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.

Cindy Alvarez, Product Manager, KISSmetrics (@cindyalvarez)

Cindy Alvarez is the product manager for KISSmetrics, where she is currently building two products (KISSmetrics and KISSinsights) using customer development / lean startup techniques.
Cindy is passionate about helping startups succeed through early focus on product management, user experience, and customer outreach. Her products have been used by millions of consumers as well as Fortune 500 companies such as Bank of America, AOL, Sega of America, Dow Jones, and American Express. She has a degree in psychology from Harvard University.

Kent Beck, Founder and Director, Three Rivers Institute (@kentbeck)

Kent Beck is the founder and director of Three Rivers Institute (TRI). His career has combined the practice of software development with reflection, innovation, and communication. His contributions to software development include patterns for software, the rediscovery of test-first programming, the xUnit family of developer testing tools, and Extreme Programming. He currently divides his time between writing, programming, and coaching. Beck is the author/co-author of Implementation Patterns, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.
Kent is currently researching effective software design. If your company is interested in sponsoring this research in return for early access to his results, please contact him directly. His other business activities include contract programming using Java/Eclipse, writing, consulting (mostly remote), and presenting workshops with his partner Cynthia Andres.

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, Engineering Director, IMVU (@jamesbirchler)

James Birchler is an Engineering Director at IMVU, where he implemented and continues to manage IMVU’s product development process using Agile and Lean Startup methodologies. 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 25 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 serves on the California Coastal Commission and is on the board of Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST,) Audubon California, U.C. Santa Cruz Foundation and the California League of Conservation Voters (CLCV.)
Steve currently teaches entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School, the joint Berkeley/Columbia MBA program, and at the Stanford University Graduate 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 a methodology of starting and managing marketing, sales and business development in high technology startups.
(See the course text at www.cafepress.com/kandsranch and blog at www.steveblank.com).

Ethan Bloch, Flowtown (@ebloch)

One of the original marketers to use IRC, Ethan founded his first business at the age of 13. Before founding Flowtown Ethan was the host of WSYK, an internet TV show which was syndicated to Revision3.

 

 

Andrew Chen, Futuristic Play (@andrew_chen)

Andrew Chen is a blogger and startup executive focused on advertising and social media. He writes the blog Futuristic Play and was most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), a Silicon Valley-based firm with $2B under management. At MDV, Andrew pursued initiatives in digital media and advertising and helped source internet investments for the firm.
Prior to MDV, Andrew was director of product marketing at Audience Science, where he co-founded the ad network business and was instrumental in growing the network to thousands of websites with over 5 billion ads served per month. He also led teams to handle the company’s initiatives around MySpace and Yahoo, two of Audience Science’s most strategic partners. In addition, Andrew played key roles in winning the company’s initial brand advertising clients, which now include dozens of top-tier publishers including AOL, IAC, ESPN, Washington Post, among others. Andrew holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington.

Siqi Chen, Zynga (@blader)

Siqi Chen was cofounder and CEO of Serious Business, where he was responsible for setting the overall strategic vision for the company, and guided the development of new, world-class social games like Friends for Sale. Serious Business was acquired by Zynga in February 2010, where he now leads product management for Zynga’s newest game, Treasure Isle.
Prior to founding Serious Business, Siqi designed and developed software for Powerset, a natural language search engine acquired by Microsoft for $100 million in August of 2008. While at Powerset, Siqi was one of the creators of Powerlabs, a social network that was a key proving ground for the company’s emerging products. Prior to Powerset, Siqi was a Product Manager at Veoh, one of the leading video content sites on the Internet, and also spent time working on machine vision technology at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL).
Siqi holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego.

Brant Cooper, Principal, Market By Numbers

Brant Cooper possesses over 17 years of success bringing high tech products to market, directing the strategy, design, and launch of key technology offerings by leveraging expertise in technology, marketing, and business development. Brant has served as a Marketing and Product Management executive for several start-ups and currently operates as an independent consultant in San Diego. He blogs about customer development principles and process-oriented, metrics-driven marketing at Market By Numbers.

