Alex Kantrowitz is a senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed News. He began his career buying ads and selling ad-tech software. Since then, he’s interviewed some of the world’s top CEOs, including Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey. You can find him on Twitter at @kantrowitz
2018
Harper Cheng is an angel investor at Sand Hill Angels. She works as a senior hardware system integrator in Pixel engineering team at Google. She worked as a senior power system design engineer in Mac engineering team at Apple for over 5 years. Prior to Apple, she worked as a power management engineer at Renesas Electronics America and Marvell Semiconductor. She is looking into entrepreneurial opportunities. She is also involved in real estate investment and rental property management. She is very passionate in philanthropy supporting healthcare services and medical research.
Natalie Abeysena is the co-founder and CEO of ScopeAI, analyzing customer conversations through natural-language processing to drive better product and operations decisions. ScopeAI is backed by investments from Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, Social Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Michael Seibel (YC). Prior to founding ScopeAI, Natalie was a UX researcher at Google where she translated user interviews into actionable insights for product teams. She holds a Masters degree in technology and innovation from Harvard University and a BSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from The University of Western Ontario.
Augusto “Aghi” Marietti is an inventor, technology entrepreneur and angel investor. Augusto aims to help to create the API economy by changing the way software is built and consumed.
He is the CEO and Co-founder of Kong, the Microservice and API company on a mission to broker world’s information. He drives the vision, strategy, and long-term growth. Kong is the most widely-adopted open-source API Gateway with over 20M downloads and one of the fastest growing open-source company. Kong is backed by Andreessen-Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, Index Ventures, CRV, NEA, Eric Schmidt’s IE and Stanford University and it received many awards including being nominated #5 enterprise startup to bet your career on in 2018 [1].
Prior to Kong, Augusto was the CEO and Co-founder of Mashape, the largest API Marketplace, which was acquired by RapidAPI in 2017. While finding ways to keep Mashape alive in the early days, he had to live like a homeless for several months [2]. Mashape eventually raised several rounds from tier-1 investors while pioneering the concept of using APIs as a business and backbone of software infrastructure. At the time of acquisition, Mashape had over 300,000 developers and was powering 20,000 APIs. Prior to Mashape, he founded MemboxX, the first European cloud service for storing documents and sensitive personal data.
Augusto received his BS in Economics from the Catholic University of Milan (now listed as notable alumni) and studied briefly at UC Berkeley. Augusto is the lead inventor on five US patents, angel investors in over ten startups and he’s fluent in four
languages.
Jonathan Charles is a Principal at the Samsung Catalyst Fund (SCF), Samsung Electronics’ early-stage venture capital fund focused on core technologies related to Internet of Things, autonomous & connected car, digital health, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure and component level technologies for devices. Prior to Samsung, Jonathan held business development and product marketing roles at venture-backed RoamBI (a.k.a. Mellmo). His Silicon Valley experiences also include working at Apple in a business development capacity and as an investment banker at Jefferies & Co. During and directly after business school, Jonathan also served as an investment associate at Apjohn Ventures, an early stage venture fund.
Jonathan holds an MBA and MHA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He also holds an MS from the Carnegie Mellon Schools of Computer Science and Business and has completed an MPH from the Tulane School of Public Health. His undergraduate studies were completed at Loyola Marymount. Jonathan is also Kauffman Venture Capital Fellow (Class 21).
Rama Sekhar, Partner, Norwest Venture Partners, focuses on early to late stage venture investments in enterprise and infrastructure including: cloud, big data, DevOps, cybersecurity and networking. Rama’s current investments include: Agari, Bitglass, ClearDATA, Dremio, Qubole, SnapRoute, and TRUSTID. Rama was previously an investor in Morta Security (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Pertino Networks (acquired by Cradlepoint), and Exablox (acquired by StorageCraft).
Rama was previously a product manager at Cisco Systems, where he defined product strategy for $1B+ networking products in the carrier and data center markets. Before joining Norwest in 2009, he was with Comcast Ventures, where he focused on investment opportunities in the enterprise and infrastructure sectors.
Vasily is a Staff Product Manager leading Tesla Customer Acquisition team. In his career, Vasily is primarily focusing on solving large complex problems and profitable growth. He is living and working in San Francisco bay area.
Before joining Tesla, for three years Vasily led Driver Growth and Driver Experience products at Uber. Prior to that, Vasily led consumer product at Reputation-com and worked for number of late stage VC funded Silicon Valley startups: SuccessFactors, BitTorrent and others.
Vasily is speaking regularly on topics of automation, product experimentation, understanding customer needs, and managing a product for maximum impact. His other interests include advising and investing in growth startups, teaching online classes to thousands of students, and helping startup employees turn equity packages to liquidity.
Vasily has MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and holds Master degrees in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Economics from New Economic School. Vasily is a proponent of living healthy, he is a former competitive swimmer and Champion of Moscow Region in Swimming
Mada leads marketing as a co-founder of Branch, the mobile growth platform for today’s top companies, powering mobile linking and growth for over 30,000 apps and 2 billion monthly users around the world. Born and raised in Romania, Mada came to the US to study Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, and then earned her Masters of Engineering and MBA from Stanford. Mada enjoys playing the latest viral mobile game, binge watching the hottest sci-fi show, and photographing Branch events. Mada regularly speaks about mobile growth at top tech events like Websummit and Saastr, and she was included in Linkedin’s Next Wave, 150 top professionals in 15 industries all under 35.
Adeo Ressi is CEO of the Founder Institute, a startup launch program that operates in nearly 200 cities worldwide, and he is a recognized mentor for fast-growing technology businesses. He has pioneered innovations in the protection of founder rights, the raising of early-stage capital and the scaling of new businesses.
Previous to the Founder Institute, Adeo has helped to create nearly $2 billion in shareholder value by founding or running nine businesses, including TheFunded, Game Trust, Xceed and Total New York. In addition, the Founder Institute has helped to create approximately $25 billion more in shareholder value by launching nearly 3,000 technology companies that have raised an estimated $1 billion from investors.
Adeo previously served on the Board of the X Prize Foundation to pursue his interests in space exploration and techniques to motivate human achievement. He studied architecture and spent time living on a commune to explore his interests in designing better ways to live. Adeo is passionate about inspiring people to achieve greatness.
George Arison is the founder and Co-CEO of Shift, an online marketplace disrupting the $1.2T car industry by fundamentally transforming the experience of buying and selling a car. Previously, George co-founded Taxi Magic (acquired by Verifone), the first on-demand mobile transportation booking technology. George has taken his experience creating Taxi Magic and applied it to building a new company that seeks to change the future of car ownership. Prior to Shift, George also worked at Google and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). George, a Georgian immigrant, was the first student from the Soviet Union allowed to attend a private U.S. high school without a government sponsorship. He later graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont. George also pursued his other professional passion in politics, helping his native country of Georgia transition to a democracy. He co-founded Georgia