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Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is the co-founder of Ning,
the create-your-own social network platform company that has raised
over $100 million in funding. He also serves on the board of Open Media
Network. 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. CrunchBase profile.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Jeff Weiner
Jeff Weiner is the Executive Vice President of Yahoo!’s Network Division. Yahoo!’s
global reach of over half a billion users worldwide serves as the
foundation for the division’s objective to be the leading starting
point on the Web for the most consumers. In his current role, Weiner
oversees the company’s category leading consumer web products,
including Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!; Communications and Community
products including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Groups, and
Flickr; Search products including Yahoo! Web Search, Yahoo! Answers,
Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Local; and Media, including Yahoo! Finance,
Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Entertainment properties. From
2002 to 2006, Weiner served as Senior Vice President overseeing the
Yahoo! Search and Marketplaces division. Beginning in November 2005,
Weiner added responsibilities for Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo!
Small Business. Prior to Yahoo!, Weiner was the co-founder of Windsor
Digital, a private equity firm focused on digital and media
investments. From 1994 to 2000, he worked at Warner Bros., where he
helped conceive the initial plan for Warner Bros. Online and played a
key role in developing and overseeing the division. CrunchBase profile.
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