Startup Grind

2011 interview with VentureBeat & TechCrunch writer, and current Google Ventures partner MG Siegler. MG has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. Before joining Google Ventures in 2013, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes a column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku. Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he hopes to write a killer screenplay.

Today we have a special interview with the Founder and CEO of Fiverr.com Micha Kauffman interviewed by director Ram Yonish in Tel Aviv earlier this year. Fiverr is the world's most transacted marketplace for services, creating economic opportunities for the entrepreneurs of the gig economy. Fiverr was founded by Shai Wininger and Micha Kaufman in 2009 and currently lists more than three million services on the site that range between $5 and $500. Fiverr.com has been ranked among the top 100 most popular sites in the U.S. and top 150 in the world since the beginning of 2013.   During August 2014, Fiverr announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series C round of funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Accel and other investors. The round brings their total funding to date to $50 million.   Micha is also an active angel investor

Jean Oelwang is the CEO of Virgin Unite, the entrepreneurial foundation of the Virgin Group and a Partner in the Virgin Group focused on People Innovation. In 2003, Jean left her post as joint CEO of Virgin Mobile Australia to begin working with Richard Branson and the Virgin staff from around the world to create Virgin Unite. Over the last 10 years, Jean has worked with partners to create new approaches to social and environmental issues, such as the Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship and a global platform to support budding entrepreneurs. She has built collaborations to incubate a number of global leadership initiatives such as The Elders, the Carbon War Room and The B Team. In addition, Jean has been instrumental in working with over 25 Virgin businesses across 15 industries to put the wellbeing of people and planet at their core. In her previous life, Jean lived and worked on five continents helping to lead successful mobile phone start-ups in South Africa, Colombia, Bulgaria, Singapore, Hong Kong, Austr

Anthony Soohoo is Co-Founder & CEO of Dot & Bo, a uniquely curated shopping experience that makes modern design accessible and inspires people to create their dream homes. Drawing upon his background in media and technology, he launched Dot & Bo in 2013 to solve for the often-frustrating experience of shopping for furniture, in which design advice is traditionally expensive and customer service is extremely limited. Prior to starting Dot & Bo, Anthony was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Entertainment Division at CBS Interactive which included CBS.com, CBS Audience Network, TV.com, The Insider.com, Chow, Chowhound, UrbanBaby, and CBS Interactive Web Original Studio. During his tenure, Soohoo helped grow the CBS Interactive Entertainment Division to become one of the leading entertainment networks on the web. He joined CBS in 2007 with its acquisition of Dotspotter, one of the fastest growing community-powered entertainment properties on the Internet where he served as Co-Fo

Bill Bryant is a partner at DFJ (formerly Draper Fisher Jurvetson), focused on early- and growth-stage investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. Bill has had early and instrumental involvement in more than 25 leading software, mobile, and digital media companies, as a founder, senior executive, investor, and board member.    He has had founding roles with Visio (now part of Microsoft), Netbot (acquired by Excite), Qpass (acquired by Amdocs), Medio (Nokia), Mixxer, and Airworks.    Bill represents DFJ on the boards of Bright Computing, Chef, Ping Identity, Z2Live, Remitly, and The Clymb.  In addition to his DFJ investments, he is an active angel investor with investments in Winshuttle, LiquidPlanner, Bonanza, and Socrata.   Lets listen into Bill Bryant interview at our Seattle Chapter by director Mike Grabham. 

