Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen is the co-founder and chairman of Ning, the create-your-own social network platform company that has raised over $100 million in funding. Marc is best known as a co-founder and chief technical mind behind Netscape Communications Corporation and co-author of Mosaic, the first widely- used web browser. He also co-founded Opsware, a datacenter automation software company that was sold in 2007 to Hewlett-Packard for over $1.6 billion. Marc also serves on the board of Facebook. CrunchBase profile.

Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff is chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. He founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise software technology. Under Benioff’s direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. For its revolutionary approach, salesforce.com has been lauded as one of BusinessWeek’s Top 100 Most Innovative Companies, named No. 7 on The Wired 40, and selected for the past two years as a Top Ten Disrupter by Forbes. Benioff has been widely recognized for pioneering innovation with honors such as the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, the SDForum Visionary Award, Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year by the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, and being ranked No. 7 on the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT survey by eWEEK. Crunchbase profile.

Henry Blodget

Henry Blodget is the CEO, Co-Founder & Editor in Chief of Silicon Alley Insider. He is currently CEO co-Founder, and Editor in Chief of Silicon Alley Media, Inc., a network of real-time business news and analysis sites. From 1994-2001, he was an investment banker and equity research analyst at Prudential Securities, Oppenheimer & Co., and Merrill Lynch & Co. From 1999-2001, he was ranked one of the top Internet and eCommerce analysts on Wall Street by Institutional Investor, Greenwich Associates, and other third-party firms. From 1999-2001, he ran the global Internet research practice at Merrill, coordinating teams of analysts in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Crunchbase profile.

Roelof Botha

Roelof Botha is a partner at Sequoia Capital focused on services and software investments. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Roelof served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal (EBAY) and worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. Roelof is a certified actuary (Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries), has a BS in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics from the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. CrunchBase profile.

Ron Conway

Ron Conway is one of the Internet’s pre-eminent angel investors. He was the Founder and Managing Parter of the Angel Investors LP funds whose investments included Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware and Brightmail. Ron was names #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “dealmakers” in 2006 and is on the list again in 2007. Ron is a close advisor and investor in Baseline Ventures, an early-stage seed capital firm. He is an active advisor for a number of Internet companies and also very active in community and philanthropic activities, including Vice Chairman of UCSF Medical Foundation in San Francisco and co-chair of the “Fight for Mike” Homer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). CrunchBase profile.

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and chairman of HDNet a HD TV cable network. July 1982 saw Cuban start MicroSolutions. MicroSolutions became a software reseller and system integration company, selling products such as Compuserve, Carbon Copy, and Lotus Notes, with the company’s biggest client being Perot Systems. Cuban sold MicroSolutions to Compuserve for $6 million in 1990. In 1995 Cuban and friend Todd Wagner became interested in the early stages of the Internet along with their interest in basketball resulted in them starting broadcast.com which grew to revenues of almost $100 million and 330 staff. The internet company Yahoo brought Broadcast.com with Cuban earning himself just over 5 billion worth of Yahoo stock. Crunchbase profile.

Chris DeWolfe

Chris DeWolfe is the co-founder and chief executive officer of MySpace.com, the leading online lifestyle portal. DeWolfe, alongside co-founder and president, Tom Anderson, created a new platform for a generation to communicate and discover culture based around the self expression and connectivity of the site’s 110 million active users. As MySpace’s CEO, DeWolfe is responsible for all aspects of the site’s strategic vision and the execution of its global business initiatives. Along the way, DeWolfe has led strategic initiatives that have extended the site’s reach into a number of vertical categories – such as online video (MySpaceTV), politics (MySpace Impact), news, music and film – and at present a total of 29 international markets. Under DeWolfe’s leadership, MySpace has grown exponentially since its launch in 2004, with an average of 300,000 new users signing up daily. More than 70 million people in the U.S. visit the site each month, creating a user composition that includes politicians, bands, filmmakers, comedians, photographers, and people wanting to communicate with friends and plan their social lives. CrunchBase profile.

Don Dodge

Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. Don has been in the software business for more than 20 years. He started his software career with Digital Equipment, aka DEC, in the database group. He worked with 5 software start-ups over the next 12 years. Forte Software was the first multiplatform object oriented development environment. AltaVista was the first search engine on the web. Napster was the first P2P file sharing network. Bowstreet was the first web services development environment. Groove Networks was the first secure P2P collaboration platform. Now he is at Microsoft… “the biggest start-up in the world”… working with VC’s and start-ups in the greater Boston area. Crunchbase profile.

