SPEAKERS
It’s a privilege to have them here!
Damon Berger
Damon Berger is the co-founder and CEO of the Primetime Emmy-nominated and award winning What’s Trending. What’s Trending is the daily destination for what’s hot on YouTube featuring the biggest traditional and YouTube celebrities anywhere. Before co-founding What’s Trending, Damon led Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation as Director of Digital Marketing,...
Brad Burnham
Brad Burnham is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. He began his career in information technology with AT&T in 1979. Brad held a variety of sales, marketing and business development positions there until 1990 when he spun Echo Logic out of Bell Laboratories. As the first AT&T “venture,”...
Cindy Gallop
Cindy Gallop is a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, whose background is brand building, marketing and advertising – she started up the US office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year. She is the founder...
Vala Halldorsdottir
Vala Halldorsdottir is a retail and mobile entrepreneur from Iceland. She is the co-director of The Startup Kids, a documentary which was successfully funded through Kickstarter and features interviews with leading entrepreneurs and VCs from Europe and the US. The film is now in distribution globally. Prior to distributing...
Gunnar Holmsteinn
Gunnar is the Director of Product Management at Jive Software. Prior to joining Jive, Gunnar was the founder and CEO of CLARA, a robust community analytics software company in the Video Games industry, which was acquired by Jive in 2013. At CLARA, Gunnar oversaw all business development, fundraising and...
Rebeca Hwang
CEO of younoodle.com
Rebeca Hwang was born in Seoul, Korea, raised in Argentina and received her education in the USA. Because of her multicultural upbringing, she has developed a wide range of interests and skills. Formally trained as a chemical, civil and environmental engineer at MIT, Cambridge, she discovered that her real...
Angela Jackson
Angela brings a decade’s experience placing 30+ angel investments (multiple sectors) and a serial entrepreneur family history to Portland Seed Fund. She has advised hundreds of entrepreneurs and seed‐stage companies across a broad spectrum of industries at AB Jackson Group, and also oversees the Portland State University Business Accelerator,...
Joshua Kauffman
Joshua is a globally active design strategist, facilitator and investor, and principal collaborator in the Quantified Self movement. With the Quantified Self, he works on the emerging opportunities in personal data and self-tracking that can enhance existing systems and lead to the invention of transformative new products and services....
Shira Lazar
Shira Lazar is the Host and Executive Producer of the Emmy nominated live interactive daily show show and 24/7 news hub, “What’s Trending”. She is also the Host and Creator of the talk show of YouTube, “Partners Project”, interviewing the biggest YouTube stars. Named one of Fast Company’s 2011 Most Influential...
Jason Mendelson
Jason has over a dozen years of experience in the venture capital and technology industries in a multitude of investing, operational and engineering roles. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Jason was a Managing Director and General Counsel for Mobius Venture Capital, where he also acted as its chief administrative...
Ryan McIntyre
Ryan has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over twenty years. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, Ryan started his career in venture capital at Mobius Venture Capital in January 2000. He currently serves on the boards of Authentic8, Awe.sm, DataHero, Cloud Engines, Memeo, Mobiplug, MongoLabs, SendGrid, Topspin and VictorOps for Foundry Group. Prior to...
Noah Ross
Noah is a Partner and Executive Creative Director of Launchpad Advertising in New York City, an award-winning full-service agency specializing in redefining opportunities for brands in transition. Over the last 10 years Noah has launched products and multidisciplinary campaigns for brands including Conde Nast, NimbleTV, Xbox, CenturyLink, Knoll, Absolut,...
John Sechrest
John Sechrest is the founder of the Seattle Angel Conference and the Willamette Angel Conference, each providing a venue for new angel investors to explore the process. He is a co-organizer of the Lean Startup Seattle, helping entrepreneurs get focused on stronger company processes. As a global facilitator for...
Dr. Thor Sigfusson
Dr. Thor Sigfusson founded the Iceland Ocean Cluster in 2011 and Codland in 2012. The role of the Iceland Ocean Cluster is to connect people and firms in ocean related fields and by that seek new opportunities. Codland´s goal is to increase the value of raw materials from fish. Codland...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Mr. Taleb is a bestselling author and distinguished scholar focused on probability, uncertainty, and randomness. He is the author of the Incerto trilogy which includes: Antifragile, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. Mr. Taleb is currently a Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York University and a Distinguished Research Scholar at Said Business School, Oxford University. His main...
Alex Torrenegra
Alexander Torrenegra (@torrenegra) is the founder and CEO of VoiceBunny and Voice123, a set of crowdsourced services to get professional voiceovers. He won the Colombia TR35 “Innovator of the Year” award from MIT’s Technology Review. Alex founded his first business at the age of 14. After migrating to the...
Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir
Sesselja Vilhjalmsdottir is an Icelandic entrepreneur and filmmaker. She is the co-director of The Startup Kids, a documentary which was successfully funded through Kickstarter and features interviews with leading entrepreneurs and VCs from Europe and the US. The film is now in distribution globally. Prior to distributing Startup Kids, Sesselja, together...
Helga Waage
Helga is Co-founder and CTO of Mobilitus, a mobile software solution development house. Mobilitus develops mobile solutions such as websites and e-commerce for the live entertainment industry. Their biggest partners are Ticketmaster and Live Nation for which they develop and operate mobile websites in multiple countries, such as the US,...
Melanie Weinberger
In the last few years alone, Melanie Weinberger has played a multitude of roles throughout the advertising industry and startup scene in Executive leadership, Digital Strategy, Business Development and Account Management. As Founder and CEO of Fit Steady, her mission to make personal health and fitness more accessible for...
Matt Wilson
Matt is the Co-founder of Under30Media. After using social media to land Under30CEO on MSNBC and BusinessWeek, he began building brands online including venture backed startups like Zaarly. Wilson’s passion for entrepreneurship began after leading Bryant University to becoming the world’s #1 entrepreneurs’ organization. He has earned personal accolades...
