Below you’ll find extensive profiles on each speaker. Simply click a name to be taken to their information.
Mitch Kapor
“Founder/CEO”
Mitchell Kapor, 56, is Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods.
He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.
Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950 and attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. At Yale, he was very involved with the college’s commercial radio station, WYBC-FM, where he served as Music Director and Program Director.
In the 1970’s Mr. Kapor worked as a disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station in Hartford, Connecticut; became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and taught TM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fairfield, Iowa; and worked as an entry-level computer programmer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978, he received a Master’s degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later called Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company.
In 1978 he bought an Apple II personal computer and worked as an independent software consultant; as the co-developer of Tiny Troll, the first graphics and statistics program for the Apple II; as a product manager for Personal Software Inc., the publisher of VisiCalc, the world’s first electronic spreadsheet; and as the designer and programmer (in BASIC) of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion products to VisiCalc.
He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with Jonathan Sachs, who was responsible for technical architecture and implementation, created Lotus 1-2-3. He served as the President (later Chairman) and Chief Executive Officer of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and as a Director until 1987. In 1983, Lotus’ first year of operations, the company achieved revenues of $53,000,000 and had a successful public offering. In 1984 the company tripled in revenue to $156,000,000. The number of employees grew to over a thousand by 1985.
After leaving executive management at Lotus, he spent 1986 and 1987 completing work on his favorite product, Lotus Agenda, the first application for Personal Information Management (PIM), and as a visiting scientist at MIT’s Center for Cognitive Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 1987-1990 Mr. Kapor served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ON Technology, a developer of software applications for workgroup computing. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.
In 1992 and 1993 he chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law which was chartered to investigate and report on issues raised by the problem of computer crime in the state. He also served as a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council and the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. From 1994-1996, he served as Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab where he taught courses on software design, Democracy and the Internet, and digital community.
For almost 20 years, Mr. Kapor has been an investor in high-technology start-up companies (through Kapor Enterprises, Inc.) and an advisor to entrepreneurs. He was a founding investor of UUNET, Real Networks, and Linden Research (the creator of the Second Life).
From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Kapor was a partner at Accel Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California.
From 1984 until its dissolution in 1998, Mr. Kapor served as a trustee of the Kapor Family Foundation. Beginning in 1997, he created and endowed the Mitchell Kapor Foundation (www.mkf.org), a private foundation focused on improving human well-being and to sustaining healthy ecosystems that support all life on earth.
In 2003 he became the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation (www.mozilla.org), which is dedicated to the development and promulgation of standards-compliant open source web browser software. He now serves as a Board member of the Mozilla Foundation.
In the fall of 2005 he became a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-taught a course “Open Source Development and Distribution of Information”. In 2006, he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley.
Mr. Kapor is a trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute (www.lpfi.org), a San Francisco-based non-profit research organization, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in the workplace and support the values of an inclusive society.
Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to publications such as Scientific American, The New York Times, Forbes, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Communications of the ACM. Mr. Kapor is married and lives in San Francisco, California.
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Scott Rafer
“Founder, CEO”
Scott has been helping Internet publishers and users jump on What’s Right Now! since 1995. Today, that means delivering services for social publishing and discovery. Scott is CEO of Lookery, as well as co-founder of Mashery, and chairman of Winksite. Most recently, he was CEO of MyBlogLog until Yahoo! acquired the company in January 2007. Lookery is building targeted advertising and other services for publishers of social applications, starting with Facebook apps. Mashery manages API and developer programs on behalf of web services providers including Facebook app providers. Winksite helps publishers large and small assemble active mobile communities around their brands based on the content they already syndicate. From 2001 to 2003, Scott was CEO of Feedster, the blog search engine and advertising network. Before Feedster, Scott co-founded WiFinder, the Wi-Fi hotspot directory; Fresher Information, a real-time search engine which was using RSS way back in 1999; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions. Before the first dotcom boom, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood, worked in investment banking at Needham & Company, and graduated from the Management of Technology program at UPenn. Please check out http://blog.lookery.com for the latest.
Keith Schacht
“Developer”
Keith is recognized as one of the most promising young entrepreneurs. In 2005, BusinessWeek named him one of the top 20 entrepreneurs under 25. Schacht is currently co-founder of Chicago-based 42 Friends LLC developing premier Facebook applications.
Prior to 42 Friends, Schacht co-founded and sold two technology companies. He has been featured in Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and Business 2.0; and served the world’s top consumer product companies including Nike, Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, BMW, Kraft, and many others. Schacht attended University of Illinois where he studied computer science and psychology.
