Startup Lessons Learned Conference

We’re continuing to add speakers, so watch this space—we’ll have some great additions to this list to announce shortly. Companies interested in speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned should contact Charles Hudson via email at charles@charleshudson.net.

Roy Bahat, President, IGN Entertainment (@roybahat)

Roy Bahat is President of IGN Entertainment, which he joined in 2007. IGN, a division of News Corporation, is a leader in videogame media, as well as video, digital distribution, and online game technology. He is on the board of Revision3, and was a board observer at Flixster before it was acquired by Warner Bros. He is also a lecturer at UC Berkeley, where he teaches the media course at the Haas School of Business and the School of Information. Before joining News Corp., Roy worked on various startups and was in the public sector, both in the office of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and at New York’s 2012 Olympic bid. Roy graduated from Harvard College and was a Rhodes Scholar.

David Binetti, Founder and CEO, Votizen (@dbinetti)

David Binetti is the founder and CEO of Votizen, a social lobbying platform for registered voters. Dave’s Internet startup history reaches back to 1994, when he was part of the 7-person team that launched QFN (later to become Quicken.com). Since then, he has served on the founding team of six other startups. Notably, Dave was the co-founder of USA.gov, which won Harvard’s “Innovation in American Government” award and was named USA Today Hot Site of the Year for 2000. His current startup produces tools that make civic participation simpler and more meaningful.

James Birchler, Director of Engineering, IMVU (@jamesbirchler)

James Birchler is Director of Engineering at IMVU, where he implemented and continues to manage IMVU’s product development process using Agile and Lean Startup methods. Prior to joining IMVU in 2006, he redesigned the product development process at Bargain Network, Inc., helping complete the company’s acquisition by Vertrue, Inc. James was also a Director at There.com, responsible for technical design, creative design, and content of the web applications and GUI for There’s virtual world application. James holds a Master’s degree in Geography and Geographic Information Systems from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Steve Blank (@sgblank)

Over the last 30 years, Steve has been part of, or co-founded eight Silicon Valley startups. These have run the gamut from semiconductors, video games, personal computers, and supercomputers. (MIPS, Zilog, Rocket Science, SuperMac, Convergent Technologies, Ardent, ESL.) Steve’s last company was E.piphany, an enterprise software company.
Steve currently teaches entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School, the joint Berkeley/Columbia MBA program, and at the Stanford School of Engineering. In 2009 he was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering. In 2010, he was awarded the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.
Steve teaches his book the Four Steps to the Epiphany was one of the first Lean Startup texts. Steve blogs at http://www.steveblank.com.

Tony Ford, Director of Engineering, IGN Entertainment (@tony4d)

Tony Ford is Director of Engineering at IGN Entertainment, the leading Internet media and services provider focused on the video game and entertainment enthusiast markets. He has been building internet technology and websites about video games since the late 90′s. In 2001, he served as lead software developer for then startup, TeamXbox. In 2003, TeamXbox was acquired by IGN Entertainment and since that time Tony has become a technologist, leader of innovation, and proponent of agile and lean practices there.

Janice Fraser, CEO, LUXr (@clevergirl)

Janice is an entrepreneur, designer, and advisor to early stage companies. She has raised capital, founded both successful and failed startups, and consulted to both large enterprises & tiny startups. Along the way Janice has learned a lot about what makes some teams thrive and others wither. At LUXr (www.luxr.co) she’s helping technology startups develop high-performance product teams through innovative coaching programs and workshops. Janice is a guest lecturer at Haas, Stanford, Northwestern, CCA and the Presidio Graduate School of Management. Prior to starting LUXr, Janice was a founding partner of Adaptive Path and served as the company’s first CEO.

Jeff Gothelf, Director of User Experience, TheLadders.com (@jboogie)

Jeff Gothelf is a user experience designer and one of the leading voices promoting the Lean UX methodology. Focused on getting designers to work more collaboratively with their teams, he’s pushed for moving software design beyond the deliverables business and back into a problem-solving and experience focus. Based in metro NYC, he has spent his career designing engaging experiences for many startups as well as enterprise clients. He is currently the Director of User Experience at TheLadders.com where he helps executive jobseekers and recruiters make meaningful connections with each other. Previously Jeff helped shape the designs of AOL, Webtrends and Fidelity.

