Opções de stock de engenheiros de software zenefits

Transformação, envolvimento e experiência digital orientada por dados.
Dados, ML, Transformação Digital AI Driven.
Interessante Digital & amp; Citações Futuras de Dados.
Como as linhas entre o que é real e o que é borrão digital, aqui estão algumas citações citáveis ​​relacionadas a dados, análises, nuvem e digitais que encontrei em vários artigos ou apresentações. Sinta-se à vontade para usá-los para ilustrar seu argumento enquanto corre para o futuro da sua empresa.
"O mundo de seus filhos será tão estranho para você, como o mundo em que você cresceu foi para seus bisavós." # 8221; & # 8211; Quantumrum
“Nossa intuição sobre o futuro é linear. Mas a realidade da tecnologia da informação é exponencial, e isso faz uma diferença profunda. Se eu der 30 passos linearmente, chego a 30. Se eu der 30 passos exponencialmente, chego a um bilhão. ”& # 8212; Ray Kurzweil.
"Você sente isso no seu local de trabalho. Você sente quando fala com seus filhos. Você não pode sentir falta quando lê os jornais ou assiste ao noticiário. Nossas vidas estão sendo transformadas em tantos reinos ao mesmo tempo - e é vertiginosa. ”& # 8212; Thomas Friedman.
"Nem tudo que pode ser contado conta, e nem tudo que conta pode ser contado" & # 8211; Albert Einstein.
"Em Deus nós confiamos. Todos os outros devem trazer dados. ”- W. Edwards Deming.
Torture os dados e confessará qualquer coisa. & # 8212; Ronald Coase Continue lendo & rarr;
Coisas interessantes:
Conversational AI dirigindo Screenless UX.
A IA de conversação é claramente o agora e o futuro. De acordo com Satya Nadella, "Bots são os novos apps". # 8221; Em 2019, 33% dos usuários de internet nos EUA aumentarão sua experiência digital usando assistentes de voz.
Em 2016, havia 3 milhões de Amazon Echos e casos de uso limitado do consumidor. Atualmente, existem mais de 35 milhões de dispositivos de primeira voz, 100 milhões de dispositivos habilitados para voz e os consumidores estão procurando experiências de Voz + Visual. A explosão de consumidores que esperam que o comércio orientado por voz atenda a uma demanda principal - pesquisa de informações, pesquisa e compra de produtos - exige novos recursos.
O que são bots conversacionais? Qualquer programa de computador capaz de interagir ou conduzir uma conversa com um ser humano via método auditivo ou textual. As pessoas gostam da interface de conversação. Segundo a Nielsen, as pessoas gastam mais de 4 horas por dia em aplicativos de comunicação (e em crescimento).
O que são experiências de conversação (ou sem tela)? Qualquer experiência baseada em voz ou texto (como chatbots ou aplicativos de assistente de voz, Siri, Alexa, Cortona, Google Home) que usa o entendimento da linguagem natural para dialogar com os usuários.
[Sinônimos: interface de conversação, UX sem tela, sistema de diálogo, UX conversacional, aplicativo de conversação, comércio de conversação, chatbot, chatter-bot, bot]
Coisas interessantes:
Aprendizado de Máquina e Aprendizado Profundo.
O aprendizado de máquina (ML) e o aprendizado profundo permitiram possibilidades completamente novas no campo das experiências digitais, segmentação e previsões. Empresas de todos os setores estão coletando mais e mais dados. Agora é possível treinar modelos analíticos que, mesmo alguns anos atrás, seriam impossíveis. As empresas tomaram conhecimento do poder de seus conjuntos de dados, levando-os a desenvolver produtos e iniciativas completamente novos.
O que é aprendizado de máquina (ML)? O ML faz parte dos campos mais amplos da Ciência da Computação e da Estatística. O objetivo do ML é permitir que os computadores aprendam com sua experiência em determinadas tarefas. O ML também permite que a máquina melhore o desempenho à medida que sua experiência cresce. Um carro autônomo, por exemplo, aprende com a condução inicial de um motorista humano; além disso, à medida que se impõe, reforça a própria aprendizagem e melhora com a experiência. Em finanças, pode-se ver o ML como uma tentativa de descobrir relações entre variáveis, onde dados padrões históricos (entrada e saída), a máquina prevê resultados fora da amostra.
O ML também pode ser visto como um modo independente de modelo (ou estatístico ou orientado por dados) para reconhecer padrões em grandes conjuntos de dados. As técnicas de ML incluem:
Aprendizagem supervisionada (métodos como regressões e classificações) Aprendizagem não supervisionada (análise fatorial e identificação de regime) Aprendizagem profunda e reforçada. O aprendizado profundo é baseado em algoritmos de rede neural e é usado no processamento de dados não estruturados (por exemplo, imagens, voz, sentimento, etc.) e reconhecimento de padrões em dados estruturados.
O que mudou nos últimos anos? Aprendizado de máquina está se movendo da periferia (fazendo ciência de dados em silos com PhDs dedicados e cientistas de dados com uma variedade de ferramentas de nicho (R, scikit-learn, Tensorflow, etc.)), suportado pelo Machine Learning (ML) como um serviço. O ML como um modelo de serviço significa que as equipes de negócios podem passar de um foco em engenharia personalizada para modelar construção e implantação, aproveitando uma variedade de algoritmos, APIs comuns, plataformas de computação e serviços de dados.
Em muitos modelos de negócios digitais que funcionam como um mercado de dois lados & # 8211; AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Amazon etc. & # 8212; onde você tem compradores (ou passageiros) de um lado e vendedores (ou motoristas) do outro lado, um mercado eficiente vem da correspondência dinâmica, previsões e atribuição. Mercados de três lados & # 8211; O UberEats (consumidores, veículos de entrega / motoristas, restaurante & # 8211; preparação de refeições) leva a complexidade a outro nível. Plataformas centrais estão se tornando aplicações de aprendizado cada vez mais inteligentes e dinâmicas que se beneficiam do conhecimento do comportamento do usuário por meio de cliques, seleções e curtidas e do conhecimento do comportamento histórico das pessoas.
Coisas interessantes:
Digital + Analytics + Cloud Convergence é o novo normal.
É incompreensível considerar o quanto o panorama tecnológico mudou em apenas alguns anos. Estamos enfrentando as mudanças mais radicais e profundas desde que experimentamos a transformação móvel e digital que começou com o IPhone há 10 anos.
Digital, Analytics / ML (e Big Data) e Cloud Computing foram disruptores separados e silos tecnológicos até o momento. Cada vez mais eles estão convergindo (e se sobrepondo) criando um novo espaço DAC. Eles são cada vez mais inseparáveis, pois cada um reforça o outro.
Digital é o meio pelo qual os consumidores interagem com o ambiente e os dados são o subproduto dessa interação.
Analytics & # 8211; ciência de dados, aprendizado de máquina e AI & # 8211; é como extraímos valor dos dados e ganhamos insights para ação. A capacidade de ver o significado dentro dos dados não é mais uma boa ideia, mas uma necessidade. A adoção da análise preditiva e do aprendizado de máquina sofreu um aumento impressionante. Quase todas as corporações estão investindo milhões de dólares para se tornarem orientadas por dados. As previsões e a análise prescritiva passaram da periferia de algumas empresas para o mainstream.
“Big Data + ML + AI” está se tornando o repositório de tecnologia sobre o qual muitas aplicações modernas (sejam consumidores, clientes ou membros) estão sendo construídas. A engenharia de dados e os pipelines de dados evoluíram drasticamente na última década. Algumas das aplicações que estamos vendo como big data e AI se juntam são realmente revolucionárias.
A nuvem está reinventando como as empresas e os consumidores orquestram, automatizam e executam aplicativos, e como o Digital e o Analytics são entregues. O Amazon Web Services (AWS) continua a crescer pela velocidade, redução contínua de custos e amplitude de seus lançamentos de produtos. Enquanto a AWS recebe toda a imprensa, o Google Cloud Platform é um dos que assistirá nos próximos 18 meses. O GCP usa a infraestrutura central do Google, análise de dados (BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Datalab, Dataprep etc.) e aprendizado de máquina (Tensorflow), que são recursos formidáveis ​​e também estão evoluindo continuamente.
Um bom exemplo de uma empresa de DAC é a NetFlix. É uma experiência digital, impulsionada por análises (personalização em esteróides, teste A / B de novos recursos) e arquitetura nativa baseada em nuvem na AWS.
O mundo está indo para o DAC & # 8221; e é muito emocionante & # 8212; mas esse mundo sempre conectado de tudo para todos os lugares adiciona nova complexidade aos sistemas de software. Nova complexidade significa mais oportunidades enquanto o caos reina.
Coisas interessantes:
Arquitetura Digital para 2020-2025-2030.
O futuro está evoluindo mais rápido do que as organizações podem se adaptar ou ajustar. O que parece louco há alguns anos é agora realidade:
Em 2004, a ideia de que as redes sociais terão impacto nas eleições presidenciais, influenciando os eleitores, teria parecido ridícula. Em 2009, a ideia de que smartphone acoplado com AI / ML / PNL / Visão / Dados em tempo real criaria uma economia de compartilhamento ampla parecia loucura. Em 2015, a ideia de que os wearables substituirão um smartphone parece loucura. Em 2017, a ideia de carros e caminhões autônomos na estrada parecia estar a algumas décadas de distância, e não bem na esquina. o fato de que temos assistentes digitais & # 8211; Alexa, Siri, etc. & # 8211; que são incorporados na vida cotidiana era insondável há alguns anos atrás. Com as mensagens surgindo como canal de escolha para muitos, e a demanda por experiências únicas está crescendo.
A velocidade de transformação e a urgência estão melhorando em quase todos os setores.
Muitas organizações fracassam em seus esforços de transformação digital porque não têm pessoas talentosas ou capacidade inteligente, mas porque não têm objetivos claros, liderança, mentalidade experimental ou roteiros plurianuais para alinhar aplicações e infraestrutura legadas (e montanhas de dívidas técnicas) em recursos digitais úteis. arquiteturas - & gt; plataformas - & gt; resultados de negócios.
Todo CEO hoje deve ter uma resposta para a pergunta “Qual é a sua estratégia digital 3 & # 8211; 5-7 anos a partir de agora? Que novas capacidades você está criando para competir com disruptores digitais? ”
O desafio não é apenas a grande clareza da imagem, mas o colapso lógico subsequente: Estratégia - & gt; Recursos - & gt; Arquitetura - & gt; Programas - & gt; Projetos - & gt; Aplicações - & gt; A infraestrutura.
Portanto, a primeira questão crítica é: o que você realmente quer alcançar? Quais são os objetivos das jornadas de clientes ou casos de uso? Quais são os resultados do negócio alvo e ROI potencial? Maior fidelidade do cliente? Melhor engajamento do cliente? Uma parcela maior de carteira via venda cruzada? Novos clientes? Menor atrito? Segmentação mais barata e rápida?
Em outras palavras, quais são os casos de uso relevantes? Como o ditado de "Alice no país das maravilhas & # 8221; vai: se você não sabe onde você está indo, qualquer estrada vai te levar até lá.
Começar com um objetivo claro é essencial para criar a arquitetura certa, escolha a ferramenta certa para resolver o problema certo. Alguma clareza é necessária para conduzir a prova de conceitos ou até mesmo selecionar uma pilha de tecnologia para experimentar.
A consumerização está impulsionando a arquitetura da próxima geração.
A consumerização e a evolução do comportamento do cliente estão forçando as empresas a mudar a forma de comercializar, engajar, vender e reter.

Opções de estoque de engenheiros de software da Zenefits
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Startups começam aqui.
O TechCrunch Disrupt é a principal autoridade do mundo em lançar startups revolucionárias, introduzindo tecnologias que mudam o jogo e discutindo o que é mais importante para os principais inovadores da indústria de tecnologia. Disrupt reúne os melhores e mais brilhantes empreendedores, investidores, hackers e fãs de tecnologia para entrevistas no palco, a competição Startup Battlefield, um Hackathon de 24 horas, Startup Alley, Hardware Alley e After Parties.
CAMPO DE BATALHA DE INICIALIZAÇÃO.
O coração do TechCrunch Disrupt.
LIDERANÇA DE PENSAMENTO.
Os tópicos mais importantes que enfrentam o cenário tecnológico de hoje.
ALÉM DE INICIALIZAÇÃO
Veja o talento e a tecnologia das empresas em estágio inicial.
As equipes de desenvolvimento criam um produto dentro de 24 horas.
Glance Clock mantém sua vida junto.
Destaques do Disrupt SF 2016.
Conheça a Snugb Tulip, uma câmera inteligente para bebês para monitorar.
San Francisco, CA 94158.
Últimas Disrupt SF News.
11 de novembro de 2017.
Robin dedica-se ao cuidado do gramado robótico e se concentra no franchising.
Robin, que lançou um combinado "Uber para cuidados com o gramado" # 8221; e cortador de grama robótico como serviço no Startup Battlefield de Disrupt SF no ano passado, é & hellip; Consulte Mais informação.
O Glance Clock mantém a sua vida em harmonia com notificações subtis mas vibrantes.
Há algo de intrigante nas soluções de baixa resolução para problemas de alta tecnologia e o Glance Clock não é exceção. No mundo de hoje, um Uber perdido pode & hellip; Consulte Mais informação.
Qualquer um pode fazer protótipos e construir com a máquina CNC Origin da Shaper.
Hoje em dia, com a agitação lateral sendo a última moda, a nova Shaper Origin torna mais fácil do que nunca começar a construir e vender gadgets legais em sua versão gratuita do & hellip; Consulte Mais informação.
O futuro da interação com computadores humanos será multimodal.
Temos usado o mouse de computador há décadas para interagir com nossa tecnologia. As telas sensíveis ao toque nos trouxeram uma nova maneira de inserir comandos em nossos gadgets, mas eles & hellip; Consulte Mais informação.
Shervin Pishevar: O primeiro Hyperloop provavelmente será construído no exterior.
Shervin Pishevar, conhecido capitalista de risco e co-fundador da empresa de transporte futurista Hyperloop One, com dois anos de existência, chegou ao TechCrunch & hellip; Consulte Mais informação.
Fique até a data.
Inscreva-se para atualizações de eventos:
Todos os horários PST 9:00 am - 9:05 am.
Comentários de Abertura.
Vida dentro da bolha de texto com David Marcus (Facebook Messenger)
Fantasia Cumprida com Jason Robins (DraftKings)
Números da Tecnologia Crunching com Jager McConnell (CrunchBase)
Construindo o Governo como Serviço: Megan Smith e Alexander Macgillivray (Governo dos Estados Unidos)
Reinventando Relevância com Morgan DeBaun (Blavity)
Do SMS ao IPO Jeff Lawson (Twilio)
Slacking todos com Leslie Miley (folga)
Mudando o jogo com Min-Liang Tan (Razer)
Vale da sátira com Mike Judge (Vale do Silício da HBO)
Conectando o Yahoo à Verizon com Tim Armstrong (Aol) e Marni Walden (Verizon)
Startup Battlefield Competition - Sessão 1.
Startup Battlefield Competition - Sessão 2.
Startup Battlefield Competition - Sessão 3.
Envolvimento da conferência.
After Party nas Obras Públicas, Patrocinado pelo iTutor Group.
Todos os horários PST 9:00 am - 9:05 am.
Comentários de Abertura.
Educação dirigida pelo mercado com Sebastian Thrun (Udacity)
Bate-papo do Fireside com Marc Benioff (Salesforce)
O novo clima de investimento com Reid Hoffman e Josh Elman (Greylock Partners)
Como trabalhar com robôs com Melonee Wise (buscar Robótica)
Redefinindo Defesa com o Secretário Ash Carter (Departamento de Defesa dos EUA)
Tweets, dinheiro, poder com Marc Andreessen (a16z)
Olhos na IA: Rana el Kaliouby (Affectiva) e Danny Lange (Uber)
Aventais vitais: Janica Alvarez (Saúde de Naya), Deborah Anderson-Bialis (Fertility IQ) e Ida Tin (Clue)
Ficção conta nosso futuro com Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
Caça Pokemon Rara com John Hanke (Niantic Labs)
Carros inteligentes Self-Made George Hotz (Comma. ai)
Olhando para a frente com David Sacks (Zenefits)
Quando o Google é o Underdog com Diane Greene (Google)
Sessão de Competição de Campo de Batalha Inicial 4.
Sessão de Competição de Campos de Batalha 5.
Ativismo social com Stephen Curry (Golden State Warriors)
Envolvimento da conferência.
Depois da festa no 1015 Folsom.
Todos os horários PST 9:00 am - 9:05 am.
Comentários de Abertura.
Companheiros da companhia de carro com Kyle Vogt (cruzeiro)
Transmitindo o Futuro com Emmett Shear (Twitch)
Alimentando o feed de notícias com Adam Mosseri (Facebook)
Todas as leis devem ser quebradas ?: Hemant Taneja (catalisador geral), Bradley Tusk (presas de bolota) e Ted Ullyot (Andreessen Horowitz)
A nova loja com Apoorva Mehta (Instacart)
Desenvolvedores Untethered com Christina Sass (Andela)
Destaques do Hackathon.
Atualizações do Alumni no Battlefield.
Passando a Disrupt Cup: Vídeo e desenhando os nomes para o fim da Apresentação das Partidas do Startup Battlefield Finals com Matthew Panzarino e Sam O'Keefe.
Finais do campo de batalha de inicialização.
Demonstração de cartão selvagem.
Computação Canina com Marc Raibert (Boston Dynamics)
Construindo mundos virtuais com Michael Koperwas e Diana Williams (ILMxLAB)
Gigante. Combate. Robôs Em conversa com Gui Cavalcanti e Matt Oehrlein (Megabots)
Praticamente lá com Michael Buckwald (Leap Motion) e Jim Marggraff (Eyefluence)
Hype e Esperança com Shervin Pishevar (Hyperloop One)
Cerimônia de encerramento.
CAMPO DE BATALHA DE INICIALIZAÇÃO.