Brett G. Durrett, Vice President, Engineering & Operations, IMVU

Brett G. Durrett has over 20 years experience leading development of software and systems ranging from large-scale Internet services to video games. He serves as VP of Engineering at IMVU where he leads the engineering and technical operations teams and was responsible for the operations infrastructure that successfully scaled from two machines to over 700 servers. Prior to IMVU, Brett served as the Director of Engineering, VP of Operations and General Manager for the virtual world at There.com. Brett was also co-founder and CEO of Asylum Entertainment, a game development company that was acquired by a publisher after producing 20 titles.

Sean Ellis, Founder and Principal, 12in6 (@seanellis)

Sean Ellis led marketing from launch through NASDAQ IPO filings at both LogMeIn and Uproar and later helped bring Xobni (Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital) to market as Interim VP Marketing.
He is now founder and principal at 12in6 Inc., a firm that has helped startups such as Dropbox (Sequoia), Eventbrite (Sequoia) and Lookout (Khosla Ventures) transition to high growth companies.
12in6’s low burn, metrics driven approach uncovers a startup’s unique user perceived value, surfaces it in optimized messaging/flows and builds growth and monetization strategies around this core value.

Timothy Fitz, Technical Lead, IMVU (@TimothyFitz)

Timothy Fitz is a Technical Lead at IMVU Inc. He is commonly known for bringing the practice of Continuous Deployment to the attention of the software development community. He is an author and speaker on software development topics, focusing on Lean Startup theory and practices. His well received Continuous Deployment is available online at http://bit.ly/Op5Ge . Timothy is one of the many regular volunteers that helps run SuperHappyDevHouse, a party in Silicon Valley for hackers and thinkers.

Andres Glusman, Vice President of Insights, Meetup (@glusman)

Andres Glusman is responsible for customer development at Meetup. As Vice President of Insights, Strategy and Community, Andres focuses on understanding how people use Meetup, the challenges they face and opportunities for growth. Andres leads teams in analytics, usability and community development. He has a background in Economics/Psychology and an MBA from Wharton. Andres is also one of the Organizers of the NYC Lean Startup Meetup.

Christine Herron, Principal, First Round Capital (@christine)

Christine Herron is a Principal with First Round Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm. Previously, Christine was a director at Omidyar Network, where she developed the Media practice strategy. Prior to Omidyar Network, Christine held operational roles with Mission Research, NetObjects, and Microsoft, and was the founder and CEO of Mercury2. She started as an investor with Geocapital Partners, where she funded early Internet and network infrastructure businesses including Netcom and AXON Networks. Christine earned degrees from both Stanford University and Columbia University.

Damon Horowitz, Co-Founder and CTO, Aardvark (Google) (@iamnottweeting)

Damon Horowitz is a leading thinker at the intersection of technology and the humanities.
Horowitz was co-founder and CTO of Aardvark, the popular social search engine, overseeing product development and research strategy. Prior to Aardvark, Horowitz built several companies around applications of intelligent language processing. He co-founded Perspecta (acquired by Excite), was lead architect for Novation Biosciences (acquired by Agilent), and co-founded NewsDB (now Daylife). Currently, Horowitz is a Director of Engineering at Google.
Horowitz teaches courses in philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science at many institutions, including Stanford, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and San Quentin. He has spoken at conferences ranging from TED to AAAI to Web2.0, and his work has been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to Discovery Channel to TechCrunch. Horowitz was recently named one of the AdAge “Creativity 50″ most inspiring thinkers and innovators of 2010.
Horowitz earned his B.A. from Columbia, M.S. from MIT Media Lab, and Ph.D. from Stanford.

Drew Houston, Co-Founder and CEO, Dropbox

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.

Matt Johnson, Grockit

Laura Klein, Principal, Users Know (@lauraklein)

Laura has been working in Silicon Valley for over 15 years in both engineering and user experience roles. Her new venture, Users Know, is a consulting company devoted to helping lean startups and other small companies learn how to connect with their customers in order to build better products.
Before Users Know, Laura was a Design Director at Sliced Bread Design, where she worked with companies of all sizes to design more usable products. She has also worked as both a senior interaction designer and software engineer at several successful startups, including IMVU. She frequently blogs about design, usability, metrics, and product management at Users Know (http://usersknow.blogspot.com).

