Dublin Web Summit Series

Niklas Zennström is one of the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Europe. He is best known for co-founding Skype, KaZaA, Joost and Joltid with his long-time business partner Janus Friis.

In 2007, Niklas co-founded Atomico Ventures, a leading venture capital firm in Europe. Atomico has made investments in Rovio (makers of Angry Birds), Fon and Jolicloud among others.

Niklas is best known for having co-founded Skype, the global leader in Internet voice communications, with over 432 million registered users. In September 2005 eBay Inc acquired Skype, and in 2009 Niklas was part of the consortium that acquired Skype from eBay. He sold Skype to Microsoft earlier this year for $8.5bn.

Nikesh oversees all revenue and customer operations, as well as marketing and partnerships. Since joining Google in 2004, he has held several positions with the company. Most recently, he led Google’s global direct sales operations. He also developed and managed the company’s operations in the European, Middle Eastern and African markets and was responsible for creating and expanding strategic partnerships in those regions for the benefit of Google’s growing number of users and advertisers.

Prior to joining Google, he was chief marketing officer and a member of the management board at T-Mobile Europe. While there, he spearheaded all product development, terminals, brand and marketing activities of T-Mobile Europe. In 1999, he started working with Deutsche Telekom and founded T-Motion PLC, a mobile multimedia subsidiary of T-Mobile International. Prior to joining Deutsche Telekom, Nikesh held management positions at Putnam Investments and Fidelity Investments in Boston.

Nikesh holds a master’s degree from Boston College and an MBA from Northeastern University, both of which were awarded with distinction. He also holds the CFA designation. In 1989, Nikesh graduated from the Institute of Technology in Varanasi, India with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

Shervin joined Menlo Ventures in 2011 and focuses on the social web, consumer internet and mobile. At Menlo, he sits on the board of Shaker and Mr. Number and has led Menlo’s investment in Warby Parker. Shervin also helped launch the Menlo Talent Fund, Menlo’s new $20m seed fund.

Before joining Menlo, Shervin was chief application officer and GM at Mozilla Corporation after spending most of his career as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Companies Shervin founded have reached an aggregate of 100 million users across companies like Social Gaming Network (now Mindjolt), Webs.com, Hyperoffice and Hotprints and he raised over $50m for those companies.

Shervin angel invested in over 40 companies including Aardvark (sold to Google), Uber, Milo.com (sold to eBay), Likealittle (LAL), Qwiki, Medialets, Milk, SolveMedia, Gowalla and SpruceMedia. Shervin serves on the advisory board of Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR).

Shervin is one of 10 members of the UN Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council. Shervin is also a supporter of Invisible Children and charity:water.

Morten Lund, is the CEO of Everbread Ltd.. a travel-search company, and Chairman of Tradeshift Ltd. the worlds first open business network.

Described variously as an ‘archangel investor’, startup ‘ideologist’ and ‘visionary’, Morten has been one of the most active seed investors in Europe, through his startup catalyst LundXY.

Known for his keen eye for turning existing business models and distribution methods on their head, Morten has co-founded and invested in more than 80 high-tech start ups, since selling his consulting company Neo Ideo to Leo Burnett 1999.

Most famous amongst his investments are Skype, the VoIP star snapped up by eBay for $2.6 billion in 2005 and mobile backup site ZYB sold to operator Vodafone Europe BV in 2008 for a sum believed to be in the region of $49m.

Matthew is the co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, Inc.

Matthew wrote his first computer program when he was 7, and hasn’t been able to shake the bug since. After attending the University of Chicago Law School, he worked as an attorney for one day before jumping at the opportunity to be a founding member of a tech startup. He hasn’t looked back. CloudFlare is Matthew’s third entrepreneurial venture.

Matthew holds a degree in English and Computer Science from Trinity College. He graduated with highest honors from the Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and was awarded the Dubliner Prize for Entrepreneurship. He earned a JD from the University of Chicago and is a member of the Illinois Bar. He teaches technology law as an adjunct professor at the John Marshall Law School where he serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. He is also the co-founder of Project Honey Pot.

Lars Hinrichs (34) is the founder of HackFwd, a serial entrepreneur and investor.

One of his first efforts, politik-digital.de, was an award-winning platform for politics and new media he launched at 22. Following that early success, his next venture, a respected new media consulting firm, went bust — but not without first paying rich dividends in learning.

Lars applied those learnings to his third major effort, XING, a highly successful business networking platform. As Founder and CEO, Lars oversaw its 2006 IPO, making XING the world’s first Web 2.0 company to go public. He then successfully steered it for two years post IPO. He also became active in investing in and helping secure funding for.

His most recent startup, HackFwd, is an innovative pre-seed investment company that supports Europe’s most passionate geeks in launching the world’s most exciting tech startups.

When he’s not working to promote European tech innovation, Lars can be found advising on the Global Leaders of World Economic Forum, the Young Global Leaders, and helping Germany with their digital strategy as part of the UNICEF council.

Sherry Coutu is a former CEO and angel investor who now serves on the boards of companies, charities and universities. She chairs Artfinder and is a non-executive member of Cambridge University (Finance Board), Cambridge Assessment, Cambridge University Press and NESTA Investments. She also serves on the Advisory Board of Linkedin.com, Care.com and Tyze.com.

She has made angel investments in more than 40 companies and holds investments in 2 venture capital firms.  She was voted by TechCrunch as the best CEO mentor/advisor in Europe in Nov 2010. In May 2011, she was voted by Wired magazine as one the top 25 ‘most influential people in the wired world’, and one of the top ten most influential investors and women.