O Startup Battlefield reúne as primeiras startups do mundo inteiro em um palco para disputar o cobiçado Disrupt Cup, um prêmio de US $ 50 mil e a atenção da mídia e dos investidores. Os juízes incluem os editores do TechCrunch, bem como os principais VCs e empreendedores, e os vencedores anteriores incluem nomes como Dropbox, Mint, Yammer, Zenefits e muitos outros. A participação é gratuita e aberta.
VENCEDORES ANTERIORES
Liquidez Nanotech Corporation.
DEPOIMENTOS.
Fundador, 42 - Disrupt NY 2014.
CEO, Cloudflare - Disrupt SF 2014.
Presidente, Scout RFP - Disrupt SF 2014.
Fundador, Number26 - Disrupt London 2014.
Interromper os alto-falantes do SF & amp; Juízes.
Stewart Alsop.
Stewart Alsop é co-fundador e sócio da Alsop Louie Partners, uma empresa de capital de risco de tecnologia em estágio inicial fundada em 2006 e localizada em São Francisco. A empresa se concentra em tecnologias inovadoras e disruptivas e fez investimentos nas áreas de segurança cibernética, análise preditiva, educação e entretenimento. Algumas das empresas em que a empresa liderou investimentos incluem a Twitch (vendida para a Amazon), a Netwitness, a Keyssa, a Cleversafe, a Wickr e a Lookingglass Cyber ​​Security.
Stewart começou como jornalista e comentarista de negócios, atuando como editora em publicações como Inc. Magazine e InfoWorld. Mais tarde, ele começou seu próprio boletim informativo, P. C. Carta, bem como duas conferências, Agenda e Demo. Em 1996, Stewart mudou de carreira para se tornar um capitalista de risco, juntando-se à New Enterprise Associates (NEA), uma empresa de capital de risco de primeira linha. Ele foi sócio geral da NEA até 2005 e liderou os investimentos da empresa em empresas como TiVo, Portola Communications (vendida para a Netscape), Netcentives, Glu Mobile e Xfire. Stewart escreveu a coluna “Alsop On InfoTech” para a revista Fortune na NEA, e depois atuou como membro do conselho de administração da Sonos, Inc. de 2005 a 2013.
Janica Alvarez.
Janica Alvarez é co-fundadora e CEO da Naya Health, responsável pela liderança da empresa, visão e estratégia de produtos e excelência em operações e fabricação. Começando com a reinvenção da bomba de leite e da mamadeira, a missão de Janica para a Naya Health é criar melhores experiências para as mães através de uma série de produtos e serviços nutricionais infantis.
Antes da Naya Health, Janica passou mais de 10 anos liderando equipes na área de saúde e pesquisa clínica, inclusive nas gigantes de biotecnologia Genentech e Gilead Sciences. Ela foi responsável pelo lançamento e gerenciamento da revisão e aprovação pelo FDA de uma dúzia de terapias oncológicas e de HIV geradoras de receita nos EUA e Porto Rico.
Janica é detentora de múltiplas patentes e possui bacharelado em Biologia e Química pela Weber State University e estudou Bioética Clínica no Union Graduate College e no Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Deborah Anderson-Bialis.
Deborah Anderson Bialis é co-fundadora e CEO da FertilityIQ. O FertilityIQ é uma plataforma para os consumidores encontrarem informações sobre médicos e procedimentos de fertilidade. Um terço de todos os pacientes de fertilização in vitro agora usam o site para encontrar seus custos médicos e de pesquisa e protocolos de drogas.
Anteriormente, Deborah liderou a experiência do usuário no Rise. Ela possui um J. D. da UC Berkeley School of Law e um B. A. da Williams College.
Marc Andreessen.
Marc Andreessen é co-fundador e sócio geral da empresa de capital de risco Andreessen Horowitz. Ele é um inovador e criador, um dos poucos a lançar uma categoria de software usada por mais de um bilhão de pessoas e uma das poucas a estabelecer várias empresas de bilhões de dólares.
Marc co-criou o influente navegador de internet Mosaic e co-fundou a Netscape, que depois foi vendida para a AOL por US $ 4,2 bilhões. Ele também co-fundou a Loudcloud, que, como a Opsware vendeu à Hewlett-Packard por US $ 1,6 bilhão.
Marc é bacharel em Ciência da Computação pela Universidade de Illinois em Urbana-Champaign.
Marc faz parte do conselho das seguintes empresas do portfólio da Andreessen Horowitz: Anki, Honor, Lytro, Mori, OpenGov, Samsara e TinyCo. Ele também faz parte do Facebook, Hewlett-Packard e MODE Media.
Anjula Acharia Bath.
Anjula Acharia é um empresário, filantropo, entusiasta da cultura pop e investidor anjo em ClassPass, The Hunt (adquirido pelo Pinterest), Mayvenn, Gobble, The Muse, Cue e Hooked - Telepathic. Como parceira na Trinity Ventures, a Anjula trabalha para transformar empresas de portfólio em marcas verdadeiramente globais, bem como trabalha para promover a campanha da Trinity por uma maior diversidade em tecnologia.
Antes de ingressar na Trinity, Anjula foi co-fundadora da Desi Hits !, que introduziu as mega-estrelas Lady Gaga, 50 cêntimos e Britney Spears na Índia, e lançou a estrela de Bollywood, Priyanka Chopra, com o sócio / investidor Jimmy Iovine, nos EUA. o mundo do entretenimento / música / tecnologia e foi nomeado como um dos "International Power Players" e "Top 40 Women in Music" da Billboard. Ela é apaixonada pelo mentoreamento de empreendedores e pela ponte entre tecnologia e entretenimento, e para isso foi nomeada em "Next Establishment" da Vanity Fair como uma "mídia, tecnologia e cultura que perturba o titã".
Anjula estava na lista ELLE Magazine de 2016 Women in Tech. Ela foi nomeada como uma das "Principais Executivas de Mulheres do Patrimônio Indígena" pela revista Forbes, uma das ganhadoras do prêmio ADCOLOR 2016 CATALYST, e mais recentemente apresentada na Lista de Disruptores 2017 da AdWeek.
Anjula também administra Priyanka Chopra.
Tim Armstrong.
Tim Armstrong é o CEO da Oath, uma empresa global digital e móvel que alcança mais de um bilhão de consumidores e parceiros com as principais marcas globais do mundo. A missão do Oath é "construir marcas que as pessoas adoram", e a empresa possui mais de 50 marcas de mídia, incluindo Yahoo, AOL, HuffPost, TechCrunch e Tumblr, além de plataformas de ad-tech e distribuição que dão suporte a milhares de parceiros em todo o mundo. O Juramento foi lançado em junho de 2017 como uma empresa da Verizon, após a aquisição da AOL Inc. pela Verizon em 2015, onde Armstrong era presidente e CEO.
Antes do Juramento e da AOL, Armstrong passou quase uma década no Google, onde terminou como presidente das Américas e membro do comitê operacional global. Armstrong começou no negócio de mídia após a faculdade, co-fundando um jornal em Boston e depois mudando para empresas de internet em Seattle, Silicon Valley e Nova York. Essas empresas incluíam a Starwave (criadores da ESPN, NFL, NBA), a Disney Internet Ventures, a Snowball (empresa da NYSE) e a America's Health Network (adquirida pela News Corp). Armstrong também co-fundou e subsidiou o Associated Content (adquirido pelo Yahoo) e o Patch (adquirido pela AOL).
Armstrong atua nos conselhos do Priceline Group, Tech: NYC como co-fundador, iDiverse como chairman, Greenwich Academy for Girls, Connecticut College Athletic Club como co-fundador, Waterside School e como curador para o US Olympic & amp; Fundação Paraolímpica. Ele também serve como marido e pai amoroso, além de treinador de lacrosse e basquete. Um nativo de Massachusetts, Armstrong é um ávido fã de esportes da Nova Inglaterra - ele é parte do Camel (Connecticut College) e parte Trojan (Lawrence Academy).
Banister ciano.
A Banister é parceira do Founders Fund, onde ela investe em setores e estágios com um interesse particular em realidade aumentada, fertilidade, indústrias altamente regulamentadas e empresas que ajudam pessoas com habilidades básicas a encontrar um trabalho significativo. Antes de ingressar no Founders Fund, Cyan era um investidor anjo ativo com um portfólio incluindo Uber, Thumbtack, SpaceX, Postmates, EShares, Affirm e Niantic, criador do Pokémon GO. Um engenheiro e empresário autodidata, Cyan ocupou vários cargos de liderança técnica ao longo de sua carreira. Como um dos primeiros funcionários da IronPort, adquirida pela Cisco, a Cyan supervisionou a infraestrutura de suporte e o desempenho de uma base global de clientes. Cyan é o fundador e editor-chefe da Zivity. Ela tem uma paixão pelas artes e é um filme voraz, documentário e consumidor de mídia.
Scott Belsky.
Scott Belsky é um empreendedor, autor e investidor. Scott fundou a Behance em 2006 e atuou como CEO até que a Adobe adquiriu a Behance em 2012. Milhões de pessoas usam o Behance para exibir seus portfólios, bem como acompanhar e encontrar os melhores talentos em todas as indústrias criativas. Após a aquisição do Behance, Scott atuou como vice-presidente de produtos da Adobe, reinicializando a estratégia de produtos móveis da Adobe e liderando o Behance até 2016. Ele agora é um parceiro de risco da Benchmark, uma empresa de capital de risco em São Francisco, um investidor em estágio inicial, e é co-fundador e presidente de um novo produto de mercado em desenvolvimento.
Ao longo dos anos, Scott tem buscado outros projetos para ajudar a organizar e capacitar as carreiras de pessoas criativas. Estes incluem 99U, think tank do Behance e conferência anual dedicada à execução no mundo criativo; e uma linha popular de produtos de papel organizacionais que ajudam a organizar pessoas e equipes criativas.
Scott também é o autor do livro best-seller internacional Making Ideas Happen (Portfolio Imprint, Penguin Books, abril de 2010).
Scott é um defensor de iniciativas tecnológicas e comunitárias que capacitam pessoas criativas e ajudam as empresas a alavancar o potencial criativo de seus funcionários. Ele é um colaborador frequente na MSNBC e trabalhou com empresas e organizações líderes, incluindo General Electric, Proctor & amp; Gamble, Facebook e o governo dos Estados Unidos. Em 2010, Scott também foi incluído na lista da Fast Company de "100 Pessoas Mais Criativas nos Negócios".
Scott aconselha ativamente e investe em empresas que cruzam a interseção de tecnologia e design, e ajudam a capacitar pessoas, entre outros critérios. Além do trabalho de Scott com a Benchmark, ele é um dos primeiros investidores e consultores no Pinterest, Uber e Periscope (agora parte do Twitter), bem como vários outros nos estágios iniciais. Scott também atuou no conselho e é o consultor de tecnologia e design da sweetgreen, uma cozinha sazonal de origem local baseada em valores.
Antes de fundar o Behance, Scott ajudou a desenvolver a Iniciativa de Desenvolvimento de Liderança da Pine Street na Goldman, Sachs & amp; A Co. Scott concentrou-se especialmente na melhoria organizacional e no fortalecimento das relações com os clientes. Scott atua no Conselho Consultivo do Programa de Empreendedorismo da Universidade de Cornell e é membro do Conselho de Administração do Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Ele frequentou a Universidade de Cornell como estudante de graduação e recebeu seu MBA da Harvard Business School. Scott e sua família moram em Nova York e São Francisco.
Marc Benioff.
Marc Benioff é presidente e CEO da Salesforce. Um dos pioneiros da computação em nuvem, Benioff fundou a empresa em 1999 com a visão de criar um serviço de gerenciamento de informações sob demanda para substituir a tecnologia tradicional de software corporativo. Sob sua liderança, a Salesforce cresceu de uma ideia inovadora para a empresa de software de mais rápido crescimento no topo do mundo e a maior empresa de gerenciamento de relacionamento com o cliente (CRM).
As tecnologias de nuvem social e conectada do Salesforce ajudam as empresas a criar conexões mais profundas e significativas com seus clientes. Por sua abordagem revolucionária, a Salesforce foi nomeada a empresa mais inovadora do mundo por quatro anos consecutivos pela Forbes Magazine. A Fortune Magazine nomeou a Salesforce como a empresa mais admirada do mundo no setor de software por dois anos consecutivos e classificou a empresa número 7 entre as melhores empresas do mundo para se trabalhar.
Benioff tem sido amplamente reconhecido por sua liderança visionária e inovação pioneira. Foi nomeado empresário do ano pelos leitores da Fortune, um dos melhores CEOs do mundo da Barron's, e recebeu o prêmio The Economist’s Innovation Award. Ele atuou como co-presidente do Comitê Consultivo de Tecnologia da Informação do Presidente de 2003-2005.
Ao longo de sua carreira, Benioff evangelizou um novo modelo de filantropia corporativa integrada. Em 2000, ele lançou a Fundação Salesforce e estabeleceu o “modelo 1-1-1”, segundo o qual a empresa contribui com 1% do produto, 1% do patrimônio líquido e 1% das horas de trabalho para as comunidades atendidas globalmente. Hoje, a Fundação inspirou outras empresas líderes a adotarem o modelo 1-1-1. Benioff concentrou sua filantropia pessoal no avanço dos cuidados de saúde das crianças através dos Hospitais de Crianças da UCSF Benioff.
Benioff é um veterano de 35 anos da indústria de software. Antes de lançar o Salesforce, ele passou 13 anos na Oracle Corporation. Ele fundou sua primeira empresa, a Liberty Software, que criou videogames, aos 15 anos de idade. Ele também trabalhou como programador de linguagem de montagem na divisão Macintosh da Apple Computer durante seus anos de faculdade. Benioff é bacharel em administração de empresas em 1986 e doutor em Humanidades pela Universidade do Sul da Califórnia em 2014.
Ele é autor de três livros, incluindo o best-seller nacional, Behind the Cloud.
Roelof Botha.
Roelof F. Botha se concentra em investimentos em Internet, serviços e software. Ele é diretor do Eventbrite, Evernote, Inside, MongoDB, Natera (NTRA), Plain Vanilla, Square (SQ), Unity Technologies, Weebly e Whisper. Ele também está envolvido com empresas do portfólio da Sequoia Capital, incluindo AssureX e Mapillary. Anteriormente, ele foi diretor do YouTube (GOOG), Páginas Insider (IACI), Meebo (GOOG), TokBox (Telefônica Digital), Nimbula (ORCL), Tumblr (YHOO), Jawbone e Xoom (XOOM), e liderou o Sequoia & Investimento no Instagram (FB). Antes de ingressar na Sequoia Capital em 2003, Roelof atuou como diretor financeiro da PayPal (PYPL), uma empresa de pagamentos on-line. Anteriormente, ele trabalhou como consultor de gerenciamento da McKinsey & amp; Empresa Roelof é atuário certificado (Fellow da Faculdade de Atuários) e possui um B. S. em Ciências Atuariais, Economia e Estatística da Universidade da Cidade do Cabo e um M. B.A da Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Michael Buckwald.
Michael Buckwald Antes da Co-Founding Leap Motion, Michael era o CEO do Zazuba, um serviço de marcação de negócios posteriormente adquirido por uma grande empresa nacional de páginas amarelas. Além disso, ele executou a primeira implantação de computadores em Madagascar com o programa One Laptop per Child. Michael obteve seu diploma duplo de bacharel em filosofia e ciência política pela George Washington University.
Ash Carter.
Ashton B. Carter é o 25º secretário de Defesa.
O secretário Carter passou mais de três décadas aproveitando seu conhecimento de ciência e tecnologia, estratégia global e política, bem como sua profunda dedicação aos homens e mulheres do Departamento de Defesa para tornar nossa nação e o mundo um lugar mais seguro. Ele fez isso em serviço direto e indireto de onze secretários de defesa nas administrações democrata e republicana. Seja no governo, na academia ou no setor privado, o secretário Carter foi guiado pelo pragmatismo e sua crença nas oportunidades ilimitadas dos Estados Unidos e trabalhou incansavelmente para contribuir com as ideias, políticas e inovações que asseguram nossa liderança global.
O secretário Carter foi vice-secretário de Defesa de 2011 a 2013, atuando como diretor operacional do DoD, supervisionando o orçamento anual do departamento e seus mais de três milhões de civis e militares, orientando a estratégia e o orçamento através da turbulência do seqüestro e garantindo o futuro da força. and institutional best practices. From 2009 to 2011, he was Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (ATL) with responsibility for DoD’s procurement reform and innovation agenda and successful completion of key procurements like the KC-46 tanker. In this capacity, Secretary Carter also led the development and production of thousands of mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles and other rapid acquisitions that saved countless service members’ lives. Determined to get the most for both the warfighters and the taxpayer, Secretary Carter instituted “Better Buying Power” for the first time guiding the department acquisition workforce to smarter and leaner purchasing. And from 1993-1996, he served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, where he was responsible for – among other issues – strategic affairs, nuclear weapons policy, and the Nunn-Lugar program that removed nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Secretary Carter also served on the Defense Policy Board, the Defense Science Board, and the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board.
Outside of his government service, Secretary Carter was most recently a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a lecturer at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He also was a Senior Executive at the Markle Foundation, helping its Economic Future Initiative advance technology strategies to enable Americans to flourish in a networked global economy. Previously Secretary Carter served as a Senior Partner of Global Technology Partners focused on advising major investment firms in technology, and an advisor on global affairs to Goldman Sachs. At Harvard’s Kennedy School, he was Professor of Science and International Affairs and Chair of the International & Global Affairs faculty. He served on the boards of the MITRE Corporation, Mitretek Systems, and Lincoln Laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M. I.T.) and as a member of the Draper Laboratory Corporation. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.
Secretary Carter earned his bachelor’s degrees in physics and in medieval history, summa cum laude, at Yale University, where he was also awarded Phi Beta Kappa; and he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was a physics instructor at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and M. I.T., and an experimental research associate at Brookhaven and Fermilab National Laboratories.