Erik Giberti
Erik is a freelance developer, system architect and technology fanatic. Most recently his projects have included infrastructure design and development for Honesty Box, Nicknames and other applications. Prior to that, Erik transformed the National Wildlife Federation’s online presence through his roles as a Sr. Developer and Internet Director.
Martin Green
“Vice President, Business Development”
Martin is Meebo’s business vice president, responsible for community engagement, revenue strategy and corporate partnerships. He started his career at Morgan Stanley and in 1996, joined an emerging client of Morgan Stanley, CNET. Martin spent 10 years at CNET Networks in a variety of strategic, financial and operations roles, most recently serving on the executive committee and serving as senior vice president of lifestyle and community. Martin grew up in England and Canada and lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children.
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David Gentzel
“Rough Facebook Warrior by trade, VP of Consumer Products by business card”
I make Viral apps.
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Mike Sego
“Lead Developer”
Mike is the Lead Developer for (fluff)Friends. When he’s not taking care of virtual pets, he is a Software Engineer on the Gmail Frontend team at Google. He previously worked at Electronic Arts on The Sims Online, and received his B.S. and M.S. from Stanford in Computer Science, with a focus on Human Computer Interaction and Graphics.
Jonathan Mendez
“Founder”
Entrepreneur, marketer, author of the popular blog Optimize & Prophesize and Founder/Chief Strategy Officer of OTTO Digital the Agency division of the world’s leading optimization technology Offermatica, Jonathan is a leading voice in using quantitative research, analytics, testing and optimization to deliver measurable improvements in digital business metrics. Jonathan has provided optimization strategy and analysis to many of the world’s leading brands and businesses including Amazon.com, Ameriprise, Disney, Citi, H&R Block, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Monster.com, Sears and T-Mobile.
Zachary Allia
“Developer”
Zach is the founder and only developer of Free Gifts. He also designs many of the gifts featured in his Top 10 application. Free Gifts has been written about in Wired, Newsweek, and many other publications. Zach recently graduated from Northeastern University with as an undergrad with a degree in Business. Zach also developed To Do List, a non-GTD to do list application for Facebook users looking for a simpler concept.
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Alex Payne
“Lead API Developer”
Alex is one of three engineers working on Twitter, a global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Amongst other duties, Alex maintains Twitter’s popular API and supports developers around the world. He recently relocated to the Bay Area from Washington, DC. You can follow him on Twitter by texting ‘follow al3x’ to 40404.
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Naval Ravikant
“Venture Hacker”
Naval was a founder of Genoa Corporation (acquired by Finisar), and the founding CEO of Epinions Inc., (went public as Shopping.com after a merger with Dealtime), and Vast.com. He invested in numerous companies while an investor at August Capital, and has advised and helped XFire (sold to Viacom), Bix (sold to Yahoo!), Dulance (sold to Google), iPivot (sold to Intel), and many other companies. Naval currently manages a small fund focused on early-stage social media investments and co-authors Venturehacks.com
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Jesse Farmer
Jesse is the creator, CEO, and lead developer of Appaholic (acquired by Altura Ventures LLC), an open analytics platform for Facebook. Before the whirlwind that is the Facebook platform took over his life he was a developer at Sugar Publishing, Inc., a privately-owned media company, focused on creating the richest, most relevant online community for trendsetting, passionate, smart women.
In his spare time he blogs at 20bits.com, runs around San Francisco with his friends, and reminisces about his days studying mathematics and computational linguistics at the University of Chicago.
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Craig Ulliott
“Developer”
Craig Ulliott, a UK-born computer programmer and builder of the Facebook travel application Where I’ve Been, spent the majority of his childhood just forty minutes south of London, in the beach city of Brighton. Always having a precocious understanding of electronics, Craig began experiementing with computers at aged ten. By the time he reached fifteen, Craig had built a piece of commercial software that is today still sold internationally.
After completion of his primary education, Craig and his five best friends spent a year travelling around South America, Oceania, and Asia. During his travels, Craig met his future wife, an American, and returned to Great Britain with her. At age nineteen, Craig was accepted into the University of Sussex where he began a degree in Computer Science. Shortly thereafter, Craig dropped out to incorporate a successful web development and new media firm called Ohaso Limited.
