Speakers & Expert Judges

DEMO Mobile 2013 line-up

Executive Producer / Moderator

Erick Schonfeld - Executive Producer of DEMO

 
     
   
Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the executive producer of DEMO. He is also a partner at bMuse, a product incubator in New York City and is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, The Next Net. He also launched an online video series with CNN/Money and hosted regular panels and conferences of industry luminaries.
 
Erick started his career at Fortune magazine in 1993. In 1999, he won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, he was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30. Erick graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.

Host

Neal Silverman - Senior Vice President & General Manager - DEMO

 
     
   
Neal Silverman brings more than 20 years’ media and sales experience to his role as Senior Vice President and General Manager of IDG Enterprise’s DEMO—world-renowned launchpad for emerging technology. In his current role Silverman oversees sales,  marketing and business development,  for the DEMO brand and participates in the selection of the companies that present. Neal has also led the expansion of the DEMO brand to China, Singapore, Africa, India, Russia and Brazil. Neal also sits on the Executive Committee for IDG Enterprise and the Board of Storage Network World.
 
Prior to joining IDG Enterprise, Silverman held a variety of executive management positions at several media companies including Fast Company Magazine, US News & World Report and The Wall Street Journal. He joined Network World in 2002 as Executive Vice President for Network World Events and Executive Forum and quickly moved up through the sales organization to SVP and General Manager.

Keynote Speakers:

  

Steve Blank - Entrepreneur & Author

 
    
   

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur-turned-educator who is changing how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is being taught. He created the Customer Development methodology that launched the lean startup movement, and wrote about the process in his first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. His second book, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, is standard text for entrepreneurship. Blank teaches the Customer Development methodology in his Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley, Columbia University and the National Science Foundation. He writes regularly about entrepreneurship at www.steveblank.com.

Matthew Brezina - CEO - Sincerely

 
    
   

Matt is the co-founder & CEO of Sincerely Inc., a startup with the mission of helping the world be more thoughtful. Sincerely has launched mobile brands such as Postagram, PopBooth & Sincerely Ink. Sincerely apps make it easy to send cards and gifts from a smartphone. Previously Matt was the co-founder of Xobni, the company that invented the people-centric inbox. Matt continues to serve on the board of Xobni. Matt is also an angel investor to: Dropbox, Exec, Voxer, Mailbox, and others.


Garrett Camp - Founder & Chairman - Uber and StumbleUpon

 
    
   

Garrett is a serial entrepreneur and investor based in San Francisco. Garrett is Chairman & Co-founder of Uber, an on-demand car service available in 30 cities across North America and Europe. Garrett is also Chairman and Co-founder of StumbleUpon, a web discovery platform he grew to over 25 million registered users as its founding CEO. Garrett completed his Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, where he researched collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval. He is also a 2007 recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award.

Tom Conrad - CTO & EVP of Production - Pandora

   
    
   

Tom Conrad leads the Pandora product organization, which includes product management, user interface design, software development, engineering development and testing with partner companies, and network operations. Over the years, Tom has led numerous engineering and product design teams across a wide range of applications – from operating systems and enterprise software to video games and consumer web sites. Before joining Pandora, Tom was the Vice President of Engineering at Kenamea, Inc. where he led the teams responsible for the design and development of an award-winning Internet-scale messaging system. Tom previously was the Technical Director for the successful video game series "You Don't Know Jack."  Tom holds three U.S. patents and a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.  Tom holds both technology and music close to his heart. His personal music collection still includes more than 1,000 CDs and he likes to say the only instrument he plays well is his stereo.

Chris Dixon - General Partner - Andreessen Horowitz

 
    
   

Chris Dixon is an investing partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, he was the cofounder and CEO of two startups, SiteAdvisor and Hunch. SiteAdvisor was an internet security company that warned web users of security threats. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. Hunch was a recommendation technology company that was acquired by eBay in 2011. As an investor, Chris cofounded Founder Collective, a seed venture fund, where he made early stage investments in GroupMe, Buzzfeed, Betaworks, and MakerBot. He has also been an active angel investor, making personal investments in technology companies including Foursquare, Kickstarter, Stripe, Warby Parker, Pinterest, OMGPOP, Behance, Stack Overflow, and others. Chris started programming as a kid, and was a professional programmer after college at a high-speed options trading firm, Arbitrade. He has a BA and MA in Philosophy from Columbia and an MBA from Harvard. When he's not meeting with entrepreneurs, he often writes blogs about his theories and experiences of investing and building startups at cdixon.org.