For his government service, Secretary Carter has been awarded the Department of Defense Distinguished Service Medal, DoD’s highest, on five separate occasions. He received the Defense Intelligence Medal for his contributions to intelligence and the Joint Distinguished Service Medal from the Chairman and Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Secretary Carter is author or co-author of 11 books and more than 100 articles on physics, technology, national security, and management.
A native of Philadelphia, he is married to Stephanie Carter and has two grown children.
Gui Cavalcanti.
Gui Cavalcanti grew up watching science fiction movies and playing BattleTech and Mechwarrior, and dreamed of building real-life versions of those giant robots. He went to school at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, specializing in biologically-inspired robot design, then worked at Boston Dynamics as a robotics engineer and systems integrator on the LS3, PETMAN, and BigDog robots for 4 years. He founded Artisan's Asylum in 2010, Boston's largest makerspace, in order to have the tools and space he needed to work on the robots of his dreams. He then co-founded MegaBots out of the space with Matt Oehrlein in 2014.
Wesley Chan.
Wesley Chan is a Managing Director at Felicis Ventures. He has led investment rounds and holds board or observer seats in Canva, CultureAmp and Dialpad.
Wesley was previously a General Partner at Google Ventures, where he led investment rounds and held board or observer seats in Angelist, Crittericism, iPerian (exited to Bristol Myers-Squibb), Cool Planet Energy Systems, and Switch Communications. Wesley also led investments in Optimizely, Vungle, DataPad (exited to Cloudera), Freshplum (exited to TellApart), Namo Media (exited to Twitter), and Parse (exited to Facebook).
As an early employee at Google, he founded and launched Google Analytics and Google Voice, which reach tens of millions of users worldwide. Wesley is a recipient of Google’s Founders Award–the company’s most prestigious recognition–for leading the development of Google’s early client efforts, which led to the development of Google Chrome. Wesley is an inventor with 16 US Patents, many from his work on building Google’s early advertising products.
Additionally, Wesley has held technical positions both at HP Labs and Microsoft. He holds both Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT where he completed his graduate research at the Media Laboratory.
He was selected as a “Top 35 Under 35” innovator by Technology Review magazine in 2010. He has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and his story as an early product innovator at Google is covered by Steven Levy’s Google Book, “In The Plex.”
Aparna Chennapragada.
Aparna Chennapragada is currently a Senior Director of Product leading Google’s computer-vision-powered effort, Google Lens. Most recently, she worked for the CEO as his Technical Assistant, helping drive cross-company product strategy. Aparna also led Google Now, a proactive digital assistant effort, and many other efforts across Google Search and YouTube over the years. With over 18 years of experience in the tech industry as a computer scientist and product leader, she is excited about the potential of AI and algorithms to build products that improve everyday life. Aparna has a Masters in Management and Engineering from MIT, Masters in Computer Science from University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelors in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.
Rafael Corrales.
Rafael is now a General Partner at CRV and brings operating and founding CEO experience from the world of early stage startups. He has led CRV's investments in Amino as well as two currently stealth companies. He also sourced CRV's investments in companies like PillPack and Airtable.
Before becoming an investing partner, he became a personal shareholder in the very first round of five startups: Instacart, Blockchain, Luxe, Webflow, and Clearbit.
Prior to CRV, he was the founding CEO of LearnBoost, a company which was acquired by WordPress as the largest of their first 12 acquisitions. His team's open source libraries have cumulatively been downloaded over 160 million times and helped popularize Node. JS.
Stephen Curry.
The first unanimous MVP in NBA history, Stephen Curry is the starting point guard for the 2015 and 2017 NBA Champions Golden State Warriors. Curry, who is a three-time NBA All-Star, holds the NBA record for the most 3-pointers in a season and in back-to-back seasons. The two-time NBA MVP is the only player in NBA history with at least 250 threes and 500 assists in consecutive seasons. Community and charity-minded, Curry serves as an ambassador for the United Nations Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign, providing life-saving bed nets in Africa. Follow Curry on social media: Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Morgan DeBaun.
Morgan DeBaun started her career in Silicon Valley and is the CEO of Blavity. She is a serial entrepreneur passionate about building technology at the intersection of creativity and culture. Since founding Blavity, Morgan has been quoted in nationwide outlets like Forbes, NPR, TechCrunch and Huffington Post as a voice of her generation.
Brian Dixon.
Prior to joining BioRelix in October 2007, Dr. Dixon was a Vice President with Bayer HealthCare in West Haven Connecticut. In that position he led a multi-disciplinary organization of up to 130 employees that delivered state-of-the-art expertise in oncology biomarker discovery, new lead discovery, research drug formulation, pharmacokinetics and drug metabolism to Bayer’s global R&D business.
In addition he held leadership roles in R&D licensing initiatives, strategic alliances and cross divisional collaborations in translational medicine. From 1998 – 2001 Brian directed Bayer drug discovery efforts in both the Osteoporosis and Oncology therapeutic areas, where his research groups advanced a number of drug candidates into pre-clinical development.
Brian was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, received his Ph. D. in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed post-doctoral training at Harvard University.
Rana el Kaliouby.
Rana el Kaliouby, PhD, is co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, the pioneer in emotion-aware technology, the next frontier of Artificial Intelligence. She invented the company’s award winning, emotion recognition technology, that is built on an emotion AI science platform that uses deep learning and the world’s largest emotion data repository of nearly 4.5 million faces analyzed from 75 countries, amounting to more than 50 billion emotion data points. Prior to founding Affectiva, as a research scientist at MIT Media Lab, Rana spearheaded the applications of emotion technology in a variety of fields, including mental health and autism research. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, CBS, TIME Magazine, Fortune and Reddit. A TED speaker, she was recognized by Entrepreneur as one of the "7 Most Powerful Women To Watch In 2014," inducted into the "Women in Engineering" Hall of Fame, a recipient of the 2012 Technology Review’s "Top 35 Innovators Under 35" Award, listed on Ad Age’s "40 under 40" and recipient of Smithsonian magazine's 2015 American Ingenuity Award for Technology. Rana holds a BSc and MSc in computer science from the American University in Cairo and a PhD from the computer laboratory, University of Cambridge.
Josh Elman.
Josh is an investment partner at Greylock Partners, He invests in entrepreneurs building social networks and platforms, mobile apps, new media, and connected devices.
He joined the team in 2011 and invests in entrepreneurs building new consumer products and services. Josh specializes in designing, building, and scaling consumer products, having been part of multiple companies that have grown to more than 100 million users.
Before joining Greylock, Josh spent 15 years in product and engineering roles at leading companies in social, commerce, and media. Josh was the product lead for growth and relevance at Twitter, growing Twitter’s active user base by nearly 10x. Prior to Twitter, Josh worked on the platform at Facebook and led the launch of Facebook Connect. Josh was an early employee at LinkedIn and helped establish early models for user growth and launched v1 of LinkedIn Jobs. Josh also held roles leading product management for Zazzle, and product and engineering for RealJukebox and RealPlayer at RealNetworks.
Josh currently serves on the boards of Medium, Meerkat, Operator, Discord, Musical. ly and Jelly. Josh also works closely with our investments in Nextdoor and Whosay. Josh led Greylock’s investment in SmartThings, which was acquired by Samsung in 2014.
Josh holds a BS in Symbolic Systems with a focus on Human Computer Interaction from Stanford University. Josh is also quite Handsome :)
Ilya Fushman.
Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Index Ventures. A former academic with both an operating and venture capital background, he is passionate about the frontiers of cutting-edge technologies and helping the next wave of startups and entrepreneurs build global businesses. Prior to joining Index, Ilya was the head of product at Dropbox. As one of Dropbox’s first 75 employees, he helped build and run the company’s business and corporate development functions, before taking on a product leadership role and building out Dropbox, Dropbox for Business and the developer platform. Before Dropbox, he was a principal at Khosla Ventures and the Director of Technology at the solar cell startup Solar Junction.
A deep technologist, Ilya holds a PhD in Applied Physics and an M. S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where he worked on quantum computing and biophysics and a B. S. in Physics from Caltech. Ilya holds a number of patents in the fields of software, photonics, and electronics. He currently lives in San Francisco and enjoys kitesurfing and skiing in his spare time.
Diane Greene.
Diane Greene has served as a member of Alphabet’s board of directors since October 2015 and has served as a member of Google’s board of directors since January 2012. Diane has also been a member of the board of directors of Intuit Inc., a provider of business and financial management solutions, since August 2006 and serves on its audit and risk committee and nominating and corporate governance committee.
Diane co-founded VMware, Inc., a virtualization software company, in 1998 and took the company public in 2007. She served as Chief Executive Officer and President of VMware from 1998 to 2008, as a member of the board of directors of VMware from 2007 to 2008, and as an Executive Vice President of EMC Corporation, a provider of information infrastructure and virtual infrastructure technologies, solutions and services, from 2005 to 2008.
Prior to VMware, Diane held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics Inc., a provider of technical computing, storage and data center solutions, Tandem Computers, Inc., a manufacturer of computer systems, and Sybase Inc., an enterprise software and services company, and was Chief Executive Officer of VXtreme, Inc., a developer of streaming media solutions. Diane is also a member of The MIT Corporation, the governing body of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Diane holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, a Master of Science degree in naval architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont.
Meron Gribetz.
A neuroscientist by training, Meron Gribetz spent years studying how the human mind and body work. A flash of insight at a New York bar – where he watched people both fail and succeed in communicating with each other using their mobile devices – inspired a desire to build a new kind of “natural machine” that could better connect people to each other and the world around them.
Building on his research in both computer science and neuroscience at Columbia University, he developed the basic tenets that now underscore Meta’s Neural Interface design philosophy. Today, he leads as the founder of Meta, the first company to deliver augmented reality (AR) designed around the way people are built to experience the world.
Arvind Gupta.
Arvind runs the SF office for SOSventures and brings over a decade of experience in helping startups and Fortune 50 companies launch new tech products. Formerly Design Director of Product Development and Strategy at IDEO and co-founder of fitness startup Starters (starters), he now plays a pivotal role in providing purpose-driven design expertise for SOSventures investments globally. In addition to driving the new SOSventures accelerator program (Leap Axlr8r ), Arvind will invest in and mentor hardware and software startup companies in the Bay Area and China.
Arvind first worked as an equity options Market Maker at the Pacific Exchange in San Francisco. During this time, Arvind became an avid BASE jumper, a sport that involves using a parachute to jump from one of four fixed objects; building, antenna, span, and earth. His passion for the sport compelled him to help understand the problem of canopy collapse during an object strike which could be fatal. This experience of working to solve a problem by blending science and art led Arvind to a Master’s Degree in Industrial Design.
Based on his experience of developing products in a variety of industries, Arvind is currently developing Adaptive Innovation, an approach to innovation that can deal with the speed of the emerging markets.
Arvind holds several US patents and has spoken at numerous conferences and events including at the SFMOMA and TEDx New Silk Road. A frequent author, his thought leadership has been published in journals ranging from Time to Design Observer to Rotman Magazine, and he has been the recipient of numerous international design awards for design and innovation including six IDSA IDEA awards.
Arvind holds a degree in Genetic Engineering form the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Master’s Degree in Industrial Design from San Francisco State University.
John Hanke.
John Hanke As CEO, John leads Niantic, Inc., an innovative company dedicated to building “Real World” mobile gaming experiences that foster exploration, exercise and social interaction. Niantic has developed and released two games, Ingress and global phenomenon Pokemon GO. The company was originally founded as a start up within Google to explore the creation of new kinds of entertainment at the intersection of location, social, and emerging mobile devices. Niantic was spun out as an independent company in 2015 with backing from investors such as Google, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company.
Earlier in his career, John was a founder of Archetype Interactive, creators of one of the very first online massively multiplayer games, Meridian59, and then went on to co-found Keyhole, a company acquired by Google for the technology that lead to the creation of Google Earth. John was Vice President of Google's Geo division (overseeing projects including Maps and Street View) for seven years before founding Niantic.
John received a BA from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
Rob joined First Round as a partner in 2006, opening up the firm's San Francisco office. Over the past eight years, he has led investments in companies such as Mint (acquired by Intuit), Gnip (acquired by Twitter), Square, Uber, and Planet Labs.
Rob invests across categories, with his interests spanning financial tech, the sharing economy, meal delivery, and consumer hardware. He is constantly exploring new areas, and enjoys working with founders who push the boundaries of existing markets.
Prior to joining First Round, Rob became the first venture investor at Omidyar Network, the investment firm started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. While there, he led most of the initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group.
Before that, Rob worked at Palm, where he product managed Palm OS during the heyday of Palm products (Palm III, Palm V, Handspring Treo). He also started the company's corporate venture fund and managed the strategic spinoff of PalmSource.
Rob lives with his wife and two daughters in San Francisco. In his spare time, he enjoys cooking at home and traveling up and down the California coast with his family and two dogs. He has an MBA from Columbia University and a B. A. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Reid Hoffman.
Reid joined Greylock Partners as an investment partner in 2009. He focuses on building products that can reach hundreds of millions of participants and businesses that have network effects.
An accomplished entrepreneur and executive, Reid has played an integral role in building many of today’s leading consumer technology businesses, including LinkedIn and PayPal. He possesses a unique understanding of consumer behavior and the dynamics of viral businesses, as well as deep experience in driving companies from the earliest stages through periods of explosive, “blitzscale” growth.
Reid co-founded LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking service, in 2003. LinkedIn is thriving with more than 400 million members around the world and a diversified revenue model that includes subscriptions, advertising, and software licensing. He led LinkedIn through its first four years and to profitability as Chief Executive Officer.
Prior to LinkedIn, Reid served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was also a founding board member.
Reid is an accomplished investor. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo, Xapo, Linkedin, and a few early stage companies still in stealth. In addition, he serves on a number of not-for-profit boards, including Kiva, Mozilla Corporation, Endeavor, and Do Something. Prior to joining Greylock, he angel invested in many influential Internet companies, including Facebook, Flickr, Last. fm, and Zynga.
Reid is the co-author of two New York Times best-selling books: The Start-up of You and The Alliance. His next book is focused on “blitzscaling”, based on his Stanford course of the same name.
Reid earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor’s degree with distinction in symbolic systems from Stanford University. In 2010 he was the recipient of an SD Forum Visionary Award and named a Henry Crown Fellow by The Aspen Institute. In 2012, he was honored by the Martin Luther King center’s Salute to Greatness Award. Also in 2012, he received the David Packard Medal of Achievement from TechAmerica and an honorary doctor of law from Babson University.
George Hotz.
George Hotz is best known for being the first person to unlock the iPhone (original) from the AT&T network and allow the device to work on other cell carriers when he was 17. He hacked the Playstation 3 when he was 21. At 25, he was approached by Tesla to build them a car vision system for millions of dollars and said no. Today, at 26, he plans to bring consumers a self driving car, by the end of 2016, for under $1000.
Wende Hutton.
Healthcare investor Wende Hutton brings 23 years of experience to identifying, investing in and building companies that are changing the practice of medicine. She has facilitated bringing over a dozen medical devices and drugs to market, and currently sits on the boards of Antiva Biosciences, Chrono Therapeutics, Glooko, OncoResponse, ReVision Optics and Theraclone Sciences. Prior investments include BiPar Sciences (acquired by Sanofi-aventis), Chimerix (CMRX), Dermira (DERM), Labrys Biologics (acquired by Teva Pharmaceutical) and Transcend Medical (acquired by Alcon/Novartis). Wende was recognized among Fierce Biotech’s 2014 "Fierce 15" women in biotech and honored as one of The Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business 2015 by The San Francisco Business Times.
Wende joined Canaan in 2004, and her life sciences track record includes seven IPOs and six acquisitions. She began her venture career at Mayfield Fund in 1993, where she incubated Heartstream (HPQ) and Northstar Neuroscience (NSTR). Earlier in her career, Wende held senior operational management positions at GenPharm International and Nellcor in business development and marketing.
Wende holds an AB in human biology from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She is active with several community service groups including serving on the board of ReSurge International which provides reconstructive surgical care to the needy in developing countries.
Mike Judge.
Mike Judge was born in 1962 in Ecuador, but raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico and attended University of California at San Diego where he earned a degree in physics. He worked as an engineer and played bass professionally before MTV picked up his 1992 animated short, FROG BASEBALL. MTV decided to spin off BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD into a show of its own in the 1990’s, with Judge doing the voices of both characters as well as others. His next project was KING OF THE HILL for FOX TV. Judge expanded into writing and directing his own live-action films, OFFICE SPACE, IDIOCRACY and EXTRACT. He’s done voices for SOUTH PARK, FAMILY GUY, AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE, and acted in Robert Rodriguez’s SPY KIDS movies. In 2012, Mike resurrected BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD with twelve new shows for MTV. Currently, Judge is a cocreator, executive producer, writer and director for the Emmy® and Golden Globe® nominated comedy series, SILICON VALLEY, which debuted its third season in April, and is currently in preproduction for its fourth season.
Danny Lange.
Dr. Danny B. Lange is Head of Machine Learning at Uber where he leads an effort to build the world’s most versatile Machine Learning platform to support Uber’s rapid growth. With the help of this branch of Artificial Intelligence including Deep Learning, Uber can provide an even better service to its customers. Previously, Danny was the General Manager of Amazon Machine Learning - an AWS product that offers Machine Learning as a Service. Prior to Amazon, Danny was Principal Development Manager at Microsoft where he was leading a product team focused on large-scale Machine Learning for Big Data. Danny started his career at IBM Research and has a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark.
Jeff Lawson.
Jeff is a serial inventor with over 15 years of entrepreneurial and product experience. Prior to co-founding Twilio, Jeff was Founder & CTO of NineStar, Founding CTO of Stubhub and Founder, CEO & CTO of Versity. He was also one of the original product managers for Amazon Web Services.
At every business, Jeff identified the fundamental need for a platform for developers and companies to easily build communications-based business solutions.
Jeff grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, started his first company in middle school, and earned his BS in Computer Science & Film/Video from University of Michigan.
Aileen Lee.
