Silicon Valley

Derek Andersen, Silicon Valley Chapter Director

Santa Claus, CEO and Founder of North Pole Industries, 12.12.12

We are hosting the worlds biggest UN-corporate holiday party for startups, entrepreneurs and small business owners! Freelancers and self-employed professionals are all welcome! Join us at YouDazzle HQ in the Nest GSV incubator as we broadcast the party live to dozens of cities worldwide through Startup Grind! Special guest appearance by founder/CEO of North Pole Industries, Santa Claus. Learn more about it here.

Eric is the co-Editor of TechCrunch and was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold to WebMediaBrands for $14 million in May of 2011, Eric also had a failed startup a few years ago. Called WriteWith, it offered online writing collaboration software. Eric attended Stanford University and graduated with a degree in international relations in 2005.

Charles Huang, Founder of Red Octane (Guitar Hero), 09.19.12

Charles is the co-founder of Red Octane and publisher of Guitar Hero, which many consider to be the most influential video game of the past decade. Guitar Hero became one of a handful of billion-dollar video game franchises in history and the third largest after Mario and Madden NFL. Charles was the EVP of Business Development at Red Octane and founded by him and his brother, Kai. Later that year the company launched the world’s first online video game rental service.In 2005, RedOctane published Guitar Hero, which went on to become the fastest growing video game franchise ever. In 2006, Activision acquired their company. He is currently the co-founder of Green Throttle Games, a gaming company trying to help make fitness fun.

Dave McClure, Founder at 500 Startups, 08.02.12

If you don’t know who Dave McClure is then I’m seriously concerned for your entrepreneurial viability. Dave is a venture capitalist & founding partner at 500 Startups, an internet startup seed fund and incubator program in Mountain View, CA. He likes to hang out with entrepreneurs, and occasionally invest in startups foolish enough to let him. He has been an investor in over 250 companies including Mint.com, Twilio, Wildfire Interactive, SendGrid, TaskRabbit, SlideShare, Mashery, CreditKarma, KISSmetrics, and MakerBot, among others.

An Miura-Ko, Partner at FLOODGATE Capital, 07.14.12

Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at FLOODGATE  where their investments include: Branchout, Chegg, Digg, IMVU, Kongregate, MILK, Reputation, Revision3, Smule, Twitter, and Zimride. In addition to serving at FLOODGATE, Ann is a lecturer in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, where she got her PhD focused on mathematical modeling of computer security. She teaches High Tech Entrepreneurship with Steve Blank and is a frequent lecturer in courses such as Technology Venture Formation, High-tech Entrepreneurship, and the Mayfield Fellows Program.

Patrick Collison, Founder of Stripe, 4.22.12

In 2005 at the age of 16, Patrick Collison was the recipient of the 41^st Young Scientist of the Year for his work with Lisp. Before Patrick’s last year of High School he left early to attend MIT. During his first quarter of freshman year, Patrick founded Auctomatic and joined Y Combinator. At the age of 19 and ten months after incorporating, the company was bought by Live Current Media for $5MM. In early 2010 John and his brother Patrick began working on Stripe together. It was recently announced that Stripe raised $18MM at a $100MM valuation.

Steve Blank, Founder of E.piphany author of The Startup Owners Manual, 04.06.12

Steve co-founded E.piphany, in his living room in 1996. His other startups include two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.  He has written several books one call Four Steps to the Epiphany. and his latest book The Startup Owners Manual integrates 10 years of new knowledge.

 

Bo Fishback, Founder of Zaarly, 03.28.12

Founder and CEO of Zaarly. Bo was previously the vice president of entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the president of Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation. He is a founder of Orbis Biosciences, a drug delivery and particle fabrication company whose core intellectual property was developed from research conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Fishback also was a co-founder of Lightspeed Genomics, a next-generation genome sequencing company that was spun out of a research program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and acquired by Macrogen.

Ben Silbermann, Founder of Pinterest, 2.29.12

Ben is an Internet entrepreneur who co-founded and is CEO of Pinterest, a virtual pinboard which lets users organize images, recipes and other things. The website allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and/or ‘like’ photos. Silbermann was raised in Des Moines, Iowa.

Kevin Rose, Partner at Google Ventures, Founder of Digg and Milk, 1.26.12

Kevin Rose is a Partner at Google Ventures where he primarily focuses on early-stage and seed investments. Prior to joining Google Ventures, Kevin co-founded Milk, a mobile application development company in San Francisco. Previously Kevin was the founder of Digg, and co-founder of Revision3, and Pownce(acquired by Six Apart). In addition, Rose is the founder of Foundation, a private newsletter and podcast, and formerly was co-host of the tech news podcast Diggnation.

Rod Swanson, Director of Electronic Arts Brand, 12.08.11

Rod serves as the global lead for the Electronic Arts brand. He joined Electronic Arts in 1992 to provide management and direction to a rapidly expanding group of traditional artists being assimilated into a culture of engineers. During this time he led several World Wide Artist Conferences within Electronic Art’s development community to build the diverse creative teams required for the creation of interactive entertainment. Rod spent over eight years within EA’s studios and went on to manage the production and design of EA’s STRIKE franchise, the first non-sports intellectual property with platinum sales.

Scott Heiferman, Founder at Meetup, 11.15.11

Scott Heiferman co-founded MeetUp Inc. in 2002 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Heiferman serves as an Advisor of Familybuilder, Inc. He co-founded Fotolog, Inc. in 2002. He was the Founder of i-traffic. He received the Jane Addams Award from the National Conference on Citizenship in 2005 and was named the 2004 M.I.T. Technology Review “Innovator of the Year”. He’s the Organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, New York’s top tech community group. Mr. Heiferman is a graduate of University of Iowa.

Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner at SoftTech VC, 11.07.11

Based in Palo Alto, California, Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested in 110+ consumer internet startups (Fund I, Fund II, Fund III) in areas like social media, monetization, search, gaming or B2B/B2C web services. These investments are typically located in Silicon Valley, New-York and Boulder. With over 20 years of operational, entrepreneurial and venture capital experience, Jeff is able to add relevant perspective and value to his companies as they grow from inception to maturity, and hopefully, success.

Ben Parr, Fmr Editor at Mashable, 09.29.11

Ben Parr is an entrepreneur, commentator, and journalist. In a previous life, he was the Editor-at-Large of Mashable, the world’s largest independent digital news website focused on social media and web technology. Ben is the founder of The Peep Project (a stealth startup), as well as an advisor to several startup. Ben’s work has been featured in media such as Fortune, Fox News, CNN and The New York Times.

Tony Conrad, Partner at True Ventures, Founder of About.me, 08.25.11

Tony is Co-Founder & CEO of About.me (acquired by Aol in December 2010). He is also a Founding Venture Partner at True Ventures where he serves on the Board of Directors of Automattic (WordPress), appssavvy, Coffee & Power, Quarterly, StockTwits, RescueTime, PastFuture (GDGT), KISSmetrics, 20×200, Smarterer, Qualaroo, Trippy and led True’s investment in MakerBot, ToyTalk, Betable and OnTheAir.

MG Siegler, Partner at CrunchFund, Writer at TechCrunch, 07.28.11

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he worked in web development. He also writes at his own blog ParisLemon. He lives in San Francisco.

Anthony Soohoo, Fmr GM of CBS Interactive, Founder at Rumpus, 06.23.11

Anthony Soohoo is co-founder & CEO at Rumpus, an early stage mobile gaming company in San Francisco. Previously Anthony served as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Entertainment & Lifestyle Division at CBS Interactive which included CBS.com, TV.com, The Insider.com, Chow, Chowhound, UrbanBaby, CBS Audience Network, and CBS Interactive Web Original Studio. During his tenure, Soohoo helped grow the CBS Interactive Entertainment Division to become one of the leading entertainment networks on the web.

Naval Ravikant, Founder at AngelList, 05.26.11

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList. Previously, he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (large white-label classifieds marketplace). He has advised Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others, and invested in many companies, including Twitter, Foursquare, DocVerse (sold to Google), Mixer Labs (sold to Twitter), Jambool (Social Gold), SnapLogic, PlanCast, Stack Overflow, Heyzap, and Disqus.

David Cowan, Partner of Bessemer Venture Partners, 04.28.11

David joined Bessemer Venture Partners in 1992. He has since made 45 early-stage investments for Bessemer, including 19 that have gone public, and 18 that have been acquired by public companies. The first Forbes Midas List ranked David among the world’s top 10 venture investors. David has invested in network technology (Ciena, P-Com), internet services (PSI-Net, Keynote, Flycast, Netli), and consumer internet (Hotjobs, Blue Nile). In 1995 he cofounded Verisign as a Bessemer-funded spinout of RSA, serving as VeriSign’s initial Chairman.

Jason Calacanis, Founder at Mahalo / Launch / Weblogs, 02.17.11

Jason was CEO and co-founder of Weblogs, Inc., a network of widely read blogs including Engadget, Joystiq, Autoblog, and Blogging Baby ranked # 1 by Technorati. Founded in January 2004, Weblogs, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL in November of 2005. Calacanis maintained editorial supervision over Weblogs, Inc. as a senior vice president of AOL. In June 2006, Calacanis relaunched Netscape, the iconic browser owned by AOL and was named its general manager.

Jeff Smith, Founder and CEO at Smule, 01.27.11

Jeff is currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Music at Stanford University. He previously received a BS in Computer Science at Stanford University. In between Stanford and Stanford, Jeff co-founded and ran an email security software company which he took public on the Nasdaq and grew to $50M in sales before stepping down as CEO. Jeff is the co-author of sixteen patents in the field of email security.

Ben Galbraith, Fmr Mozilla and Palm Exec, VP of Mobile at WalMart, 12.15.10

Ben founded Ajaxian.com, headed Developer Tools at Mozilla, ran Developer Relations at Palm and is now running mobile architecture and engineering at Walmart.com after being acquired along with their start-up team in early 2011. Ben’s been writing code since he was six and starting businesses since he was ten; he’s written books, given hundreds of award-winning presentations world-wide, produced a few technical conferences, sold three companies, and has held CEO, CIO, CTO, and Software Architect positions in the medical, publishing, media, consumer electronics, advertising, software and internet industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and six children.

Chad Harrington, Founder of DataScaler (sold to Oracle), 10.28.10

Chad Harrington manages Adaptive Computing’s worldwide marketing efforts. Prior to Adaptive, Chad was a strategy consultant, helping companies increase shareholder value. Previously, he was CEO and founder of DataScaler, a database technology company which Oracle acquired in 2010. He has a history of success, holding executive, marketing, and business development roles at companies that were acquired by Symantec, McAfee, Check Point, and Oracle. He has appeared on CNN, Marketwatch, Univision, and in other major media outlets.

Spencer Tall, Managing Director Allegis Capital, 05.20.10

Spencer Tall serves on the boards of Allegiance, EMN8, IMVU, Solera Networks and Symplified. Prior investments include E.piphany (EPNY), Web TV (acquired by MSFT), and One Touch Systems (acquired by Hughes Satellite). Mr. Tall is renowned for his ability to leverage marketing, distribution and sales opportunities especially in Asia for his portfolio companies. Prior to Allegis Capital, Mr. Tall was a co-founder and General Partner with APV Technology Partners for three funds over 10 years.