Craig and his wife moved to America in 2005. He began freelance programming for various companies, including SingleFeed, where he acted as head developer for their cutting edge AJAX application. In 2006, after having lived in both Denver and Chicago, they moved to Philadelphia, where Craig headed the programming department for Blueye, a Chicago-based web development corporation. Finally, in 2007, he solely built Where I’ve Been, Facebook’s most popular travel application, which combines Craig’s love of travel and technology. Craig is now pursuing the transformation of Where I’ve Been into a successful Internet travel company.
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Carnet Williams
Carnet captains the ChipIn.com ship and makes sure they have what they need to keep moving fast (and in the right direction!). He helps share their story and the social ecommercesm mantra.
Entrepreneur, Executive Director of HiBEAM; Associate Dean, Stanford Law School; Director of Academic Technology, Stanford University; Director of Business Development, TurboLinux; Founder and Executive Director of NetCorps, and co-founder of Boardtactics.com.
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Benjamin Pollack
“Developer”
Ben is currently finishing his degrees in English and Game design at Depaul University Chicago. An entrepreneur at heart, his first foray into the business world began as the sole owner and proprietor of a small Chicago based IT shop when he was 17 years old. When he’s not pwning it up online, you can often find him jamming with his band or enjoying a good book on the couch. His favorite food is sushi, and he would pick the Beatles over the Stones any day. Find out more about him, or feel free to just say “hi” by friending him on facebook!
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Aaron Batalion
“Developer”
Aaron is a founding partner at Hungry Machine, LLC., a full service web development group specializing in the design, development, and deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. The Hungry Machine team is responsible for over 12 Facebook applications, most notably Visual Bookshelf, Mardi Gras, among others. Aaron has been banging the Rails drum since 2005 and has been deep in the Rails community ever since. A lead portal architect for RevolutionHealth.com, one of the largest Rails sites on the web, Aaron was also a portal architect for Blockbuster.com.
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Donald McLagan
“Chairman, President & CEO”
Don brings more than 30 years of experience in business information services. He was the founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of NewsEDGE Corporation, a public company later acquired by Thomson Corporation. Previously, Mr. McLagan was Vice President and General Manager of the Information Services Division of Lotus Development Corporation and a founding employee and Executive Vice President of Data Resources, Inc.
Don holds a BS and BSME degrees from Trinity College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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Rob Hayes
“Partner”
Rob joined First Round Capital in 2006. Rob came to First Round Capital from Omidyar Network where he was their first venture investor. He led most of Omidyar Network’s initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group.
Prior to joining Omidyar Network in 2004, Rob was at Palm where he started up their corporate venture fund. While in that role he also managed the strategy effort around Palm OS that led to the spinout of PalmSource. Rob started at Palm as product manager for the initial device-independent releases of Palm OS. During this time, Rob was responsible for the versions of Palm OS on dozens of devices including the initial Treo products.
Rob previously spearheaded complex, system-level product development efforts at companies such as Geoworks and Go Corp where he focused on building products for the Japanese market. He began his career with the Japan External Trade Organization, studying international trade issues and building relationships between US and Japanese businesses, at a time when trade friction between the two countries was at its peak.
Rob has an MBA from Columbia University and a B.A. in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Andrew Braccia
“Partner”
Andrew Braccia joined Accel in 2007 bringing with him a decade of operational and leadership experience. His primary areas of investment interest include consumer Internet and software businesses with a focus on web search, digital media and online advertising.
Prior to Accel, Andrew held a variety of senior roles in business development, general management and operations with Yahoo! He began his career with the company in 1998, as a member of Yahoo’s early business development team. Most recently he served as vice president of Yahoo! Search, where he was responsible for all business and operational aspects of Yahoo’s consumer search business. In this capacity, he played a key role in helping to lead the company’s entry into the social search arena with the launch of Yahoo! Answers and the acquisition and integration of Del.icio.us.
Previously, as vice president of business operations for the Yahoo! Search and Marketplace Group, Andrew oversaw the business planning and financial performance of multiple Yahoo! businesses. Andrew also served as vice president and general manager of Yahoo’s Marketplace division, which includes Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel, Yahoo! Real Estate, and Yahoo! Autos – all leading commerce sites in their respective categories under his leadership.
As a member of the original operating team that led the development Yahoo’s in-house search technology, he also played a significant role in the acquisition and integration of several companies, including Inktomi, Overture, Alta Vista, and FAST. In addition, he helped lead the acquisition of Flickr, an important component of Yahoo’s emerging community and social search strategy.
