Speakers & Mentors

• 
  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.
• 
  Hiten Shah
  KISSmetrics
  I love helping entrepreneurs, especially when they are trying to apply lean startup principles.
• 
  Janice Fraser
  LUXr
  LUXr is a 10-week product design program that guides teams as they implement Lean Startup in their organization, with an emphasis on developing a strong product team and exceptional user experience.
• 
  Laura Klein
  Users Know
  Laura listens to users and then designs things for startups.
• 
  Farb Nivi
  Grockit
  Farb is passionate about innovating learning. Founder of Grockit, a social-learning platform detailed in The Lean Startup Book.
• 
  Julia Lam
  Facebook
  As an early Facebook employee, Julia worked on high impact developer marketing initiatives including Facebook’s $10 MM fund, fbFund, the Facebook Developer Garage program, Facebook Presence, and the f8 Developer Conference. Julia currently advises startups on building scalable marketing programs and their self-sustaining communities, and is helping build up the innovation and entrepreneurship program at UCLA.
• 
  Kyle Bragger
  Forrst
  Founder of Forrst. Engineer turned product designer. More about me here: http://kyle.io/
• 
  Diane Loviglio
  Mozilla
  Diane is a User Experience Researcher, currently working at Mozilla, but she has worked for technology, healthcare and environmental companies in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. She loves talking to people and wants to pass along some tricks of the trade.
• 
  Daniel Brusilovsky
  Teens in Tech
  Founder & CEO of Teens in Tech Labs. Associate Producer of Olive the Movie. Evangelist, Silicon Valley at JESS3. Advisor at Everyme.
• 
  Janet Zhou
  Beachmint
  Janet is a lover of fashion and food on the outside but a total geek on the inside. She is currently Director of Product and Mobile at BeachMint, by way of Joyus, Bluerun Ventures, and Stanford's Design School and Business School.
• 
  Jennifer Chin
  LaunchBit
  Co-founder of LaunchBit. After making $10k in the first month, pivoted to become an ad network for email.
• 
  Cindy Alvarez
  Yammer
  Cindy Alvarez will help you build better products through intensely understanding your customers. She has over 10 years experience in customer development, user research, and product management. She will smack you if you don't have a viable business model.
• 
  Chris McCann
  StartupDigest
  Chris McCann is the co-founder of StartupDigest, advisor at StartX (Stanford Accelerator), and mentor to the Thiel Foundation's 20 Under 20.
• 
  Dave Concannon
  Metricfire
  Dave helps run Metricfire, the easiest way to measure your Application Performance. Previous to that, he's worked in startups in a range of different industries.
• 
  Tristan Kromer
  GrassHopperHerder.com
  Tristan is an international miscreant who designs programs for entrepreneurs. If you want business advice, don't listen to him. He'll just tell you to listen to your customers.
• 
  Parker Thompson
  Pivotal Labs
  Parker is currently Director of BizDev at Pivotal Labs where he works with startups and enterprises to help them bring new ideas to market. He has a passion for rapid iteration and tacos.
• 
  Julian Nachtigal
  faberNovel, Inc./pariSoma
  Julian has built and developed one of the most well known coworking spaces in the Bay Area, the pariSoma Innovation Loft, where he serves as Chief Coworking Guru/CEO. He is also the COO to faberNovel, Inc., the consulting agency behind pariSoma that has equity in several Bay Area startups, including Vidcaster and Awayfind. I've lived about 3 times more than most people my age.
• 
  Bennett Blank
  Intuit Inc.
  Bennett is a member of Intuit's Innovation Catalysts team, and Innovation Leader for Intuit Brainstorm. As a product manager, designer and entrepreneur, Bennett has led the development of numerous early-stage products at Intuit and beyond.
• 
  Thomas Knoll
  LaunchRock Inc.
  co-founder & hustler at launchrock.com who's done community architecture and customer development for Zappos, UserVoice, and Seesmic.
• 
  Jonathan Gottfried
  Twilio
  Jon Gottfried is a Developer Evangelist at Twilio and one of the organizers of the Hacker Union. He is a die-hard hacker and loves to help people build amazing products and learn something new in the process. Before joining Twilio, Jon worked as a developer for various startups and Big Co's and even founded his own small startup Lemonade Stand, which was a Semi-Finalist in the StartupBus competition at SXSW.
• 
  Jeremiah Lee Cohick
  Awe.sm
  The best developers don't just include social features, but understand and optimize them. With Awesm, Jeremiah is responsible for designing APIs and reporting interfaces that power social-data-driven applications for customers including Groupon, Zynga, and Topspin Media. Previously, Jeremiah worked as a software engineer at Disney ABC Television Group and co-founded the fbFund-backed Digital Dandelion.
• 
  Nick O'Connor
  Productdevelopment.com
  Coaching technology product development teams (start ups, public and private companies) with strategy and tactics of customer development / market validation.
• 
  William Pietri
  NeedFeed
• 
  Ben Mappen
  LeanLaunchLab