Justin Kan - Founder & CEO - Exec

 
   
   

Justin Kan is the CEO and founder of Exec. Exec is an on-demand errand running service that allows anyone to get their errands run from their mobile phone. He is also the president and cofounder of TwitchTV, an online community of 23 million monthly viewers watching and broadcasting video gaming video, including popular titles League of Legends, Starcraft 2, and more. TwitchTV was developed as a product of Justin.tv, a live broadcasting site that Justin cofounded in 2006. Other notable Justin.tv products include Socialcam, which was sold in August of 2012 to Autodesk. Justin currently also serves as a venture partner at the technology seed fund Y Combinator.

Vinod Khosla - Founder - Khosla Ventures

 
  
   
Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor, and technology fan. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, focused on impactful clean technology and information technology investments. Mr. Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. One of Mr. Khosla’s greatest passions is being a mentor to entrepreneurs, assisting entrepreneurs and helping them build technology based businesses. Mr. Khosla is driven by the desire to make positive impact through scaling alternative energy, achieving petroleum independence, and promoting a pragmatic approach to the environment. He is also passionate about Social Entrepreneurship. Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT, New Delhi, a Master's in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

 

James Senior - Director of Windows Apps - Microsoft

 
    
   

James works on the Windows team at Microsoft and is responsible for enabling strategic partners on the Windows platform. A web developer by trade, James has worked on a number of open source web tools and platforms at Microsoft including WebMatrix, ASP.NET MVC 2 & 3, ASP.NET Ajax library and worked on the project to have Microsoft contribute directly to jQuery. In a previous life he worked for Intel as a Lead Software Engineer building scalable web apps and tools.

Gentry Underwood - CEO & Co-Founder - Orchestra

 
  
   

Gentry Underwood is the CEO and co-founder of Orchestra Inc (http://orchestra.com).Prior to this, Gentry led IDEO’s Knowledge Sharing domain, which focused on facilitating large-scale collaboration through the human-centered application of technology. He began his career as a software designer after earning a degree in human-computer interaction from Stanford University, but left the Silicon Valley and the world of start-ups to study psychology, anthropology, and community development. At Orchestra, Gentry combines his social science and design backgrounds to focus on building collaborative systems that people actually want to use. Gentry has been a thought leader in social software, writing for Techcrunch, Core77 and keynoting at a number of conferences, including Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and PICNIC.

Deena Varshavskaya - Founder & CEO - Wanelo

 
  
   
Deena Varshavskaya is the founder and CEO of Wanelo (“wah-nee-lo,” from Want, Need, Love), an online community for all of the world’s shopping. Wanelo is democratizing and transforming the world’s commerce by reorganizing shopping around people. Originally from Siberia, Deena launched her first web startup straight out of college, only to learn that she loved designing websites, but knew nothing about design. She then pursued user experience design working for a social network and later established her own design agency. After realizing the need for a radically different shopping experience that empowers the individual, Deena launched Wanelo in late 2010. Today, Wanelo is an advertising-free shopping environment with hundreds of thousands of stores and is a growing movement of millions of people.
 

Expert Judges

Coleen Baik - Designer - Twitter

 
  
   

Coleen Baik is a user experience designer living in San Francisco, California. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in French but, through an interesting confluence of events, ended up in Silicon Valley. Since then she's worked at tech companies large and small, from dot-com giants such as Sun Microsystems to ten-employee start-ups like MixerLabs. Currently, she's proud to be a part of a world-class design team at Twitter. She loves slow food, old films, and essays by David Foster Wallace. Her time to screen in the morning is about 7 seconds. She is @colbay on Twitter.