Andrew graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He resides in the Bay Area with his wife and two children.
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Bret Taylor
“Entrepreneur In Residence”
Bret spent more than four years at Google, responsible for the design, development and launch of Google Maps, the Google Maps API, and several products that emerged from the group, including Local and Satellite Maps. In 2006 he received the Google Founders’ Award, the highest honor given an employee, in recognition of those contributions. In total, he led more than 25 successful product launches during his tenure, including Google Local, Google Web Toolkit and numerous improvements to Google Web Search. He was also instrumental in growing the company’s broader developer programs, which support a growing ecosystem of software and standards that let companies build new products on top of Google’s Web applications.
Bret earned a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science and a Masters of Science degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.
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Keith Rabois
“Lead Business Development”
Keith leads business development & strategy for Slide. Prior to Slide, Keith ran business development and advertising sales for LinkedIn. Earlier in his career, Keith served as Executive Vice President of Business Development & Policy for PayPal. He serves on the Board of Directors of yelp, Xoom, Vendio, and was an early investor in YouTube. He consults for Google as well as advises Wize and FanIQ.
Keith graduated from Stanford University and earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He also practiced law at Sullivan & Cromwell and clerked for the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Keith is the only person who owns equity in every VC-financed consumer Internet company founded by former PayPal employees.
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Dan Peguine
“Developer”
Dan is the co-creator and developer of Honesty Box, one of the most popular Facebook applications. Prior to the launch of the Facebook platform, Dan lead NishNash.com, a start up with the grand vision of providing every restaurant a real online presence. Dan has also built and is managing a popular niche forum and a thriving e-commerce business. Dan grew up in Israel and Belgium and has lived in the UK and in Boston. He received his BA in Economics from Brandeis University last year.
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Matt Marshall
“Founder & Editor”
Matt Marshall is founder and editor of VentureBeat, a news site that covers innovative start-ups and the investors that back them. VentureBeat is a successor to the SiliconBeat site he started while still with the San Jose Mercury News. Matt launched VentureBeat ten months ago, after he left the Mercury News, where he was a staff writer focused on venture capital and emerging technologies . Prior to Mercury news Matt worked at some of the well known names in print journalism including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington post and Los Angeles times. He has won several awards including James Madison Freedom of Information Act Award and Journalist of the Year, awarded by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. These days Matt prowls Silicon valley looking for exciting technology startup companies, the entrepreneurs who start these companies and the VC’s who fund these emerging companies. Matt received a Ph.D in government from Georgetown University and a BA in Economics and Politics from UC Santa Cruz.
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Edward Frederick
“Partner”
Creator of the Visual Bookshelf social shopping suite, Eddie was formerly a lead engineer at RevolutionHealth.com before co-founding Hungry Machine LLC
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Blake Commagere
“Freelance Developer, Founder”
Blake is the creator of the superviral Vampires, Zombies and Werewolves games on Facebook and one of the founders of Mogad. Prior, he led the development of the Causes on Facebook application. Blake was also an early engineer on Plaxo’s client team and a founding engineer at BuildForge.
Stephen Benedict
“Director”
As Director of AIM Developer and Consumer Services, Stephen Benedict is responsible for managing AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) partnerships across consumer verticals and growing the AIM ecosystem of 3rd parties and developers. At AOL he has also led product management and strategy for desktop- and web-based AIM products. His background prior to AOL includes technical leadership positions at Apple, where he played key roles in delivering advanced display technologies and the company’s first Bluetooth products, and strategic marketing at Motorola. Stephen holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Florida A&M University, a MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a MBA from Harvard Business School.
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Paul McKellar
“Keyboard slave”
Paul is known for programming in one hand while solving rubics cubes with the other, blindfolded. His projects have been included and featured on refrigerators, some great news magazines and at
debaucheries of dinner parties. Sometimes while dancing, Paul likes to smile, but not often.
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Murtaza Hussain
“Co-Founder”
Murtaza in 2001 founded Gaming Ventura, an international entrepreneurship holding group, which he has successfully been leading in his capacity as President for the previous 6 years. He has analyzed and developed business plans for a range of companies and organizations, recently assisting a startup in raising more than US $2 million for an enterprise incubator in the heart of London. He was the Captain of Team Pakistan in the Intl. Enterprise Olympics 2003, where his team finished 3rd globally. Murtaza is also an Intl. Debating champion, captaining the Wales Debate team in 2003 to the Worlds Championships in Germany. He is a natural inventor and web-developer, leading his team to 3 consecutive first-place finishes in the Intel International Schools Educational Olympiad from 1999-2001. For two seasons, Murtaza hosted a national youth TV show in Pakistan that boasted a viewer-ship of more than 10 million.