Dan Farber

Dan Farber was named Editor-in-chief of CNET’s News.com in February 2008. Previously he was vice-president of editorial at CNET Networks and editor in chief of ZDNet. Dan has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. He joined ZDNet in 1996, and led the development of ZDNet’s worldwide network of more than 70 technology-focused sites. Prior to joining ZDNet, Dan served as vice president and editor-in-chief at Ziff-Davis’ flagship computing news publications, PC Week and MacWeek. He was also a founding editor at MacWorld and part of the editorial staffs of PC World and PC Magazine. CrunchBase profile.

Bradley Horowitz

Bradley oversees Google’s communications products and social applications including Google Docs, Google Talk, GrandCentral, Blogger and Picasa. Before joining Google, Bradley led Yahoo’s advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab and was pursuing his Ph.D. there when he co-founded Virage. CrunchBase profile.

Chad Hurley

Raised near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, Hurley received his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating, he joined eBay’s PayPal division, primarily focusing on user interface. It was there that he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim with whom he founded YouTube, a video sharing website, in 2005.

YouTube quickly became one of the web’s fastest-growing sites, and was ranked as the 10th most popular website just a year after its launch. There are reportedly 100 million clips viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours.

Hurley currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and was voted 28th on Business 2.0 magazine’s “50 people who matter” list in 2006. That year, he and Chen sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion in stock. CrunchBase profile.

Joi Ito

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons, and founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the “50 Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” for 2002. CrunchBase profile.

Josh Kopelman

Josh Kopelman is a venture capitalist and Managing Partner at First Round Capital. Previously, Kopelman founded Half.com, which was acquired by eBay in 2000. He remained with eBay for three years, running the Half.com business unit and growing eBay’s Media marketplace to almost half a billion dollars in annual sales. In late 2003 Kopelman helped to found TurnTide, an anti-spam company that created the world’s first anti-spam router. TurnTide was acquired by Symantec just six months later.In 2001 Kopelman co-founded the Kopelman Foundation, a non-profit grant fund for social entrepreneurs. He also serves as a member of the advisory boards for Wharton Entrepreneurial Center and the Weiss Tech House at the University of Pennsylvania. Crunchbase profile.

Loic LeMeur

Loic is the CEO and visionary behind Seesmic, founded in 2007, with the goal of transforming online video into a medium for threaded, interactive video conversation. Prior to Seesmic, Loic incubated several other start-ups including four French companies: Ublog, (merged with Six Apart in 2003) and RapidSite, (acquired by France Telecom in 1999) two popular blog companies, B2L, an interactive agency in 1999 (acquired by BBDO) and LeWeb, one of Europe’s leading web conferences for businesses and web 2.0 innovators in 2005.

Loic serves as a board member on the RSS Advisory Board. He is also an active investor and mentor to entrepreneurs and contributes to the World Economic Forum blog, which he founded. Originally from the South of France, Loic lives in San Francisco, California. CrunchBase profile.

Om Malik

Om Malik has over 15 years of experience as a journalist covering technology and business news. Most notably, he was a Writer at Red Herring during its glory days. He then went on to be part of the founding team of Forbes.com as a Senior Editor. Most recently, he was a Senior Writer for Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories. His contributions have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review. Additionally, Malik is the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. He is the founder of Giga Omni Media, the company behind popular blogs such as GigaOM, NewTeeVee, WebWorkerDaily, Earth2Tech & OStatic. CrunchBase profile.

Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer is VP, Search Products & User Experience at Google. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to 100+ languages and launching numerous features and products. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. Before Google, she worked at UBS research lab (Ubilab) and SRI International. Marissa has been featured in various publications, including Newsweek (“10 Tech Leaders of the Future”), Red Herring (“15 Women to Watch”), Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, Fortune and Fast Company. CrunchBase profile.

Tim O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the Web 2.0 Summit, the Web 2.0 Expo, the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, and the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar, “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is an activist for open source and open standards, and an opponent of software patents and other incursions of new intellectual property laws into the public domain. Tim’s long-term vision for his company is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
CrunchBase profile.