Chi-Hua Chien - General Partner - Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

 
  
   
Chi-Hua Chien is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and he also serves on the board of directors or works closely with the teams at Booyah, Chegg, Chill, GOGII, Inspirato, Klout, Path, Reputation.com, Spotify, Twitter and Zaarly. Before coming to KPCB, Chi-Hua worked with Accel Partners as a venture advisor and associate. Before becoming an investor, Chi-Hua was an early employee or co-founder of several startups and he was the director of marketing at Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), where he led the marketing and inside sales teams and served as interim CFO for Coremetrics through two rounds of venture funding. He also was part of the early teams at MyListo (as a founder) and eCoverage. Chi-Hua has an M.S. degree in industrial engineering, a B.S. degree in industrial engineering and a B.A. degree in economics, all from Stanford University; and he also earned an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Chi-Hua was named one of the Top VCs Under 35 by VC Journal and a member of the Elite Eight VCs To Watch by Forbes.

 

Jeff Clavier - Founder & Managing Partner - SoftTech VC

 
  
   
Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested in 110+ consumer internet startups (Fund I, Fund II, Fund III) in areas like social media, monetization, search, gaming or B2B/B2C web services. Prior to founding SoftTech VC, Jeff spent more than 16 years in the enterprise software world as an entrepreneur, senior executive and venture capitalist. In 2000, Jeff became President of RVC Capital, the firm managing the Reuters Greenhouse Fund with $600M invested in 82 companies. He joined the venture arm of Reuters from the company’s product development division, where he was leading a 250+ staff in Paris, London and New York, and was responsible for the Risk Management and Desktop products. In 2007, Jeff was recognized as one of the 13 “Web 2.0 King Makers” by (late) Business 2.0. BusinessWeek named him one of “The 25 Most Influential People on the Web” in 2008, and one of the “Top 25 Angels in Tech” in 2010. He was also nominated in the “Best Angel” category at the Crunchies in 2009 and 2010.
 

Evan Doll - Co-founder - FlipBoard

 
   
   

Evan Doll is the co-founder of Flipboard, the personalized social magazine for iPhone, iPad and Android. Prior to founding Flipboard with Mike McCue, he was a member of the original iPhone engineering team at Apple. He also taught the first university-level iPhone app development course at Stanford, which was downloaded over 5 million times on iTunes U.

Di-Ann Eisnor - Vice President, Partnerships & Platform - Waze

 
   
   

Di-Ann Eisnor, VP of Partnerships & Platform, runs US operations and is crafting the cartography of “live mapping” for the crowd-sourced navigation and real-time traffic start-up, Waze. Diann is also founder and chairman of Platial, and founded Eisnor Interactive which was bought by Omnicom back in 2001. Di-Ann is a neogeography pioneer and serial entrepreneur employing all means to increase the world’s citizen mappers.

Dr. Michael Harries - Chief Technologist - Citrix Startup Accelerator

 
  
   

Dr Michael Harries is Chief Technologist for the Citrix Startup Accelerator.  He selects, seed funds and coaches early stage startups creating the future of Mobile Workstyle and Cloud Services. He is also a long standing member of Citrix CTO Office and Citrix Labs leadership team.  Michael’s focus over the last decade has been on the often elusive intersection between new technology and market viability. At Citrix Startup Accelerator he works with startups building new cloud and mobile infrastructure. He is also interested in rapidly evolving spaces like robotics, augmented reality, commoditized manufacturing (e.g. 3d printing, Raspberry Pi, etc), sensor proliferation, the quantitative self, and the implications of the resulting massive data. His original training was in computer science, economics and artificial intelligence.


Mary Lou Jepsen - Founder & CEO - Pixel Qi Corporation

 
  
   
Dr. Mary Lou Jepsen is the CEO and Founder of the Pixel Qi Corporation, a high tech startup doing things in display technology that many believed were impossible and delivering them into high volume mass production. She is also a member of Innovation Board of MEDCO, one of the largest pharmacies in the world, serving 65 million people.  Previously she co-founded One Laptop per Child and served as its CTO and the chief architect of the $100 laptop.  She has also been on the faculty of the MIT Media Lab, was the CTO of Intel’s Display Division and was the CTO and a co-founder of MicroDisplay Corp.  She has received numerous awards for her work including: Time Magazine inducting her into its “Time 100” as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, The Edwin Land Medal from the Optical Society of America, and the IEEE ACE Award for top emerging technology.  She holds a Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering (with honors), an A.B. (req) in Art and a Ph.D. in Optical Sciences all from Brown University, and a S.M. in Visual Studies from the MIT Media Lab.
 

