Andrew Braccia – Accel Partners

Andrew Braccia joined Accel in 2007 bringing with him a decade of operational and leadership experience. His primary areas of investment interest include consumer Internet and software businesses with a focus on web search, digital media and online advertising. Andrew currently sits on the board of Cloudera, High Gear Media, a next generation automotive content and advertising network, OpenX, the world's leading Open Source Ad Server, SB Nation, the leading sports blog network and TRUSTe, a provider of online privacy certification.

Prior to Accel, Andrew held a variety of senior roles in business development, general management and operations with Yahoo! He began his career with the company in 1998, as a member of Yahoo’s early business development team. Most recently he served as vice president of Yahoo! Search, where he was responsible for all business and operational aspects of Yahoo’s consumer search business. In this capacity, he played a key role in helping to lead the company’s entry into the social search arena with the launch of Yahoo! Answers and the acquisition and integration of Del.icio.us.

Previously, as vice president of business operations for the Yahoo! Search and Marketplace Group, Andrew oversaw the business planning and financial performance of multiple Yahoo! businesses. Andrew also served as vice president and general manager of Yahoo’s Marketplace division, which includes Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Travel, Yahoo! Real Estate, and Yahoo! Autos – all leading commerce sites in their respective categories under his leadership.

As a member of the original operating team that led the development Yahoo’s in-house search technology, he also played a significant role in the acquisition and integration of several companies, including Inktomi, Overture, Alta Vista, and FAST. In addition, he helped lead the acquisition of Flickr, an important component of Yahoo’s emerging community and social search strategy.

Andrew graduated from the University of Arizona with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He resides in the Bay Area with his wife and three children.

Bradley Horowitz – Google

As Vice President of Product Management at Google, Bradley oversees product management for Google Apps, including Gmail, Calendar, Google Talk, Google Voice, Google Docs, Blogger and Picasa. Before joining Google, Bradley led Yahoo's advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab and was pursuing his Ph.D. there when he co-founded Virage.

Daniel Woods– Eventbrite

Daniel is a veteran internet technical executive having built and led engineering teams and driven technical strategy at Eventbrite, Yahoo! Inc., eGroups, Invisible Worlds, PLATINUM, and SGI.

Daniel recently joined Eventbrite after nine years at Yahoo! where he was a leader in the strategy, definition and delivery of Yahoo!'s industry leading mobile internet services including mail, search, advertising, messaging, news, finance, sports and weather. The internet virus invaded Daniel's system during his tenure at Silicon Graphics where his team released CosmoPlayer, an award winning browser plugin for 3D graphics.

Always seeking new challenges and to learn new things, Daniel's career has included work in the fields of medical imaging, geophysical modeling, chip design, video encoding, computational chemistry, XML databases, high performance computing and 3D graphics. Daniel has been meeting the challenges involved in delivering always-on internet products, services and infrastructure for over 10 years.

Daniel dreams of making the list of "top 5 golfers in the world named Woods" and has a Masters and PhD in Mathematical Sciences from Rice University.

David Cancel – Performable

David Cancel is currently the CEO and founder of Performable. Until recently, he was the co-founder and CTO of Lookery. Before starting Lookery, he started and was CTO at Compete, which was acquired by WPP (LON:WPP). Prior to Compete, he was the CTO of BuyerZone, which was acquired by Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK). In the late 90's, he was part of the founding team of Bolt and part of Lycos.

In addition to Performable, Cancel sits on the board of directors of Geezeo and the advisory boards of Compete, Visible Measures, MyPerfectGig, Sonian Networks, Yottaa and Shareaholic.

Cancel is originally from New York City and now lives in the Boston area with his superstar wife and daughter.

Des Cahill – Plug and Play Tech Center

Des Cahill brings extensive executive-level experience in marketing, sales and operations from some of America's best-known technology companies - Apple Computer, Autonomy, BridgeSpan, eFax.com and Habeas.

Cahill was most recently President and CEO of Habeas, an award-winning leading email services company, where he was responsible for all company operations. Over five years, Cahill grew Habeas from zero to over 400 customers, raised three rounds of venture funding and won Red Herring Technology 100 and Stevie "Most Innovative Company" awards. Cahill sold the company in Q3 2008.