Randy Komisar, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Randy Komisar joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2005 as a partner. For several years prior, Randy worked with entrepreneurs creating businesses with leading-edge technologies.
He was a co-founder of Claris Corporation, served as CEO for LucasArts Entertainment and Crystal Dynamics, and acted as a “virtual CEO” for such companies as WebTV and GlobalGiving. He is a founding director of TiVo and serves on the Global Advisory Board for the UCSB Institute for Energy Efficiency. Earlier, Randy served as CFO of GO Corporation and Senior Counsel for Apple Computer, following a private practice in Technology Law.
Randy holds a BA in Economics from Brown University and a JD from Harvard Law School. He is a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University and author of the best-selling book The Monk and the Riddle, as well as several articles on leadership and entrepreneurship. He is also the co-author of a book on managing innovation, Getting to Plan B. Randy frequently speaks here and abroad on such topics.

Dan Martell, Co-Founder, Flowtown (@danmartell)

Dan Martell is an angel investor and co-founder of Flowtown. He skydives and snowboards and believes running is among the secrets to a fruitful life.
Dan has been described as not having a “knowing-doing gap.” An award-winning entrepreneur, at 25, Dan formed his first start-up, Spheric Technologies Inc., and watched it grow by an average of 152% per year before he sold the company in mid-2008.
An award winning Entrepreneur, Dan recently co-founded Flowtown, a company focused on providing web-based tools that allow small businesses to measure their online marketing efforts. As an informal angel investor, he is active in advising entrepreneurs using metric-based marketing tactics to gain market adoption.
Martell is a board member of Propel ICT and also volunteers his time working with youth battling addictions at Portage NB. He is passionately involved in facilitating micro-lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries through the non-profit, Kiva.org.

Ash Maurya, Founder, WiredReach (@ashmaurya)

Ash Maurya is the founder of WiredReach where he builds dead-simple sharing software.
Prior to founding WiredReach in 2002, Ash was Director of Software Development at telecom technologies inc., which was subsequently acquired by Sonus Networks in 2001. Ash helped build and lead the development team responsible for tti’s distributed Voice over IP Softswitch product.
Ash holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and resides in Austin, TX with his wife, 2 kids, and 2 dogs. His other interests are being a foodie and yogi.

Dave McClure (@davemcclure)

Dave McClure likes to hang out with entrepreneurs, and occasionally help or invest in their startups if they let him. Dave has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years, and has worked with companies such as PayPal, Mint, Founders Fund, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Twilio, Simply Hired, O’Reilly Media, Intel, & Microsoft. Many years ago he used to do real work like coding or marketing or running conferences, but these days he mostly does useless stuff like sending lots of email, blogging, and hanging out on Facebook and Twitter. Dave also likes to play ultimate frisbee when his knees don’t hurt.

Erin McKean, CEO and Co-Founder, Wordnik

Erin McKean likes to call herself a Dictionary Evangelist. She is the CEO and co-founder of Wordnik, a new online dictionary project. Before founding Wordnik, she was Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press, and the editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e. She is the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. and the author of Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That’s Amore (also about words). Her first novel, The Secret Lives of Dresses is due out from Grand Central Publishing in 2011. She is a regular language columnist for the Boston Globe. Previously, she was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at ScottForesman, a Pearson company. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech. She also serves on the advisory board of Credo Reference, is on the Visiting Committee to the University of Chicago Libraries, and was previously an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. She lives in Chicago, rants about dresses on her blog (A Dress A Day), and she’s actually really bad at Scrabble (but surprisingly good at roller-skating).

Sean Murphy, Founder and CEO, SKMurphy, Inc. (@skmurphy)

Sean Murphy is founder and CEO at SKMurphy, Inc. Since 2003 his firm has assisted software firms with customer development, focusing on early customers and early revenue. He enjoys working with small teams who plan to change the world, creating more opportunities than they started with. He is also the founder of Bootstrappers Breakfast® meetings that are designed for entrepreneurs to share ideas and “eat problems for breakfast.”™ Sean has a BS in Mathematical Sciences and an MS in Engineering-Economic Systems, both from Stanford.

