Atlanta, GA. She was previously the CEO + founder of Pencil You In, enabling businesses as far away as Australia to operate more efficiently by accepting appointments online. Tiffani is a front and back-end developer working primarily with Ruby on Rails and iOS. Tiffani holds a BS in Computer Science from Howard University.
Adam Berk
Adam started one of the first sharing economy companies www.neighborrow.com and made pretty much every decision wrong. He and his cofounder went through a leantervention and Adam has been running experiments ever since.
A lean entrepreneur and lean teacher, Adam now travels the world mentoring, teaching and consulting at places like KauffmanLabs, TechPeaks, Bizdom, Etohum, TurkishWIN, FastForward Ramallah, AOL, ESPN, NEWSCORP, AMEX.
He helps teams design and run experiments and his first question is always, “What problem are you solving.”
Blair Beverly
Blair is really interested in what it takes to build highly effective organizations. For a few years, he thought he wanted to study them full time as an academic, so he left his job at Google to work on a PhD in Management and Organizations at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Realizing how difficult it was to sit on the sidelines and merely observe and think about people doing work without participating himself, he left his program with a master’s degree and rejoined Google.
He’s currently happily getting his hands dirty again, managing a small data team in Google AdSense’s sales and marketing group. Nonetheless, Blair still appreciates the theory-building and empirical methods he learned while training to be a researcher, which is probably why Lean Startup is so appealing to him.
David Binetti
David is a repeat entrepreneur, having founded or served on the founding team of six startups including Votizen (acquired by Causes.com), USA.gov (USA Today Site of the Year 2000), ArchRock (acquired by Cisco) and QFN (Intuit.com). He is a long-time member of the Lean Startup movement and has helped develop and promote many of its core concepts. He currently is focused on extending the Lean Startup approach to Fortune 500 companies with a particular emphasis on Innovation Accounting.
Rachman Blake
Rachman Blake is the co-founder of AppHeroes a tech recruiting company that connects startups with mobile app developers through live events that use humor. Realizing that humor and business go together like chocolate and peanut butter Rachman co-founded FunnyBizz, which is dedicated to making web content more compelling. Rachman helps organize the FunnyBizz Conference, a bi-annual gathering to expand customer bases and enjoy hotel conference buffets.
Businesses who want to connect with customers realize humor is a fast, effective way to do so. Rachman co-created FunnyBizz writes, a platform to help funny-ize, de-bore and de-snore all manner of electronic copy from website content to press releases and more.
A graduate of Princeton, Rachman is also a marathon runner despite not being Kenyan. He is from New Jersey, which is close.
Jeff Boodie
Jeff was born and raised in New York City. At 17 he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur when he began selling candy in High School at a 50% margin from the wholesale purchase price; selling assorted candy filled in a need that his peers weren’t getting from cafeteria lunch food. He had found his first disruption. What started out as a business to raise money for Senior Dues, turned into a booming business to pay for college books and expenses. Jeff studied Biology and was pre-med in college. Even though he loved science, he knew his life was going to take him on a different path. He started his career after college working for Oprah Winfrey managing her financials and overall business on O, Magazine with interactions on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and Oprah.com. He worked directly with General Manager Nancy Denholtz analyzing budgets of 200 million dollars and pricing ads. Preparing finance reports, reviewing numbers, and maintained the financial system for advertising prices. After 3 years at Oprah, Jeff went on to work at DreamWorks Animation as a recruiter, hiring entry-level positions of artists and junior technical directors. Jeff was a founding team member of the Start-up Intern Sushi. He recruited hundreds of companies year one engaging with the biggest brands across the U.S. on the platform. After Intern Sushi, Jeff went on to co-found JobSnap where he is currently changing how people tell their story via a 30 second video, he believes that there is disruption needed in the story telling department when it comes to hiring Gen Z candidates with social responsibility implemented.
Laura Busche
Laura has implemented The Lean Startup methodology with more than 150 entrepreneurs and their 90+ internet-based startups. Being a digital marketing mentor for Colombia’s IT Ministry and its Apps.co program — based entirely on The Lean Startup and the Business Model Canvas — has given her a unique insight to approach brand building for internet-based startups. In 2014 she compiled the lessons learned in her Lean Branding book, published by O’Reilly Media.
Laura graduated summa cum laude in Business Administration from the Kogod School of Business (American University), and completed a Master’s degree in Design Management (Savannah College of Art & Design, SCAD). She is currently completing her PhD dissertation in Consumer Psychology, sponsored by the Colombian Government’s Administrative Department for Science, Technology & Innovation (Colciencias). Laura regularly blogs about branding, design and business at leanbranding.com/blog. She co-founded a digital agency called Ozone Group in 2008. Busche is part of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers community. More at www.laurabusche.com.
Sean Butler
In private, Sean will eventually admit to being a licensed attorney, though not without some fear of ending up chained to the bottom of the ocean.
Growing up in Silicon Valley it was largely a foregone conclusion that he would end up in the technology industry, and as a former philosophy major who got tired of asking ‘would you like fries with that,’ becoming a technology lawyer seemed a logical choice (at the time, anyway).
Currently, Sean is the lead attorney for Cisco’s Cloud Networking Group—the former Meraki team—responsible for ensuring the business continues to scale at a break-neck pace while staying (mostly) out of trouble. Sean represented Meraki as outside counsel for five years before joining the team full-time as its first in-house attorney and subsequently helping to guide the company through its $1.2 billion acquisition by Cisco.
Before joining Meraki, Sean left the hallowed halls of Big Law and started his own gig as a contract GC for startups and entrepreneurs, where he got his first taste of what it means to be an entrepreneur himself. Sean began his legal career as a corporate/securities attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Zachary Cohn
Zac Cohn is Founder and CEO at Wonful Consulting, which works with enterprise companies, startup accelerators, and the State of Washington to teach them about customer development, lean startup, and other pre-Agile methodologies.
Zac has become an expert at teaching early stage product validation and customer development through similar work as a Partner at LIFFFT, and while working for Startup Weekend at their headquarters in Seattle.
When he’s not changing the world through entrepreneurship, he’s training parkour and doing backflips, traveling the world, and running events all over Seattle. He’s also co-author of a book: “Pre-Agile Methodologies: A Tactical Guide To Not Building The Best Wrong Thing.”
Stacy Conlon
Stacy Conlon is the founder and CEO of The Zen Media Group, a strategic digital marketing consulting firm based in Northern California serving the spa and wellness industries. Known as “The Zen Girl” in the social media world, Stacy has 14 years of experience in spa and hospitality sales and marketing, and is also a Certified Wellness Coach.
Cheryl Contee
Cheryl Contee, CEO at Fission Strategy and co-founder of Attentive.ly, specializes in helping non-profit organizations and foundations use social media to create social good. She was also the co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics writing as “Jill Tubman” on one of the top black blogs online. Cheryl was recently named as an Affiliate of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Cheryl is included in The Root 100 list of established and emerging African-American leaders. Huffington Post listed her as one of the Top 27 Female Founders in Tech to Follow on Twitter in 2011 as did Black Enterprise. Fast Company named her one of their 2010 Most Influential Women in Tech. She has over 15 years of award-winning interactive expertise and previously served as Vice President and lead digital strategist for Fleishman-Hillard’s West Coast region in San Francisco.
Cheryl has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, San Francisco Magazine, C-Span, Black Enterprise, BBC, Current TV, MSNBC and CNN, among other media appearances. She is also proud to serve on several boards and advisory committees: Netroots Nation, BlogHer, Focus100/Digital Undivided, Guttmacher Institute, Citizen Engagement Lab and Public Radio International. She received her B.A. from Yale University and has an International Executive M.B.A. from Georgetown University. In her spare time, Ms. Contee enjoys hiking, yoga, movies and tai chi sword.
Brant Cooper
Brant Cooper helps organizations big and small innovate. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, The Lean Entrepreneur, and is a sought after speaker, startup advisor and mentor.
He has over 16 years experience helping companies bring innovative products to market. His startup career includes Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, inCode, and many others. He has experienced IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure.
Brant previously authored The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, the first purpose-written book to discuss Lean Startup and Customer Development concepts. He has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs across the globe.
Brant is the Co-Founder of Moves the Needle Group, which has advised the innovation practices of such leading companies as Qualcomm, Intuit, Capital One, Pitney Bowes and Hewlett-Packard.
Alistair Croll
Alistair is an entrepreneur, author, and startup accelerator. He has launched several companies, including Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011) and a number of technology conferences such as Cloud Connect, O’Reilly Strata, Bitnorth, the Enterprise Cloud Summit, and the International Startup Festival.
Alistair is the author of four books on technology and business, including the best-selling Lean Analytics, much of which is based on his experience running the Year One Labs accelerator in Montreal.
