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 is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding 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 global startup accelerator and venture capital firm founded in 2006 and headquartered in New York City. The accelerator provides capital, mentorship, and other support for early-stage entrepreneurs.
Wences Casares is a Silicon Valley–based fintech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Xapo Bank, and also founded Internet Argentina, Wanako Games, Patagon, Bling Nation, Lemon Wallet, and Banco Lemon. Casares sat on the boards of PayPal and Diem.
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.
AH Capital Management, LLC is an American privately held 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, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
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.
BetterCloud, an independent software vendor based in New York, NY and with engineering offices in Atlanta, GA, builds unified SaaS management software. A venture-backed startup, BetterCloud has raised $187 million in total funding, with the most recent round was led by Warburg Pincus with series F funding with $75 million raised to date. A previous round of funding was done in April 2018 which was led by Bain Capital Ventures. In December 2016, BetterCloud completed pivot from G Suite to general SaaS management.
SOSV is a venture capital firm that provides pre-seed, seed, Series A and later stage funding to deep tech startups that join its startup development programs, which are located in New York City, Newark, New Jersey, and San Francisco. SOSV was founded in 1995 by Sean O'Sullivan. It is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, with additional offices in Cork, Pune, Shenzhen and Tokyo.
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. He is a non-executive director of the UK government-owned development bank, British Business Bank, which has facilitated over £12 billion of financing for UK small and medium-sized businesses and also operates the StartUp Loan Company and British Patient Capital, a £2.5bn fund launched in 2018.
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.
HAX is a pre-seed, startup development program specializing in hard tech startups and headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. The 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) facility houses machine shops and mechanical, chemical, and electronics labs to support founders working on sustainability tech across climate, industrial automation, and human health. Operated by the U.S. venture fund SOSV, HAX also has offices in Pune, Shenzhen, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
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.
Aaron Skonnard is an American businessman and the co-founder and former CEO of Pluralsight. Skonnard founded the company in 2004 with Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, and Bill Williams, to provide online video training courses for software developers, IT administrators, and creative professionals.
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.