Aileen Lee - Founder - Cowboy Ventures

 
  
   

Aileen Lee is founder of a seed-stage focused fund currently called Cowboy Ventures. She is also a partner at KPCB, which she joined in 1999. At KPCB, she has focused on working with mostly consumer-oriented digital companies, including Callaway Digital Arts, Dollar Shave Club, One Kings Lane, Plum District, Rent the Runway, True & Company, and RMG, where she was founding CEO for two years. Prior to that she has worked with companies like ShopKick, Zazzle, Bloom Energy, Blue Nile, Friendster, Good Technology and Tellme. Aileen has a Bachelor of Science from MIT and an MBA from the Harvard Business School, and is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

 

Rich Miner - General Partner - Google Ventures

 
  
   

Rich Miner is a general partner at Google Ventures and came to Google through the acquisition of Android, a mobile platforms company that he co-founded. During his early years at Google, he helped lead the development of the Android platform and ecosystem. Prior to Android, Rich was a Vice President at Orange.  He was also a Vice President at Wildfire, another company he co-founded which developed a voice-based personal assistant, and which was acquired by Orange.  Rich received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Keith Rabois - Partner - Khosla Ventures

 
  
   

Keith Rabois joined Khosla Ventures in March 2013.  He served as the Chief Operating Officer at Square from August 2010 until January 2013 where he lead the company’s business operations including marketing, communications, business development, distribution, human resources and risk management. Keith specializes in transforming early-stage startups into successful businesses and has deep expertise in the financial services industry and government affairs.
An accomplished executive, entrepreneur and angel investor, Keith has held leadership roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, Slide and began his career practicing law at Sullivan & Cromwell. Keith was an early investor in several high-profile Internet companies including YouTube and currently serves on the board of directors of Yelp and Xoom.

Michael J. Riegel - Vice President, Mobile & Application Integration Middleware - IBM

 
  
   

Mike currently serves as Vice President of Mobile & WebSphere solutions for IBM. In this role he leads all the marketing for IBM’s mobile and web products across 182 countries. Previously Mike was IBM’s Vice-President of ISVs, Startups and Academic Programs where he led the business development and marketing for all of IBM’s partnerships with software companies, startups and universities around the world. He has over eighteen years of experience in the high-tech industry driving break through innovations, top line revenue growth and client satisfaction. Prior to joining IBM, Mike worked at InterAmerica Technologies, a privately held software firm in McLean, Virginia. He also worked briefly as an economic advisor in the United States Congress. In addition to his role at IBM, he has served on the Board of Trustees for Saint Anselm College, and is on the Board of Directors for the Software & Information Industry Association.
 

Aseem Sood - Head of Mobile Product Management - Dropbox

 
  
   
Aseem is responsible for mobile product development at Dropbox. Prior to Dropbox, he was a Senior Product Manager at Google where he worked on AdWords Billing, Google Toolbar for IE and Firefox, as well as number of other initiatives. He also built a team to explore Social News ideas within Google.
 

Craig Walker - CEO & Founder - Firespotter Labs

 
  
   

Craig Walker brings 15 years of experience as a serial entrepreneur in the communications space to Firespotter Labs, a start-up focused on making complex telephony products easy to use. Products in the Firespotter family include TechCrunch award-winning ÜberConference, Nosh, NoshList and Jotly. In past lives, Craig was CEO of Dialpad Communications, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 (now Yahoo! Voice), co-founder and CEO of GrandCentral Communications, acquired by Google in July 2007 (now Google Voice), and Entrepreneur in Residence at Google Ventures. He was also a technology venture investor at Sterling Payot Capital and TeleSoft Partners and a corporate attorney at top-tier law firms in Silicon Valley, where he represented companies ranging from early stage start-ups to Cisco Systems. Craig is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BA), Georgetown University (MBA) and Boalt Hall School of Law (JD).