Sean Parker

Sean Parker is the co-founder and Chairman of Causes on Facebook and MySpace, a new network that aims to enable large-scale political and social activism on the Internet. Sean is also a Managing Partner at The Founders Fund, an early stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco . Previously, Sean was the co-founder of the category defining Web ventures Napster, Plaxo, and Facebook. At Napster, Sean helped to design the Napster client software and led the company’s initial financing and strategy. Under Sean’s leadership, Napster became the fastest adopted client software application in history. Following Napster, Sean co-founded and served as President of Plaxo, where he pioneered the viral engineering techniques used to deploy Plaxo’s flagship smart address book product, ultimately acquiring more than 15 million users. In 2004, Sean left Plaxo to become the founding President of Facebook, one of the most rapidly growing sites on the Internet today. Sean sits on the boards of several private companies. CrunchBase profile.

Ash Patel

Ash Patel is currently the Head of Yahoo’s Audience Products Division. Previously he was the Executive Vice President of the Platforms and Infrastructure Division where he was responsible for global technology investments and platform initiatives both on and off the Yahoo network. Under his previous title he also led an increased focus on innovating and developing next-generation services for Yahoo customers, and oversaw divisions including Product Platform Engineering, Platform Strategy & Architecture, and the Advanced Development Division. Since starting at Yahoo in 1996, Patel has played a key role in architecting and enhancing MyYahoo, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Chat and many other products that continue to impact millions of Yahoo users. Crunchbase profile.

Kevin Rose

Kevin Rose is the founder and chief architect of Digg. Kevin started Digg in September 2004 as a personal project. His initial idea was to conduct a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote news and other content on the Web, without external editorial control. After a very short time, he realized the power of his idea, as Digg was becoming a resource for breaking news stories and developed a strong user following. Kevin is also a co-founder of the Internet Television Network Revision3 where as a member of the board he provides strategic direction to the company. CrunchBase profile.

Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg was named COO of Facebook in March 2008, and she manages business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy, and communications. Prior to Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google, where she built and managed the online sales channels for advertising and publishing and operations for consumer products globally. She was also instrumental in launching Google’s philanthropic arm. Sandberg was previously Chief of Staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. She was also a management consultant with McKinsey & Company and an economist with The World Bank.
CrunchBase profile.

Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble is a leading blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his popular blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Fast Company as a video blogger. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.CrunchBase profile.

Yossi Vardi

Yossi Vardi is an Israeli entrepreneur most famous for being the original investor in ICQ - the first Internet-wide instant messaging system. Vardi has invested in over 50 tech companies in diverse areas of software, energy, Internet, mobile, cleantech, and others. Vardi has been an active civil servant in Israel through projects involving energy and infrastructure. He also co-founded Alon, an Israeli oil company. Vardi acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy in the developing world. Vardi has received many awards including The Prime Minister Award, The Industry Award, Entrepreneur of the Year (Tel Aviv University), and the CEO!’s Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame from the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization. CrunchBase profile.

Jeff Weiner

Jeff Weiner is an Executive-in-Residence for leading Venture Capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Prior to joining Accel and Greylock, Weiner served in key leadership roles at Yahoo for over seven years, most recently as the Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division. In this position he led a team of over 3,000 employees, managing products reaching over 500 million consumers, and overseeing a P&L responsible for roughly $3 billion in annual revenue. During his tenure, Weiner helped drive the Networkʼs Open and Social strategy as well as expansion of the companyʼs category-leading consumer web products, including Yahoo’s Front Doors, Communications and Community products, Search, and Media properties. Prior to his Network role, Weiner was part of the Search leadership team that directed the acquisition and integration of Inktomi, AltaVista, and FAST as well as the development of Yahoo Search Technology. From 2001 to 2002, Weiner oversaw Corporate Development at Yahoo, where he was responsible for the development and modification of overall corporate and individual business unit strategy and M&A. Weiner is also actively involved in the non-profit sector, with specific focus on leveraging digital capabilities to broaden the reach and scale of high impact causes. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of DonorsChoose.org and Malaria No More. CrunchBase profile.

Evan Williams

Originally from Nebraska, Evan Williams co-founded Pyra Labs to make project management software. The company spun off a note-taking as Blogger, one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs. Pyra was eventually acquired by Google, where Williams stayed until October 2004 when he left to co-found Odeo. In late 2006, Williams co-founded another company, Obvious Corp, with Biz Stone and other former Odeo employees. Obvious has acquired all previous properties of Odeo, including Odeo and Twitter, another project started by Williams. Crunchbase profile.