Suneel Gupta, VP Product, Groupon (@guptathink)

Suneel loves to build stuff from scratch. Prior to his current role as VP of Product Development at Groupon, Suneel built products for Mozilla Labs, blogged for MTV, developed television concepts for Sony Pictures, led trade efforts in Ghana, wrote speeches in President Clinton’s West Wing, and produced the Kahani Movement, an interactive film project with his brother, Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN), which debuted at last year’s South by Southwest.

Drew Houston, Co-Founder and CEO, Dropbox (@drewhouston)

Drew Houston is the cofounder and CEO of Dropbox, the leading way to store and share files online. Dropbox helps millions of people across the world to access and share their important files from any computer or the web. The company launched at the TechCrunch50 conference in 2008 and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.
Drew was named one of the top “Twentysomething Entrepreneurs” by BusinessWeek in April 2008. Before starting Dropbox, he cofounded an online SAT prep company and has held a variety of engineering roles in other startups since age 14. He received his S.B. in computer science from MIT.

Mitch Kapor, Managing Partner, Kapor Capital (@mkapor)

Mitchell Kapor is a pioneer of modern computing. He is the founder and former CEO of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. In the past 30 years he created or helped create dozens of startup companies and organizations, including UUNET, a first-generation Internet Service Provider; The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet; Real Networks, the originator of streaming media on the Internet; the Mozilla Foundation*, creator of the open source web browser Firefox; Linden Research*, the creator of the first successful virtual world, Second Life, and Xmarks*, formerly Foxmarks, the leader in bookmark synchronization, and ePals*, the Internet’s largest global community of connected classrooms (*current member of Board of Directors).
Currently he also serves on several non-profit boards, including the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, which works to ensure fairness and equity for low-income communities of color in the areas of civic engagement, sustainability, and college access; the Level Playing Field Institute, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in education and the workplace; and One Web Day, Earth Day for the Internet.
Through Kapor Capital, he is an active investor in seed stage startup companies.

Zach Larson, Entrepreneur/Former CPO, SideReel (@zachlarson)

Zach Larson is the CPO of SideReel. Prior to SideReel, which he co-founded in 2007, Zach helped create and launch web products at GUBA, Medem, OpenTable, and Abilizer Solutions. Zach started his career as an engineer with Convergent Communications. He is usually found playing games, hiking into places without internet access, bingeing on TV series, or playing with his wee daughter. Zach also has a larger collection of novelty internet t-shirts than you do. Favorite TV Shows: 30 Rock, Fringe, Mad Men, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The League, and Sons of Anarchy.

Tim McCoy, Director, Integrated Product Development, Cooper (@seriouslynow)

Tim McCoy helps companies understand their customers and create compelling products and services. He is active in the agile and lean user experience community, working to create balanced teams of designers, developers, and product management. Tim draws on fifteen years of hard knocks in financial, medical, retail, publishing, and consumer projects to advise teams from lean startups to Fortune 100 companies. Tim currently serves as Designer in Residence for Startup Monthly and is a Director at Cooper, a strategic design and development consultancy in San Francisco.

Pascal-Louis Perez, VP Engineering and CTO, Wealthfront (@pascallouis)

Pascal-Louis Perez came to Wealthfront from Google, where he worked on the creation of the Closure Compiler. At Google, Pascal sat on the ECMA committee, working towards the standardization of ECMAScript 4. An entrepreneur since youth, Pascal created his first company at the age of 16. Pascal is the co-author of Vocation Createurs (Editions du Tricorne, 2004), a book about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. A graduate of the Federal Institut of Technology Lausanne, he holds a master’s degree with distinction in research from Stanford University.

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (@ericries)

Eric Ries is the author of the forthcoming book The Lean Startup which will be published in September, 2011 by Crown Business, as well as the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. In 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.