Cahill currently provides advisory and interim CEO services to startups as an Executive-in-Residence at Plug and Play Tech Center where he helps start-ups in the interactive marketing and business-to-business services.

Cahill was the U.S. co-founder of Autonomy, a leading player in enterprise search (NASDAQ: AUTN). Cahill spent nine years at Apple Computer in a variety of roles including managing Apple's global relationship with AOL and running Apple.com.

Douglas Hubert – SABRE Real Estate Group

In 2007, Doug became the co-founder and Executive Vice President of SABRE Real Estate Group. By unifying his real estate consulting, brokerage, and business experiences he has obtained a unique perspective, and continues to facilitate creative solutions for the firm’s clientele. For almost 25 years, Doug has provided solutions that align his client’s real estate commitments with their business plan, while providing flexibility to accommodate change. He has completed a tremendous amount of varying real estate transactions ranging from small monthly leases to large headquarter campus land purchases. Most importantly, he mitigates risk.

He is strategically focused and clients benefit from his ability to convert information into a distinct business advantage. As a professional negotiator and problem-solving advisor, his efforts have saved his clients millions of dollars, while positively affecting both share value and bottom-line results. Doug has provided his real estate expertise to many startups and recognized global entities. Past clients include: Yahoo!, pogo.com, Cellular One, Veritas Software, Marimba, Novellus, razorfish, Alexa, Infineon Technologies, and Wells Fargo Bank.

Doug was a member of the Board of Directors for Spectrum Center for over 13 years. Spectrum Center was a special education school and consulting program for physically and mentally disabled students. In 2004, as Chairman of the Board, he formalized the sale of the non-profit school to a for profit entity. Now as the Chairman of the Board for the Wing Institute , an independent and non-profit organization, the $19MM Spectrum Center sale proceeds are being utilized to promote evidence-based education policies and practices to address the serious challenges facing education today.

Doug graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a BA degree in Political Science. He resides in Piedmont, California and represents clients throughout the U.S. and internationally.

Irene Au – Google

Irene Au is dedicated to raising the strategic value of design and user research within software companies through better methods and practices, processes, leadership, and quality. She is Director of User Experience at Google, where her team is responsible for design and user research for Google's products worldwide. Prior to Google, she spent eight years at Yahoo! where she was Vice President of User Experience and Design. At Yahoo!, Irene established the interaction design and user research practice, and led product and platform design efforts worldwide. Irene also headed up the Product Practices team which coached teams on Agile development practices and developed product operations programs to help business units deliver on corporate strategy.

Prior to Yahoo!, Irene was at Netscape Communications, where she was an interaction designer and led cross-product design efforts on Netscape's browser, mail/news client, and page editor. Irene holds a master's degree in human-computer interaction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of South Carolina, where she graduated magna cum laude.

Johanna Rothman – Rothman Consulting

Johanna Rothman helps managers and leaders solve problems and seize opportunities.

She consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She enables managers, teams, and organizations to become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management.

Johanna publishes The Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter and podcast, and writes two blogs: Managing Product Development and Hiring Technical People. She is the author of several books:

• Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
• 2008 Jolt Productivity award winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)
• Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
• Corrective Action for the Software Industry (with Denise Robitaille).

Johanna is also a host and session leader at the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference. Find more of Johanna's articles and her blogs at www.jrothman.com.

Jonathan Strauss - Snowball Factory, Inc.

Jonathan Strauss is the co-founder and CEO of Snowball Factory, Inc., developers of next-generation content marketing tools including awe.sm, a campaign tracking platform for social media. Prior to founding the Snowball Factory, he spent four years at Yahoo! working in corporate strategy, business operations, and product management. A native of Los Angeles, Jonathan has strong roots in the entertainment industry and worked in film production on projects for Warner Brothers, Focus Features, and Warner Independent Pictures. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a bachelors degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.