Today, he works on research and strategy at CloudOps; blogs at Solve For Interesting; and spends much of his time trying to walk the line between data-driven decision-making and leaps of faith. His latest project, Tilt The Windmill, looks at how intrapreneurs produce change in large organizations.
Holly DeWolf
Holly is a user experience research and design expert. After 6 years of systems and usability engineering at Lockheed Martin, Holly decided to go out on her own. She runs her consulting business from Stuttgart, Germany and helps clients understand and connect with users from around the world.
Holly started her career as a weather officer, and quickly learned that forecasting the weather was too final for her, she enjoys a more iterative process. After transitioning to engineering and attaining her master’s degree in Human Factors in Information Design she was able to pursue her passion of discovering what makes people tick and learning how to bring more joy to their day with a user experience tailored to them. In Holly’s eyes, from the simplest task (like an easy to find “submit” button), to a beautifully designed beginning to end customer experience; great user research and design is her contribution to making the world a better place.
William Donnell
William is founder and lead “designtist” of experience design firm Sodium Halogen. Over the past 12 years, William’s distributed team has worked remotely with startups from San Francisco to DC, as well as with established companies such as Chick-fil-A and Mars Pets, to create amazing brand experiences for the web and mobile with their “Designtific Method.”
William created a workshop with the smart folks at LUXr.co on remote collaboration, and he is passionate about teamwork and the technology that allows people to work together, even when they are are apart.
Steli Efti
Steli Efti is the co-founder and CEO of Close.io and ElasticSales. He’s a Y Combinator alumni, an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs and the author of “The Ultimate Startup Guide To Outbound Sales.”
Jana Eggers
Jana is a tech exec focused on products and the messages surrounding them. She’s started and grown companies, as well as led large organizations within big companies. She supports, subscribes, and contributes to customer-inspired innovation, systems thinking, lean analytics, and the Autonomy/Mastery/Purpose-style leadership.
Jana is the President of neuroscience-based artificial intelligence company, Nara Logics. Her software and technology experience comes from technology and executive positions at Intuit, Blackbaud (software for nonprofits), Basis Technology (internationalization technology), Lycos, American Airline’s Sabre (decision support systems for logistics), Los Alamos National Laboratory (computational chemistry and supercomputing), Spreadshirt (customized apparel platform & ecomm), and acquired startups that you’ve never heard of.
Ame Elliott
Ame has fifteen years experience finding insights that drive design and creating delightful products. She’s a Senior Project Leader and Design Research Community Lead for IDEO San Francisco, where she’s worked on everything from ATM machines to drinking water delivery systems for India. Ame’s portfolio spans multiple phases: from initial need-finding and strategy, through prototyping, implementing, and evaluating. She led a multi-disciplinary team for Gannett resulting in the launch of The Bold Italic, a groundbreaking community journalism website that won awards from AIGA, IDEA, SF Weekly and the Webby awards. She led the IDEO team that created the Innovator’s Accelerator, an online social learning platform taught by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, and Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University.
Prior to joining IDEO in 2007, Ame was a Research Scientist in the Computing Science Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly known as Xerox PARC), and at Ricoh Innovations where she focused on ubiquitous computing applications and shared media. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley for her work developing hybrid physical-digital interactions to support the architectural design process and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University Colorado, Boulder.
Kevin Ellsworth
Kevin is the Product Manager at Cirris Systems, a company which designs and manufactures test equipment for electrical cable assembly shops. In addition to customer development work, he also directs much of the marketing work for Cirris. He began at Cirris in the engineering department where he found many questions about customer behavior went unanswered. Discovering Lean Startup ideas helped him realize there was a better way to make design decisions. He is now working to help transform the development and marketing processes at Cirris into a more market driven approach to ensure they are creating products people love.
With an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kevin may seem an odd fit to end up in product management and marketing. However, he feels this is where he can make the most impact right now. Though there have been challenges in implementing Lean Startup principles in a long standing B2B manufacturing company, Kevin strongly believes these concepts can be applied to any organization.
John Paul Farmer
John Paul Farmer is the Director of Microsoft’s Technology & Civic Innovation group, based in New York City. In this role, he leads engagements with civic leaders and the grassroots community to drive meaningful change through the creative application of technology. Previously, John served as the Senior Advisor for Innovation in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under President Barack Obama, where he spearheaded the President’s innovation agenda and infused Lean Startup into the public sector. John co-founded and led the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which attracts top innovators and entrepreneurs from the private sector for focused tours of duty in government, in order to make game-changing progress on projects of national importance in months, not years. Earlier in his career, he focused on healthcare and finance, co-founding new business units and taking them from zero to one. John also played professional baseball as a shortstop in the Los Angeles Dodgers and Atlanta Braves minor league systems, compiling a .344 career batting average. He holds an MBA with honors from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University and an AB with honors from Harvard University.
Mark Ferlatte
Mark Ferlatte is a co-founder of Tetherpad, a software company that builds software products for large public healthcare projects, Fortune 500 clients, and individual mobile workers. He was a member of the tech surge that saved healthcare.gov. Prior to Tetherpad, he pioneered many modern DevOps and cloud computing techniques at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life. He cares about quality software engineering, being mindful of time and attention, and delicious whiskey.
Janice Fraser
Janice is one of America’s leading experts on Lean Startup, having advised the founders of many successful companies including Task Rabbit, Lyft, and Sharethrough. She has trained The White House administration staff on innovation techniques, and her workshops have been sold out around the world. Janice is a serial entrepreneur and an interaction designer. At Pivotal Labs (and before that at her own company Luxr) Janice provides innovation support to corporations, government, and hundreds of startups. Janice is a frequent keynote speaker at startup conferences around the world and leading business schools, including Kellogg and Haas.
Anthony Frasier
Anthony Frasier is best known for being one of the savvy founders of The Phat Startup, an integrated media company that produces resources for aspiring entrepreneurs. By leveraging Lean Startup methodology and drawing on the connections between entrepreneurship and hip hop, you can credit Frasier and his team for successfully selling out events to speaker series that highlight some of the best minds in business. His work has been featured on hit media outlets and documentaries such as Black Enterprise, Black Entertainment Television (BET), Black In America (CNN), CNN Money, and NBC’s The Grio. He has been invited to speak for leading brands in the tech space, which include Penny Arcade Expo, Lean Startup Conference, SXSW, and the Greater Newark Enterprises Corporation.
A serial entrepreneur, Frasier was the creator of a mobile startup called Playd and established an award-winning gaming site called The Koalition. As a freelance consultant, he advises, consults and coaches startups and small businesses on their product visions, business development efforts and social and digital media initiatives to propel their endeavors forward.
Outside of his work in the startup and entrepreneurial scene, you can find him actively involved in promoting a positive community impact for aspiring tech entrepreneurs in Newark, New Jersey as the creator of BrickCity Tech. His philanthropic initiatives have been recognized by the Business Outreach Center, where he was granted the Award for Entrepreneurship and Community Impact in 2012.
Christie George
Christie George is the Director of New Media Ventures, the first national network of angel investors supporting media and tech startups that disrupt politics and catalyze progressive change. At New Media Ventures, she has overseen the investment of over $4m into a portfolio of non-profits and for profits, including NationalField, Sum of Us, and Upworthy.
Christie’s work centers on fostering an independent, vibrant, and diverse media sector. She has spent her career supporting individuals and institutions that are making media that matters — from independent filmmakers documenting powerful stories to social entrepreneurs disrupting the way media is created, distributed and promoted.
George started her career at a venture capital firm, spent six years managing sales and marketing for Women Make Movies, the world’s leading distributor of films by and about women, and is a co-founder of Louder, the crowd-promotion platform for ideas that matter. She serves on the board of the Roosevelt Institute and was recently named a Social Citizen Ambassador by the Case Foundation.
George holds a MBA from Yale University and a MBA with distinction from the University of Oxford, where she was a Skoll Scholar in Social Entrepreneurship and graduated with the Said Prize, awarded annually to the program’s top student. She lives in San Francisco and is a proud co-owner of the Rio Theater in Monte Rio, CA.
Lauren Gilchrist
Lauren has been building software and companies for almost 10 years. She is currently a Product Manager at Pivotal Labs, an agile software development consultancy. Prior to Pivotal, she ran product at several startups, including MamasLatinas, Yipit, and Urgent Career. Lauren is the co-founder of Hack’n Jill, which advocates for diversity by organizing 50:50 male:female hackathons.
Jocelyn Goldfein
Ex-Facebook Engineering Director Jocelyn Goldfein is a freelance angel investor, startup advisor, and industry spokesperson. At Facebook, she led new product development for News Feed and Photos before taking point on executing Facebook’s pivot to native mobile app development.