Farb Nivi, Founder and CEO, Grockit (@farbood)

After teaching for a decade, Farb founded Grockit in December of 2006 with the goal of helping learners connect to teach each other.
He grew up in both Canada and the United States and is a graduate of The University of Michigan. In the past, he founded Vision Computer Solutions in Northville Michigan and WAPonimizer, the first privacy service for cell phones. He has been a winner in the MIT Sloan Business School 1K Entrepreneurship competition and has been The Princeton Review’s National Teacher of the Year.

Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (@ericries)

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of 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.
He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

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.

Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot (@dharmesh)

Dharmesh Shah is founder and Chief Technology Officer of HubSpot, an Internet marketing software company dedicated to helping small businesses leverage the Internet to get found by qualified prospects and convert more of them into leads and customers.
Prior to HubSpot, Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, an enterprise software company that was acquired by SunGard in 2005. He also runs OnStartups.com, the top blog and online community for entrepreneurs. He is an active member of the Boston area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over a dozen startups and a frequent speaker on the topic of entrepreneurship and Web marketing.
Dharmesh holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Alabama and an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT. He is the author of the business bestseller Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs, published by Wiley in October, 2009.

Hiten Shah, Co-Founder, KISSmetrics (@hnshah)

Hiten Shah graduated from UC Berkeley in 2003. Since then he has been engulfed in the Internet marketing world. He first started off with offering SEO services and Internet strategy consulting services by co-founding Advantage Consulting Services in 2003. Soon after he saw the need for better Internet marketing tools and started creating web applications including Crazy Egg, Siteblimp, and Serph. In 2005, Hiten co-founded Crazy Egg, and helped large corporations such as eBay, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, TechCrunch, Walmart, and Zappos better understand the user experience on their web sites. In 2008 he co-founded KISSmetrics to help web-based businesses understand their customers.

Clara Shih, Hearsay Labs and The Facebook Era (@clarashih)

Clara is founder and CEO of Hearsay Labs, which provides software to help companies securely manage and measure their presence across Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Clara’s new bestselling book, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, CRM Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, and is being used as a marketing textbook at Harvard Business School. In 2007, Clara created the first business application on Facebook with her Faceconnector application, which integrates Facebook and Salesforce CRM.
Previously, Clara was Product Line Director of the AppExchange at salesforce.com, where she also led the company’s partnerships with Facebook and LinkedIn. She has also worked in corporate strategy and software development at Google and Microsoft. Clara has a BS in computer science and economics and MS in computer science from Stanford University, as well as a MS in internet studies from Oxford, where she studied as a United States Marshall Scholar. She is a frequently invited keynote speaker on social media at global conferences including AlwaysOn, Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0, CRM Evolution, Direct Marketing Association, American Marketing Association, Toronto TechWeek, and Social Ad Summit. Clara blogs and Twitters as @clarashih.

Rashmi Sinha, Co-Founder and CEO, SlideShare (@rashmi)

Rashmi is cofounder and CEO of SlideShare. She focuses on partnerships and product strategy. Her guilty pleasure is design, which she tries to find time for on the weekends.
Before SlideShare, she ran MindCanvas, a game-like survey platform for customer research and sold it to clients like Microsoft, eBay and many startups.
Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University and did research on search engines and recommend systems at UC Berkeley. She is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo and Future of Web Apps. She writes a blog at http://www.rashmisinha.com about running a startup.

Max Ventilla, Head Zoo Keeper, Aardvark / Google (@ventilla)

Max Ventilla is now Head Zoo Keeper at Google after the company acquired his startup in February 2010. Prior to co-founding Aardvark, Max was part of a small corporate strategy team at Google. Previously, he was VP of Business Development for Trader Classified Media and founded Krypteian Systems, an enterprise software startup that sold to Corporate Smarts in 2001. Max has a BS in Math and Physics and a MBA from Yale University.

David Weekly, Founder and Chairman, PBworks (@dweekly)

David has been programming since he was five and has coded for MIT, Harvard, Stanford, There.com, atWeb, and Legato. David wrote the first layman’s description of MP3 in early 1997 and graduated in 2000 with a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a President Scholar and a finalist in the ACM International Programming Competition. David started the company that became PBworks in 2003. He likes to throw hacker parties, fly helicopters, ride his motorcycle, and make useful things.