Jonathan's current product, awe.sm, is a campaign tracking platform for social media that enables professional publishers and marketers to measure the effectiveness of their efforts in channels like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Customers use awe.sm to instrument the syndication and sharing tools they already use and connect them to existing web analytics solutions. awe.sm also offers proprietary analytics to measure outbound marketing across multiple channels and use-cases, providing customers with a cohesive view of their efforts and the ability to understand their relative effectiveness. awe.sm launched in private beta in early May 2009 and currently powers tracking on over 140 domains for customers like Universal Music Group, Fox Broadcasting, and the Gannett Company.

Kris Jacob – Sierra Delta Enterprises

Kris Jacob has been the President of Sierra Delta Enterprises, Inc., a multi-faceted media business development and e-commerce consulting organization, since November of 2008. Mr. Jacob was recently the Executive Vice President of Sales, and Business Development at Watercooler, Inc. His current focus was driving Watercooler’s relationships with advertising partners, media companies, and sports teams, Jacob and was also responsible for positioning Watercooler’s extensive audience network of sports and entertainment applications (now 18.5 million subscribers strong) for global advertisers and other brands seeking to connect with their audiences through social media.

Mr. Jacob has contributed significantly to a number of media and technology organizations over his 15 year career including leading business development and sales as Executive Vice President for PodShow, Inc (now Mevio, Inc.) a leading online video network focused on independently created media, and his role in business development at Yahoo! Inc following the acquisition of Stata Labs, where Jacob was the Vice President of Business Development.

Prior to Stata Labs, Jacob was the Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at ActiveSky, where he negotiated media and carrier relationships for the wireless media platform provider. Prior to ActiveSky, Jacob was the Managing Director of Alterlayer, LLC, an early venture services company, where he and his team provided strategic business development, marketing, and financial services for 12 early stage companies, including Weave Innovations (acquired by Kodak) and Keen.com (now Ingenio, acquired by AT&T).

While in the Strategic Partnerships organization at Microsoft Corporation, Jacob created and managed relationships with new media, broadcast and cable companies focused on in digital and interactive television initiatives. Mr. Jacob was also a very early employee of SportsLine USA (renamed CBS SportsLine in 1997, now CBS Sports.com) ultimately focusing on technical business development there. He also held positions at On Ramp, Inc and Sun Microsystems in the early 1990’s.

Mario Chaves - Avantica Technologies

Mario Chaves is the CEO and Co-Founder of Avantica Technologies. He's an accomplished technical executive with over 25 years of software development and engineering management experience.

As Chief Executive Officer at Avantica, Mario leads the company´s strategy and direction. His constant pursuit of innovation has led Avantica to become an award winning company in this field; as he was honored for Innovation in the Entrepreneur of the Year Awards in 2009 by a major Costa Rican newspaper, for leading the company to the development of groundbreaking applications using cutting edge technologies.

Before Avantica, Mario was Chief Technology Officer at Babcock & Brown, a leading investment banking firm, where he led a worldwide team and was responsible for all technology strategies and implementations. Before Babcock & Brown, Mario was Director of Product Development for Intuit, where he led the development of new products for the Quicken product line and managed the development of Intuit's International Products. Prior to that, at Software Publishing Corporation, Mario created Harvard Graphics, which redefined the presentation graphics software category and was largely responsible for the company's growth from $20M to over $100M in revenues. Mario earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis.

Michael Dexter-Smith – Xtremesoft/Pine Brook Ventures

While Michael Dexter-Smith has focused on the Software Industry, he has experience at a senior level in the Biotech and Computer hardware arenas, as well as nine years with Price Waterhouse in the UK, USA and New Zealand, which taught him a lot about international business generally.

Xtremesoft has given Dexter-Smith the platform to nuture ideas and start new ventures in the social networking, Biotech, infomercials and Ads as well as the 'cloud' computing arena; to participate in the public offering of two computer hardware companies; to participate in the sale of a company in the Biotech market; and to continue to nurture a bunch more in a variety of markets.

Dexter-Smith likes the diversity of the businesses, but the issues are always the same - money and people. He runs Pine Brook Ventures, which invests in other enterprises, ideas and offerings - some good, the majority bad over the last year!