Prior to Facebook, she helped build VMware from a small software company to an industry titan and co-founded enterprise software startup MessageOne. Jocelyn studied computer science at Stanford University.
Bill Gross
Bill Gross is an incurable entrepreneur who has been starting businesses since he was 15 years old. In the last 40 years, he has started more than 100 companies, resulting in more than 45 successful IPO’s and acquisitions including Overture, eToys, CarsDirect, Cooking.com, CitySearch, Picasa, and Evolution Robotics.
Bill is the Founder and CEO of Idealab, a “company factory” based in Pasadena, California, which he started in 1996. Idealab is the longest-running technology incubator, focusing on world-changing technologies including search, ecommerce, robotics, renewable energy, and mobile monetization.
Idealab companies are based on ideas that challenge the status quo, and change the way people think, live, and work. Idealab provides a full range of resources to infuse startup companies with the development strategies and financial support needed to rapidly introduce innovative products and services.
Bill currently serves on the boards of numerous companies in the areas of automation, software, and renewable energy. In addition, he serves as a Trustee on the Board of Directors at the Art Center College of Design and his alma mater, the California Institute of Technology, where he graduated with an engineering degree in 1981.
Bill Grundfest
Golden Globe Award winning writer-producer Bill Grundfest has created content – and consulted on content creation – for projects which have been seen by many millions of humans, ranging from hit TV sitcoms numerous Academy Award telecasts, and for companies including CBS, NBC, ABC, HBO, Showtime, Sony, Paramount, Nickelodeon, and Comedy Central. As you can see his work has appealed to the widest range of audiences from kids and family to sophisticated/adult to edgy. He is also content advisor to a high-tech Silicon Valley company (Timeful). He’s the founder of NYC’s Comedy Cellar, where he discovered folks like Jon Stewart, Louie CK and Ray Romano. His workshop – “Content” – leverages Lean Start Up methods to reveal the “secret sauce” of how Hollywood creates massive amounts of content every day – and leaves attendees with actual work product – stories and plans for content that can be immediately acted upon. He lives in Los Angeles, where his wife and kids seem relieved to have him in San Francisco.
Hillary Hartley
Hillary Hartley is co-founder and lead creative at 18F, a digital services agency inside the General Services Administration. She came to the GSA as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2013, where she worked on the development of MyUSA.gov. Hillary has been working to make government more accessible and available online for nearly two decades, starting as a web designer for Arkansas.gov in 1997. As Director of Integrated Marketing for eGovernment provider NIC, Hillary helped NIC’s 30 state government partners embrace new technology and concepts for a 21st century government. She speaks at events across the country, educating and evangelizing “government 2.0” and customer service/community engagement best practices for government.
Hillary spends much of her free time on community-based movements such as BarCamp and Coworking, and has participated in or helped organize several government-focused unconferences: eDemocracyCamp, TranparencyCamp, Gov2.0Camp, CityCamp, etc. In 2008, after the passage of California’s Prop 8, she co-founded EqualityCamp – a pilot event bringing geeks who know the lessons of the web together with activists for marriage equality and LGBT equal rights. Her latest endeavor is Yes and Yes Yes (YxYY) – a summertime “geek retreat” in Palm Springs. The second annual event sold out in 48 hours and will bring more than 400 thinkers, futurists, nerds, and creatives together at the Ace Hotel for the ultimate experiment in planned serendipity.
Seppo Helava
Seppo Helava co-founded Self Aware Games. He focused on creating a company that valued its employees, never crunched, built things no one had ever made before, iterated fast, learned quickly, and most of all, where people loved coming to work. He was the lead designer on Taxiball, Word Ace, Fleck, and Card Ace: Casino (now Big Fish Casino), one of the highest-grossing apps of all time, and functioned as the General Manager of the studio.
He has been developing games since 2000. While at Electronic Arts/Maxis, he created a brand-new combinatorial food system for the Sims, and he led the development of numerous pitches & prototypes while at Factor 5.
He now provides independent consulting services specializing in system design & managing company culture, with a focus on deeply understanding the differences between developing AAA & mobile games, and why approaching mobile with an AAA mindset is a fatal mistake.
He hates “gamification”, loves building things with passionate collaborators, and thinks that there are no blanket answers to anything.
Seppo graduated from MIT with a B.S. In Mechanical Engineering, where he enjoyed building robots. He’s been a gamer since the days of the Commodore 64, and loves to cook.
Andrew Homeyer
Andrew Homeyer is an intrapreneur by day at Rally Software and an entrepreneur by night. He founded and leads Waffle.io inside Rally, but is equally proud of the lessons he’s learned from the many failed products he’s attempted. Catch him in the hallway if you want to talk about innovation inside enterprises, customer development for SaaS startups, or building great teams.
Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz is a co-founder and partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and the New York Times Bestselling author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP in 2007 for $1.6 billion, and was appointed vice president and general manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software at HP.
Earlier, he was vice president and general manager of America Online’s E-commerce Platform division, where he oversaw development of the company’s flagship [email protected] service. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications. He also served as vice president of Netscape’s widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. Before joining Netscape in July 1995, he held various senior product marketing positions at Lotus Development Corporation.
Ben has a BA in Computer Science from Columbia University and an MS in Computer Science from UCLA. He serves on the board of many companies including Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, Okta, Rap Genius and Tidemark.
Follow Ben on “Ben’s Blog” (www.bhorowitz.com), where he covers everything from how CEOs should hire executives to how to minimize politics in your company, and Twitter, @bhorowitz.
Ken Howard
Church creator, pastor, author, speaker, and ordained Episcopal clergyman, the Rev. Ken Howard has led, served on, or mentored the leadership teams of several church startups and turnarounds.
His current congregation is St. Nicholas Church, an Episcopal congregation he founded in 1995, and where he and the leadership have spent the last 18 years developing lean and experimental approaches to creating and sustaining Christian community.
He is the author of the book, “Paradoxy: Creating Christian Community Beyond Us and Them” (Paraclete Press, 2010), and has published articles on the future of the Church for Anglican Theological Review, Vital Practices (The Episcopal Church Foundation), Witness 6.7 (The Anglican Communion), and others, including his own blog, Paradoxical Thoughts. He has worked with a number of churches and dioceses on applying lean and experimental approaches in their own contexts. And he is currently working on his second book, with the working title, “Church-X: A Lean and Experimental Church for an Undiscovered Future.”
His presentation “Stealing from Startups: A Church Goes Lean” won the People’s Choice Award at the 2014 Lean for Social Good Summit in Washington, DC.
He describes his professional vision as “Seeking the transformation of the Church for its future while preserving the heart of the faith.”
Adam Josephs
Adam Josephs is a Partner at Celerity Consulting Group LLC. He has managed engineering projects and product organizations for over 20 years at Apple Computer, Microsoft and a variety of startups. He is currently the Managing Partner at Celerity Consulting Group which trains and coaches organizations all over the world. The focus of their work is to create high performance teams that accelerate innovation and product development. Adam has taught the subject at New York University, UC, Berkeley and at industry conferences. He is a graduate of Stanford University and is completing his Doctorate at Oxford University. Adam makes his home in San Francisco and is an active rugby player.
Susana Jurado
Susana is Innovation Manager and mentor at Telefonica R&D. In recent years she has been working in strategy, the last three years mainly focused on innovation. She is part of the team that defined the current Telefonica R&D seedbed innovation model, where Lean Startup is the cornerstone of the execution phase. In her role at Telefonica R&D she runs the innovation process, fosters conceptualization of new ideas to get high quality innovation proposals and mentors and assesses innovation projects.
She has co-authored, with Maria Olano, the Lean Elephants report, describing their experience and learnings of applying Lean Startup to innovation projects at Telefonica for more than two years. The application of Lean Startup at a large corporation is complex, but it definitely pays off, speeding up the innovation process and being able to do more with less, with a clear focus on market and customers. Susana lives in Madrid, Spain, and holds a MS in Telecommunication Engineering and an MBA from IE Business School.
Jim Kalbach
Jim Kalbach plays bass. He is currently a principal UX designer with Citrix. Jim holds a degree in music theory and composition from Rutgers University, where he also studied information science. A seasoned instructor, he has taught many courses, workshops and seminars on a variety of topics. Jim is the author of bestselling book Designing Web Navigation (O’Reilly, 2007). He blogs at www.experiencinginformation.com and tweets at @jimkalbach.
Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor is a pioneer of the personal computing industry. He is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the “killer application” which made the PC ubiquitous in business in the 1980s.
Mitch is the co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, which relentlessly pursues creative strategies to leverage tech for positive, progressive change. The Center works primarily with underrepresented communities and focuses on gap-closing endeavors.
Through Kapor Capital, he is active as a seed-stage information technology investor in social impact startups, especially in education, healthcare, and consumer finance.
