Speakers

Brian Goffman is CEO and co-founder of Optify. Along with Erez Barak, Brian co-founded Optify with the mission of making B2B real-time online marketing easy, profitable and measurable. Prior to Optify, Brian was a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle. Brian has been a venture capitalist and Internet entrepreneur since 1994, with experience at Microsoft, Austin Ventures, PointCast, Reuters and McKinsey & Company. Brian has a BA and MBA from Harvard University.

Brian Wong is the founder of kiip (pronounced "keep"), a mobile rewards network, backed by True Ventures. Kiip has raised over $4.4 million in funding to date and is redefining the advertising industry through a "moments"-based value model, versus the traditional attention based screen estate model. Very recently, Kiip was listed by Forbes as one of the "4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Put on Your Watch List". Techcrunch and the Wall Street Journal called Brian the "youngest person to ever receive funding by a venture capital firm". He was an early Bachelors of Commerce graduate from the University of British Columbia, graduating at the age of 18, after skipping four grades in elementary and high school. He was recently lauded in Mashable as one of "The Top 5 Young Entrepreneurs to Watch", and the Vancouver Sun called him "a budding internet visionary". He was also recently a recipient of the Top 20 Under 20 awards in all of Canada. Before starting kiip, Brian was responsible for key publisher and tech partnerships at the social news website Digg.com. He also launched the Digg Android mobile app, adding to the company's rising mobile presence.

Eric is the author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned and the creator of the Lean Startup methodology. He co-founded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup, which has today has over 40 million users and 2009 revenue over $22 million. An entrepreneur in residence at Harvard Business School and a frequent speaker at business events, he advises startups on business and product strategy using the Lean Startup approach. He is the author of the HE LEAN START UP: How Today’s Entrepreneur Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Crown Business, Sept. 2011).

Glenn is Redfin's CEO. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a Sequoia-backed, publicly traded company that created the enterprise portal software market. In his seven years at Plumtree, Glenn at different times led engineering, marketing, product management and business development; he also was responsible for financing and general operations in Plumtree's early days. Prior to starting Plumtree, Glenn worked as one of the first employees at Stanford Technology Group, a Sequoia-backed start-up acquired by IBM. Glenn was raised in Seattle and was graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular contributor to Redfin's blog and Twitter.

Jennifer Cabala is the Chief Marketing Officer at Startup Weekend. She also serves on the board of Social Media Club Seattle and a contributor to Seattle 2.0. 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.

Jenny is a co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, a small software startup focused on making beautiful software experiences. Their latest product is A Story Before Bed is the first (and only) service that lets parents, grandparents, and children record video of themselves reading children's books and play it back as often as they like on the Mac, PC, or iPad. Before Jackson Fish, Jenny worked at Microsoft from 2001–2007 as Creative Director of the Windows User Experience team. When she isn't running her startup, she serves on the board as Experience Director of the AIGA Seattle chapter and works with national and local organizations to foster the next generation of creative design talent headed for the tech industry. She was named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Technology by the Puget Sound Business Journal and was awarded Seattle 2.0 Best Startup Designer in 2010.

Jonathan has the distinct honor of being the first person to sell 2 companies to Google. As the CEO of Picnik, Jonathan created a category-defining (1st search result for "photo editor") online photo editor to profitability and reached 47M visits a month. Prior to Picnik, Jonathan founded Phatbits which went on to become Google Gadgets. Prior to Phatbits, Jonathan was a senior manager in Microsoft's consumer division. Jonathan is currently the chairman of Geekwire.com, which reports on technology news in the region and strives to make sure that the world revels in Seattle's geek-dom in all forms.

Marc Nager is the CEO and Co-Founder of Startup Weekend NPO. With a degree in International Business from Chapman University in Southern California, Marc left his MBA program after the first semester to pursue a new direction. Scratching his own itch to learn how to launch a startup, Marc and his co-founders attended, then acquired Startup Weekend, LLC and transformed it into a non-profit in 2009. Since then Startup Weekend has grown more than 500% and helped 40,000 entrepreneurs. This year there will be more than 250 Startup Weekends in 70 countries around the world.