Dexter-Smith focuses on trying to add value to every business, organization, process and interaction he participates in. Equally, he is not shy to say "I don't know."

In thirty years of hacking around in the business "weeds", little surprises him. For small companies, it’s "money and people, people and money". He probably understands international business and people better than most having worked in three countries, run companies in five more, traveled to 30 or so and done business in numerous others. His goal remains adding value - seeing that value germinate in to business success is the 'rush'!

Mira Wooten - Oak Hill Corporation

Mira Wooten specializes in helping startups plan, budget and create product information, including web copy, marketing collateral, technical documentation, and training. As Director of Business Development for Oak Hill Corporation, a consulting company that specializes in technical content development, Mira has provided the best content solutions to Fortune 500 companies like Cisco Systems, Google, Palm, and Hewlett-Packard, as well as startups like ConSentry, GridIron, OpSource, Corefino, and Skyfire.

Mira is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication and a certified Enterprise Content Management Practitioner, with a BS degree in Business from the University of Phoenix and a graduate certificate in Telecommunications Management from Golden Gate University. As an avid networker, Mira coaches others on the importance of strong networking skills in her blog at http://mirawooten.blogspot.com/.

Nicole Stata - ex-CEO Deploy Solutions, Entrepreneur

Nicole Stata is an entrepreneur, experienced CEO, and angel investor.

From 2008 to 2009, Ms. Stata served on the Board and as Chief Operating Officer for an innovative start-up, Jackpot Rewards. Prior to that, Ms. Stata was the Founder, CEO, and President of Deploy Solutions, a leading provider of SAAS Human Capital Management (HCM). Founded in 1997, Deploy was widely recognized as a national and regional Best Place to Work and was a recipient of Deloitte and Touche’s Fast 50 award in 2006. Deploy was sold to Kronos in 2007. Before Deploy, Ms. Stata managed the global service center for Restrac, Incorporated (Webhire), and started her career with Lotus Development Corporation.

She has been the keynote speaker at multiple events and works with several boards and committees including: Insight Performance, The Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Olin College of Engineering.

Ms. Stata graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in Business Administration and received a certificate in System Dynamics from MIT’s Sloan School. She is a native of the Boston area and today resides in Westwood with her husband, two-year old son, and one-year old twins.

Randhir Vieira – Eye-Fi

Randhir Vieira brings 14 years of experience in software product development and marketing. He is currently at Eye-Fi where he leads product marketing. Prior to Eye-Fi, he was with Yahoo! where he led product development for community and social platforms and the broadband team.

Randhir also worked in business development at MindTree Technologies and in HR, marketing and product development at Wipro Technologies.

He holds a BA degree in Economics from Bombay University, a MA degree in Personnel Management from TISS and a MBA in technology marketing from Emory University.

Ron Brown – Brown & Company

Ronald Brown has a rich combination of technology- and consumer-marketing experience, giving him unique perspective on what it takes to bring successful products to market. In his role as CEO of Brown & Company LLC, he specializes in improving team problem-solving and innovation skills.

Brown has been CEO of successful startups and has held senior marketing positions in large firms. He is co-founder of United Keys, Inc., an early stage company improving input device usability. Prior to United Keys, he was president of eFax.com, an internet service that attracted millions of users. He has consulted for entities as large as Philips Electronics and as small as individual patent holders. He has heavy product development experience, is a patent holder himself, and has a strong background in leveraging outsourced manufacturing and distribution channels.

Brown developed classic consumer marketing skills as an account manager at advertising agencies J. Walter Thompson and BBDO, where he gained valuable insight into using creativity to solve business problems. At JWT, he was part of the team that managed Hewlett-Packard‘s personal computers and printers businesses. Before that, he worked for The Nestle Company.

Todd Sampson – entrepreneur, founder of MyBlogLog

Todd Sampson is an entrepreneur and technology strategist with more than a dozen years experience in the online sector. In 1996, he co-founded the web software development shop Cloudspace. In 2005, he co-founded MyBlogLog which sold to Yahoo! two years later. Todd now lives in San Francisco, California where he is a board member and adviser to a number of startups and entrepreneurs.