As a board member and major funder of the Level Playing Field Institute, Mitch works to increase fairness in education and workplaces by closing opportunity gaps and removing barriers to success.
He was the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet, and founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, maker of the open source web browser Firefox.
Mitch’s investments include UUNET, Real Networks, Linden Lab, Uber, Twilio, and Asana.
Megan Kierstead
Megan uses a holistic, empathetic approach to help companies design and build technology that people really want to use. Her UX and product consultancy, Social Ergonomics, works primarily with early to mid stage startups in crafting integrated, innovative experiences for everyone. An expert in user research and design, Megan is particularly interested in creating inclusive technology that has reach beyond the usual Silicon Valley bubble.
Megan graduated in 2008 with B.A. in Computer Science and Political Science from Wellesley College and is wrapping up an M.S. from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Her free time is divided mainly between copious cooking/eating, nerding out as a birder, and hanging with her four ridiculous rabbits.
Laura Klein
Laura Klein helps startups learn more about their customers so they can build better products faster. Her career has spanned 15 years as an engineer and designer. Laura is also the author of UX for Lean Startups from the O’Reilly Lean Series, and creator of the popular design blog, Users Know.
During the day, Laura is a Mentor at Tradecraft where she helps train the next generation of UX Designers, and the VP Product at Hint Health where she’s trying to make healthcare affordable. In her spare time she pretends she has enough time to write another book.
Amanda Krantz
Amanda is the Founder and CEO of tech startup DohJe, whose app provides patients with a simple way to thank their nurses, doctors and other healthcare heroes. Major hospitals across the nation are recognizing the power of gratitude to improve staff morale and reduce attrition. Patients love using DohJe and caregivers love their DohJe gratitude lockers.
Prior to founding DohJe, Amanda used lean startup principles and creative partnerships to get products to market quickly in VC funded tech startups (Radar and KnowNow), large corporations (AOL & AT&T), and as a professional drummer in a touring rock band. Her life and product philosophy can be summed up as “Go as far as you can see. When you get there, you can see farther.”
She began her career as an Air Force Officer assigned to NASA. After sending a few satellites into space, she was selected to coach NCAA women’s tennis at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Amanda holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Kathryn Kuhn
Kathryn is a self-described Agile Evangelist and Chief Analogy Officer at Hewlett-Packard. Kathryn began her career at Accenture in Washington D.C., has done service work in Guatemala, moved her family to Singapore and now calls the San Francisco Bay Area home. Kathryn has been practicing Agile techniques in it’s various forms for about 11 years in large and small companies and holds several Agile certifications that are meant to impress people.
In her role at HP Kathryn works with teams that range from highly experimental teams in HP Labs to HP Server teams to Software Operations monitoring teams. Kathryn hopes to be a disruptive force for anyone who thinks that the way we develop products is just fine.
Ellynita Hazlina Lamin
Ellynita Hazlina Lamin is an impact practitioner for economic growth in underserved communities around South Asia. She is committed to sustainable pro-poor development through an integrated approach of business, arts and science.
From developing interactive knowledge management and research application to a nationally recognised technology funding agency, she has enjoyed 15-year experience in the exciting and challenging environment of startup communities in Southeast Asia.
As the former Lead Founder and Chairperson for Social Enterprise Alliance Malaysia, Ellynita continuously advocates collaborative environment to help enterprises bring about social change for disadvantaged communities.
Having been a college drop-out and diagnosed in 2008 with nasal cancer, she believes in facilitating second chances. Her dream is for all to move beyond tolerance towards one another but to understand and accept each other beyond biases. She aspires to see the lives we all touch, in some way – no matter big or small – begin to impact the lives of others.
Julie Lorch
Julie is the Head of User Experience at DoSomething.org and a published author on topics relating to millennials & tech. With nearly 3 million members, DoSomething.org is one of the largest organizations for young people and social change. Julie spends most of her day drawing flowcharts for software products that support young people making an impact on their communities. She also brews a mean pourover.
Gabe Luna-Ostaseski
As a founder, operator, advisor and angel investor, Gabe has helped numerous companies launch, navigate growth and scale. Since early 2014 Upshift’s first 5 graduates have raised over $215m in follow on funding. Before starting Upshift, Gabe led Co-Founded CalFinder Group and bootstrapped sales to $20m in sales. Calfinder continues to be one of the fastest growing marketplaces in home services. Prior to Calfinder Gabe sold his first company at 21 years old. Gabe serves on the boards of Calfinder and Metta Institute. In addition to investing and helping founders scale sales he is also actively involved in incubating additional businesses.
Sam McAfee
Sam McAfee is a Principal at Neo, where he provides advising in Agile and Lean practice, leads product validation project teams, and helps oversee the engineering team with a particular focus on data and analytics, and scaling. Before coming to Neo, Sam worked variously as a consultant, and as a leader of consumer-facing web product teams. He co-founded a web development agency in 2002, which he ran for a decade before joining Change.org as the Director of Web Engineering in 2012, and then serving as VP of Engineering for Luxr in 2013.
Dan McKinley
After starting his career in finance, Dan McKinley freaked out and moved to Brooklyn. He stumbled into a fledgling Etsy.com in 2007, and spent his first years there trying to stop overwhelming traffic from reducing the site to its constituent elements. In the long summer that followed he worked on activity feeds, search, recommendations, experimentation, and analytics.
In early 2014 Dan amicably left Etsy to start Radico with some of his colleagues. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.
Drew McManus
Drew McManus is a technology product executive and an advisor to startups.
As VP of Product for Pivotal Labs, Drew is responsible for Design and Product Management, helping clients define, design, and deliver customer software applications while also transforming their software teams.
Drew was previously the principal and founder of Road 3, a consultancy dedicated to helping turn ideas into successful products. Road 3 worked with a wide variety of clients–from two-founder startups to Fortune 100 companies, including AT&T and HP. After a long and successful strategic partnership, Road 3 was acquired by Pivotal Labs in the Summer of 2012.
In 2007, Drew co-founded Bring Light, a web service to help nonprofits reach new donors and raise funds online. Bring Light was acquired in 2011 by Rally.org, a social fundraising platform.
Drew’s 25-year career in software also included stints at Adobe Systems, Apple, and Apple’s software subsidiary, Claris Corporation (now Filemaker Inc.).
As a representative of many men and women who help make a difference in the world, Drew is featured in the book We Are the New Radicals: A Manifesto for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World by Julia Moulden.
Phil Metz
Phil Metz, PhD
Delivering Breakthrough Innovation Results
In today’s uber-networked world, disruption of established industries is unprecedented. Breakthrough innovation is paramount for incumbents and new entrants alike.
As Co-founder and Top Dog at SingingDog, Phil is passionate about delivering breakthrough innovation results. He works with companies struggling to deliver breakthrough innovation – new products, services or new businesses. He helps them tailor the innovation approach that’s best for their company, get it established across the enterprise, deliver value to customers, and grow.
Recently, working with Brant Cooper, Co-founder at Moves the Needle, Phil has published a popular whitepaper, Lean Startup Innovation for Large Enterprises – What You Need to Know. This whitepaper addresses why breakthrough innovation is increasingly critical for large enterprises, how Lean Startup Innovation can help, and what it takes to implement in a large company.
With over 24 years of executive-level experience, both in industry as VP Marketing and in consulting as Director, Phil has focused throughout his career on innovation management, product and service development, strategy, marketing and creation of new businesses. Phil has an MBA in General Management and a PhD in physics.
Dan Milstein
Dan Milstein is a co-founder at Hut 8 Labs, a software consulting shop in Boston. He’s worked as a programmer, architect, team lead and product manager at a variety of startups over the last 15 years.
A bunch of years back, during one of those post-yet-another-failure periods when one is thinking, “OMG there has to be a better way,” he happened upon Eric Ries’s Lessons Learned blog. He has found the set of ideas laid out therein very much worth wrestling with, ever since.
Sarah Milstein
Sarah Milstein is CEO and co-founder, with Eric Ries, of Lean Startup Productions, a media company that teaches people how to build and scale high-growth startups. She is also co-author, with Tim O’Reilly, of The Twitter Book, and she writes regularly about race, gender and merit-based decision making. Her career has spanned the tech and media sectors, including hosting influential conferences like Web 2.0 Expo and Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC). During the first wave of the commercial Internet, she was a regular freelance contributor to The New York Times, among other outlets. Before that, she founded Just Food’s CSA in NYC program and helped children’s musician Laurie Berkner launch her record label. She blogs at DogsAndShoes.com, contributes to other sites, and splits her time between New York and San Francisco. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a BA from Rutgers University. Bonus fact: She was the 21st user of Twitter.
