Ronald Crawford Conway is an American angel investor and philanthropist, often described as one of Silicon Valley's "super angels". Conway is recognized as a strong networker.
Reid Garrett Hoffman CBE is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist 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. On the Forbes 2019 list of the world's billionaires, Hoffman was ranked #1349 with a net worth of US$1.8 billion.
Rachel Marjorie Joan Whetstone is a public relations executive. Whetstone joined Facebook as VP of communications of its WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger products in September 2017. She was senior vice-president of communications and public policy for Uber until April 2017. She was in a similar position at Google until June 2015.
Christopher Sacca is an American venture investor, company advisor, entrepreneur, and lawyer. He is the proprietor of Lowercase Capital, a venture capital fund in the United States that has invested in seed and early-stage technology companies such as Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter, investments that resulted in his placement as No. 2 on Forbes' Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017. Prior to founding Lowercase Capital in 2010, Sacca held several positions at Google Inc., where he led the alternative access and wireless divisions and worked on mergers and acquisitions. Between 2015 and 2017, he appeared as a "Guest Shark" on ABC's Shark Tank. In early 2017, Sacca announced that he was retiring from venture investing.
Todd Joseph Miller is an American actor, stand-up comedian, producer and writer.
Bill Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California. He is listed consistently on the Forbes Midas List and is considered one of technology’s top dealmakers.
Bradley Tusk is an American businessman, venture capitalist, philanthropist, political strategist, and author of The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics. He is the founder and CEO of Tusk Holdings, a multi-faceted platform featuring multiple businesses, politics, philanthropic efforts to increase voter turnout in the United States through mobile voting, and writing and commentary.
Airbnb, Inc., is an American online marketplace and hospitality service brokerage company based in San Francisco, California, United States. Members can use the service to arrange or offer lodging, primarily homestays, or tourism experiences. The company does not own any of the real estate listings, nor does it host events; it acts as a broker, receiving commissions from each booking.
Brian Joseph Chesky is an American billionaire Internet entrepreneur who co-founded the peer to peer lodging service Airbnb. Chesky is the CEO of the company and was named one of Time's "100 Most Influential People of 2015".
The Internet Association (IA) is an American lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., which represents internet companies. It was founded in 2012 by several companies, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Facebook, and is headed by the president and CEO Michael Beckerman.
Travis Cordell Kalanick is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder of Scour, a peer-to-peer file sharing application; Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery network; and Uber, a transportation network company. Red Swoosh was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007. Kalanick is the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, a position he held from 2010 to 2017. He resigned from Uber in 2017, after controversy over the company's reported unethical culture, including allegations that he ignored reports of sexual harassment at the company. He remains a shareholder and board-member.
Sharing economy is a term for a way of distributing goods and services, a way that differs from the traditional model of corporations hiring employees and selling products to consumers. In the sharing economy, individuals are said to rent or "share" things like their cars, homes and personal time to other individuals in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Chris Hollod is a venture capitalist and an angel investor in Los Angeles, where he invests in innovative, early-stage consumer start-ups at the convergence of culture and wellness. He has done more than 150 deals and currently oversees a $300 million portfolio of approximately 100 companies, including Uber, Airbnb, Houzz, Spotify, Pinterest, Casper, and Warby Parker.
A unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures. A decacorn is a word used for those companies over $10 billion, while hectocorn is the appropriate term for such a company valued over $100 billion. According to TechCrunch, there were 279 unicorns as of March 2018. The largest unicorns included Ant Financial, DiDi, Airbnb, Stripe and Palantir Technologies. Lyft is the most recent decacorn that turned into a public company on March 29, 2019.
Shervin Pishevar is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, super angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Hyperloop One and a co-founder and managing director of Sherpa Capital, a venture capital fund which has invested in companies including Airbnb, Uber, and Munchery.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created through a corporate restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. The two founders of Google assumed executive roles in the new company, with Larry Page serving as CEO and Sergey Brin as president. Alphabet is the world's fifth-largest technology company by revenue and one of the world's most valuable companies.
Blind is an anonymous chat app for verified employees. Users in Blind are grouped by topics, company and their greater industry. According to the company, it clandestinely verifies that the registered users actually work in the said company.
Susan J. Fowler is an American writer and software engineer known for her role in influencing institutional changes in how Uber and Silicon Valley companies treat sexual harassment. Her business celebrity led to book and Hollywood film deals based on her experience. Originally homeschooled in rural Arizona, Fowler studied physics at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked at two technology startup companies before joining Uber in late 2015. In early 2017, her blog post on sexual harassment at the company was widely shared and led to the ouster of the company's CEO. She runs a science book club and wrote a book on microservices. Fowler served as editor-in-chief of a quarterly publication by the payment processing company Stripe, and is currently a technology opinion editor at The New York Times.
