Brent Shawzin Hoberman is a British entrepreneur and investor. During the dot-com boom, he co-founded lastminute.com with Martha Lane Fox in 1998, where he was CEO from its inception, before selling the business to Sabre in 2005 for $1.1bn.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
Techstars is a pre-seed investor that provides access to capital, mentorship, and other support for early-stage entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of January 2024, the company had accepted over 4,100 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of $106bn USD. Techstars operates accelerator programs in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
Wenceslao Casares, also known as Wences Casares is an Argentinian entrepreneur and businessman in Silicon Valley-based fintech. He is the CEO of Xapo Bank, and founded Internet Argentina, Wanako Games, Patagon, Lemon Wallet, and Banco Lemon. Casares sits on the boards of PayPal, Diem, and Endeavor.
Bill Liao is an Australian entrepreneur. He is a venture partner with SOSV and recognised as one of the Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology by the Financial Times.
Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.
The National Digital Research Centre, or NDRC, is a national accelerator programme in Ireland, for "globally ambitious" entrepreneurs, delivered by a consortium led by Dublin-based Dogpatch Labs, and supported by multiple venture capital firms. It offers a "mentorship-driven" approach, with €100,000 "founder-friendly" funding, and early stage supports including non-equity pre-accelerator programmes available to entrepreneurs across Ireland. It also runs a Masterclass Series for companies working in the start-up space, teaching them how to support young digital venture teams with significant scale potential. It succeeded a previous version of the concept, run by a team on behalf of five Irish third-level institutions.
Chris C. Kemp is an American entrepreneur who, along with Dr. Adam London, founded Astra, a space technology firm based in California, in 2016. He served as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and as NASA's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for IT. While at NASA, Kemp partnered with Google and Microsoft and helped in the creation of Google Moon and Mars. He worked with the White House to develop the cloud computing strategy for the United States Federal Government and co-founded OpenStack, an open-source software project for cloud computing. He was also one of the founders of Nebula, a company that from 2011 to 2015, worked to commercialise the technology.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management.
Watsi, legally Watsi, Inc., is a nonprofit healthcare crowdsourcing platform that enables individual donors to directly fund medical care for individuals in developing countries without access to affordable medical care.
Elizabeth Jane Iorns is a New Zealand scientist, entrepreneur and researcher, and the founder and CEO of Science Exchange, a Silicon Valley startup which operates a platform to allow scientists to outsource their research to scientific institutions such as university facilities or commercial contract research organizations. Science Exchange has received considerable media attention since it first launched in August 2011, particularly following its participation in the Y Combinator incubator program in Summer 2011 and its role in launching the Reproducibility Initiative in Summer 2012. Iorns has been profiled in many leading publications including Nature, FastCompany, the San Francisco Business Times and Xconomy. Iorns lives in Palo Alto, California, where Science Exchange is now headquartered.
Nebula, Inc. was a hardware and software company with offices in Mountain View, California, and Seattle, Washington, USA. Nebula developed Nebula One, a cloud computing hardware appliance that turned racks of standard servers into a private cloud. The Nebula One private cloud system was built on the OpenStack open source cloud framework, as well as many other open source software projects.
Intel Capital is a division of Intel Corporation, set up to manage corporate venture capital, global investment, mergers and acquisitions. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, data center and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute, semiconductor manufacturing and other technologies.
SOSV is a venture capital firm that provides pre-seed, seed, venture and growth stage funding to startups in the technology sector. The company conducts seed accelerator programs in Asia and the United States of America.
Canopy Labs is a customer analytics company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with offices in San Francisco. It was founded in 2012 and offers SaaS marketing analytics for businesses and organizations. The company is an alumnus of the Y Combinator accelerator program. Canopy Labs was acquired by Drop.
Jonathan Piers Daniel Linney is a British businessman and investor with a professional background in the City. Linney has been recognised as one of the top 100 Black Britons and is known as a champion of entrepreneurship and growth businesses.
Founder.org is a nonprofit foundation in San Francisco, California, United States that invests in student entrepreneurs. The organization features a company building program for student entrepreneurs at major research institutes and universities. Operated by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Founder.org supports teams across various industries including sensors, sanitation, influencer marketing, biotechnology, health and transportation.
Dragons' Den was an Irish television series, presented by Richard Curran, based on the worldwide series Dragons' Den. It first aired in February 2009 and ran for eight series, until 2017.
Haoyuan (H.Y.) Li is a computer scientist and entrepreneur specializing in distributed systems, big data, and cloud computing. He is best known for proposing Virtual Distributed File System (VDFS), and creating an open-source data orchestration system, Alluxio. He is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Alluxio, Inc, a company commercializing the Alluxio Data Orchestration Technology. He is also an adjunct professor at Peking University. He is a frequent speaker on the topic of AI, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Open Source at conferences.