Joanne Molesky
Joanne works for ThoughtWorks, a global company that provides software delivery, pioneering tools and consulting for organizations with ambitious missions for the use of technology. Joanne’s professional passion is to find practical ways within organizations to provide enough control to give visibility and transparency into what is happening without bogging teams down in unnecessary activities that waste resources. She has worked many years in the trenches of IT – as a business analyst, technical writer, quality assurance analyst and a GRC analyst – for both startups and enterprise organizations. She is co-author (with Jez Humble and Barry O’reilly) of “The Lean Enterprise”, which is part of the Eric Reis’ Lean Startup series published by O’Reilly books.
Hugh Molotsi
Hugh Molotsi is the Vice President of the Intuit Labs Incubator at Intuit. Hugh joined Intuit in 1993 and in his tenure has worked on QuickBooks and several other small business offerings. Hugh has a passion for innovation and has helped launch several new businesses at Intuit including Intuit Payments. Hugh’s current responsibilities involve incubating nascent offerings that develop out of Intuit’s grassroots innovation programs including strategic new businesses like Brainstorm.
Outside work, Hugh is committed to helping underserved youth. He’s on the financial advisory board of #YesWeCode, an initiative to teach low-opportunity youth how to code. He is also the past president of the Board of Directors of Fresh Lifelines for Youth, a nonprofit agency that runs programs for at-risk youth.
Hugh holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University and a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Engineering Technology from the University of Southern Mississippi. Hugh is married to Michelle and is the proud father of two daughters.
Florian Motlik
Flo is the co-founder and CTO of Codeship, a Continuous Delivery service. There he works with many different teams daily to make sure they iterate quickly and are as productive as possible.
He’s from Vienna, Austria, and holds a BSc from UT Vienna. When not working he can be typically found hunting for the best dessert places in town.
Cory Nelson
Cory Nelson is Sr. Executive, Product Management, GE Distributed Power, and leads a large development program.
Cory began his career as a Research Engineer with Allis-Chalmers Corp. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1981. He joined the Waukesha Engine Division of Dresser Industries as an Application Engineer in 1985 and moved through roles in marketing, sales, operations and engineering, ultimately holding the titles of VP-Mfg and VP-Engr. In 1999, he moved to Houston, TX to become the VP-Mfg, Americas, for the Dresser Valve Division, with responsibility for ten plants from Canada to Brazil.
In 2004, Cory joined GE Energy as the Global Marketing Leader for Aero Energy. He was appointed General Manager, LM6000 Product Line in 2006, and added the LM2500 in 2011. He won Power & Water Leadership Awards in 2009 and 2012 for product line competitiveness. He assumed his current position in February, 2012.
Cory holds a BS degree in Agricultural Engineering from North Dakota State University and a MS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Marquette University.
Cory and his wife, LaRae, have two adult children and reside in Missouri City, TX.
Greg Nelson
Greg has worked at Hudl for more than four years, moving from Support Specialist to QA Analyst, to a Project Manager with serious drive behind gathering user feedback. During this time, Hudl has grown to help over 15,000 high schools and colleges win using video and data. It probably doesn’t hurt that he’s a user himself. He worked with the University of Nebraska football team before joining high school staffs around Lincoln, and kicks off his first season as head coach this fall.
As a project manager on the Hudl Product Team, Greg’s done his share of finding creative ways to generate meaningful user feedback while building new features such as Playbook and Recruit.
Find @GregJNelson on Twitter for product thoughts, football insights, and Oklahoma City Thunder love.
Anita Newton
Anita Bajaj Newton has spent the last 20 years helping marketing organizations both large (P&G, Sprint) and small (Zave Networks, acquired by Google) grow. She currently runs marketing at startup Mighty Green Solutions, a CPG company that makes eco-friendly products and improves the customer shopping experience.
Anita is also the VP of marketing at Adknowledge, a global ad tech company focused on helping demanding clients get the best ROI from their digital marketing spend.
She teaches marketing through the Kauffman Foundation’s Founders School and FastTrac’s Venture Program. She also coaches FLL Robotics and is a contributing editor at Inc.com.
Anita lives in Kansas City with her husband, two children and (perhaps the favorite member of her household?) her puppy Scout.
Grace Ng
Grace Ng is the Co-Founder of Javelin.com, the leading provider of software and services to implement Lean Startup. Since its launch in 2010, Javelin’s educational workshop, Lean Startup Machine, has expanded to over 150 cities around the world, helping entrepreneurs and innovation teams launch hundreds of successful new businesses.
Grace has trained thousands of entrepreneurs and coached executives from companies like GE, American Express, and ESPN, to help them integrate a process of rapid experimentation. In 2014, Javelin launched its software tool, QuickMVP, to help anyone test the viability of any idea in 5 minutes.
María Olano
María works as Innovation Manager and Lean Startup mentor at Telefónica R&D in Barcelona. During the last three years she has been part of the team which has designed and implemented a pioneer innovation framework. One of the essential pieces of that program is the roll out of Lean Startup methodologies.
To share the learnings and the experience she has co-authored with Susana Jurado the Lean Elephants whitepaper. María combines an engineering background with product and business skills but even more importantly she is passionate about people, this is why she enjoys so much the Lean Startup mentor role. María strongly believes that although there are obstacles and difficulties Lean Startup delivers clear benefits also in the context of a large corporation.
Neetal Parekh
Neetal Parekh is an experienced communicator, with a specialty in social enterprise, startups, social media strategy, writing/blogging, and public speaking. She is currently Chief Development Officer at Thinktomi, an education company (and public benefit corporation) dedicated to teaching entrepreneurship education to people of diverse ages, backgrounds, and cultures.
Todd Park
Todd Park is a tech advisor to the White House based in Silicon Valley. From March 2012 to August 2014, he served as United States Chief Technology Officer and in this role served as an Assistant to the President. Todd joined the Administration in August 2009 as Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In this role, he served as a change agent and “entrepreneur-in-residence,” helping HHS harness the power of open data, technology, and innovation to improve the health of the nation.
Prior to joining HHS, Mr. Park co-founded Athenahealth and co-led its development into one of the most innovative health IT companies in the industry. He also co-founded Castlight Health, a web-based health care shopping service for consumers. Mr. Park has served in a volunteer capacity as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he focused on health IT and health reform policy, and as senior health care advisor to Ashoka, a leading global incubator of social entrepreneurs, where he helped start Healthpoint Services, a venture to bring affordable telehealth, drugs, diagnostics, and clean water to rural India. Mr. Park graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College with an A.B. in economics.
Nathan Parker
Nathan’s most recent adventure is a three month tour of duty at US Digital Service — a new startup within The White House. He helped hack the federal bureaucracy to enable modern software design practices to thrive there, and leveraged his SRE experience from seven years at Google to ensure a successful re-launch of healthcare.gov.
Before scaling up infrastructure at Google, Nathan built weather radars, chased thunderstorms, and rode the waves of a number of mostly-failed startups.
Leanne Pittsford
Leanne Pittsford is an entrepreneur, investor, risk taker, world traveler, LGBTQ and Women’s Rights Activist. She’s the CEO and founder of Start Somewhere, which helps social good organizations with their technical and design needs. She’s also the founder of Lean Impact, a community of Social Good Organizations using Lean Startup Principles to increase impact (www.leanimpact.org).
Leanne Pittsford is also the founder of Lesbians Who Tech, the community of queer women in and around tech (and the people who love them). She is also the co-creator of the When You Work at a Nonprofit Tumblr Blog.
Previously, Leanne was a senior director at Equality California, the largest statewide LGBTQ organization in the U.S, and worked on the No on Prop 8 campaign. She’s also an advisor and investor in two tech startups. You can find Leanne in San Francisco, New York & Berlin (most of the time). You can find her on Twitter at @lepitts.
Mark Randall
Mark’s career as a serial entrepreneurial conceiving, designing and marketing innovative technology spans nearly 20 years and three successful tech start-ups. As Chief Strategist, VP of Creativity at Adobe, Mark Randall is focused on infusing agile thinking at the software giant.
As a startup founder, he has fielded over a dozen award-winning products which combined have sold over a million units, generated over $100 million in sales and won two Emmy awards. As an inventor, Mark has 10 U.S. patents, he’s been named to Digital Media Magazine’s “Digital Media 100″ and he is one of Streaming Magazine’s “50 Most Influential People.” Mark speaks & teaches frequently on entrepreneurship, innovation and strategy and has appeared on CNN, ABC, NBC and CNBC.
John Roman
John L. Roman has produced and assistant directed motion pictures, television movies and television series for over 36 years. A native of Michigan, John began his career in the Detroit film industry. In 1981, he moved to Chicago to work as an assistant director on the MGM- TV series, Chicago Story. After a five year stint as the Executive Producer for The Director’s Group, a commercial production house he co- founded, John went on to hone his unique production and administrative abilities in further theatrical ventures. His assistant director credits include Ron Howard’s Backdraft, Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day, Straight Talk, Gladiator, and the TV series, The Untouchables.