Most recently he was co-founder of XuQa.com, a leading online casual gaming community and built it to 2M+ users and profitability. Since then, hes moved on to Peanut Labs which replicates XuQa business model of monetizing through research across 70+ online communities. He is currently heading Peanut Labs as co-founder and CEO.
He was pursuing a Bachelors of Arts in Anthropology at Williams College, USA before he dropped out to start the company.
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Lindsay Blakely
“Techreporter”
Lindsay recently joined Fortune¹s San Francisco bureau as a tech reporter. Prior to Fortune, she wrote about startups, business travel and social networks for Business 2.0 magazine. Lindsay holds a master¹s degree in journalism from Northwestern University¹s Medill School of Journalism.
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Chris Moore
“Partner”
Chris Moore is a Partner with Redpoint Ventures focusing on consumer Internet, online marketing and business services opportunities. Prior to joining Redpoint, Chris evaluated Internet opportunities for IVP, a firm he joined in 1999. He currently serves on the board of directors of DailyStrength and Azureus, and is actively involved with Redpoint’s investments in Efficient Frontier and Oodle. Chris also led Redpoint’s investment in Right Media (acquired by Yahoo!) and was actively involved with Redpoint’s investment in MySpace.
Prior to joining IVP, Chris led business development efforts for wine.com, the online wine retailer, and held various product management positions with Peapod, the pioneering online grocery shopping service provider. Previously, Chris evaluated and executed Internet and media investments for Ameritech. He began his career as a financial analyst in the mergers and acquisitions and leveraged buyout groups of Wasserstein Perella & Co.
Chris holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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Vineet Buch
“Principal”
Vineet Buch, Principal at BlueRun Ventures, focuses on Consumer Internet and Mobile Services, Enterprise Software, including Open Source, and on BlueRun Ventures’ investments in India. Vineet joined BlueRun Ventures in 2005. Immediately before that, he co-founded Riya, a Consumer Internet company funded by BlueRun.
Vineet is involved with BlueRun’s investments in Coupa, Deeya Energy, Riya, Slide, Ugenie, and Zmanda.
Prior to joining BlueRun, Vineet was a Director with Product Management and Software Development responsibilities in Oracle Server Technologies, the organization that develops the Oracle Database and Application Server.
Before Oracle, Vineet was co-founder and CTO of Karient, a provider of systems management software. Vineet started Karient after serving as Senior Director of Engineering at Corio, a leading Application Service Provider since acquired by IBM. Before joining Corio, Vineet was a Practice Manager in Oracle Consulting, running a consulting practice focused on Enterprise System Architecture.
Vineet has an MS in Computer Science from Cornell University and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT, Kanpur. Vineets blog can be found at http://ventureexplorer.typepad.com
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John Bautisa
“Partner”
John Bautista, a partner in the Silicon Valley office, is a member of the Emerging Companies Group, which advises emerging companies and venture capital firms. Before joining Orrick, he was a co-founder of Venture Law Group and served on the Executive Committee. Mr. Bautista previously practiced at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati. Mr. Bautista focuses on emerging companies, and represents both public and private high-tech companies and venture capital funds in many areas, including corporate and securities law, venture capital financings, mergers and acquisitions, public offerings, public company representation, and technology licensing.
Katherine Barr
“Partner”
Katherine Barr is a member of the investment team at MDV focused on Internet-enabled companies.
Prior to joining MDV, she was a Senior Consultant at Vantage Partners (spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project) helping high tech clients such as IBM, Cisco and HP to better negotiate and manage their critical business relationships (including customer, supplier, outsourcing service provider or buyer, and alliance partners).
Before Vantage, she worked as a Product Development Manager at HSA, an education technology startup in Boston, leading a team that developed multi-media products and online learning systems.
Katherine teaches a yearly Professional Education Negotiation program for the School of Engineering at Stanford. During her graduate studies at Stanford, she was a research and teaching assistant for the US-Asia Technology Management Center in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering. She was also involved in running the E-Challenge business plan competition for BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students).
Katherine received her B.A. from McGill University, and completed an M.A. and the M.S. core curriculum in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.
