Speakers & Mentors

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  Ash Maurya
  Spark 59, Author Running Lean
  Ash bootstrapped his last company, WiredReach, in 2002 which sold in late 2010. Throughout that time, he launched many products with varying degrees of success and is constantly in search for a better way to build products. A leader in lean methodology, Ash has sold over 10k copies of self-published e-book Running Lean. Currently: Founder Spark59 – with a mission of helping other startups raise their odds of success.
• 
  Eric Ries (Virtual)
  The Lean Startup
  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 2010, he became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School.
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  Josh Baer
  Capital Factory
  Joshua helps people quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. He brought together 20 others to form the Capital Factory accelerator to mentor and invest in tech startups. Joshua founded his first startup in 1996 in his college dormitory and now teaches a class at the University of Texas for student entrepreneurs.
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  D. Keith Casey, Jr.
  Twilio
  Keith Casey has been a developer for over a decade and helps organize various tech communities. To pay the bills, he works as a Developer Evangelist for Twilio to get good tools to good developers so they can build great things. In his spare time, he is the web2project project lead, runs amok in Austin, and blogs on the mis-application of technology at CaseySoftware.com.
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  Irene Mwathi
  Startup Katalyst
  Irene Mwathi is the founder of Start Up Katalyst, an Austin, Texas-based organization that mentors start-ups and coaches them through funding and post funding stages to sustain growth. She is also the CEO of RAI IT Consulting , a technology consulting business that helps Fortune 500 companies, such as Dell, Cisco Systems, IBM, and 3M, in reengineering projects to realign with evolving business processes. A native of Nairobi, Kenya, Irene and she received her MBA at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
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  Steve Sanderson
  Food on the Table
  Steve is VP of Product Development at Food on the Table. He is a maker of software products, with an emphasis on products that are simple and elegant.
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  Dave Koston
  Koston Consulting
  Dave helped build a startup software company called cPanel to a global leader in hosting control panels with over 75 employees and 30M in revenue. Since leaving cPanel, he has helped companies in the hosting space rapidly develop new customer centric technologies including Attracta who has quickly risen to the number one SEO Tools provider with over 1.7 million websites utilizing Attracta technology.
• 
  Manuel Rosso
  Food on the Table
  Founder of Food on the Table. Manuel has been practicing Lean Startup methods since he joined IMVU in 2006.
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  Jim England
  PublikDemand
  Jim England is a co-founder and designer at PublikDemand who focuses on product direction and user experience. He became fascinated with consumer startups after discovering Hacker News and participating in a Startup Weekend in 2008.
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  Tim Gasper
  Infochimps
  Tim Gasper is Product Manager of Infochimps, a provider of Big Data systems, tools, and expertise. He was formerly Founder and CMO of Keepstream, a social media curation and analytics company, which went through Capital Factory 2010 and was acquired by Infochimps in August 2011.
• 
  Travis McCutcheon
  Leap for Mankind, Spark59
  Travis' first exposure to lean came while implementing the Toyota Production System at Intuit. After hearing Eric Ries speak at a company design4Delight conference he committed himself to helping startups succeed. Since obtaining his master's degree Technology Commercialization he has worked with entrepreneurs across the globe on business models, customer development and user experience.
• 
  Emiliano Villarreal
  Spark 59