Steve Blank

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur and has been a founder or participant in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978. After he retired, he wrote a book about building early stage companies: Four Steps to the Epiphany. He's moved from being an entrepreneur to teaching entrepreneurship to both undergraduate and graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, Stanford University and the Columbia University/Berkeley Joint Executive MBA program. The “Customer Development” model that he developed in his book is one of the core themes for these classes. In 2009 he was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering. 

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Anne Miura-Ko

Ann Miura-Ko is a partner at Maples Investments where her investment interests include capitally efficient software and technology enabled services. 

In addition to serving at Maples Investments, Ann is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University, where her research focuses on mathematical modeling of computer security. As a part of the program, she teaches several courses in Stanford's renowned Technology Ventures Program, including Technology Venture Formation, High-tech Entrepreneurship, and the Mayfield Fellows Program. She has helped graduate engineering students develop business plans for new technology products or services they have developed while studying at Stanford, and many of her students have gone on to secure Angel and VC funding for their ideas. 

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Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah is a co-founder of KISSMetrics, a metrics solution designed for developers, marketers and product managers. KISSMetrics boasts a list of investors that is any startup's dream, including including Polaris Ventures, True Ventures, SoftTech VC, Felicis Ventures, Dave McClure, Shervin Pishevar and Bobby Yazdani. Hiten graduated from UC Berkeley in 2003. Since then he has been engulfed in the Internet marketing world. He first started off with offering SEO and SEM services by co-founding Advantage Consulting Services and helping to write ACS’s company blog, Pronet Advertising. Soon after he saw the need for better Internet marketing tools and started creating web applications including Crazy Egg, Siteblimp, and Serph. More recently along with his partners at ACS, he has been focusing on providing Social Media Marketing solutions for companies of all sizes.

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Jeff Clavier

Based in Palo Alto, California, Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested in more than 70 consumer Internet companies in areas like social media, communities, search, gaming or consumer infrastructure, almost exclusively in Silicon Valley. With over 20 years of operational, entrepreneurial and venture capital experience, Jeff is able to add relevant perspective and value to his companies as they grow from inception to maturity, and hopefully, success. 

In 2007, Jeff was recognized as one of the 13 “Web 2.0 King Makers” by (late) Business 2.0, and in 2008, BusinessWeek named him one of "The 25 Most Influential People on the Web". He is often noted for his investments in categories such as “passion-centric communities” or online gaming, or for having sold a number of his Web 2.0 startups to the likes of Yahoo, AOL, Intuit or more recently Twitter. 

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Larry Chiang

Larry is CEO of Duck9. He focuses all 88 of his self-reported IQ points into helping college students build their FICO.

He and his mentor hacked the Fair Isaac Co (FICO) credit scoring algorithm. To maximize credit score, tips are sent in fortune cookie sized text messages delivered monthly to a college students cell phone. He cut-and-pasted the technique of ‘second stage premiums’ where you give more pizza after the initial slice of pizza given out on campus.

He wrote the book, What They Don't Teach You At Stanford Business School, blogs at Business Week, GP at Larry Chiang G51 Fund of Stanford Founders and teaches ENGR 145 as EIR (entrepreneur in residence)in the school of engineering.

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Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble is a well-known technology blogger/ evangelist and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at Microsoft. He currently works for Rackspace and is building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building 43. He previously worked for Fast Company as a video blogger. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel.  

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Vivek Wadhwa

Senior Research Associate, Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School; Executive in Residence/Adjunct Professor, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University. 

Vivek Wadhwa is an Executive in Residence/Adjunct Professor for the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a Wertheim Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. A technology entrepreneur and a columnist for BusinessWeek.com, he leads groundbreaking research into globalization and the state of U.S. competitiveness. Wadhwa was named a "Leader of Tomorrow" by Forbes.com, and his company, Relativity Technologies, was named as one of the 25 "coolest" companies in the world by Fortune magazine. Wadhwa received a bachelor's degree in computing studies from the University of Canberra (Australia) and an M.B.A. from New York University. 

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