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Jia Shen
“CTO & Co-Founder”
Jia is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of RockYou, and has focused extensively on graphic design and usability throughout his professional web development career spanning over 10 years. Prior to RockYou, Jia has held management roles leading the user interface and technical solutions teams at Open Harbor, and managing the majority of engineering at Iconix. Jia started working on scalable consumer applications at shopping tools internet provider Bluedog, a Stanford based startup, and was part of the original team at Bell Laboratories which developed the VoiceXML format into the W3C standard. In addition, Jia’s experience has spanned enterprise sales and professional services functions, as he closed transactions and integrated with large multi-national corporation customers like Mitsubishi, Tyco, Flextronics, and DHL. Jia has a double major in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
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David Feinleib
David Feinleib brings extensive entrepreneurial and operating experience to his role at MDV. He invests in Internet-enabled companies.
Prior to MDV, David ran a profitable online advertising business. He founded Centeris, a venture funded company providing interoperability software for mixed Windows and Linux environments. Before Centeris, David was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Ignition Partners, where he co-founded and was VP of Product Management at Consera Software (HPQ). Prior to Consera, David co-founded and was CEO of onDevice (KEYN), a wireless software company.
Before onDevice, David led marketing and development teams at Microsoft. He managed the Out of Box Experience team for Windows and worked on television and Internet access services. David’s first entrepreneurial endeavor was in junior high school when he developed and sold ShareWare programs.
David maintains a blog at www.vcdave.com. He serves on the board of Centeris Software and sourced MDV’s investments in Fliqz, Genius, hi5 and PBWiki.
David holds a B.A. from Cornell University, and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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David Troy
David Troy is a technology entrepreneur. He founded a mail computer sales firm at age 14 in 1986, and transitioned into the Internet Service Provider market when he founded ToadNet, a prominent ISP in the mid-Atlantic area. He was an initial investor in Core Communications, a profitable CLEC based in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2004, he sold ToadNet to Landmark Communications (parent company of the Weather Channel, Trader Publications, and several other media properties) in an all-cash deal.
David is the founder and CEO of Popvox, LLC, an global VoIP consultancy providing design and operations support to emerging carriers in Europe, South America, Canada, and the United States. He is an active contributor to Asterisk, author of the AstManProxy manager proxy, and develops code for OpenSER. In 2007 he was the developer of the very popular Twittervision.com and Flickrvision.com, which received worldwide attention. David is also the author of the upcoming book Ruby and Telephony, to be published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. He lives in Arnold Maryland with his wife and two children, and is a certificated private pilot.
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Lars Leckie
Lars Leckie is an Associate at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. Prior to joining Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Lars was involved in founding and operational roles at start-up companies. He was a co-founder of AutoFarm (now Novariant), a company focused on GPS, robotics and automation of industrial equipment. Lars was in charge of strategy, product marketing, business development and building the sales team across three continents. Lars has also been involved with the founding team of SportBug, a GPS and Internet fitness company. While Lars spends less time coding now, he started his technical career coding and hacking computer games. He is the holder of two US patents.
Lars is an avid sailor and a former member of the Canadian Sailing Team. He represented Canada sailing Snipes in the Pan American Games as well as other international events.
Lars has a Masters of Science (Engineering) from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of business. He also holds an Engineering Physics degree from Queen’s University (with Honors).
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Chris Conway
At Trulia, Chris is responsible for the overall content strategy of the
site, including competitive benchmarking, partner evaluation, deal
execution, product development, and syndication opportunities. He
manages revenue optimization across the site, with ownership of search
and ad network relationships. Chris is also responsible for the product
strategy and evolution of the Trulia API, widgets, and micro-sites.
Prior to Trulia, Chris was a Business Development Manager at NexTag, a
comparison shopping site, where he was responsible for evaluating and
growing emerging service categories, including real estate, online
education, and travel. Chris led the content acquisition, competitive
benchmarking, licensing negotiations, and product development efforts
for the home valuation service on NexTag.com. He also was responsible
for outbound sales and partnership development for the travel vertical.
Prior to NexTag, Chris was a Senior Consultant and member of the
Business Development & Corporate Strategy team at ThruPoint, a
professional services firm funded in part by Cisco Systems and Morgan
Stanley Venture Partners. In this role, Chris advised Fortune 500
financial services companies on strategic technology decisions and
networking technology integration. Chris founded a new practice area
for ThruPoint in the storage networking space that led to strategic
alliances with Cisco and EMC.
Chris holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Yale
University as a Dual Major in Ethics, Politics, & Economics and East
Asian Studies.
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