In 1995, John formed Spinnaker Films, Inc. to produce movies for television. After eleven TV films for USA Network and NBC, John began a long relationship with Dick Wolf, one of television’s most successful creator/producers. John started up five TV series for Wolf Films, among them was Law & Order Criminal Intent, where he produced 187 episodes. After successfully launching a firefighter series (Chicago Fire) and a police show spinoff (Chicago P.D.) with Wolf in Chicago, John is very pleased that both shows will have new full seasons.
John is now an Adjunct Professor at the USC School of Cinema Arts. He and his wife Kim, split their time between Los Angeles and their home in Alpharetta, GA.
Eric Ries
Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Business, published by Crown Business. He graduated in 2001 from Yale University with a B.S. in Computer Science. While an undergraduate, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. He later co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. In 2008 he served as a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers before moving on to advise startups independently. Today he serves on the board of directors for Code for America and on the advisory board of a number of technology startups and venture capital firms. In 2009, Ries was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. In 2010, he was named entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and is currently an IDEO Fellow. The Lean Startup methodology has been written about in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Inc., Wired, Fast Company, and countless blogs. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, Tara.
Manuel Rosso
Manuel Rosso is VP, Commerce Platforms at Scripps Networks Interactive, owner of Food Network, Food.com, Cooking Channel, HGTV, The Travel Channel and others. He came to Scripps via the acquisition of Food on the Table, where he was founder and CEO. Food on the Table is the most comprehensive and highest rated mobile meal planning platform. It is the brainchild of his year as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Austin Ventures.
Manuel has been developing products following Lean Startup principles since 2006 when he joined Eric Ries at IMVU Inc as VP of Marketing.
Allison Dulin Salisbury
Allison is an entrepreneurial educator focused on preparing students for success in a world of increasing complexity and uncertainty. She works in the President’s Office at Davidson College where she designs and tests new education programs in the areas of entrepreneurship, K12 education, sustainability, and education technology. Her work includes: serving as the DavidsonX Product Manager, where she manages the creation of Davidson’s MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) on the edX platform from start to finish, and leading strategic planning for the future of MOOCs on Davidson’s campus; launching and directing the Entrepreneurship Initiative, which prepares students to be innovators in a rapidly changing world; and managing strategic partnerships with K12 and environmental sustainability organizations.
In 2013, Allison was named one of the top 30 leaders under 30 in the City of Charlotte, and became a World Economic Forum Global Shaper. Previously, Allison founded the Office of Sustainability at Davidson and served as a Program Facilitator for a study abroad program in Thailand. Allison is a graduate of Davidson College, where she majored in Psychology. She enjoys mountain bike racing, hiking, and thinking about the future of education.
Charlie Scheinost
Charlie Scheinost is a Engineering Manager at Adobe. For the last 7 years he has been creating innovative web services for developers and designers. Over the last few years he has paid particular attention to user feedback and analytics to turn ideas into products.
Hiten Shah
Hiten Shah is the co-founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. He’s been creating and growing both self-funded and venture backed SaaS analytics businesses since 2005. As an advisor, investor or service provider he’s helped dozens of companies with marketing, product and growth initiatives. Hiten helped coin the term growth hacker which has helped to define the evolving role of marketing. He is a sought after mentor and advisor to entrepreneurs and their companies
Ursula Shekufendeh
Growing up, Ursula aspired to work in the public sector. After an internship with the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade, she decided to experiment with her career by interning for a Bay Area startup. That experience lead her to a life-changing pivot into the world of software.
She is now a product manager at AppFolio, Inc., on a mission to delight property managers. She has most recently collaborated on the development of mobile property inspection and a revolutionary online lease signing tool.
She holds bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Legal Studies from UC Berkeley, is an avid tango dancer, surfer and volleyball player.
Balaji S. Srinivasan
Balaji S. Srinivasan is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm. Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford, and taught data mining, statistics, and computational biology in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University. He was the co-founder and CTO of Counsyl, was an NDSEG, NSF, and VIGRE fellow, was named to the MIT TR35 and Founders Fund F50 lists, and has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Reviews Genetics. In addition to his work at Andreessen Horowitz, Dr. Srinivasan teaches the Startup Engineering MOOC and runs the new Stanford Bitcoin Group with Professor Vijay Pande. Follow him at twitter.com/balajis.
Robert Sutton
Robert I. Sutton is professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, where he co-founded the Center for Work Technology and Organizations, Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and Institute of Design (“the d.school”). He studies innovation, leadership, the links between knowledge and action, workplace civility, and scaling excellence.
He has published over 100 articles and chapters in peer-reviewed journals and the popular press. Sutton’s books include The Knowing-Doing Gap (with Jeffrey Pfeffer), Weird Ideas that Work, and two New York Times bestsellers, The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss. His latest book is the Wall Street Journal bestseller Scaling-Up Excellence (with Huggy Rao).
Sutton is a Fellow at IDEO and co-founder and director of three Stanford executive education programs: Leadership for Strategic Execution, Customer-Focused Innovation, and the new online program Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate. Sutton was named as one of 10 “B-School All-Stars” by BusinessWeek, which they described as “professors who are influencing contemporary business thinking far beyond academia.”
The London Business School selected Sutton for the Sumantra Ghoshal Award “for rigour and relevance in the study of management.” He blogs at Work Matters and as a LinkedIn Influencer. Follow Sutton @work_matters on Twitter.
Mikkel Svane
Mikkel Svane is the Founder and CEO of Zendesk, a software development company that was valued at $631 million in the IPO in May 2015. Mikkel has served as Chief Executive Officer since August 2007 and as a member of the board of directors since August 2007. He was appointed Chair of the board of directors in January 2014. Prior to founding Zendesk, Mikkel founded and served as the Chief Executive Officer of Caput A/S, a software company, and served as a technology consultant. He holds an A.P. in marketing management from Arhus Kobmandsskole. Mikkel is the author, along with Carlye Adler, of the book “Startupland” to be published by Jossey-Bass in December 2014.
Des Traynor
Des is a co-founder of Intercom where he is now VP of Customer Success. He uses the insights gained through interactions with customers to influence Intercom’s product roadmap. Prior to Intercom, Des was a co-founder of developer tool Exceptional, which was acquired and is now part of Rackspace. Previously he was a UX designer and co-founder of product design consultancy Contrast. Des writes for the Inside Intercom blog, and is a regular conference speaker on topics such as product strategy, UX design, customer experience, and the business of start-ups.
Max Ventilla
Max’s career has focused on creatively using technology to enrich daily life. He founded Krypteian Systems (acquired in 2001) and the social search company Aardvark (acquired by Google in 2010). At Google, he was part of the founding team of Google+ and then served as the Head of Personalization across Google products. Max earned a bachelor’s degree in Math and Physics and an MBA from Yale University.
Dan Ward
Dan is he author of FIRE: How Fast, Inexpensive, Restrained, and Elegant Methods Ignite Innovation. He is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force.
Nate Weisz
Nate Weisz has a fifteen year track record of success in technical and management pursuits. For the past few years he enjoyed a foray into product management where he learned dark arts like turning ideas into shippable products. Prior to this, most of his career was in the more concrete world of coding and managing software development teams. His technical experience includes architecture, design, and development of multi-tier applications on both Java and .NET platforms.
He thrives on leading cross-functional team – defining, prioritizing, and managing the delivery of software. Working for CommerceOne, IBM, and SRA, and 3Pillar Global, he managed teams of five to twenty-five members through the full software development lifecycle, including waterfall and agile methodologies, requirements definition, technical design, implementation, build/deploy, systems infrastructure, and operations. His experience spans startup to enterprise environments including projects in e-commerce, telecom, insurance, publishing, and DoD.
Nate is a lifelong resident of the Washington, DC area and enjoys spending time with his wife and two kids, commuting by bicycle, cooking and doing things out in nature.
Christina Wodtke
Christina Wodtke’s mission is to give companies and individuals tools to make their visions into realities. To achieve that goal, she is currently coaching, advising, teaching and consulting. As well, she is working on her new book, The Executioner’s Tale (working title) about using OKRS (objectives and Key results), predictive roadmaps, and a cadence of celebrations to build high performance teams. Learn more http://alert.theexecutionerstale.com/
Most recently she led the creation of a social network/gaming platform as a General Manager at Zynga, Before that she was General Manager of Social at Myspace, Principal Product Manager at Linkedin and Sr Director of Design at Yahoo back when yahoo was pretty neat.
As well, she likes founding things: she founded a startup where she developed the collaborative blogging tool PublicSquare, Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design, and co-founded the Information Architecture Institute. She may found again.