Daniel Klausssen, Senior Director within the Innovation Strategy Department at Marriott International. Prior to joining Marriott, Daniel led the complete re-development of the Public Broadcasting Systems digital strategy including all of their mobile apps, streaming tools, and architecture. Prior to that he was a stay at home dad while consulting for startups after a career at legendary silicon valley companies like Netscape, Borland, and Collabra. Daniel grew up in Squaw Valley California and received a degree in physics from the university of colorado at boulder.    Lets listen into Daniel Klaussen interviewed by Tom Denison at our Chicago Startup Grind Chapter.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:  Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Jon Steinberg who at the time was the President and COO of Buzzfeed. Following Buzzfeed he became CEO of the US version of the Daily Mail Online and a Board Member of Bustle. He is an Ex-Googler previously as a Strategic Partner Development Manager on Google’s SMB Partnerships team. Prior to Google, Jon was the Director of Business Development at Majestic Research and the founder of iBuilding, a commercial real estate software company backed by Tishman Speyer Properties, Benchmark Capital, and 12 Entrepreneuring. He is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and holds an MBA from Columbia University.   Lets listen into Jon Steinberg interviewed at our Startup Grind NYC Chapter in 2013.   Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Nigel Morris, co-founder of the Capital One Financial Corporation. Nigel started Capital One with the simple idea of dropping annual fee’s for credit cards and instead target different credit cards to specific segments of the population. Now it's a publicly traded company with over $20 Billion in revenues headquartered in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Nigel is now the managing partner of QED Investors, a direct investment fund focused on high-growth companies that leverage the power of data strategies. In addition, he serves on the board of numerous companies, including TransUnion, Red Ventures, Prosper, MediaMath, and Braintree. He has angel invested in Webs.com (acq by VistaPrint for $117M) and AddThis. Lets listen into Nigel Morris interviewed in Washington DC by chapter director Brian Park.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Jim Bankoff.  Jim is CEO and Chairman of Vox Media, a global internet media company that currently has three major editorial brands, SB Nation, The Verge, and Polygon, a video-gaming site. SB Nation, its sports brand, boasts over 30mm users per month across 300 individually branded, fan-centric sports communities, each covering a specific professional or college team, league or sport. In November 2011, Vox Media launched The Verge, which has quickly established itself as a category leader and the fastest growing site that covers technology. In October 2013, Vox launched Polygon, a site dedicated to news and community for fans of gaming, anchored by an all-star roster of writers. All Vox Media sites are built upon its world-class proprietary publishing platform. As the former Executive Vice President of Programming and Products at AOL, Bankoff has developed and led many notable websites including Aol.com, Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music, Netscape and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) . He is also known for establishi

Jennifer Dulski President & COO of the social advocacy platform Change.org. An early Yahoo! employee, Jennifer led one of the company's 6 Business units, serving as group VP and general manager of local and commerce. In 2007, Jennifer left Yahoo! to become co-founder and CEO of The Dealmap, a location-based deals site that Google acquired in 2011. She served as a senior executive at Google for two years before joining Change.org in January 2013. Jennifer's first job out of college was founding and running the Pittsburgh site of the Breakthrough Collaborative, a non-profit organization helping underserved students get on a path to college. She currently chairs the board of the Silicon Valley site of the Breakthrough Collaborative and serves on the board of Little Passports.    Lets listen into Jennifer Dulski interviewed in San Francisco by Archive.ly founder Perri Gorman.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:  Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Tony Wheeler. When Tony and his wife arrived in Sydney in 1972 after a six month trip through Asia from Europe toward Australia, they decided to start Lonely Planet Publications to publish the story of their journey - Across Asia on the Cheap. From those humble beginnings, Lonely Planet Publications has grown to become the world’s largest independent guidebook publisher with more than 500 titles in print and over 400 staff around the world. In 2011, Tony completed the sale of Lonely Planet, and though he doesn’t have a formal role in the company, he still keeps busy writing books such as Tony Wheeler’s Dark Lands.    Lets listen into Tony wheeler interviewed by our Startup Grind Melbourne Chapter Director.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

United States Congresswoman Suzan DelBene. Prior to her election as the representative for Washington’s 1st congressional district in 2012, Suzan held various tech exec roles including as the Co-Founder and VP of Drugstore.com which sold to Walgreens for $409M. Suzan has also served as the CEO of Nimble Technology and as Microsofts VP of Mobile Communications. Earlier in her career at Microsoft, Suzan worked on the famed Windows 95 operating system. She has a degree in biology from Reed College and a MBA from the university of Washington.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Daehee Park & JT Marino. The two founded Tuft & Needle with the idea that it is possible to create high quality products and charge a fair price to customers.  Launched in 2012 by two software engineers, Tuft & Needle was the first vertically integrated ecommerce mattress company to focus on selling one perfect product: an unbeatable mattress at an unbeatable price. With a background in ecommerce and marketing, prior to Tuft & Needle Daehee Park served as a consultant at Acxiom Corporation. Daehee received his bachelor’s degree in Security & Risk Analysis at Penn State University. John-Thomas (“JT”) Marino leads product and software development. With a passion for thoughtfully designed customer experiences, JT started his career at Hashrocket helping startups build just that. With roots in Northeastern Pennsylvania, JT studied Computer Science at Penn State University.   Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Matt Barrie is an Australian technology entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Freelancer.com: the world's leading freelancing and crowd-sourcing marketplace and Eight-time Webby-award winner. Matt was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011 by BRW and in 2014 he was named the most influential person in technology in Australia by Smart Company.  After graduating at Stanford University Matt worked as a venture capitalist at Innovation Capital. Then he founded Sensory Networks that was acquired by Intel Corporation in 2013. In 2009 Matt foundedFreelancer.com and listed it on the ASX in 2013. It is today valued at over $600 million and grows at the rate of 40% per year. We will sit down for a fireside chat with Matt at Startup Grind London to talk about freelancing, crowd-sourcing, the future of work and building globally successful companies. 