Aileen Lee is the founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage focused fund. Cowboy Ventures seeks to back exceptional founders who are building technology products that re-imagine work and personal life in large and growing markets - what they call "Life 2.0". Cowboy-backed companies include August, Area 1 Security, DocSend, Dollar Shave Club, Guild Education, Lending Home, MassDrop, Product Hunt, and Textio.
Prior to Cowboy, Aileen joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers in 1999, where she worked hands-on with a range of consumer, enterprise, media and greentech companies. During that time she was also founding CEO of KPCB-backed RMG Networks, the leading digital out-of-home media network. She previously worked in various operating roles at Gap Inc. and as an analyst at Morgan Stanley. Aileen enjoys thinking about and writing about tech insights, including “Welcome to the Unicorn Club” and “Why Women Rule the Internet”.
She has degrees from MIT, Harvard and Millburn High School. Aileen is also mom to 3 kids, chickens, fish, and a dog; and wife to the co-founder/CTO of a series-A startup, Renovo Motors.
Jenny Lefcourt.
Jenny Lefcourt brings 20+ years of technology start-up experience to her role as General Partner.
at Freestyle, a $60M seed stage fund in San Francisco whose partners are all serial.
entrepreneurs. Jenny invests in next gen commerce,
marketplaces, real estate technology, consumer, enterprise and SaaS. Freestyle has led investments in.
companies such as Intercom, Narvar, Patreon, Airtable, Wag, BetterUp, Crexi, and Digit.
Prior to joining Freestyle, Jenny cofounded WeddingChannel in 1998 (sold: KNOT),
cofounded Bella Pictures (sold: CPI) and has personally invested and/or advised start-
ups such as StyleSeat, Minted, and MainStreetHub. Jenny earned her BSE at Wharton.
and attended Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
Susan Lyne.
Susan has had a long career in media, commerce and consumer products. She has held leadership positions at companies of all sizes and stages, from startups to public companies, often during periods of internal or external change.
She began her career in the magazine industry, where she founded and led Premiere Magazine. She spent almost a decade at Disney, rising to President of Entertainment at ABC. She was the CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; CEO and then Chair of Gilt; and she led AOL’s Brand Group, overseeing such brands as TechCrunch, Engadget and Moviefone, immediately before launching BBG Ventures.
She has four daughters, three sisters, and a wide circle of entrepreneur-advisees who give as much as they get. Her biggest wins have all come from listening to, building for and betting on women.
Alexander Macgillivray.
Alexander Macgillivray, also known as “amac,” is US Deputy Chief Technology Officer. Prior to joining the federal government, Mr. Macgillivray had a variety of roles at Twitter, including General Counsel, head of Public Policy, Corporate Development, Communications, and Trust & Safety. Prior to Twitter, Mr. Macgillivray was Deputy General Counsel for Products and IP at Google and a litigator with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He received his J. D. from Harvard Law School and is an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He tweets, blogs, bakes bread, and sometimes codes.
Carine Magescas.
Carine Magescas is a french-born Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist.
In 2017 she was nominated "Angel Investor of the Year" at TechCrunch's 10th Annual Crunchies Awards.
To date Carine invested in over 150 Startups through AngelPad, a seed-VC and Accelerator she co-founded in 2010. AngelPad is consistently ranked Top U. S. Accelerator by MIT/Rice University Annual Accelerator Rankings Project.
Prior to AngelPad, Carine held executive roles in Engineering, Strategic Alliances and Marketing at pre-IPO startups, before founding an E-commerce Startup in 2003. Carine is also an accomplished Fine Art Photographer. Her work is represented by Art Galleries in the US and Europe and has been exhibited in New York, London & São Francisco.
David Marcus.
David Marcus is the Head of Messaging Products at Facebook.
David was President of PayPal from April 2012 to July 2014, where he has overall responsibility for establishing PayPal as the leading global payment service and helping to drive the future of money around the world. A mobile payments entrepreneur and product innovator, David brings a wealth of experience creating products that engage and delight customers – both businesses and consumers alike. Most recently, David was PayPal’s vice president of mobile, where he led the company’s mobile business and product strategy, including the development and launch of PayPal Here.
David has more than 15 years of mobile and telecommunications experience worldwide and has a proven track record of starting and leading successful businesses. He joined PayPal in the company’s acquisition of Zong, a leading provider of payments through mobile carrier billing. Under David’s leadership as founder and CEO, Zong developed relationships with more than 250 carriers and more than 1,000 online merchants.
A native of France, David grew up in Paris and Geneva. At 23, he started his first company, GTN, which became one of the top three alternative carriers in Switzerland and was acquired by World Access in 2000. David first began learning how to become a technology entrepreneur at age 8, when he taught himself how to code on a PC.
Jim Marggraff.
Dedicated to developing innovative technologies that improve learning, communication, and productivity, Jim Marggraff has founded/co-founded several successful companies, including Livescribe (inventor of the smartpen), Explore Technologies, and StrataCom. He has held a number of executive positions at LeapFrog Enterprises and invented LeapPad learning system, leading to sales of over $1 billion worldwide. Jim holds 36+ patents/apps and was Ernst &Young N. CA Entrepreneur of the Year, 2011. He holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.
Jager McConnell.
Jager McConnell is the CEO of Crunchbase, the leading platform used by millions of entrepreneurs and investors looking to discover innovative companies and the people behind them. Jager joined Crunchbase after it spun out from AOL, a move that was announced at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015. Prior to joining Crunchbase, Jager spent 11 years at Salesforce in various roles across sales, marketing, and product development. In his last role at Salesforce, Jager was VP of Product in the Sales Cloud, where he oversaw the core salesforce automation product line.
Apoorva Mehta.
Apoorva Mehta is founder and CEO of Instacart, the fast-growing [retail delivery](instacart/) service whose workers hand pick and deliver items from trusted local stores. Originally launched in San Francisco and since expanded into many other cities, Instacart has fundamentally changed the traditional [grocery delivery](instacart/) space by connecting customers with shoppers and drivers who shop for and deliver groceries and other items in as little as one hour. In January 2015, Instacart was named [“America’s Most Promising Company."](forbes/sites/briansolomon/2015/01/21/americas-most-promising-company-instacart-the-2-billion-grocery-delivery-app/)
An engineering graduate of the University of Waterloo, Apoorva worked as a design engineer at Blackberry and Qualcomm, then joined Amazon as a supply chain engineer before founding Instacart in 2012.
Leslie Miley.
Leslie Miley is a Director of Engineering at Slack, he formerly held engineering leadership roles at Twitter, Apple, and Google. He serves as an adviser to several startups founded by women and minorities and is an investor in a fund dedicated to entrepreneurs who are POC, LGBT, and women.
Sergio Monsalve.
Sergio brings to NVP extensive operational and venture capital experience from a wide range of business and consumer technology companies. Sergio is focused on early and growth investments in ecommerce, consumerized SaaS, consumer finance, and educational technologies. His current investments and board seats include Adaptive Planning, Bionic Panda Games, Branchout, Gemvara, Motif Investing, and Rafter.
Sergio was previously on the board of The DealMap (acquired by Google), myYearbook (acquired by Quepasa), and StarCite (acquired by The Active Network). He is a board observer at InsightsOne and Lending Club.
Sergio started his career at Morgan Stanley, where he advised several companies on mergers and acquisitions. Sergio was also a marketing and business development manager at Portal Software (now part of Oracle) which had a successful Initial Public Offering in 1999, during his tenure.
Sergio was also the co-founder and first business development executive at Cymerc, which was a hosted SaaS solution for consumers and small-sized businesses. Sergio successfully raised two rounds of venture financing and grew Cymerc from inception to more than $15 million in sales.
From 2001 to 2005, Sergio was Director of the Mobile Electronics Categories at eBay, which he grew from $150 million to more than $500 in gross merchandise sales. Prior to NVP, Sergio was Vice President of Marketing at Photobucket, which was successfully sold to News Corp. for $300 million in 2007.
Sergio was born and raised in Latin America and has worked in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Sergio holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of science degree in management sciences and engineering (industrial engineering) from Stanford University.
Adam Mosseri.
Adam Mosseri is a VP at Facebook and leads the product and engineering teams responsible for News Feed and Sharing. Before this role Adam was the PM director for News Feed and before that the design director for the Mobile product group, where he was responsible for the design of all of Facebook’s mobile apps. Prior to Facebook he worked at TokBox as the company’s first designer.
Adam began his career founding a design consultancy in 2003 with offices in New York and San Francisco that focused on graphic design, interaction design and exhibition design. Adam holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Study from the Gallatin School of Interdisciplinary Study at NYU where he studied Information Design and Media. He and his wife Monica are proud parents of sons, Nico and Blaise.
Patricia Nakache.
Since joining Trinity Ventures in 1999, Patricia has focused on funding early-stage companies launching innovative online consumer and business services, particularly in the sharing economy, real estate and food tech sectors. She has had a strong investment theme around the “she-conomy” and is interested in the impact of mobile, machine learning and crowd-sourcing on the next generation of internet services. Patricia is also a resident voice on diversity and the importance of female representation in tech, Silicon Valley and Venture Capital.
Patricia has active investments in Bevi, EAT Club, Kixeye, Mayvenn, Owler, Ruby Ribbon, thredUP, and Turo, and was previously involved with Affinity Labs (acquired by Monster Worldwide), Care (CRCM), LoopNet (LOOP), MyNewPlace (acquired by RealPage), PayScale (acquired by Warburg Pincus), and Sabrix (acquired by Thomson Reuters).
Prior to Trinity Ventures, Patricia worked at McKinsey & Company, helping enterprises in technology, financial services, and retailing identify and address their strategic and operational issues. Previously, she also contributed to FORTUNE magazine and other publications on management best practices in technology companies.
Patricia received her M. B.A from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and her A. B. in Physics and Chemistry from Harvard University.
Stephanie Palmeri.
Stephanie is a partner with Uncork Capital (formerly SoftTech VC), making investments in seed stage companies that empower individuals, families, businesses, and communities. She seeks passionate communities builders and businesses with natural network effects.
Since 2011, Stephanie has led over 25 investments at Uncork in Consumer, Marketplaces, SaaS, EdTech, Health, and Hardware, including Poshmark, ClassDojo, Clever, Panorama Education, Survata, Thanx, Lantern, Phil, Fatherly, Pared, Wonderschool, and Carrot. She previously served on the boards of Chariot (acquired by Ford), Niche (acquired by Twitter), and Spoon University (acquired by Scripps Networks Interactive).
Prior to joining Uncork Capital, Stephanie spent a decade working in New York City in roles that spanned technology, marketing, and startups. Stephanie holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and graduated magna cum laude from Villanova University with joint BS degrees in Marketing and Management Information Systems. She is a Lang Fund Board Member and sits on the Advisory Board for the Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School.
Matthew Panzarino.
Matthew Panzarino has been a retail jockey, founded a professional photography business and a news blog covering the Apple ecosystem. He has served as News Editor and Managing Editor at The Next Web and is now Editor-In-Chief at TechCrunch.
He has made a name for himself in the tech media world as a writer and editor, relentlessly covering Apple and Twitter, in addition to a broad range of startups in the fields of robotics, computer vision, AI, fashion, VR, AR and more. Owns shares in ETFs, shares in Verizon via employee stock grants and small amounts of various crypto currencies.
Contact Matthew at matthew@techcrunch.
PGP Key: keybase. io/panzer.
Peter Pham.
Peter Pham is a Co-Founder at Science, a 4yr old technology studio that helps incubate companies co-building them alongside CEO's, with recent companies like Dollar Shave Club which sold to Unilever for $1B and leading marketplaces like DogVacay. More recently Science created created one of the top 100 iOSl Apps called Wishbone. He's also helped his portfolio raise over $350M in that time. Previously as an operator, he has been been a part of building companies like Photobucket handling its $300M acquisition in 2007 to Fox Interactive Media as well as CEO of BillShrink which which was acquired by MasterCard in 2012.
Shervin Pishevar.
Shervin Pishevar is a Managing Director at Sherpa Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he co-founded with Scott Stanford in March 2013. Sherpa Capital is an investor in companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Munchery, ipsy, Shyp, Stance, Rent the Runway, Beepi, PillPack, Doctor on Demand, and Cue Health. Shervin is Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at Hyperloop-one.
Shervin is a Strategic Advisor to Uber Technologies and served as a Board Observer at Uber from 2011-2015. Previously he was a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, a venture capital fund with over $4 billion under management. Shervin joined Menlo Ventures in 2011 and led investments such as Uber (Series B), Machine Zone, Warby Parker, Tumblr and Getaround. As an angel investor he personally seeded over 60 companies. Shervin founded and operated technology-enabled companies, including Webs (acquired by VistaPrint), Social Gaming Network (SGN), WebOS and HyperOffice. Companies he founded have reached an aggregate of over 100 million users.
In 2016, Shervin was selected as an Ellis Island Medal of Honor award winner. Shervin was appointed by the President of the United States to serve on the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FFSB) in 2015. He was also chosen by the U. S. Government as an Outstanding American by Choice, one of the only 100 naturalized Americans to be chosen since the beginning of the award. He serves on the advisory board of Comscore, was one of the 10 members of the UN Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council, serves as an entrepreneurial ambassador in several state department delegations to the Middle East and Russia, and was a keynote speaker at the President Obama’s Summit on entrepreneurship in Algeria.
Shervin is a graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, who holds a bachelor’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, a published researcher in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) and Neuroscience Letters, and the author of several U. S. patents.
Brian Pokorny.
Brian Pokorny is a General Partner of SV Angel. Prior to this, he was at Airbnb, where he joined via an acquisition of DailyBooth/Batch. DailyBooth was a venture backed social media start-up that Brian led for 3 years as their CEO. Before this, Brian was a partner at SV Angel with David Lee and Ron Conway upon the launch of the firm. Prior to SV Angel he was a founding team member and partner at Baseline Ventures, a leading seed-stage investment firm. Before joining Baseline, Brian spent close to 4 years at Google within various positions in the Content Partnerships team and Direct Sales Organization. Before this, he had various roles within sales operations and finance at Juniper Networks, TIBCO Software, and Applied Materials. Brian graduated with a degree in Operations and Management Information Systems from Santa Clara University. Brian's first angel investment was in Twitter and he is also a personal angel investor in Square, OMGPOP (Acquired by Zynga), Tweetdeck (Acquired by Twitter), Milo (Acquired by eBay), Chomp (Acquired by Apple) and others. Brian has advisory positions with Ooyala (Acquired by Telstra), Rupture (Acquired by EA). At SV Angel, Brian has also originated investments in companies such as Instacart, Patreon, Mesosphere, Credit Karma, and foursquare.
Marc Raibert.
Marc Raibert was Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1986 through 1995. He is co-founder and President of Boston Dynamics Inc, (BDI), which is located near MIT in Cambridge.
Raibert's research is devoted to the study of systems that move dynamically, including physical robots and animated creatures. Raibert's laboratory at MIT, the Leg Lab, is well known for its work on systems that move dynamically, including legged robots, simulated mechanisms, and animated figures. The Leg Lab created a series of laboratory robots including one-legged hoppers, biped runners, a quadruped, and two kangaroo-like robots. Taken collectively, these robots travel along simple paths, balance themselves actively, climb a simple stairway, run fast (13.1 mph), run with several gaits, and do rudimentary gymnastic maneuvers. A couple of years ago two robots (and 3 students) appeared inRising Sun with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes. The Leg Lab also created On The Run, a computer generated cartoon in which all the characters were animated using simulation and control. Work at Boston Dynamics on automated characters and physics-based dynamic simulation are outgrowths of research done by Raibert's group at MIT.
Raibert received a B. S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University in 1973, and a Ph. D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. His Ph. D thesis, entitled "Motor control and learning by the state space model", used robotics techniques to model biological beahvior. He worked on robot sensing and control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech from 1977 through 1980. He was on the faculty of Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department and the Robotics Institute from 1981-1986. He is author of Legged Robots That Balance published by MIT Press, is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, was guest editor of two issues of IJRR devoted to legged systems, and is a fellow of the AAAI.
Jason Robins.
Jason is Chief Executive Officer of DraftKings, the innovative sports-tech entertainment platform that is changing the way consumers around the world engage with and consume sports. Robins co-founded DraftKings in 2012 and oversees all of the company’s strategy and operations, while also driving funding and partnerships. Robins has quickly built a reputation for expanding DraftKings’ reach across numerous platforms through wide-ranging, forward-thinking partnerships. Under his leadership, DraftKings became the first DFS company to sign a league partnership, with Major League Baseball (MLB) in 2013. Since then, the company has signed three additional league-wide partnerships, including the National Hockey League (NHL) and NASCAR. DraftKings is also the exclusive partner of 12 National Football League (NFL) teams, seven National Basketball League (NBA) teams, 27 MLB teams and seven NHL teams. Robins attended Duke University, where he received his degree in Economics and Computer Science. He resides with his wife and sons in the Boston area.
David Sacks.
David Sacks is an Internet entrepreneur and investor. He was the original COO and product leader of PayPal and Founder/CEO of Yammer (acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion). Sacks has invested in a number of successful tech companies, including Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir, Airbnb and Houzz.
Christina Sass.
Christina Sass is the co-founder and COO of Andela, a company that recruits the most talented software engineers on the African continent and pairs them with global tech companies as full-time, distributed team members. Founded on the premise that brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity is not, Andela has built one of the most selective engineering institutions in the world, with headquarters in Lagos, Nairobi, and NYC.
Christina has built education and employment programs in China, Gaza and the West Bank, Kenya, and Nigeria. Prior to co-founding Andela, she directed the Program department of the Clinton Global Initiative and advised the President and CEO of The MasterCard Foundation, a $9B global foundation working to advance education and financial inclusion for youth in Africa.
Christina serves on the Advisory Council of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights and on the board of the non-profit Global Give Back Circle. She also serves as education topic expert for the Clinton Global Initiative University annual meeting. Christina’s work has been mentioned by Forbes, CNN, The New Yorker, NBC, and WIRED. She has a BA in Ancient Philosophy from the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs) and a MA in International Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School from Tufts University.
