We’re excited to share that Mike Jones, CEO of Userplane and Senior Vice President at AOL, will be one of the judges for our Showoff selection process. Big thanks to Mike for his support of Twiistup – here’s more about him..
Have something you want to showoff at Twiistup 3 on January 15 2008? Apply here before November 15.
Chairman and CEO, Mandalay Entertainment
Founder and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, the visionary multimedia venture spanning movies, TV, sports, and new media, Peter Guber is among the most successful executives in the entertainment and communications industries. Films he personally produced or executive produced, including "Rain Man," "Batman," "The Color Purple," "Midnight Express," "Gorillas In The Mist," "The Witches of Eastwick," "Missing," and "Flashdance," have earned more than three billion dollars worldwide and garnered more than fifty Academy Award nominations.
Tapped for his wisdom and expertise, Guber appears as a media and entertainment analyst on numerous network and cable shows. He can be seen as co-host of In the House, a half-hour news and interview show focused on industry trends in pop culture. Guber can also be seen on the NBC-owned Los Angeles outlet KNBC, as co-host of Show Business with Bart and Guber. This weekly show features discussion and analysis specifically designed for Los Angeles’ showbiz community.
Peter Guber is a noted author and in December 2007 wrote the cover article for the Harvard Business Review titled,” The Four Truths of the Storyteller.” He has since authored op-ed pieces for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is currently writing a business book to be published by Crown Publishing Group in the Fall of 2010. Guber is a full professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and has been a member of the faculty for over 30 years.
Founder of Y-Combinator
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple statistical spam filter that inspired a new generation of filters. He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.
Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Demand Media
As a serial entrepreneur and Internet visionary, Richard co-founded Demand Media in May 2006, and currently serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Through Demand Media, Richard is redefining the next generation of new media companies.
Richard has built, operated and sold numerous Internet media companies with a combined value of more than $1.3 billion. Most recently, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Intermix Media, Inc., and Chairman of Myspace.com. He joined Intermix in March 2004 and led a successful turnaround of its existing business. Specifically, he helped grow Myspace.com from an unknown website to one of the most popular properties on the Internet and developed a number of new online properties, significantly increasing shareholder value. During his eighteen months as CEO of Intermix, its public market capitalization grew from $70 million to over $650 million, until acquired by News Corporation in October 2005.
As Founder, Chairman and CEO, Richard sold iMALL in 1999 to Excite@Home for $565 million. iMALL was one of the first Internet companies to recognize the power of user-generated content. It offered users a suite of tools that enabled them to build their own eCommerce stores and conduct transactions over the Internet.
Richard is actively involved in a number of private Internet companies and serves as non-executive chairman of iCrossing, a leading digital and natural search firm. Richard is a Southern California native, with a BA from UCLA and JD from USC Law School.
Founder Giga Omni Media
Om Malik is the founder and senior writer for GigaOm. Before launching his own publishing venture, Om was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories. He is also a Venture Partner at True Ventures.
Co-Founder and CEO of BlogHer
Lisa Stone is the co-founder and CEO of BlogHer the leading participatory news, entertainment and information network for women online, reaching more than 15 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub, and an publishing network of more than 2,500 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates.
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries is the author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned and the lean startup methodology. He is a frequent public speaker. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. 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. 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.
Founder and CEO, Vator.tv
Bambi Francisco is founder and CEO of Vator.tv, a leading platform for entrepreneurs and innovators to broadcast and communicate with industry professionals, and VatorNews, a video business network. Prior to Vator, Bambi was an award-winning columnist and correspondent at Dow Jones MarketWatch, where she had 400,000 subscribers to her newsletter. She was a morning business anchor for KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco and made frequent appearances as an expert on Internet investments and trends on CNBC, Fox Business News, and CBS.
Founder and CEO, Samasource
Leila first developed the idea behind Samasource while working as a management consultant at Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Co.), where her clients included global leaders in the outsourcing and telecom sectors and a number of prominent non-profits. Along with Professors Thomas Pogge and Aidan Hollis, she founded Incentives for Global Health and helped produce a plan for incentivizing the development of new drugs for neglected diseases. As an undergradudate, Leila authored background papers for the World Bank's Development Research Group and Ashoka on equity and social rights. Leila is a recipient of the Rainer Arnhold and TEDIndia Fellowships, and serves on the San Francisco board of the Social Enterprise Institute. She is a former Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Program on Global Justice and the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Australian National University. When she's not running Samasource, Leila blogs on Social Edge and tries to keep up with her Twitter account. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University.