Today we have a great episode with the co-founder of Genius, formerly rap genius Mahbod Moghadam whose current project is helping to run everipedia, the encyclopedia for people and more. in 2014 Genius had raised a total of 56.9 million from investors such as Andressen Horowitz. Moghadam and his co-founder came up with the idea for Rap Genius in the summer of 2009 when Lehman asked Moghadam about the meaning of a Cam'ron lyric. Moghadam was a Fulbright scholar to France and following Yale Undergrad, a graduate of Stanford Law School. After a departure from Genius in May 2014 he met Everipedia co-founder Sam Kazemian when he was giving a talk at UCLA, and immediately fell in love with Everipedia. He had planned on retiring because of traumatic brain surgery but Everipedia lured him out of retirement. Everipedia's mission is to make information on the internet more accessible by connecting individuals to their digital footprint.  

Juan Diego Calle the Founder of the .CO domain business. Prior to founding .CO which was  by Neustar, Inc. in April of 2014, while at the university of Miami, Juan Diego launched and ran TeRespondo.com, a performance-based advertising network, which he sold to Yahoo in 2005.    Juan Diego also currently serves as the chairman of STRAAT, a company builder software based in Miami, Florida. Juan Diego also co-founded Building.co,  a collaborative work space for growing tech companies, Classic.com, a classic car restoration business, POP.co,  a platform designed to help entrepreneurs and businesses get online, and BoutiqueHotels.com a hand-curated list of boutique hotels around the world.  He’s an alumni of the Harvard Business School OPM program.  lets listen into Juan Diego Calle interviewed by our Bogota Colombia Chapter director. 

Jason joined Maveron in 2007 and is now a partner focused on investing in education, e-commerce and web-enabled consumer businesses. He is involved with the firm's investments in General Assembly, Common, TrueFacet, Julep, Everlane, CourseHero, Dolls Kill and Lively.  Prior to joining Maveron, Jason served as senior director of strategic operations for Career Education Corp., where he co-founded and led admissions and marketing for IADT Online, a for-profit design school. He has also served as an associate at Spinnaker Ventures, an expansion-stage venture capital fund.  Jason graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in economics from the University of Michigan  and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adam Nash, CEO of Wealth Front. As president and CEO of Wealthfront, Adam has built the company around a centralized mission to always put the client first and change the bad practices that plague the financial services industry. Adam joined Wealthfront from Greylock Partners, where he was an Executive-in-Residence. Prior to Greylock, he was VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, where he built the teams responsible for core product, user experience, platform and mobile. Adam held a number of leadership roles at eBay that included Director of eBay Express, as well as strategic and technical roles at Atlas Venture Preview Systems and Apple. Adam holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.    

Tony Xu founded Door Dash as a local delivery service for Stanford students and participated in the Y Combinator incubator with his co founders while polishing the business model. Prior to co-founding Door Dash, tony worked in product at Square, led special projects for the CEO and CFO at eBay, and began his career at McKinsey and Company. He holds a B.S. with High Honors in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from UC Berkeley and a MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. 

William Pence who is the CTO of AOL. As the CTO of AOL William leads all aspects of AOL’s global technology strategy, platform development, and external technology partnerships. He also plays a key leadership role in the overall strategy and direction of AOL.  Before joining AOL, William served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of WebMD from 2007 to 2014 as well as Chief Operating Officer of WebMD from 2012 to 2014. Prior to WebMD, William served as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at Napster from 2003 to 2007. From 2001 to 2003, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of pressplay, a Universal Music Group/Sony Music Entertainment joint venture, and from 2000 to 2001 he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Universal Music Group. Previously, William spent more than a decade at IBM.   William received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Virginia, and a PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell Unive