Emmett Shear.
Emmett Shear is founder and CEO of Twitch (twitch. tv), the world’s leading video platform and community for gamers. Mr. Shear is also co-founder of Justin. tv and a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator, where he advises fledgling startups on product and strategy. Mr. Shear graduated from Yale University in 2005 and in 2012 was included in Forbes Magazine on their 30 under 30 list. Twitch launched in 2011, and in 2014 The Wall Street Journal cited the brand as having the 4th largest peak internet traffic in the U. S.
Megan Smith.
In September 2014, President Obama named Megan Smith the United States Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, she serves as an Assistant to the President. As U. S. CTO, Smith focuses on how technology policy, data and innovation can advance the future of our nation.
Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist. She most recently served as a Vice President at Google, first leading New Business Development -- where she managed early-stage partnerships, pilot explorations, and technology licensing across Google’s global engineering and product teams for nine years -- and later serving as a VP in the leadership team at Google[x] -- where she co-created the company’s “SolveForX” innovation community project as well as its “WomenTechmakers” tech-diversity initiative and worked on a range of other projects. During her tenure she led the company’s acquisitions of major platforms such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Picasa, and also served as GM of Google during its engineering transition, adding Google Crisis Response, Google for Nonprofits, and Earth Outreach/Engine, and increased employee engagement.
Megan previously served as CEO of PlanetOut, a leading LGBT online community in the early days of the web, where the team broke through many barriers and partnered closely with AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and other major web players. Megan was part of designing early smartphone technologies at General Magic and worked on multimedia products at Apple Japan.
Over the years, Megan has contributed to a wide range of engineering projects, including an award-winning bicycle lock, space station construction program, and solar cookstoves. She was a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student team that designed, built, and raced a solar car 2000 miles across the Australian outback.
Megan has served on the boards of MIT, MIT Media Lab, MIT Technology Review, and Vital Voices; as a member of the USAID Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid; and as an advisor to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and the Malala Fund, which she co-founded. She holds a bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT, where she completed her master's thesis work at the MIT Media Lab.
Neal Stephenson.
Best known as the father of the Metaverse--the centerpiece of his novel SNOW CRASH--Neal Stephenson is the New York Times bestselling author of SEVENEVES, REAMDE, ANATHEM, CRYPTONOMICON, and other science and historical fiction, including the Hugo Award winning DIAMOND AGE.
Steeped in hard science and computers from an early age, Stephenson was a Member, Technical Staff at Blue Origin between 2000 and 2006 and a senior inventor at Intellectual Ventures Labs. His involvement with Magic Leap is built on a quest to blend storytelling and technology that stretches back thirty years.
Santi Subotovsky.
Santi is a General Partner at Emergence Capital. Prior to joining Emergence, Santi founded, AXG Tecnonexo, a SaaS e-learning company in Latin America. He expanded the company to 150+ employees with operations across Latin America and the US. Santi is also a founding board member of Puente Labs, an organization that finds and selects the best founders of high potential growth companies from Latin America and helps them scale their businesses globally.
Santi currently serves on the Boards of Civitas Learning, CrunchBase, High Alpha, Quasar, Restorando, Tophat, Xapo and Zoom.
Santi received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in Economics from St. Andrew’s University in Argentina. He is Kauffman Fellow and an Endeavor Entrepreneur.
Outside of work Santi is passionate about traveling internationally. He spent 6 months backpacking around the world and continues to work on a personal goal of visiting at least 50% of the world countries. He is an avid opera and classical music follower and, like almost every Argentine, he is passionate about soccer.
Gary Swart.
Gary Swart is a General Partner at Polaris Partners. He was the former CEO of oDesk.
Gary is a thought leader in entrepreneurship; how best to hire and manage teams; and the future of work, including online work. He is passionate about helping small businesses thrive, fueled by his extensive experience working with startups and small businesses that use oDesk, as well as by mentoring entrepreneurs and business school students.
Gary has spoken at the Inc. Leadership Conference, The Economist’s Ideas Economy panel, South by Southwest, TechCrunch 50, TiECon, GigaOM’s Net:Work Conference in 2010 and 2011, and at Harvard Business School which teaches a case study on oDesk.
His commentary has appeared in a variety of publications including Forbes, TechCrunch and The Washington Post. He has also appeared on numerous TV and radio shows, including BBC, National Public Radio, and the Fox Business program “After the Bell.”
Previously, he led SMB Sales for the Americas at IBM’s Rational Software Product Group, and prior to that served as VP of Worldwide Sales at Intellibank, where he was responsible for leading the sales organization.
Gary holds a B. S. in Business Administration from the University of Maryland.
Min-Liang Tan.
Min-Liang Tan is the co-founder and CEO of Razer, where he directs and oversees the design and development of all Razer products. Mr. Tan was born in Singapore and resides in San Francisco. He graduated from the National University of Singapore Law School and was a lawyer before turning his passion for gaming into a 500-person global company.
Min-Liang Tan was recently elected to the board of the PC Gaming Alliance. In March 2012 he contributed $10,000 USD to the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter project, admitting it was to atone for pirating Wasteland when he was a child. (Wasteland designer and Interplay CEO Brian Fargo replied that Mr. Tan has more than made up for his piracy of the game.)
Min-Liang Tan has been named one of "The 25 Most Creative People in Tech" by the Business Insider together with Jonathan Ive and Gabe Newell. He has also been ranked one of the top 40 most powerful people in gaming by Kotaku in their "The Kotaku Power 40" Lista.
Hemant Taneja.
Hemant Taneja is a managing director of General Catalyst, a venture capital firm with approximately $3.75 billion under management. He launched the Palo Alto office the firm in 2011. Hemant focuses on founders with an authentic mission to change entire industries. His investment thesis, known as “economies of unscale,” describes how small, tightly focused companies leverage data and services to successfully take on much larger competitors. Taneja’s current investment portfolio ranges across the fields of energy, education, media, medicine, and finance, and includes companies such as Stripe, Snapchat, Gusto, Livongo Health, TuneIn, ClassDojo, Fundbox, Digit, Fractyl, Gridco Systems, and Highfive. Taneja is also deeply interested in the intersection of technology and policy. He serves on the board of directors of Khan Academy and co-founded Advanced Energy Economy, a public policy advocacy group. He holds five degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sarah Tavel.
Sarah joined Greylock as an investment partner in 2015. Her areas of focus include products, platforms, networks, and marketplaces that enable new forms of communication, media, and commerce.
Prior to Greylock, Sarah was the product lead for search, recommendations, machine vision, and pin quality at Pinterest. As one of the first 35 employees, her first order of business was to launch Pinterest internationally and close the Series C financing. Sarah then moved into product, becoming Pinterest’s founding PM for search and discovery, and launching Pinterest’s first search and recommendations features. She also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper-growth.
Sarah joined Pinterest in 2012 after co-leading the Series A investment while at Bessemer Venture Partners. She spent six years at Bessemer, investing in a wide range of businesses from e-commerce companies such as Quidsi [parent company of Diapers, Soap, Wag, and others] (Acquired by Amazon), Onestop Internet, and KupiVIP; to SaaS companies Mindbody Software (IPO), Cornerstone OnDemand (IPO), and Convertro (Acquired by AOL); to an enterprise software company, Metalogix (Acquired by Permira).
Before Bessemer, Sarah worked as a strategy consultant and founded a general contracting business while in college. She graduated cum laude with a degree in Philosophy from Harvard, where she was captain of the women’s rugby team.
Sebastian Thrun.
Sebastian Thrun is a scientist, educator, inventor, and entrepreneur. He is founder, chairman, and president of Udacity, whose mission is to democratize education by providing lifelong, on-demand learning to millions of students in more than 190 countries.
He is also the founder of Google X where he led the self-driving car, Google Glass, and other projects. Earlier on, he led the Stanford Racing Team whose robot “Stanley” won the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Sebastian continues as a research professor at Stanford University, and is the first recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Education.
Sebastian has set his sights on democratizing higher education with the founding of Udacity. Sebastian is a Research Professor at Stanford University, former Google Fellow, as well as inventor of the autonomous car and lead on various projects at Google X including Google Glass. Sebastian has been named the 5th Most Creative Person in Business (Fast Company), among the 50 Smartest People in Tech (Fortune), and highlighted in 50 Best Inventions of 2010 (Time).
Ida is the CEO and co-founder of the leading female health tracking app, Clue. Born in Copenhagen, Ida graduated from Denmark's prestigious creative business school, the KaosPilots. A lifelong entrepreneur, she previously led motorcycle tours around the world and published a book about her experience, “Direktøs” which became a Danish bestseller. She is recognized for coining the term "Femtech" to describe the sector of technology focused on improving women's health.
Hans Tung joined GGV Capital in 2013 as a managing partner to focus on consumer mobile internet, cross-border ecommerce, IoT, and mobile social communication investments in both China and the US. Hans led GGV’s investment and serves on the boards of Wish, a fast growing cross border mobile commerce marketplace; Xiaohongshu, a leading active social community and recommendation app for cross-border shopping in China; Poshmark, a simple and fun way to buy and sell fashion; and GrubMarket, a marketplace for local farm goods. He has invested in mobile social communication companies such as musical. ly, a popular user-generated music video-sharing app, Slack, which brings all your communication together in one place; Bustle, an online community providing a fresh spin on information and all subjects; and Curse, a social communication platform for gamers. Hans is a personal investor in leading Indian e-commerce companies Flipkart and Snapdeal. He is also actively involved with GGV portfolio companies Airbnb, Flipboard, DraftKings, and Yodo1.
Hans was one of the earliest investors in, and a former board member of, Xiaomi. At GGV, he has backed several Xiaomi IoT ecosystem companies, e. g. Smartmi (air purifiers and other smart home appliances), Zimi (mobile wifi devices), 1More (headphones), and other IoT companies including Misfit, maker of wearable and smart home products. Hans has been ranked as a top VC on the Forbes Midas list since 2013 and was recognized by The Founder and CBN News magazines in the past as a Top 10 most entrepreneur-friendly VC in China.
Hans’ prior work experience spans venture capital, internet startups, and tech investment banking over 18 years. He previously led investments in, or served on the boards of, startups that have since category leaders, including Xiaomi, Mafengwo Travel, Vancl, 51fanli, Domob Ads (sold to Blue Focus Advertising, Shenzhen Stock Exchange: 300058), Forgame (HKSE: 0484), and eHi Car Rental (NYSE: EHIC). He joined GGV from Qiming Venture Partners, where he focused on investment in China from 2007 to 2013. Previously, he was with Bessemer Venture Partners, where he helped global players such as Skype expand into China. Hans was also a founding member of two pan-Asian internet startups with roots in Silicon Valley that were subsequently sold to telcos, HelloAsia and Asia2B. He started his career at Merrill Lynch as an investment banker focused on the technology sector. He received his B. S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.
Bradley Tusk.
Bradley Tusk is currently the Founder of Tusk Strategies, which develops, manages and executes full-scale PR campaigns. When someone has a lot at stake - whether they are a Fortune 500 company, a major issue advocacy group, or a candidate for office - and they want someone to professionally manage their campaign for them, they hire Tusk. Using a holistic approach Tusk will develop the underlying strategy, help put together the team, and then will run the campaign through to completion.
Prior to founding Tusk Strategies, Bradley, helped New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg with his re-election. Tusk was the Senior Vice President at Lehman Brothers. and before that, Deputy Governor of the State of Illinois.
He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania:
Bachelor of Arts (B. A.), English Language and Literature/Letters.
He is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School:
Doctor of Law (J. D.)
Ted Ullyot.
Ted Ullyot is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads Policy and Regulatory Affairs. He is also a cofounder of the Economic Innovation Group, which brings together leading entrepreneurs, investors, economists, and policymakers from across the political spectrum to address America’s economic challenges. From 2008 to 2013, Ted served as general counsel of Facebook where he built and ran the company’s legal and security teams from private, early-stage through IPO.
Ted spent most of his pre-Facebook career in a variety of positions in Washington D. C., including as a law clerk for U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; as a litigation partner in the Washington office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP; and in the administration of President George W. Bush (as a deputy assistant in the White House, and later as chief of staff at the Justice Department under Attorney General Gonzales).
Ted graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, after doing his undergraduate work at Harvard. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and three children.
Kyle Vogt is the CEO and Founder of Cruise Automation, which develops self-driving car technology and was recently acquired by General Motors. Previously, Kyle was a Co-Founder at Justin. tv, Socialcam (acquired by Autodesk), and Twitch (acquired by Amazon). Kyle studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT.
Marni Walden.
Marni Walden is executive vice president and chief operating officer for Verizon Wireless, the largest wireless company in the United States, with responsibility for the company’s nationwide operations and delivery of industry-leading performance for consumer and business customers. A premier technology company, Verizon Wireless operates the nation’s largest and most reliable 4G LTE network.
Prior to her current role, she was vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless, responsible for all marketing initiatives and the management and development of mobile products and services. This included brand management, media buying, agency management and website integration across the entire corporation.
Walden also has served as president of the company’s Midwest Area, responsible for operations spanning 15 states. Previously, she was president of the Southern California Region, and president of the Desert Mountain Region.
She also has served as branch director for AirTouch Cellular in Colorado and Wyoming.
Walden has more than 20 years of experience in the wireless industry, working for AT&T Wireless, McCaw Communications and General Cellular, as well as AirTouch and Verizon Wireless.
Padmasree Warrior.
Padmasree Warrior is Chief Executive Officer of NextEV, U. S. She also serves as the Chief.
Development Officer of NextEV, as well as a member of its Board of Directors. In these capacities, she is responsible for the brains of NextEV's autonomous, electric vehicles and the overall user experience. She is based in San Jose, CA where NextEV US is headquartered.
Previously, Warrior served as the Chief Technology & Strategy Officer (CTSO) for Cisco until.
September 2015. In this capacity she was charged with aligning the company's technology and.
business strategy to business results. She was in charge of corporate strategy, mergers,
acquisitions, venture investments, and strategic partnerships. Previous to that she was the GM for.
Cisco Enterprise segment and co-led Cisco's worldwide engineering organization. Prior to joining.
Cisco, she was executive vice president and CTO at Motorola. Under her leadership, Motorola was.
awarded the 2004 U. S. National Medal of Technology.
Padmasree Warrior has been widely recognized for her creative, visionary leadership. Forbes has.
named her one of "The World's 100 Most Powerful Women" for three years running. In 2013, The.
International Alliance for Women gave her the World of Difference Award. In 2012, Business Insider called her one of the "25 Most Influential Women in Wireless". The Aspen Institute gave her the first Leadership in Science and Technology Award. India's National Association of Software & Service Companies (NASSCOM) named her the Global CTO Award winner. The Wall Street Journal has called her one of "50 Women to Watch." Fast Company included her among the "100 Most Creative People in Business." The Economic Times listed her as "the 11th Most Influential Global Indian."
Warrior holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of.
Technology in New Delhi and a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell.
Universidade. In addition to NextEV's board, Warrior serves on the board of Microsoft. She previously served on the board of Gap and Box.
Warrior is married and has a son. You can follow her on Twitter @Padmasree.
Diana Williams.
Diana Williams is a member of the Lucasfilm Story Group, the team charged with developing narrative cohesion narrative cohesion and connectivity within the Star Wars universe. She is also the creative development executive for ILMxLAB (ilmxlab/), a laboratory for immersive augmented and virtual entertainment. The recently launched division that combines the talent of Lucasfilm, ILM and Skywalker Sound, ILMxLAB focuses on compelling storytelling, technological innovation and world-class production that will reinvent the way stories are told and experienced.
Prior to Lucasfilm, Diana was a founder of Roller Coaster Entertainment. She produced critically acclaimed narrative films which include Our Song, documentaries Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible and Another First Step, webseries Awesome Asian Bad Guys and consulted on Method to the Madness of Jerry Lewis for Starz Entertainment and Room 237. Diana also developed The Gatecrashers – a multi-media storyworld and comic book series created by Zach Mortensen; 5 Girls – southern gothic horror feature film; and Chinafornia – an animated comedy webseries created by Ellie Lee.
Melonee Wise.
Melonee Wise is the CEO of Fetch Robotics, which is delivering advanced robots for the logistics industry. The company introduced their robot system, including Fetch and Freight, in May of 2015. Prior to joining Fetch, Melonee was CEO and co-founder of Unbounded Robotics. Before then, Melonee was Manager of Robot Development at Willow Garage, where she led a team of engineers developing next-generation robot hardware, including the PR2 and TurtleBot from Willow Garage. Melonee also has extensive experience in the growth of ROS as a research and commercial platform. Melonee is currently a Mentor in the Qualcomm Robotics Accelerator.
Susan Wojcicki.
Susan Wojcicki is the CEO of YouTube.
Previously, she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce at Google. She oversaw the design, innovation and engineering of Google's advertising, commerce, and measurement platform products, including AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, Offers, and Google Analytics.
Susan joined Google in 1999 as the company's first marketing manager and worked on the initial marketing programs. She also led the initial development of several key successful consumer products including Google Images and Google Books.
Before joining Google, Susan worked at Intel, Bain & Company, and several start-ups. She graduated with honors from Harvard University, holds a master's in economics from the UC Santa Cruz, and an MBA from UCLA.
Monique Woodard.
Monique Woodard is a Venture Partner at 500 Startups where she invests in early stage startups and leads a $25M microfund that invests in Black and Latino founders and markets. She believes that shifting demographics combined with the current $2.5 trillion in Black and Latino purchasing power are creating the next big emerging market ‒ right here in the United States. Monique invests at the intersection of startups led by Black and Latino founders and companies focusing on high-growth categories that will be impacted by this demographic and economic growth.
Monique is also the Founder and Executive Director of Black Founders -- a nonprofit startup started by four tech friends in a San Francisco restaurant over shrimp and grits and jazz music.
