Speakers

Ben Elowitz is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a media company with an audience of 10MM monthly unique users. Ben is also the author of Digital Quarters, a blog that examines the future of digital media and publishing. His work has been featured on Huffington Post, TechCrunch, AllThingsD, paidContent.org and CNBC.com, among others. Prior to Wetpaint, he co-founded Blue Nile (NILE), the largest online retailer of luxury goods. Prior to Blue Nile, he was an early employee at Fatbrain.com (FATB), an early e-commerce company that went public in 1998 and sold to Barnes & Noble in 1999. Ben is an angel investor in a number of media and e-commerce companies, including ICanHasCheezburger, and a frequent conference speaker on digital media, user generated content, and entrepreneurship.

Dave McClure is a greedy, blood-sucking venture capitalist & the 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 help or invest in their startups if they are foolish enough to let him. Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O'Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft. Years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.

Garry Tan is Co-Founder of Posterous.com -- dead simple blogs by email. Previously, Garry co-founded the engineering team for Palantir Technology's quant analysis platform, now deployed at one of the most successful global macro hedge funds in the world. Garry has also co-authored five patents issued around data synchronization, quantitative analysis of financial time series, and online shopping user experience.

Hadi first established himself as a technology leader during the browser wars in the 90s, as Group Program Manager for Internet Explorer. After the release of IE 5.0, Hadi was on the founding team for Tellme Networks, which was later acquired by Microsoft. During his 2nd stint at Microsoft, Hadi was General Manager of the MSN portal, where he helped deliver 30% growth and MSN's first and only period of profitability. He then joined twin brother Ali Partovi to co-found iLike, which was acquired by MySpace. Hadi is now an active angel investor and has also served in advisory roles for numerous companies including Facebook, Dropbox, OPOWER, and others. A graduate of Harvard University, Hadi enjoys skiing, kayaking, guitar, and grabscrab.

Jan has designed software user experiences for 20 years. Jan’s career began at Microsoft, working on the company's first electronic mail products. Jan led the design of the Microsoft Money personal finance line for five years, including the creation of an innovative design methodology called inductive user interface design, and Jan was the user experience architect for Microsoft Windows Vista. Jan’s interest and expertise span the range of software development activities from conception to implementation. He is the author of flow|state, a blog on user interface design. Jan holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Cornell University. As a husband and a father of three children, he’s acutely interested in exploring ways technology can simplify the lives of busy families.

Jeff Lawson is CEO and Co-founder of Twilio, the cloud communications company that is revolutionizing telecom with APIs for making and receiving calls and text messages, and the recent release of OpenVBX. Jeff has over 10 years of entrepreneurial product leadership experience. Prior to founding Twilio, Jeff served as Product Manager for Amazon Web Services, and has held founding executive roles for NineStar, Stubhub.com, and Versity.com

Jennifer is currently the Editor of Seattle 2.0. She also serves on the board of Social Media Club Seattle. Jennifer has been a reporter in Seattle for the last three years, first at Q13 and most recently at KING 5. She loves technology and business and is so addicted to her iPhone, her mom recently bought her special gloves with holes in the thumb and index finger so she could use it without her hands getting cold.

Keith is the co-founder and CEO of BigDoor Media, a startup that powers virtual economies for digital publishers. Prior to starting BigDoor, Keith founded the company that became Zango and served as its CEO for ten years. Keith grew Zango from a startup to a multi-national company employing 300 people in six offices in four countries and multiple years was ranked among the Best Places to Work in Seattle. The company grew to $78 million in annual revenue and $24 million in EBITDA and ranked #7 on the Inc 500. Zango ultimately became a victim of the 2008 financial crisis and Keith got the opportunity to learn valuable lessons about proper levels of debt for an Internet business. Keith started and bootstrapped two other tech companies prior to 1999, both businesses were kind enough to provide Keith with vast amounts of experience in what not to do. Keith dropped out of Northwest College three weeks before graduating to pursue his career and start his first business. He sits on the board of the WTIA and is actively involved in youth based charities.