Along the way she wrote the bestselling Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, and has spoken on the topic of the human experience in information spaces at conferences worldwide. She writes still at eleganthack.com.
Margo Wright
Margo Wright is the founder of Yenko, a social purpose for-profit organization committed to leveling the playing field by leveraging technology to increase college completion. She recently completed the SolveFor{S} Fellowship, where she developed a mobile app for college students targeted at the 25 million American families living on less than $25,000 a year. Margo first began working on college persistence in her role as Senior Manager for College Readiness and College Success at the Harlem Children’s Zone, which is world-renowned for their data-driven results and effectiveness in some of New York City’s most devastated neighborhoods. She also served as Executive Director of Bodanna, a nonprofit social enterprise focused on job readiness and work experience for young adults. Margo received an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College and holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. Fun fact about the name “Yenko” – a rallying call that means “Let’s go forth” in the Akan language, it captures the sense or urgency needed to solve the college completion problem and is a nod to Margo’s Ghanaian heritage.
Mentors
Samihah Azim
Samihah Azim manages the UI & UX product design efforts at Bluenose Analytics to bring delightful and intuitive experiences for users to an enterprise product. Prior to that, she founded GleeBox to connect users to local goods, led product design for BizeeBee creating a CRM for local businesses, and has designed interfaces and experiences in the consumer software space. She wholeheartedly believes in constantly learning and going after your goals. Follow her tweets about design, soccer, and macarons @samihah
Arthur Bart-Williams
Four-time entrepreneur passionate about solving problems, lean principles, and mentorship. Latest venture, Canogle, is a mobile platform that aggregates stories about places to capture and share as social tours.
Farrah Bostic
Farrah is the founder of The Difference Engine – an insight-driven product strategy company. Before founding TDE, Farrah ran innovation practices at research-based brand consultancies Hall & Partners and OTX, and she was a brand and digital strategist at agencies including Digitas, TBWA\Chiat\Day and Mad Dogs & Englishmen. She has worked with clients including Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Netflix, USA Network, Syfy, HBO, Disney, Time Inc., NASCAR, FootJoy, DIAGEO, Moet-Hennessy, UPS, Kraft, Walmart, eBay, Merck and others to develop new brand, business, and product strategies – online and off.
John Bradberry
Background in psychology. Business counselor. Published author. 25 yrs exp with global firms+startups. Assesses/improves venture health and founder talent. Helps leaders/teams get smarter, more honest, more focused.
David Charron
David Charron is a member of the professional faculty of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He is a Senior Fellow of the Haas School’s entrepreneurship program. Mr. Charron has held several leadership positions at Haas, including Executive Director of the Berkeley Innovative Leadership Development Initiative (BILD) and Executive Director of the Haas School’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. At Haas, Mr. Charron teaches many MBA level courses including Business Model Innovation and Entrepreneurial Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Problem Finding Problem Solving, Case Studies in Entrepreneurship, Workshop for Startups and others. He is also active in executive education with the Venture Capital Executive Program, Bio-entrepreneurship and several innovation and leadership programs. Mr. Charron started UC Berkeley’s NSF I-Corps program as Faculty Lead and continues to teach scientists customer development skills through I-Corps.
Mr. Charron is an entrepreneur, having been a founder of Scientific Learning Corporation, the first successful neuroplasticity company. He has also started several other ventures and consults to startups, inventors and entrepreneurs. He has been an angel investor in several companies and is on the board of Impact Carbon, a non-profit developing carbon credit projects.
He has worked in and studied the field of technology commercialization and entrepreneurship for 25 years. Mr. Charron’s experience in this field has been at corporations such as Xerox PARC, academic institutions including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF, and the national labs such as LBNL, LLNL and Sandia.
He has also been a principal member of the faculty team for Intel Corporation’s Global Technology Entrepreneurship Education project teaching international faculty how to teach entrepreneurship and create entrepreneurial ecosystems. With that program he has traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.
He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley.
Neelan Choksi
Over the past 15 years, Choksi has led the business side of software companies through their Lean Startup journeys at such companies as Tasktop, Lexcycle (acquired Amazon), SpringSource (VMware), and SolarMetric (BEA).
Natasha Clark
Around age eight Natasha Clark was told it was a woman’s job to take care of the home and since then she has built a career out of telling women they can do whatever the hell they want to do.
Founder of the startup Lioness, the leading digital magazine for female entrepreneurs, the former news reporter has created a platform to educate, elevate and support female entrepreneurs. Natasha is a former board member of the Young Professional Society of Greater Springfield, a BusinessWest “40 Under 40” winner, in 2011 she was voted Top Woman in Public Relations by Western Mass Women Magazine and in 2012 her startup was voted Most Innovative Local Business at the Springfield Republican’s Reader Raves awards. She was recently honored as one of the 2014 Top 10 Women in Business in the Pioneer Valley by the Women’s Business Owners Alliance.
She has been a panelist on Generation Next and Taking Your Small Business to the Next Level discussions, a regular speaker at Westover Job Corps’ “A Woman’s Worth” program and host of 5, a talk series for women on innovation. She is the proud mother of her teenage son Shaun and resides in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Gretchen DeKnikker
Gretchen DeKnikker has been launching and growing enterprise SaaS startups and platforms since way back in the last century. She loves bacon, bourbon, hip hop and all things tech.
Kevin Dewalt
Kevin has been part of the startup ecosystem as a founder (4 startups), an Angel/VC (25 startups) and mentor/advisor (a lot) for nearly 20 years.
Joe Dunn
Joe runs Cloudbreak – a consulting group that helps founders and executive teams grow their companies, their careers and their executive skills.
Joe has only ever worked in startups. Three went public, two sold.
Bruce Fratto
Bruce is a 30+ year veteran with General Electric. He’s currently a FastWorks Coach and Master Black Belt (MBB) for GE’s $8B business called Energy Management.
Career spans Sourcing, Engineering, Sales and Marketing
Kat Gordon
Kat is a seasoned advertising creative director and Founder of The 3% Conference. She consults with startups in Silicon Valley and is Creative Director at Maternal Instinct, a marketing to women agency in Palo Alto.
Kelly Goto
Kelly Goto founded gotomedia to create global digital products and services that are both research-driven and people-friendly. She also pioneered the field of design ethnography to study context across multiple devices.
Mike Hagler
Mike Hagler is a NYC based serial entrepreneur, former private equity investor and corporate development professional with experience across tech, manufacturing, business services and professional services.
Steph Hay
Steph Hay is the Director of Content Strategy at Capital One. She’s a mentor at 500 Startups; co-founded FastCustomer.com; was co-founding editor of WorkDesign.com; and co-organized the DC Lean Startup Circle.
Neil Hempsall
Experienced FastWorks Coach & Commercial Operations Project Leader. 18 yrs+ in GE, held various positions, currently a member of Corp team scaling FastWorks across the company. Formerly 9 years in Design consultancy
Learie Hercules
Learie Hercules is the founder of Octavia Technologies, a company that aims to collaboratively quantify wireless connectivity and a Sr Dir of Big Data at AT&T. He oversees strategy and roadmap and helps startups figure out the role big data should play in their overall strategy. He currently serves on several tech and non-profit boards.
Ken Ikeda
Ken Ikeda is Founder & Principal of Civic IP, a community investment and strategy agency focused on transforming and scaling community working solutions into profitable enterprise. A former public radio CEO and nonprofit arts Executive Director, organizations under Ken’s direction have secured $200m in private equity investment and philanthropic support; managed a multimillion dollar public radio loan fund; worked with the MOMA, Merce Cunningham, NEA, PBS, NPR, NSF and Dept of Labor; negotiated over $300m in mergers and acquisitions that has expanded the reach of public broadcasting services to over 65 million Americans; consulted with over 250 public media station GM’s and University Trustees; and trained over 8,000 incumbent digital media employees for companies as diverse as Pandora, Pixar and Wells Fargo. He currently serves as a board director for Youth Speaks, The Working Group and Greater Public.
Amy Jo Kim
Amy Jo Kim, Ph.D. is a social game designer, community architect, and startup coach. She recently launched MVP Design Hacks, a 4-week online program for accelerated, game-influenced Customer Discovery.
Jini Kim
Ms. Jini Kim is the Founder of NunaHealth, a startup that provides data analytics for large employers and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. She took a leave of absence to participate in the “tech surge” that saved the Healthcare.gov site. In the Healthcare.gov war room, her duties included bug-fixing, and a Time magazine cover article calls her the “Queen of Errors.”
She was previously a product manager with Google Health. As one of the first product managers for Google Health, she was tasked with determining Google’s strategy in genomics. Her work led to the funding of research labs and startups in genetic sequencing and large database work on genotypic/phenotypic associations.