Their hackathons at historically black colleges and universities and workshops and conferences for founders are designed to move entrepreneurs from idea to execution. With a mission to increase the number of successful black entrepreneurs in tech, the organization has cultivated a new generation of tech founders from Silicon Valley to New York City, Atlanta, Austin, and several HBCU campuses.
Previously, Monique served as one of the first Innovation Fellows for the San Francisco Mayor’s Office where she worked on the many ways that a city at the epicenter of innovation can use technology to transform workforce and other government services. During her fellowship term, she wrote the resolution on broadband and unlicensed spectrum which was adopted at the US Conference of Mayors and contributed to the City’s early strategy around community internet access and closing the digital divide in low-income and minority communities.
Monique was an entrepreneur before entrepreneurship was the new normal. She has built things big and small, including Speak Chic – a mobile app that teaches you how to correctly pronounce fashion brands. Speak Chic gained a loyal fashion-insider following and was featured in Harper’s Bazaar UK, Cosmopolitan, Essence, and InStyle.
Monique has been an advisor to for-proft startups and technology-focused philanthropic organizations including EveryoneOn and Startup Policy Lab. She regularly speaks, writes, and advises in the areas of consumer technology, diversity, and civic technology. She has been interviewed around entrepreneurship and investing for USA Today, MSNBC, New York Times, Buzzfeed, NPR, TheRoot, and Essence Magazine.
You can find out more at moniquewoodard and follow her on Twitter @moniquewoodard.
Speaker submissions for Disrupt SF are closed.
Disrupt can’t happen without the support of our amazing sponsors and attendees. If you are interested in sponsoring at Disrupt San Francisco, email sponsors@techcrunch for more information.
STARTUP ALLEY.
At the heart of the conference floor lies Startup and Hardware Alley where hundreds of early-stage companies showcase their talent and technology to attendees, investors and members of the press. With different companies exhibiting each day, Startup Alley hosts hundreds of exciting companies, many of which are launching for the first time. Don't miss the "Wild Card Winner" which is selected by a combination of audience and editorial votes and is awarded a place in the Startup Battlefield competition.
AI e amp; VR/AR Demos at the Showcase Stage.
On Monday and Tuesday of the conference, come by the Showcase Stage in the heart of Startup Alley at 12:00pm to see startups in these fields demo their company’s innovations.
VR/AR Demo Companies – Monday, September 12 @ 12:00pm:
Lampix | Transform any surface into a smart surface.
Sync-Think |SyncThink provides technology for rapid concussion assessment and monitoring.
TheWaveVR |TheWave is a cross-platform virtual reality music experience.
AI Demo Companies – Tuesday, September 13 @ 12:00pm.
Smart Moderation | Intelligence that protects your profiles from inappropriate content.
The SaaS Co. | Email bot for sales people – Learning Intelligent Sales Agent (LISA)
CrunchMatch.
CrunchMatch is a program designed to introduce investors to entrepreneurs, based on curated analysis of which startups fit with a given investor’s profile. The goal is to improve the odds that investors and entrepreneurs make a super promising contact. The program is free for Disrupt attendees.
How it works: When an investor registers for Disrupt, they receive an invitation to complete a questionnaire about their investment interests. Startups participating in Disrupt’s Startup Alley and Battlefield fill out a similar form. When the TechCrunch team finds strong matches, they will propose that the parties connect at Disrupt at a time and in a private space arranged by the events team.
To participate, sign up for Disrupt today. Questões? E-mail startupalley@techcrunch.
Bloomberg CNBC. Financial Times. Mashable Disrupt hosts hundreds of accredited reporters, bloggers and correspondents from around the world. Journalists can apply for a media pass to Disrupt here.
Our Hackathons are crazy, exciting, exhausting events where hundreds of coders and developers come together to form teams which have just shy of 24 hours to build something amazing from the ground up.
General Admission Ticket.
Three Day General Admission Conference Pass.
Hardware Alley Exhibitor Package.
Startup Alley Exhibitor Package.
Miss out? Sign up for the waitlist with the link below! goo. gl/forms/gMlESSLL9CDlzDap2.
Student Tickets.
Students currently enrolled in a college or university program are eligible for reduced admission ($300) to Disrupt SF. To apply for this rate, send a copy of your current transcripts showing your current enrollment status and a copy of your university identification card to students@techcrunch. Upon approval, you will be provided instructions on how to complete your registration.
Government/Military Tickets.
Current full-time employees of federal, state or local government agencies, current full-time employees of international government agencies and active military employees only can receive an attendee ticket to Disrupt SF for $995. To qualify for the discount, you must email government@techcrunch from a valid. gov email address with a copy of your current, valid government ID. Additionally you must present your current, valid government identification card during registration check-in at Disrupt SF. If you are unable to provide valid government identification at the event, you will be charged the general admission rate of $2,995.
The government discount cannot be combined with any other discount offers.
Government contractors, including contractors working on government “Cost Reimbursable Contracts”, are not eligible for the government discount.
Accepted government identification:
Government issued Visa, MasterCard or American Express Government picture ID Military picture ID Federally Funded Research Development Corp (FFRDC) ID.
旧金山TechCrunch Disrupt会议.
TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco是世界上最具影响力的初创公司活动。活动最大特色就是聚集了硅谷最好的投资者和企业家以及来自创业竞技场（Startup Battlefield competition）的顶尖初创公司，包含人工智能和虚拟实现在内的各领域数百家参展初创公司。今年Disrupt在9月12日至14日旧金山码头48（Pier 48）举行。本次TechCrunch将会是第一次为华人访客提供更体贴及方便的服务。这里是我们将提供的特别服务：
为演讲者和创业公司竞赛准备中文同声翻译服务 现场中文志愿者帮助解决问题 用中文印刷会刊 9月12日周一晚上6-8时的 中文接待和特别活动 活动前和活动期间提供中文客户服务.
我们期待您的加入。往届Disrupt的演讲者包括特拉维斯·卡兰尼克（Travis Kalanick）、马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg），马克·贝尼奥夫（Marc Benioff）和伊隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）。我们的创业竞技场取得了巨大的成功。在过去的八年中，已有610家公司在该竞赛中成立。他们一共筹集到了总计61亿美元，并且有76家公司通过收购或IPO实现了投资退场。过去的参赛者包括DropBox、Mint、Yammer、Zenefits、Postmates和CloudFlare等公司。您可以在这里查看创业竞技场完整的公司列表。此外，在展会现场，还将有上百个优秀的创业公司参展，并且每天都由不同的参展的公司参展。

Wefunder.
The largest Regulation Crowdfunding platform by every measure.
from 509 investors.
"Kickstarter for investing" was legalized on May 16th, 2016: now, anyone can invest $100 in a startup or local business. Since then, we have become the largest Regulation Crowdfunding platform, larger than all of our competitors combined. We’ve been preparing since 2012, when we helped pass the JOBS Act that made this all possible, and were invited by Congress to watch Obama sign it into law in the Rose Garden.
$199,657 revenue and $56,065 profit in September 2017.xx $115,000/month avg. revenue over last 6 months. xx $50 million+ of investments made on Wefunderxx 165+ startups and small businesses and 125,000+ investors.
xx 50 % market share in Regulation Crowdfundingxx $2 billion+ increase in total market valuation of portfolio since fundedxx Helped Congress pass JOBS Act in 2012; invited to watch Obama signxx We're a Public Benefit Corporation with a mission of defending the American Dreamxx.
Our Ambition.
We aim to revitalize capitalism and keep the American dream alive. GDP growth is slowing. Wealth inequality is increasing. Entrepreneurship is dying across America, falling from 10.6% to 3.6% among those under 30 from 1989 to now. We aim to reverse these trends by funding more deserving businesses. Our goal is to build a new type of stock market ("a NASDAQ for riskier ventures") that lets us fund tens of thousands more startups and small businesses.
The largest Regulation Crowdfunding platform by every measure.
"Kickstarter for investing" was legalized on May 16th, 2016: now, anyone can invest $100 in a startup or local business. Since then, we have become the largest Regulation Crowdfunding platform, larger than all of our competitors combined. We’ve been preparing since 2012, when we helped pass the JOBS Act that made this all possible, and were invited by Congress to watch Obama sign it into law in the Rose Garden.
"Kickstarter for investing" was legalized on May 16th, 2016: now, anyone can invest $100 in a startup or local business. Since then, we have become the largest Regulation Crowdfunding platform, larger than all of our competitors combined. We’ve been preparing since 2012, when we helped pass the JOBS Act that made this all possible, and were invited by Congress to watch Obama sign it into law in the Rose Garden.
Our Ambition.
We aim to revitalize capitalism and keep the American dream alive. GDP growth is slowing. Wealth inequality is increasing. Entrepreneurship is dying across America, falling from 10.6% to 3.6% among those under 30 from 1989 to now. We aim to reverse these trends by funding more deserving businesses. Our goal is to build a new type of stock market ("a NASDAQ for riskier ventures") that lets us fund tens of thousands more startups and small businesses.
$199,657 revenue and $56,065 profit in September 2017. $115,000/month avg. revenue over last 6 months. $50 million+ of investments made on Wefunder 165+ startups and small businesses and 125,000+ investors.
The largest Regulation Crowdfunding platform by every measure.
Successfully Funded on Dec 13 2016.
Why I Like Wefunder.
Why I Like Wefunder.
The Story of Wefunder.
Lobbied Congress to legalize equity crowdfunding.
We thought it wrong that it was illegal to invest in our friends. So we launched a petition to Congress to change the law. We were invited to DC by Senator Brown, Senator Bennet, Senator Merkeley, and Rep. McHenry, and helped teach them how startups raise money. We were mentioned on the Senate floor and in the Congressional Record several times.
Invited to watch president obama sign into law.
Congress passed Regulation Crowdfunding as part of the JOBS Act in record time, and we were invited to the Rose Garden to watch President Obama sign it into law. The only hitch: the SEC had to write 600+ pages of rules before it could take effect. Little did we know that would take 4 years.
Y-COMBINATOR.
We packed our bags and headed to California to attend Y Combinator, the Harvard of startup accelerators. We drank a lot of red bull and coded all night long. We also became friends with some of the most talented startup founders in the world. It helped us understand how to work with high-quality startups with lots of other financing options.
Launched 'rich person crowdfunding'
It became evident the SEC was not going to roll out Regulation Crowdfunding anytime soon. So we decided to use current law to help wealthy accredited investors around the world invest in promising tech startups. On March 25th, we launched our first company: Zenefits. At a $9 million valuation. Last we checked, it was worth $4.5 billion.
Talks with sec.
The rich person crowdfunding gig was fun, but it's not what we wanted to do long-term. We never took our eye off the SEC and their rule-making on Regulation Crowdfunding. We offered nearly 20 pages of detailed comments on their proposed rules and flew to Washington DC to meet the SEC in person.
make beautiful software.
Thanks to our new designer, Linlin, we upgraded the entire web site with a more usable and beautiful design. And thanks to Greg and our new software engineer Omar, we became a "full-stack startup". We wrote our own payment transfer, electronic contract signing, accounting, funding portal, income verification, and SEC filing software. We knew we had to drive down costs if crowdfunding was going to work.
sec posts final rules for reg crowdfunding.
The SEC released 685 pages of rules. Wefunder was mentioned 72 times. Overall the rules were good, but there are a couple of flaws that Congress needs to fix to protect investors. Senator Bennet wrote a letter to the SEC with our concerns, and Congressman McHenry introduced the Fix Crowdfunding Act.
After $16m, A pivot to a new business.
After the SEC posted the final rules for Reg Crowdfunding, we pivoted back to our initial vision: creating a new type of public stock market for risky early-stage companies. We began to wind down our "online venture capital for the wealthy" business. All in all, we funded $16 million dollars into 110 startups that increased in value over $2 billion.
Cumulative Investment Volume.
Final "Online VC" Results: Since April 2013.
Amtrak across America.
For three years, we focused on funding tech startups in Silicon Valley. With Regulation Crowdfunding coming, it was time to expand. Our vision was always to help fund a cross-section of the economy in "real America". So our entire company hopped on a train and met hundreds of business owners across America, 12 cities in 2 weeks, coast to coast.
regulation CROWDFUNDING GOES LIVE – FINALLY!
On May 16th, the law changed: startups can raise up to $1 million per year from their friends and supporters, who can invest as little as $100 each. Companies can be funded as they were 80+ years ago: by their friends, neighbors, and local communities. Not some conglomerate bank headquartered on Wall Street that treats you like a FICO score.
Wefunder is the largest platform.
Over the first year of Regulation Crowdfunding, Wefunder is the largest funding portal by every measure. We're larger than all our competitors combined. Let's look at some stats.
Results: May 2016 to May 2017.
Annual Growth.
On May 16th 2016, Regulation Crowdfunding became law. Our business dramatically changed. All graphs year ending Sept 30th.
Regulation Crowdfunding Growth.
Our operational workload increased 30x when Reg CF rolled out. We devoted most of our resources over the last year to automating away that work, but still grew consistently.
Our Growth Driver: Company Launches.
We're a double-sided marketplace. But we only need to focus on acquiring companies, not investors. Each company we work with tells their community to sign up for Wefunder. 30% of these investors then invest in other companies. Network effects are a wonderful thing.
On average, each Reg. Crowdfunding company launched raises $200k (including ones that fail and raise $0). We earn 6.6% cash fee for each dollar of funding volume and another 2% in equity. So we earn, on average, $13,200 in cash and $4000 in equity per company. Our direct costs to launch each company is $600. Our cost of acquisition is currently under $200.
Lifetime Value per Company.
The value per company we launch is at least $13,200 in the first year. The lifetime value may be 5X higher if we include referrals, follow-on financings, future value of equity or carry, the LTV of each investor the company signs up, & other services we can cross-sell. Here are two examples.
Barrow's raised $301,688 in 2016.
Barrow's signed up 224 new investors to invest in their round. They have since invested $502,970 in other companies on Wefunder.
The founder referred two companies - Vaute and Avua - that raised $336,854 on Wefunder.
At our current fee, the value of adding Barrow's Intense to date would be $98,170.
LegionM raised $1M in 2016 with Reg CF.
In 2017, LegionM opened a Reg A+ round on Wefunder and raised $2,042,761.
In total, LegionM signed up 5130 new investors to invest in their rounds, who since invested $359,559 in other companies on Wefunder.
Reg A+ is free until we're a b/d. Otherwise, LegionM's value would be $292,599.
Cost of Company Acquisition.
As of October 2017, we’ve spent $27,000 to acquire the 149 companies we’ve launched, for a cost per company of.
US $ 180 These payments were made solely to our scout referral program. We did not have any marketing, direct sales, or advertising expenses for acquiring companies.
Meet the Founders.
and the rest of the team.
Raised $7,021,081.
From 517+ Investors.
For companies that raise with Regulation Crowdfunding:
We charge the company 7% of their total fundraise (5% in cash, 2% in equity) We charge the investor 2% of their investment (min: $75, max: $75).
For companies that raise with Regulation D, we are not allowed to charge a transaction fee until we decide to 'upgrade' from a funding portal to a broker/dealer. Instead, we charge investors 10 to 20% carried interest.
If Congress passes the Fix Crowdfund Act, for Regulation Crowdfunding offerings we will reduce the up-front 2% investor fee and also charge carried interest. This aligns our incentives with those who invest on our platform: we only make money when they do.
The value of our current portfolio should not be a factor in your decision to invest in Wefunder; assume it's $0. We waived our fees in the beginning.
For instance, Zenefits was the first company we listed on Wefunder, and as such, we charged 0% carry. If we had invested $150k at 20% carry, the value of our carried interest would have been $1,260,000 18 months after we funded them.
Our past portfolio speaks for itself on our previous success in Reg D. We must continue to attract high-quality companies for Regulation Crowdfunding.
First, it's important to define "high quality". It does not mean that companies are like Zenefits, offering investors a 4000%+ return in two years. To us, high-quality means deserving businesses with legitimate founders who can grow profitable companies. A donut shop that offers a return to their investors qualifies.
Our biggest strength is that we've spent years immersed in the Y Combinator startup culture, so we intimately understand how founders who have leverage against investors (as their startups are highly sought-after) think. When we take this understanding to the "real world" outside of San Francisco, we expect to blow away the competition.
Customer service: save founders time.
An obvious truism is that successful founders with other financing options don't want to waste a lot of time. So we do nearly all the grunt work for them. We schedule an hour interview, ask for some disclosures and assets, and then hand them a fully-fleshed out fundraising profile and "Form C" SEC filing for their review and approval. Our customer service is key.
Companies with other options won't pay an obscene amount.
Another obvious point is that high-quality companies don't need to pay to get funded . Our competitors - typically the ones with a broker/dealer finance background - who charge from 6-10% of the round will not get the best companies.
We currently charge the company 5% cash upfront and 2% of the round with the exact same terms as the investors. In our experience, companies can justify this cost in return for the marketing value of having their customers be investors. We will continue to drive down company costs as long as possible and take more of our compensation in the same form as our investors, so our goals and interests are aligned.
(We also charge $0 for a "Form C" instead of the up to $5000 of some of our competitors).
Companies care about "signaling"
Finally, working with credible companies is a virtuous cycle. High-quality companies want to be funded alongside other high-quality companies.
Think about the difference between Y Combinator and Techstars. Most credible startups apply to Y Combinator first, and only go to Techstars if YC rejects them. It's much more prestigious to be in YC.
We understand follow-on financing.
Another great benefit of being immersed in Silicon Valley for years is that we intimately understand the issues around follow-on financing when the venture capitalists come aboard. So we pioneered new crowdfunding securities to ensure that companies don't shoot themselves in the foot if they are successful. Our competitors don't do this to the same extent.
Our costs are lower than our competitors', and we want to pass on the savings so we can fund more higher-quality companies.
We're a "full stack" software and nearly entirely vertically integrated. We outsource almost nothing. This was an intentional decision as we knew we had to drive down costs to make thousands of investors cost effective. We wanted to control the user experience.
We spent four years writing software to automate nearly everything. For instance, we wrote our own electronic contract signing software, ACH payment transfer software, investor management software, accounting software, SEC filing software, and are now working on tax filing software.