Konstantin Guericke is an entrepreneur who was most recently CEO of jaxtr, a social communications start-up with over ten million registered users that was purchased by SabSe Technologies in June 2009. In addition to serving on the boards of several startups and working on his next project, Konstantin continues to advise LinkedIn on the company’s activities in the German market. Before jaxtr, Konstantin co-founded LinkedIn and as vice president of marketing led the company’s marketing activities from launch to first six million members and profitability. Prior to LinkedIn, Konstantin served as vice president of marketing at Presenter.com and as vice president of sales and marketing for Black Sun Interactive, a pioneer in 3-D social software at the dawn of the web. Konstantin graduated from Stanford University with a B.S. and M.S. in engineering. Konstantin has lived, studied and worked in Asia as well as the United States and Europe.

Marcelo Calbucci is the Founder and Publisher of Seattle 2.0, a resource for tech entrepreneurs and startups in Seattle. Marcelo was the Founder & CTO of Sampa, a startup focused on the family and baby website space he founded in 2005 and closed its door in mid-2009. Marcelo is also the creator of the StartupDay, a conference he would have enjoyed attending if it existed when he left Microsoft in late 2004. At Microsoft, Calbucci worked on MSN Search (now Bing) for 4+ years and on Exchange Server since 1998.

Monica has lived on the bleeding edge of high technology for more than 20 years in both the for-profit and nonprofit worlds. She’s been the Chief Marketing Officer for two hugely successful Seattle-area startups: Valve (makers of Half-Life) and Picnik (which was acquired by Google in March 2010). Between startups, she worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she managed the central communications team and served as media advisor to Bill and Melinda Gates. Before startups, she was an award-winning marketer at Microsoft. She now manages marketing and business development for Intersect, a Seattle-area startup founded by Pulitzer Prize winning tech entrepreneur Peter Rinearson.

Rashmi Sinha is a designer and entrepreneur. She is co-founder & CEO for SlideShare, the best place to share your presentations on the web. Rashmi believes that good software comes from a true collaboration between developers and designers. Her background is social software & interface design. She did a Ph.D. from Brown University and researched search engines & recommender systems at UC Berkeley. Deciding that she wanted to build products, she cofounded Uzanto which did design consulting during the day and built MindCanvas (online games meet online surveys) at night! Her appetite for products was whetted and SlideShare is her next venture. Rashmi blogs about the social web at www.rashmisinha.com. She speaks frequently at conferences like FOWA, SXSW & WebVisions. For her next career, she wants to write a book about strange things people do on social websites.

Shayan Zadeh is co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, the largest social dating service with over 50 million members worldwide. Prior to starting Zoosk, he held program manager and software engineer titles at Microsoft. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Sharif University of Technology, a Master of Science in computer science from University of Maryland, and an MBA from University of Washington.

Todd Hooper has over fifteen years of experience with early stage companies, primarily in enterprise networking and security. He was bitten by the entrepreneur bug in Australia where he sold his first company in 1996. Todd relocated to Seattle in 1998 and has worked with local companies WatchGuard Technologies, Trillium Lane Labs and Napera Networks.

Tony most recently served as CEO of RescueTime, whose mission is to help individuals and businesses spend get smarter about how they spend their time and spend it more effectively. Tony accidentally fell into self-employment during the Web 1.0 boom and has never had a job since. He's founded and sold two bootstrapped technology companies and led RescueTime from a goofy side project to a Y-Combinator-funded experiment to a Series-A-funded company trending towards profitability. His professional passions include UX design, marketing, freemium funnel design, viral loops , SEO, PR, and personal productivity.

Vivek Bhaskaran is the founding member and CEO of Survey Analytics, one of the industry's leading providers of web-based research technologies. As Chief Executive Officer, he plays a key role in defining the company strategy and using technology and innovation continuously to maintain its leadership in the industry. He has played a pivotal role in the Survey Analytics journey. In 2008, Survey Analytics made Inc. magazine's list of the fastest-growing private companies, ranking 172nd overall and 25th among business-service providers. Puget Sound Business Journal recognized Survey Analytics as one of the 100 fastest-growing private companies in Washington State. Vivek is also an active investor in technology led startups and is in the board of IdeaScale and ResearchAccess. Vivek completed his primary education in India before moving to Russia and then US. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University, Utah