Kim was also the product manager of the Go team, Google’s first programming language. She was also responsible for launching Google Public Data, which fostered her deep understanding of how to create tools for people who had little to no experience with data analytics or visualization.
Matt Kresse
Matt Kresse is a UX Designer at Toyota ITC, a research arm of Toyota located in Mountain View, CA. His focus is on developing Toyota’s mobility services and employs lean startup to develop prototypes and run pilots.
Sarah Kunst
Partner @ Fortis. Investor. Write for Entreprenuer.com and The Daily Beast. Venture for America and New York City Department of Education Business and Finance Industry Commission Board Member
Past: Mohr Davidow Ventures
Matt LeMay
Matt LeMay is the co-founder of PL Data, a research consultancy that integrates data science and social science. In his work as a technology communicator and curriculum designer, Matt has collaborated with General Assembly, Hyper Island, and Smith & Beta to develop and lead global data strategy and digital training workshops for companies like GE, Ogilvy & Mather, American Express, McCann Worldgroup, and Pfizer. Previously, Matt worked as Senior Product Manager at New York-based music startup Songza (acquired by Google), and Head of Consumer Product and Platform Manager at Bitly. Matt is also a musician, recording engineer, senior contributor to music website Pitchfork.com, and the author of a book about singer-songwriter Elliott Smith.
Steve Liguori
Steve is the Founder and CEO of Liguori Innovation. The firm specializes in helping established organizations identify and create new sources of growth for existing lines of business and potential new categories. He has also coached many start-ups to successfully navigate the big enterprise world.
Most recently as General Electric’s – Executive Director of Global Innovation, Steve was instrumental in efforts that helped transform and re-invigorate GE’s growth and speed to market with outstanding results. Steve acts as an “Innovation Accelerator” says Beth Comstock, CMO of General Electric, “If you are looking for leadership and action to accelerate innovation in your firm, Steve is your ‘go to’ expert. He helped advance GE’s critical initiatives over the past decade, and his passion for Innovation is infectious.”
Steve is an expert at applying start-up principles that stress leadership, speed and improved customer outcomes in complex organizations.
Adapting these cutting-edge new skills while respecting a firm’s strengths and culture is what makes Liguori Innovation unique.
He brings a background of thought leadership and in-market successes in categories as diverse as consumer packaged goods, heavy industry, financial services, software and healthcare.
Steve is currently Chairman of the Business Marketing Association (BMA) and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School.
Alicia Liu
7+ years experience building web/mobile apps at early-stage startups, from enterprise to consumer. Previously cofounded two companies. Awarded “Woman to Watch” by Women Who Code.
Erin McKean
Erin McKean is the founder of Reverb Technologies & Wordnik.com. Previously, she was the editor in chief for American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. In addition to Reverb, she’s written six books, uses five Twitter accounts, and has one son.
Nathalie Molina Niño
Referred to as a “super-connector” by Keith Ferrazzi, Nathalie Molina Niño is the “fuel core of a network that makes it easy for her to tap the resources to get stuff done, and done quickly.” Most recently Molina Niño spearheaded the creation of [email protected] at the Athena Center for Leadership studies of Barnard College at Columbia University, with the mission of leveling the playing field for women entrepreneurs. She is a consummate intra & entrepreneur who launched her first tech startup at the age of 20. Involved in launching and growing a multinational business with Lionbridge (NASDAQ: LIOX) into a nearly $100M operation within 6 years, Molina Niño has advised industry leaders in both the for- and non-profit sector ranging from multinationals (Disney, Microsoft, MTV, The Discovery Channel, Mattel), early stage startups (Cranium, Onvia) and non-profits (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Affairs Council, Seattle International Film Festival, Hedgebrook).
Zach Nies
Zach is Chief Technologist at Rally Software, part of the faculty at The University of Colorado Boulder, and a mentor of multiple Techstars programs. He is a serial startup entrepreneur and large company intrapreneur.
Tim O’Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media Inc. His original business plan was simply “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. Tim is also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly’s early stage venture firm, and is on the boards of Safari Books Online, PeerJ, Code for America, Civis Analytics, and Maker Media, which was recently spun out from O’Reilly Media. Maker Media’s Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution.
William Pietri
William Pietri is a serial entrepreneur, engineering leader, and troublemaker. He started applying Agile methods to startups in 2000, so when he found Eric Ries’s blog in 2009, it was like coming home.
Cathryn Posey
Cathryn Posey is an agent of change. The founder of Tech By Superwomen and the Jan 2015 Tech Superwomen Summit and an award-winning digital marketing and community executive driving social and comms at Electric Cloud
Shobana Radhakrishnan
Shobana Radhakrishnan is VP of Engineering at Mindflash, responsible for its technology and engineering execution. Prior to this, she led the development of high scale cloud-based systems at Netflix and Yahoo.
Adria Richards
Adria Richards is the Executive Director of Everyone Hacks, an organization focused on exposing youth to STEM careers through hackathons. Previous roles as a consultant, developer, network admin and technology instructor.
Scott Sambucci
Scott Sambucci is the VP of Sales at Blend and the Founder of SalesQualia. He’s spent more than 15 years developing technology products and building sales the process for startups and publicly traded companies.
Nicole Sanchez
A self-described “people geek,” Nicole is an organizational culture pro with 20 years of experience. Her practice emphasizes creating and cultivating diverse workforces. She holds degrees from Stanford and UC Berkeley.
Steve Sanderson
Steve is passionately attempting to help teams solve their “build it & they don’t come” problem by compassionately re-writing their operating model in-place. Currently he’s the Resident Lean Startup Expert at Rackspace.
Patrick Sheridan
Pat is co-founder and CEO of Modus Create, a product studio that helps people “build the right thing.”
Pat is an EIR at Georgetown University and serves on the advisory board of Build-DC and TKout
Arin Sime
Arin Sime is a developer, agile coach and entrepreneur who regularly speaks at conferences including Lean Startup 2012. Arin lives in Costa Rica where he founded design and development firm AgilityFeat.
Andy Smith
I’m a VC investing in and helping grow early-stage companies as they build the Internet of Things (IoT). In 2010, I co-wrote The Dragonfly Effect an actionable guide to social marketing. Previously: Dolby, Intel, PwC.
Khalid Smith
Khalid is cofounder & chief product officer of Lessoncast.com, a platform for the continuous improvement of teacher education. He’s also a speaker, facilitator & designer of experiential education events for educators.
Lisa Kay Solomon
Lisa Kay Solomon co-authored the Wall Street Journal Bestseller, Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. She teaches innovation and leadership at the MBA in Design Strategy.
Tony Stubblebine
Programmer, founder, author. Expert on productivity for entrepreneurs and other high achievers.
Wayne Sutton
Wayne Sutton is a serial entrepreneur and general partner at BUILDUP.vc. BUILDUP is dedicated to growing global innovations by bringing innovators together from an array of backgrounds and experience – technology, corporate, healthcare, design, environmental, social and political leadership – to a forum to investigate new realms of technology.
Wayne has over 14 years experience in technology, design and business development. Wayne was recently recognized as one of the Silicon Valley 100 coolest people in tech, one of the 52 hottest new stars in Silicon Valley, one of the 46 Most Important African-Americans In Technology by Business Insider and one of the Top 100 most influential black people on social media in 2014.
Akash Trivedi
Akash graduated from The Wharton School in 2007 with a dual degree in Finance and Management. Unlike the majority of his peers however, he was admittedly never interested in pursuing a career in management consulting or investment banking. He fancied himself as more a builder and an entrepreneur – someone that hoped to leave the world a little better off than he found it.
After a couple of startups and a short stint as a financial analyst, Akash found himself at Kiva.org, where he served as Chief of Staff to the CEO and President. Now, he is one of the business leads on Kiva.org’s new pilot program, Kiva Zip. Together, he and the rest of the Zip team are testing different ways to leverage technology such as mobile payments to make Kiva’s existing model more direct.
In his spare time, Akash enjoys mentoring high school students and going on hikes.
Justin Wilcox
Justin is a 2012 and 2013 Lean Startup Conference Speaker, a Customer Development curriculum designer and mentor for Startup Weekend, Startup NEXT, Founder Institute, and Lean Startup Machine.
He’s a collaborator with Google for Entrepreneurs and Microsoft Ventures and teaches Lean Startup workshops from London to Singapore, to Silicon Valley all while blogging at CustomerDevLabs.com.
Navarrow Wright
Navarrow has served as CTO of Radio One’s Interactive One, CTO of Black Entertainment Television and as co-founder of GlobalGrind.com with Russell Simmons. He is also the Founder of the “Close The Divide” project.
Jeff Zias
Jeff Zias is an Innovation Leader specializing in Grassroots Innovation and the building of strong innovation cultures. He has led technology groups at Apple, IBM, Taligent, Intuit and 4 Silicon Valley startups.
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