We've partnered with a bank for on-demand escrow accounts at nominal cost and CPAs to offer independent reviews to our clients at nearly 20% of the market rate.
We've also worked with our lawyers at Wilson Sonsini on legal structures that limit some franchise taxes and other unnecessary costs. Finally, we operate as an exempt reporting investment advisor and funding portal, limiting compliance costs that broker/dealers are burdened with.
AngelList and FundersClub have been our two most credible competitors from our founding in 2012 to May 16th, 2016, when Regulation Crowdfunding is implemented. After May 16th, we'll be moving in an opposite direction.
FundersClub is an "Online VC" that crowdfunds its limited partners from accredited investors. They have no plans to pursue unaccredited investors, expand to small businesses, or be a self-service fundraising platform, like we intend after May 16th. They are our competitor much the same way Union Square Ventures is our competitor.
AngelList is a beautiful web site for accredited investors who know the "inside baseball" game in Silicon Valley. It's perfectly designed for professionals. It's also the "operating system" for startups, with a number of useful services. If AngelList decides to expand to Regulation Crowdfunding, we expect the learning curve on how to best appeal to and educate retail investors - and how to best work with non-tech companies - will slow them down.
We've always known that we were competing with AngelList and FundersClub in the short-term (although we didn't expect it would take 4 years for the SEC to implement Regulation Crowdfunding!). For the past four years, we've kept true to our vision of a more "Kickstarter" vibe. We're designed to appeal to and educate non-professionals on how to invest, where anyone can invest as little as $100 in both startups and small businesses. Our competitors - even those who started because of the JOBS Act - iterated more and more towards the accredited market.
Competitors include StartEngine, SeedInvest, Indiegogo, and NextSeed.
The results speak for themselves. We're larger then all other funding portals combined.
Our biggest strength is that we know what is takes to find and work with high-quality companies. We've already proven that we can attract high-growth, high-profile companies to crowdfund from accredited investors (i. e., Zenefits), and now we're doing it again for Regulation Crowdfunding (i. e., Beta Bionics).
Another strength is that we've spent four years working on software that drives down costs and is simple and easy to use for both investors and founders. We're not finance people, we're product people. Our product isn't about just taking a cut, it's about relationships and emotion. Wall Street doesn't do that.
If you ask this question, you don't understand our ambition. We're talking about turbo-charging the entire economy . We want to accelerate GDP growth by making us a nation of owners in the true engine of our economy: small businesses and startups. We want to explode the number of new businesses.
Our ambition is not to be a VC. We're aiming to create a new type of stock market that can allocate more capital to all sorts of worthy businesses, be it a local community-supported coffee shop or the next Uber. We want to create and dominate the emerging private/public hybrid stock market for new businesses, where it's accepted that these are riskier, longer-term investments (i. e., not the NASDAQ). We believe the "wisdom of the crowd" is superior to the judgement of a few gatekeepers like bankers and venture capitalists. Markets beat top-down decision making.
We also want to single-handedly increase the percentage of under 30 year olds that own stakes in private businesses from the current 3.6%, back over 10%, like it was in 1989. Entrepreneurship is dying in this country, outside of tech hubs like SF and NYC. We aim to revitalize capitalism for young people.
Our long-term vision is to create a new type of stock market for risky and early-stage companies, for long-term investments subject to investment limitations. We believe that informed investors can allocate capital more efficiently across our society than a few bankers or venture capitalists. Markets beat gatekeepers.
Unlike the NASDAQ, since it's expected by the public that these investments are far more risky (and as such are subject to investment limits), the burden of regulations are far, far less than that required by a company going public. Companies that refuse to go public until forced to do so (i. e., Uber) as a result of the burden of regulations imposed after Enron may consider a private/public hybrid stock market with a lighter regulatory regime.
The features of this stock market should include:
Acceptance of risk with every purchase . Investors should affirm that they may lose all their money and afford to bear this risk with every purchase. Investment limitations . Investors should not invest more than the 5%-10% limit of net worth or income imposed by Regulation A+ or Regulation Crowdfunding. Proxy voting power to one person with fiduciary responsibility . Minor shareholders should appoint one representative - who may be on the board of directors - to advocate for their interests. The company only needs to deal with one person with sophisticated knowledge of their business, and the voting power of small investors is aggregated to increase their leverage. No daily price ticker; limited resale . The short-term focus to manage quarterly earnings is often detrimental to long term vision. We envision a stock market where companies can opt to allow resale on a secondary market only once per quarter or year.
The benefits to our society include:
More capital goes to where it is needed most . Capital will be allocated more efficiently to a wider range of businesses. We expect an explosion of entrepreneurship. There are enough people in our society who want to support riskier ideas. We can start reversing the disparity of wealth . In the 1990's, it was a badge of honor for companies to go public, and they did it as soon as possible. Now they delay it as long as possible. This means ownership in the fastest growing companies are no longer available to people who are not rich. Isto está errado.
Investment clubs are our most important feature to grow.
Investment clubs let groups of experts create their own "Wefunder in a box", host it on Wefunder, and get an economic incentive to do so. It's a little like a "group syndicate". Only instead of one tech celebrity like on AngelList, it's composed of a group of experts in a particular industry. Some examples could be artificial intelligence, bio-tech, agriculture, or Chicago restaurants.
Investment clubs are responsible for sourcing, vetting, and endorsing companies. Wefunder handles everything else.
The long-term business model on Investment Clubs will be determined by whether the Fix Crowdfunding Act is passed in the Senate by December 2017 (it already passed the house 394-4). If it is passed, investment clubs will be able to earn carried interest from the companies they source, vet, and mentor.
We've made it dead easy to invest in a company - it takes maybe 30 seconds to fully execute an investment and transfer the funds. Consider it a "one click Amazon-style checkout" for investing.
We've also created some beautiful software that lets founders highly customize how they wish to present their company to investors. and helps them generate and file a "Form C" with the SEC at a fraction of the complexity and cost of our competitors.
Next, we want to execute better on our long-term vision. The investment is meant to be the start of our product experience. We want to help people "feel behind the curtain" -- that they are making a difference in the world, that they can find ways to help their portfolio companies, be it by spreading the word about product launches, providing introductions to new hires or partners, or giving detailed product feedback. That's our focus in the last half of 2016.
We've been relentlessly pursuing our vision for four years. We don't let anything stop us, starting before Congress even passed a law. We helped Congress write the sections of the JOBS Act that will enable all Americans to invest, were mentioned by name in the Congressional Letter of Intent, and were invited to watch President Obama sign it into law.
When we first started, we did not appreciate what we were getting ourselves into. Now we do. We were already proven product designers and software engineers. with MBAs. But we also needed to learn securities laws inside out, obtain our Series 65 and Series 7 licenses, and learn what it takes for investors to attract high-quality startups.
But, most importantly, we have four years of hands-on, practical experience with raising money from accredited investors outside of SF, for some of the most-sought after startups in the country. We've learned a ton that will be applicable to Regulation Crowdfunding. It'll be very hard for others to catch up to us. We have a vision, practical experience, and a formidable will to make it happen.
Initially, we built this for ourselves. We wanted to make investments in our friends (back before we were accredited).
One of Nick's best friends is angel investor Bill Warner, who founded a public company and sold another for about the same amount. He's inspired all of us: Bill spends practically all of his time helping founders. We wanted to be like him and help and invest in our startup friends. But we didn't have $50k to invest in each company. we had more like $500. Plus, it was effectively illegal for us to do so. We thought that was stupid.
We’ve always wanted to invest in founders we believed in. Not primarily for the financial returns, but to give back, to help, and to live vicariously through their experience. It made no sense to us that only the wealthy had the privilege to act on these emotions prior to the passage of the JOBS act. People are people; the dollar amounts are just smaller.
As we built Wefunder, we also learned that we could help our country by revitalizing entrepreneurship. It became evident to us how many deserving businesses can't get the capital they need to start or grow; the banks got way more risk-adverse after 2008, and venture capitalists pour money into a small sliver of the economy. We believe we can help fix that. The people who care should be allowed to allocate capital to businesses that need it.
We've spoken to thousands of investors on Wefunder. We were surprised to the extent that they were motivated by the same things as us.
We don't want to lose money, but we're not investing in startups primarily for the financial returns. We want to support things we believe in. We consider our startup investing to be socially good lottery tickets. We were surprised that even accredited investors with a finance background feel the same way.
We were also surprised that unaccredited investors (who apply to invest, but can't yet until May 16th) pick the same exact startups on Wefunder as accredited investors. There is no correlation between income and the startups chosen.
While we expect to be able to build a profitable business under present law, our vision will not be fully reached unless Congress and the SEC further improve securities regulations. It might take five years (if at all) for government to fully modernize our regulations.
We've worked with the Deputy Majority Whip, Congressmen McHenry, to help draft the Fix Crowdfunding Act that would greatly increase the potential of Regulation Crowdfunding. We've also been in touch with the offices of Senator Bennet, Senator Merkeley, and Senator Daines to support it in the Senate. But it's an open question if and when Congress will act.
The SEC and FINRA can always decide to impose more burdensome regulations in the future. There is a big risk that our growth will be constrained because of ineffective, counter-productive regulations that increase risk to investors, and increase the cost burden on businesses that choose Regulation Crowdfunding.
1) Esses números incluem startups atualmente no Wefunder se eles passarem sua meta mínima.
2) Algumas startups usam duas leis diferentes ao mesmo tempo (ou seja, o Regulamento D e o Crowdfunding de Regulamentação).
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Improving Workplace Culture, One Review at a Time.
With its emphasis on transparency, the jobs site Glassdoor aims to upend corporate power dynamics.
According to an H. R. director, many job applicants now say, “I read this on Glassdoor. How do you respond?”
One day in 2007, in Seattle, Rich Barton, the C. E.O. of the real-estate Web site Zillow, was getting ready for the company’s annual reviews. The process—talking to each employee about his or her performance and whether he or she would be getting a raise—called for discretion and tact. On his computer, he pulled up a spreadsheet containing the salary and stock options for every employee, and pressed Print. However, instead of sending the document to his personal printer, he sent it to one in the middle of the open-plan office. When Barton’s assistant realized the mistake, she rushed across the room to retrieve the document before anyone could read it. She succeeded, but the moment stayed with Barton. As he likes to tell people, it led him to wonder: why, exactly, was this information secret, aside from the fact that making it public could be extremely awkward?
Barton had started out at Microsoft, where, in the mid-nineties, while running the travel-business unit, he came up with the idea of selling airline tickets through the Internet. Back then, this, too, ran counter to social norms. Responsible people did not give their credit-card information to a computer; if you wanted to buy a plane ticket, you talked to your local travel agent, who gave you crumbs of information. “You had to literally ask what the prices and schedules were,” Barton recalled recently. In 1996, he persuaded Bill Gates to spin off Microsoft’s travel unit as its own company, Expedia, which, with other sites, changed the travel landscape. Customers discovered that they could not only buy plane tickets online but also tap into huge caches of information in order to get the best deals. Airlines, now that they no longer had to pay commissions to travel agents, could lower their ticket prices; travel agents could enroll in culinary school, or take up woodworking.
In 2003, Barry Diller’s company I. A.C. acquired Expedia, and Barton left to start Zillow. A Zillow feature called Zestimate used data from past listings to calculate the price of every house in the country, with the result that everyone suddenly knew the answer to the world’s worst dinner-party question: “Nice place. How much did you pay for it?” Barton came to see Expedia and Zillow, which used the Internet to correct “information asymmetries” in markets, as part of the same project. He told me, “We were empowering people with information and tools that they didn’t have before.” His slogan was “Power to the people,” and, after the printer incident, he realized that it could be applied to the world of work, too. Why should a job seeker have to furtively call around to find out how much she should be making as an operations manager at Xerox? Shouldn’t such information be online? Bosses might be nervous about a potential backlash, but, then again, as Barton said, “if I’m doing a good job as a leader, and the management and H. R. teams are promoting people and paying them fairly, then a sheet like that ought to make sense.” He went on, “Everyone ought to be able to look at it and say, ‘Yeah, Jane deserves that raise.’ ”
Barton handed his idea off to a former employee, Robert Hohman, who, in 2008, launched Glassdoor. Today, it is the second most popular jobs Web site, after Indeed, and is valued at more than a billion dollars. It has job listings, but it is also a Yelp for workplaces, on which people share salary information and post anonymous reviews evaluating their office environments. Among the site’s features are company ratings, based on how many stars the employees award the organization, on a scale of one to five; and C. E.O. approval ratings, given as a percentage of how many people approve of the company’s leadership. Initially, most of the jobs listed and reviewed were at tech companies in Silicon Valley, but the site now has thirty-three million reviews of more than seven hundred thousand companies in almost two hundred countries.
Glassdoor upended workplace power dynamics in the same way that Ratemyprofessors altered the power dynamics of college lecture halls, where, suddenly, professors had to worry about whether their students found them to be “inspirational” or “hot.” “It definitely changed the way business leaders thought,” Beth Comstock, a former vice-chair of G. E., told me. “There’d been a march for more transparency that had come along with the digitization of business. But suddenly it became very personal. People were, like, ‘Wait a minute, they’re going to be rating me ?’ ”
To scroll through a company’s Glassdoor page is to experience the frisson of setting eyes on hitherto secret stuff: the Pentagon Papers, or your sister’s diary. Here, beneath the impressive company logo, are tales of interdepartmental feuds (“Sales reps blame the support team . . . tech support blames sales”), managerial chaos (“Stop the drama. This isn’t high school”) and insecure bosses (“makes fun of what the employees are wearing, trying to be funny”), weird vibes (“cult-like culture”) and smells (“rubbing alcohol”). There are confessions (“I’ve made a terrible mistake coming here”) and earnest pleas (“appreciate the crewmembers!”).
Any one review on Glassdoor, like any single restaurant review on Yelp or product review on Amazon, may be misleading, useless, or unhinged. One user I spoke to, Blake Bolan, said that the process of sifting through reviews of a tech company she was interested in was like browsing Yelp reviews of her favorite restaurant, the Red Pepper Diner, near Beacon, New York. “It’s in a little building with a gas station. It doesn’t look like much, but you walk in and they serve the most amazing Sri Lankan food,” Bolan said. It gets many five-star reviews. “But I was recently wondering, as I was eating there for the millionth time: do they have any one - or two-star reviews?” They did. “I looked at it and was, like, Oh, this person got a burger! I’d never get a burger there.” Bolan is now happily working at the tech company.
And yet the quirks of anonymous online reviews—typos, digressions, outbursts—also give them a certain authority. Even if you’re not looking for a job, there is a voyeuristic fascination in a review left by, say, a vice-president at Goldman Sachs’s New York headquarters (pro: “good gym”; con: “Leaving at 5pm is a half day”), or by a dog handler at the Spot Experience, in Tribeca (“They expected me to master this ‘alpha’ mentality in 4 months”), or by a server at the Trump Hotel on Waikiki Beach, where, according to one reviewer, the pros include “beautiful location with ocean views.” The cons:
The Trump Hotel in Waikiki, Hawaii was a complete mess . . . 1 month training, minimum wage, instead of actual training they had us opening boxes and stocking kitchens . . . unorganized . . . not open to suggestions, uniforms were inappropriate for being so close to the beach (stockings and polyester skirts?) . . . LIES about who really owned the property (the TRUMP name had only been licensed) . . . and these people are making 6 figures geez. . . . Umm no thank you but thank you.
(The hotel did not respond to a request for comment.)
A recent survey by Software Advice claims that nearly fifty per cent of job seekers in the U. S. read Glassdoor reviews. There are reviews of jobs at mall kiosks, truck stops, and Amazon warehouse facilities. But it is in higher-paid industries like tech and consulting, where workers wield the most negotiating power, that the reviews hold the most sway. Beth Steinberg, the chief people officer at the online insurance company Zenefits, who previously worked at Electronic Arts, Facebook, and Nike, told me, “It’s pretty rare that a job candidate doesn’t look at Glassdoor before they come in. Often, they bring it up in the interview. They’ll say, ‘I read this on Glassdoor. How do you respond?’ ”
Anne Diebel, who works for Q. R.I., a private-investigation firm often hired by investors, recalled using the site to conduct a background check on a C. E.O.: “The Glassdoor reviews taught us that his peers saw him as entrepreneurial, while the staff saw him as arrogant, a perception that was confirmed by interviews we did.” Journalists keep an eye on the site. Last year, Glassdoor reviews tipped off a reporter to ethical issues at the Silicon Valley food startup Hampton Creek; reporters later discovered a “mayo buyback” scheme, in which contract employees had shopped for Hampton Creek’s vegan mayonnaise in grocery stores. (The company has since been cleared of wrongdoing by the Justice Department.)
Some of the site’s biggest enthusiasts are those advocating for social change. Laura Kray, a social psychologist studying gender in the workplace, told me, “In terms of academic research, if your goal is to increase gender equality, it’s hard to come up with a downside of greater transparency.” Some evidence suggests that women fail to demand higher wages because they experience more backlash than men do for being “pushy” in negotiations. Kray said that a printout from Glassdoor—a list of salaries for comparable jobs in the industry, or results from the site’s Know Your Worth feature—can provide “objective criteria you can refer to, instead of saying, ‘I think I’m worth this.’ ”
Glassdoor reviews provide real-time accounts of “boys’ club” dynamics, uncomfortable hugs, and demands for sexual favors by management. Jennifer Berdahl, who studies workplace sexual harassment at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, calls the site “a really exciting development,” comparing it to the scribbles on bathroom walls. “This is just putting on the Internet what’s been going on forever—women whispering about bad experiences they’ve had within companies,” she said. As recent scandals at companies like Uber and Fox News have proved, internal monitoring systems such as human resources are often “junk,” Berdahl said, when it comes to protecting workers from harassment: “They’re only as good as the people who can fire them.” When a company has a toxic or abusive culture, she said, “whistle-blowing—going outside the company—is the only alternative. You can do it by leaving, or by writing about the company online and exposing it to the public, so the shock and condemnation force a change. And hopefully the market will start taking care of it.”