Technology Blogger
Robert Scoble is a blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft.
Seed stage investor for the Founders Fund
Dave McClure is a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, startup investor, and blogger. He currently works for Founders Fund and coordinates FF Angel LLC, a seed-stage investment program; as well as fbFund REV, a micro-seed incubator program for Facebook-related startups.
Dave is an investor in over 30 startup companies including: Mint (acquired by Intuit), SlideShare, Twilio, Credit Karma, UserVoice, Bit.ly, CrowdFlower, KissMetrics, TeachStreet, RichRelevance, Mashery, and Simply Hired, among many others.
From 2005-2006, Dave launched and ran marketing for job search engine Simply Hired. From 2001-2004, Dave was Director of Marketing at PayPal (acquired by eBay in 2002), where he started & ran the PayPal Developer Network program. Prior to PayPal, Dave was a database consultant & programmer for several companies, including Microsoft and Intel. In 1994 he founded Aslan Computing, an internet and e-commerce firm later acquired by Servinet/Panurgy in 1998.
Dave is the co-founder of Startup2Startup and Finance4Founders, two monthly dinner series for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. He has been chairperson and organizer for several tech and startup conferences including STARTonomics, Graphing Social Patterns, and Web 2.0 Expo (SF). He has been a visiting lecturer on social networking platforms and applications at Stanford University. Dave has been an advisor to microfinance organizations Unitus & Kiva, and co-founder of the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network. He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University in 1988 with a BS in Mathematical Sciences Engineering.
Managing Director of FirstMark Capital
Rick Heitzmann, is the Managing Director of FirstMark Capital, a $2 billion VC fund focusing on investments in the emerging media & advertising and data & analytics sectors. Prior to founding FirstMark Capital, Rick was a Partner with Pequot Ventures. Rick led Pequot’s investments in StubHub (Acquired by eBay), First Advantage (NASDAQ: FADV) and US Search. Rick has led and sits on the board of 4 FirstMark portfolio companies, including Clickable, Weplay, Live Gamer and Riot Games.
New Media Author and Consultant
Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of most prominent thought leaders in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has influenced the effects of emerging media on the convergence of marketing, communications, and publishing. He is principal of FutureWorks, an award-winning New Media agency in Silicon Valley, and has led interactive and social programs for Fortune 500 companies, notable celebrities, and Web 2.0 startups. BrianSolis.com is ranked among the top of world's leading business and marketing online resources.
Co-founder of Quack.com, CEO of YouMail
Alex Quilici was the co-founder of voice-portal company Quack.com (acquired by AOL), and is currently CEO of YouMail. Quilici is also a member of the board of directors of NeoEdge Networks and a member of Tech Coast Angels. Quilici received a PhD in computer science from UCLA, and from 1991-1999 was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii.
Twiistup! Where venture capitalists and entrepreneurs come to find the next big thing
Skirball Cultural Center
Mike:
we met when you wer on a the panel for a apst TCA Fast Pitch at UCLA.
This contact is about Entretech and why board of directors needs your input. We cordially invite you to a meeting on Tuesday, July 29th at the Luxe Summit hotel to discuss Entretech’s goal of better serving entrepreneurial eco-system of Greater Los Angeles. Send me your email and I will send you a two page narrative that describes a program that closely parallels two well known programs, e.g. Connect runs Springboard in San Diego and OCTANe runs Launch Pad in Orange county. Both programs were designed to facilitate mentorship between successful executives, VCs and successful entrepreneurs on one hand and aspiring entrepreneurs on the other hand.
The directors of Entretech believe that a similar program is needed in Greater Los Angeles. This meeting is designed to get the input of a hand picked group of successful entrepreneura and early stage investors.
Please RSVP if you can join us at 11 am on Tuesday, July 29th, at the Luxe Summit Hotel. Your presence will make a difference.
Sincerely,
On behalf of the
Entretech Board Members
John Morris
Vice Chairman