Matt is an executive with over 15 years experience in the online games space. At WildTangent he is responsible for the platforms and products for both WildTangent Games and WildTangent Media. This includes being co-founder of the WildCoins digital currency business model and creating the BrandBoost advertising platform. Prior to WildTangent, he has held leadership positions at InfoSpace and Go2Net and got his start in the games industry as a developer for Sony Interactive Studios. He holds a degree in Computer Science from University of California at San Diego.

Megan Casey is co-founder of Squidoo.com, which she started with Seth Godin and a small team in 2005. Together they bootstrapped their way to millions of pages of original content published by hundreds of thousands of creative writers, and earned a spot as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world (so says Quantcast, for those who follow such things). She spends her free time helping entrepreneurs take their ideas and make them happen.

Micah is CEO and Chief Community Caretaker of Graphic.ly. Graphic.ly provides an immersive social experience and marketplace around digital comics and associated merchandise. Previously, Micah was VP, Business Development and Chief Evangelist for Lijit Networks, the sixth startup Micah has been involved in (having sold his last startup, Current Wisdom, in the beginning of 2007). Micah has helped author several books on internet and search marketing, and started the #followfriday meme on Twitter, which has become part of the fabric of the social web. A frequent speaker and with appearances on CNN and articles in many of the leading blogs, including Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, you can read about Micah’s philosophy of success through failure here on this blog.

Rand Fishkin is the CEO & Co-Founder of the web's most popular SEO Software provider, SEOmoz. He co-authored the Art of SEO from O'Reilly Media and was named on the 40 Under 40 List and 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30. Rand has been written about in The Seattle Times, Newsweek and PC World among others and keynoted conferences on search around the world. He's particularly passionate about the SEOmoz blog, read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day. In his miniscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, whose serendipitous travel blog chronicles their journeys.

Scott Porad leads Product Development as the CTO at the Cheezburger Network, the company behind I Can Has Cheezburger? Failblog.org, Memebase.com, TheDailyWh.at and KnowYourMeme.com. Since 1995, Scott has been involved with six web-based startups including launching drugstore.com, working on ESPN.com at Paul Allen's Starwave Corporation and for Seth Godin at Yoyodyne Entertainment. Scott lives online at http://scottporad.com and in real life with his family in Seattle.

Sean Ellis is the founder and CEO of CatchFree, a new startup that makes it easy to discover and share the best free apps and avoid those with hidden catches. Before founding CatchFree, Sean ran marketing at LogMeIn and Uproar from launch to NASDAQ IPO filings & helped bring Dropbox, Lookout, and Xobni to market in interim marketing leadership roles. He also helped accelerate growth at Eventbrite, Socialcast, Webs, World Golf Tour, Wordpress.com and Songkick.

T.A. McCann was the founder and CEO of Seattle-based Gist, Inc. and is now a Vice President at Research In Motion, which acquired Gist in February 2011. Previously T.A. was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at both Vulcan Capital and Polaris Venture Partners. Prior to Polaris, he held senior positions at Microsoft, leading product planning for the Exchange Server Group and developing Service Delivery Platforms focused on mobile applications. T.A. currently serves on the board of Zoopa and Wishpot. He is also an advisor/mentor for Techstars/Seattle and Notary One. In addition to his deep technology background, T.A. has won sailing's America's Cup and sailed around the world.

Tom Seery is the Founder and CEO of RealSelf.com, a community of consumers who want the real story about medical-beauty procedures and products. Tom's inspiration to launch his own company came from TripAdvisor, which was acquired by Expedia where he spent 5 years in debates about whether publishing hotel reviews was a good idea. Prior to Expedia, Tom worked at Unisys, a computer services company, and paid his dues working on Capitol Hill for a senile U.S. Congressman. Tom holds an MS from Drexel University, MBA from University of Washington, and BA from Connecticut College.