Recent scandals have also shown corporations, and their shareholders, that workplace “culture” is a serious topic—and that a bad culture, left untended, can become an existential threat. In the past two years, Zenefits laid off half its employees and its C. E.O. resigned after the company was caught breaking insurance laws. Reports later emerged of a frat-house atmosphere, where employees drank and had sex in stairwells. Steinberg, one of the executives who joined the company in the aftermath, said that Zenefits has a coördinator who now reads all the company’s Glassdoor reviews, to monitor “day-to-day culture stuff.”
Spencer Rascoff, the C. E.O. of Zillow Group, who took over from Barton, calls himself “the Naked C. E.O.” “I was focussed on corporate culture before it was cool,” he told me. He reads every review of his company on Glassdoor and responds to many of them himself. He said, “It’s common for me to walk out of a meeting and write on Twitter, ‘Just finished a great meeting with @camille reviewing our P. R. goals for 2018.’ ” The constant communication, he said, “shows my other thirty-five hundred employees that I care, and it gives Camille a thrill. And maybe she amplifies it to her social network, which retweets it and shares it.” Rascoff, whose employees have given him a ninety-three-per-cent approval rating on Glassdoor, said that these efforts build an “employer brand,” which helps in the battle to attract talent in Silicon Valley.
Last year, twenty-one per cent of workers in the U. S. changed jobs, and the consulting firm Deloitte has estimated that companies spend more than two hundred billion dollars annually on finding people to fill the positions. Glassdoor sees an opportunity in this. In addition to publishing job listings, the company sells “enhanced profiles,” which are like display ads in the Yellow Pages. Glassdoor creates a bare-bones Web page for any company that gets a review, which will often appear at the top of a Google search. The company can’t make Glassdoor take the page down, but, for a minimum of six thousand dollars a year, and often an amount well into six figures, it can “claim” its Glassdoor page and make it look nicer—adding photographs and mission statements. For a higher fee, the company can customize its page for different types of workers, or get rid of advertisements from competitors. Jeremy Heimans, the co-author of “New Power,” a forthcoming book about the implications of growing online participation, described to me the process of getting a “Glassdoor face-lift” as “gentle extortion.” Threatening to damage your reputation, Glassdoor charges you to repair it.
One day last fall, I met with Robert Hohman, Glassdoor’s C. E.O., at the company’s Chicago office. He had just hosted a TED - like conference (tagline: “Winning with informed candidates”) where C. E.O. s and talent recruiters took notes on how to operate in the new era of corporate transparency. Hohman, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, resembles the actor Jeff Daniels; friendly and rumpled, he wore jeans, and his blond hair was slicked back. According to Glassdoor, ninety-one per cent of employees approve of Hohman’s performance. The other nine per cent include a former sales director, who recently griped about a “culture of blame” at the company’s Mill Valley, California, headquarters and advised Hohman to “stop standing up in meetings dropping F-Bombs like a 6th grader with a head injury.”
Hohman hasn’t spent a lot of time sending his résumé to H. R. departments. He was hired to work at Microsoft as soon as he graduated from Stanford, where he studied computer science, and became part of Rich Barton’s circle of frequent collaborators, a genial group that reminded me of the all-male crew of actors who regularly work with the movie director Judd Apatow. Another member of the group, the investor Erik Blachford, who is on the boards of Zillow and Glassdoor, described Hohman as a “hard-core technical engineer” who is also “a fun guy.” At Microsoft, Hohman was known for being motivated, but also for having a mischievous streak. He once told the members of his engineering team that, if they hit their ship date, he would shave Barton’s head in front of the entire staff. (It happened.) In 1996, Barton hired Hohman to work for Expedia, where he spent two years running Hotwire, a hotel-booking Web site that the company had acquired. After leaving Expedia, he decided to stay home with his wife and two young kids in Mill Valley and play the online video game World of Warcraft, in which multiple players control character avatars and fulfill “quests” in “guilds.” When Barton came to Hohman with the printer anecdote, he knew that Hohman was ready to start a company of his own. Plus, Barton told me, “I kind of knew Robert was playing a lot of World of Warcraft.”
Hohman told me that, when he spoke to Barton, he had been playing the game for six months straight. Barton’s idea about making salary information transparent had struck him not merely as a good business concept but as an opportunity to mimic the guilds that the game’s characters form and join: “I was thinking that, if we built a platform that let people help each other, by sharing information, that could scale way more than we ever could by researching companies ourselves.” He said yes to Barton—who became an early investor in Glassdoor, and is now the non-executive chairman of its board—and teamed up with Tim Besse, another Microsoft-Expedia alum.
Vault, JobVent, and FuckedCompany already provided workers with places to gossip and rail, but such forums had a reputation as “rant sites for angry people,” Hohman said. In order to keep the conversation on Glassdoor “constructive,” he and his co-founders created a set of Community Guidelines, which included: no profanity or discriminatory language; no personal attacks; no sharing trade secrets; and no naming individuals who are below the level of the most senior executives, known as the “C-suite.”
Some early reviews posed other kinds of problems. “ ‘People are doing coke in the bathroom, and the C. E.O. is a drug addict,’ ” Hohman said. “That was a tough one. Is it relevant to a job seeker? Bem, sim. But it’s also a criminal matter. The question is, are we the forum to resolve it?” After some discussion, Hohman and his colleagues decided that information about nonviolent crimes—drug use, sexual harassment, financial malfeasance—should be published, since it was relevant. When reviews contained threats of violence or descriptions of violent crime, like rape and murder, they would contact the authorities. (In April, 2013, after a user left a review of a hospital where he used to work which included a threat to bomb it, Glassdoor contacted the hospital, which called the police. The man was arrested.)
When it comes to sexual harassment, Glassdoor’s spokespeople noted that posting about it on the site should not replace reporting it through “appropriate channels.” But Hohman was enthusiastic about the site’s potential to curb abuse. Bringing up the #MeToo movement, he said, “This time that we’re going through, I do not think it’s an accident that it’s happening as transparency has been on the rise. If you wanted to run a racist, misogynistic company where there was sexual harassment going on, the only way you could possibly do that is to have there be this ironclad veil of secrecy. Which is basically what Harvey Weinstein had.”
In 2008, shortly before Glassdoor’s launch, Hohman called his sister, Melissa Fernandez, in Akron. She had just given birth to her first child and wanted to work from home. He enlisted her to read every review that was submitted to the site, scanning them for violations of the Community Guidelines. When the workload got to be too much, Fernandez recruited Cara Barry, another stay-at-home mom, who recruited a third mom, her neighbor. Eventually, this group—the content-moderation team—grew to include twenty-six people, several of them men, although for years employees at Glassdoor’s headquarters referred to them as “the WAHM s,” for “work-at-home moms.” During the past decade, Glassdoor has built machine-learning algorithms to screen for fraud and profanity, and the members of Fernandez’s team read anything that users have flagged; these days, they also read half of all reviews submitted to the site regardless—a step that Yelp and TripAdvisor don’t take, Hohman said.
Hohman had also attempted to deal with a common problem plaguing online reviews. In statistics, it’s known as “voluntary response bias”—the fact that volunteers are more likely to have extreme opinions. Hohman calls it the “J-shaped curve.” If you were to graph the number of stars that voluntary reviewers assign to things, you’d get a relatively large quantity of five-star reviews, from the people who love whatever they are writing about; a low number of fours, threes, or twos; and mostly ones, from the foaming-at-the-mouth furious.
From the start, Hohman instituted a “give to get” policy at Glassdoor. As a user, before you can look at any information on the site you must contribute an anonymous review of your own current job or one that you’ve held in the past five years, or share your salary. (Glassdoor users are allowed one review per year for each company they’ve worked at.) Hohman says that this gives everyday users greater incentive to contribute to the site, and he claims that it shows in Glassdoor’s data. “From the beginning, the average rating has been 3.2, which is not low,” he said. “And, if you looked at the distribution, it’s not bimodal. Seventy per cent of reviews are in the middle hump, where you are satisfied with your job but not ecstatic. Like, ‘Things are O. K. Work is fine.’ ”
Still, the one-star reviews make a strong impression. I learned more about the site from a friend, Alexa Hirschfeld, who, in 2008, founded Paperless Post, a New York tech startup that makes online invitations. Her company recently chose to end an entire business line, printed invitations, in order to put more resources into digital, and laid off fifteen per cent of the staff. “That was when I realized the crazy power of this thing,” she told me. Within days of the layoffs, the negative reviews started trickling in. “We went from a four-star average to a bunch of one-star reviews with very angry descriptions.” The company’s over-all score went down, and potential recruits started asking questions. She went on, “Basically, as a company, you have to make really hard decisions. And, if you make everybody happy, you’re not going to succeed.”
When I mentioned this to Hohman, he sighed. “People will say, ‘I fired that person! Why would you let them write a review?’ ” he said. “My answer is, that person is writing about their own experience, and their one data point is valid.” He also argued that turmoil and even layoffs do not necessarily result in bad reviews: “How you’re treated when you’re separating says a lot about companies. Caterpillar”—the construction-equipment company—“was one of the big ones. In 2009, they laid off twenty thousand people, and their ratings actually went up, they did such a good job communicating—the communication was just so crisp.”
Last fall, Dawn Lyon, Glassdoor’s chief reputation officer (and now a consultant), told me that bosses often feel wronged by Glassdoor: “People say, ‘I have a Glassdoor problem.’ We deal with that all the time. The question is, do you really have a Glassdoor problem, or is it a reflection of something going on inside the company?” Some people suspect that Glassdoor might make certain allowances to paying clients, but Hohman adamantly denied this. “No special treatment for clients versus non-clients,” he said. “With new sales hires, the first value I lead with is integrity. Everyone needs to know the day they start we’ll never trade a review for money. Because once we do that we’ve lost all credibility as a neutral platform.”
The company insists that, since the reviews and the scores on the site are “a mirror that reflects back on companies,” as Lyon put it, there should be no quick fixes for bad reviews, and no shortcuts to improve a company’s ratings. Josh Bersin, a consultant from Deloitte, said in a speech at Glassdoor’s conference, “The bottom line is, no matter how much you try to influence Glassdoor surveys, the ultimate problem is building the irresistible organization.”
And yet, as Glassdoor’s paying clients will tell you, there is an easy way to raise your company’s scores, by increasing what Glassdoor calls “employee engagement.” Glassdoor warns employers not to offer incentives in exchange for reviews: “We will remove positive reviews where we have evidence that employees were compensated and/or coerced.” But there is nothing preventing companies from encouraging their employees to write reviews on the site—especially if they are likely to write good ones. (In response to Hirschfeld’s complaints, a Glassdoor client representative told her that, after she’s had a great conversation with an employee, “you just say, ‘Would you mind leaving your feedback on Glassdoor?’ ”)
At the conference, Marie Artim, the vice-president of talent acquisition at Enterprise Rent-A-Car, told me that the company reminds managers to tell newly promoted employees, “Congratulations! Go change your LinkedIn profile! Give us a Glassdoor review!” Thomas Pullen, a recruiter for an industrial-chemical company, said that his company’s scores were abysmal until he launched an internal e-mail campaign: “I told everyone, ‘Hey, go to Glassdoor! Leave us a review!’ In six months, we went from 2.8 to 3.9.” In a recent article about corporate change at the online marketplace Etsy, the Times noted that the company’s Glassdoor reviews “portray a company in decline,” and that, soon after a reporter contacted the company, several new reviews appeared on the site, with titles like “Why I Love Etsy.” Etsy said that it did not encourage its employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor.
But the “fake positive” review, apparently written by a management-appointed shill, is a common feature of the site. The biggest tells are often in the “Cons” section—“So much free food. I’ve gained 8 pounds!”; “No cons”; “Sometimes I feel like I love my job too much”—and under “Advice to management,” when the reviewer writes some version of “Keep up the great work!” Hohman has the same attitude toward dubious positive reviews as he does toward agenda-driven rants. “Everything is only a single source,” he said. “It’s when you hear the same thing multiple times, in multiple different voices, that it tends to have an effect.” But almost everyone I spoke with—worker or manager—had a Glassdoor conspiracy theory: the company encourages fake reviews, because they bring in more Web traffic; if you know someone at Glassdoor, she can get a negative review taken down or a positive one pushed to the top of the page; a friend’s comments were deleted under mysterious circumstances. (According to Glassdoor, none of this is true.)
Laurie Ruettimann, who writes about human resources and is a consultant for companies such as Pfizer and Monsanto, suggested that such mistrust might stem from Glassdoor’s business model. The company presents itself as a tool for employees, like a union, but it is funded, in part, by their bosses, like an H. R. department. “It’s ambiguous messaging,” Ruettimann said. She tells the companies she advises, “Don’t hire people to read Glassdoor, don’t comment on negative feedback. Once you respond to one review, you have to respond to everybody. It’s a black hole that doesn’t necessarily yield anything for you.” As for the fees, she said, “You’re better off, in terms of your company’s reputation, if you invest that money in your own Web site and your own management training.”
From Chicago, Hohman returned to San Francisco. Dawn Lyon and I went to visit the content-moderation team, which works in an office park in Green, Ohio, five miles from the Akron airport. Melissa Fernandez met us at the door. She has a “Rachel” haircut, wire-rimmed glasses, and an even-keeled demeanor. She introduced her team of moderators—twenty-one other women and four men, working at adjustable-height desks. According to Glassdoor’s Glassdoor page, the Ohio office is the happiest of the company’s six locations, beating London and San Francisco, with a 5.0 rating—a perfect score. Fernandez explained that this is in part because the team has a great culture, and also because its San Francisco-style startup perks—yoga classes, dogs in the office, flexibility to work from home—are virtually unheard of in Akron, where the biggest employers are factories and call centers. Laura Beth Mercina, the team’s head of community care, previously worked at Arby’s. She said, “I tell people about my job at Glassdoor, and they’re, like, ‘Is this place real?’ ”
Working for a platform like Glassdoor is a little different from working for a traditional publication like The New Yorker . There’s no investigative reporting, copy-editing, or fact-checking. (A popular office mantra is “We are not the finders of fact.”) Whereas a publication is legally responsible for what it publishes, Glassdoor’s reviews are the responsibility of its reviewers. This demands a hands-off approach from the moderators, each of whom reads eighty to a hundred reviews per hour—many years’ worth of employment. If they see a violation of the Community Guidelines, they reject the review. If the situation is ambiguous, Fernandez said, they ask themselves, and sometimes one another, “Is it helpful to the job seeker?”
“ ‘The C. E.O.’s super fat and greasy,’ ” one of the moderators, Cara Barry, said, citing an example. “We get that a lot.” This comment would normally be a violation (personal attack), but the moderators decided to make an exception in the case of a fitness company, where someone had noted, “The C. E.O. is obese and smokes a pack of Marlboros a day.” (Helpful to the job seeker.)
Barry brought up another review, which Glassdoor had been sent by a British finance company. Under “Pros,” the employee had written, “Good place to work for.” Under “Cons”: “Not enough British ethnics employed!” Was this discriminatory language?
“It’s a gray area,” Fernandez said, explaining that the comment didn’t single out a particular ethnic group for insult. Barry left it up.
Barry leads the fraud team, which reads reviews caught by the fraud-detecting software; these are often sent from fake e-mail addresses. “It’s more about gaming—trying to leave multiple five-star reviews to make your company’s score go up, or an angry employee trying to leave a bunch of negative reviews to make the company look bad,” she said.
The moderators handle a lot of regrets, Barry said. “We get a lot of e-mails where people say, ‘I changed my mind! How do I take it down right now?’ ”
“Or ‘I didn’t know you were going to publish my job title! Now they’ll know who I am!’ ” Fernandez added. (Glassdoor now allows users to delete their own reviews.)
The closest readers of Glassdoor—and the moderators’ main correspondents—are employers. “The employer is always sure they know who wrote the review,” Fernandez said. “They say things like ‘I know this is Ann Smith from H. R., and she was an alcoholic!’ ” According to the moderators, they are almost always wrong.
I asked how often employers threaten lawsuits. “Daily,” Fernandez said. (Although users are responsible for what they write, the company will go to court to protect their anonymity from employers; most cases are dismissed, on First Amendment grounds.) Generally, if a boss merely disagrees with a review, his or her only option is to write a response on Glassdoor. But the boss can also “flag” the review, to indicate that it contains a violation of the Guidelines. “There are so many ways employers have found to try to get us to take things down,” Fernandez went on. “ ‘That’s not an employee!’ ‘We never had a location in that place!’ ”
Krystle Neeb, a member of the flag team, read aloud a review that had been flagged by the management of an I. T. company, in which the reviewer had written, “Bleeding heart liberals such as myself may have issue with a few of their clients.” He or she disliked having to work on a project “for an anti-gay fundamentalist religious client.” A discussion ensued among the moderators.
Fernandez said, “In my opinion, it’s not discriminatory. They’re not saying anything negative about gays.” Neeb wondered if the review could be perceived as discriminatory against anti-gay religious fundamentalists. The moderators reflected, inadvertently engaging in the decision-making process currently under way in the wedding-cake case before the Supreme Court. The review got a pass.
Leann Boso, also on the flag team, rejected a review that advised management, “Sever ties with Head of Communication as quickly as possible.” (Negative comment about an individual below the C-suite.)
In a message to Glassdoor about another review, headlined “Opportunity,” a user had written, “This looks fake as all get out.”
“It’s probably positive,” Fernandez said. Boso scanned the review, which awarded the company five stars and claimed that senior leadership “has done a great job diversifying the business model for long term growth and stability.” The only con was that the environment was “so fast paced and dynamic you have to stay focused on core responsibilities.”
“This is fine,” Boso said.
But what if it was written by the head of the company’s P. R. department? “The head of the P. R. department can leave a review, too,” Lyon said. “It’s allowed.” ♦
A previous version of the article incorrectly stated the percentage of job-seekers who read Glassdoor reviews. It also misquoted Robert Hohman on the bimodality of rating distribution.
Lizzie Widdicombe is an editor of The Talk of the Town.