Manuel Rosso, Founder, Food on the Table (@manuelrosso)

Manuel has spent the past 20 years in a variety of marketing, strategy and leadership roles that range from introducing Puerto Rican consumers to Tennessee Whisky to practicing Customer Development at IMVU. After spending the early years of his career in the worlds of package goods and beverage marketing he pursued his passion for technology and transitioned to a seven year stint in consumer product and marketing roles at Dell Inc.
Following Dell he had the unique opportunity of joining Will Harvey, Eric Ries and the rest of the early IMVU team and spent two years as Vice President of Marketing and Product. While at IMVU Manuel learned firsthand the day to day benefits and challenges of leading a Lean Statup and how to scale them in a fast-growing company.
After IMVU Manuel spent a year as Entrepreneur in Residence at Austin Ventures and for the past year he has been building a new startup (www.FoodontheTable.com) utilizing a variety of the key Lean Startup principles.

Josh Seiden, Program Director, LUXr NYC (@jseiden)

Josh is a designer, manager, and coach with unique expertise in delivering user experience services in entrepreneurial environments. He works with early-stage startups who seek rapid and responsive design strategy, as well as with large businesses seeking disruptive change and innovation.
Over the course of 20 years working in technology he has developed specialities that include interaction design, service design, design strategy, and user experience design in agile software and Lean Startup environments. Josh ran the user experience group at Liquidnet, a financial services startup in NYC, worked at Cooper as a designer and designer manager, and is a founding board member and past President of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA.)

Clara Shih, Founder and CEO, Hearsay (@clarashih)

Named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential People in Technology, Clara is CEO and founder of Sequoia-backed Hearsay Social, which has built the leading social media platform for brands to manage, support, and measure what their people are saying on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Hearsay is the social media compliance, content, and analytics management solution of choice for State Farm, 24 Hour Fitness, Farmers Insurance Financial Group, and a host of other Fortune 500 organizations.
In 2007, Clara created the first business application on Facebook and subsequently authored the New York Times-featured bestselling book The Facebook Era, which is used as a sales and marketing textbook at Harvard Business School.
Previously, Clara was a marketing executive at salesforce.com, and held positions at Google and Microsoft. Clara has a BS in computer science and economics and MS in computer science from Stanford. She is a frequently invited keynote speaker on social media at global conferences including AlwaysOn, Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0, CRM Evolution, Social-Loco, American Marketing Association, Toronto TechWeek, and Social Ad Summit. Clara blogs at http://thefacebookera.com and Twitters as @clarashih.

Brad Smith, President and CEO, Intuit (@IntuitInc)

Brad Smith became Intuit’s president and chief executive officer in January 2008, culminating a five-year rise through the company where he successfully led several of its major businesses. Intuit is a leading provider of business and financial management solutions for small and mid-sized businesses, financial institutions, consumers and accounting professionals, and is consistently ranked as one of the most-admired software companies and best places to work.
Before being named CEO, Smith was senior vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Small Business Division. Appointed to this position in May 2006, Smith was responsible for the company’s small business division which included the portfolio of QuickBooks, Quicken and Payroll products, serving 7 million small businesses. Before moving to the small business division, he led the company’s Consumer Tax Group in San Diego from March 2004 through May 2005. The group produces TurboTax, the nation’s leading consumer tax preparation software.
Smith joined the company in February 2003 as the vice president and general manager of Intuit’s Accountant Central and Developer Network in Plano, Texas. Previously, he was senior vice president of marketing and business development at ADP. Smith also held various sales, marketing and general management positions with Pepsi, Seven-Up and Advo, Inc.
Smith earned his master’s degree in management from Aquinas College in Michigan and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Marshall University in West Virginia.

Adam Wiggins, Co-Founder, Heroku (@hirodusk)

Adam Wiggins is a hacker, entrepreneur, and good-natured bad-ass. He cofounded Heroku, the platform that is changing the way that apps are built and deployed on the web. He blogs about technology and entrepreneurship at http://adam.heroku.com.