As an entrepreneur, Sherry was founder of two businesses in the financial services industry. The first (acquired by Euromoney plc) has operations in more than 70 countries.  The second, which she was CEO and chairman for was responsible for the first e-commerce transaction in the financial services industry in Oct 1995.

Philanthropically, she helped found the Prince’s Trust Technology Leadership Group, is a member of the venture board of Cancer Research UK and serves on the Harvard Business School European Advisory Council.

Jason Goldberg is a serial entrepreneur. Jason is passionate about designing products that enrich millions of people’s lives. Prior to leading Fab.com, Jason founded fabulis, socialmedian (sold to XING AG), and Jobster. Jason also served as Chief Product Officer at XING in Hamburg, Germany in 2009. Jason holds an MBA from Stanford University. Jason writes about entrepreneurship on his blog, http://betashop.com. The first start-up Jason worked at was Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1991 and 1992, which led to a 6 1?2 year stint working in the White House. Jason resides in New York City with his partner Christian and their dog Rupey, aptly named after the Indian currency as Jason has traveled to India more than 30 times the past 5 years to work alongside the best web development team on the planet. His blog: www.betashop.com

Founder/CEO of Mashery; previously ran several companies including an online auction for high end wine and a comedy/improv theatre company called The Groundlings. Started his career as an engineer writing 8086 assembly language code. Father of two teenagers; enjoys making and sharing food with friends.

After training at the Polytechnic and then at Proctor & Gamble, Axel Dauchez quickly made his way in media and on the Web.

In 1995, he became director of the consumer marketing department of Coktel-Sierra-Blizzard, the world-lader of edutainment games and software for computers. In1996, he launched their first paying online services.

Appointed President of the first French Web Agency BDDP & Tequila interactive in 1998. In 2002, he then became the CEO of Moonscoop Group, the world’s largest company in audio-visual animation productions. He joined Deezer as CEO on January 26th, 2010 aged 41.

Axel Dauchez chairs the ESML syndicate which aims to exchange digital, legal music development and protect the use of catalogues.

Dharmash is a Partner at Balderton Capital, one of the largest venture capital groups in Europe with circa $2bn under management and over 60 portfolio companies including: Betfair, Bebo, Wonga, Lovefilm, Yoox, The Hut, Wooga, Big Fish Games. He currently focuses on the consumer internet (especially e-commerce), media and marketing services, payments and SAAS; involved as a Board member with KupiVIP, Achica, Mog, Ewise, Habbo, Lovefilm (AMZN), Adjug (TFA.DE), 7Digital (HMV.L)

Prior to joining Balderton Capital, Dharmash was part of the management team that successfully delisted and sold Emap’s consumer division to H. Bauer for £1.1bn. He spent eight years at Emap, where he held a range of executive roles, including Group Managing Director of Emap Consumer Media and Emap Performance.

Mike Butcher is Editor of TechCrunch Europe. In 2010 Mike was No. 57 out of Britain’s Top 100 “digital power-brokers” by Wired UK magazine. He is a regular commentator in the media on the technology business.

He is co-founder, of TechHub, a space for startups in London’s Silicon Roundabout and of Coadec.com, a non-profit. He also serves on the Mayor of London’s Digital Advisory Board. His personal blog is mbites.com, while he Twitters as @mikebutcher.

Chris is the CEO and cofounder of Lyst, a social commerce platform that makes it easy for users to buy fashion they discover by following their favorite designers, stores, magazines and friends. From launch nine months ago, Lyst already generates millions in dollars of sales for its partners around the world.Prior to cofounding Lyst, Chris was a venture capital investor at Balderton and Benchmark Capital in London, where he focussed on early stage consumer internet investments, mostly in the ecommerce, music and games space.

Chris has an MA in Physics and Philosophy from Cambridge University, where he was a DERA scholar.

Demet is the Founder & CEO of Trendyol.com, Turkey’s leading fashion ecommerce site. With 4 million+ members, Trendyol is a consumer lovemark in Turkey. Demet is also founding partner of Peak Games and an investor in Doktorsitesi.com. She was voted entrepreneur of the year in 2010 in Turkey and mentors many young entrepreneurs. A Turkish / USA dual-national, Demet was born in NY and spent her life between Turkey and USA. After graduating from NYU (where she ranked first in her class in Economics) she worked at a number of leading companies in USA, Japan, Turkey, and Switzerland. In 2008, she enrolled at Harvard Business School where she focused on entrepreneurship and dropped out from HBS to build Trendyol.com.

Barely 20, Chris ‘moot’ Poole is the creator of 4chan and Canvas, he’s delivered a TED talk, and was voted Time Magazine’s Most Influential Person in The World in 2008. Just last year he launched his second incarnation, Canv.as.

Spencer is CEO and Founder of Artfinder, a London based start up that helps people find, and find more about, great art. The Artfinder website – www.artfinder.com – has recently launched and the company is also publishing a range of smart phone and tablet apps.

Before Artfinder Spencer was COO of Last,fm, and Retail Director of Technology Products for Amazon in Europe. Before moving into high tech, Spencer set up Hasbro’s operations in Japan and was also Assistant Factory Manager for Hasbro Thailand. He is also a venture partner at Wellington and serves as a board / advisory board member for a number of start-ups including Linked-In, Yoyo-games, Summly and Mendeley.

Alexandra is Founder & CEO of Luluvise, a social communications platform for women, which launched in December 2011. Previously, Alexandra was Global Head of Marketing & PR for Upstream, one of the world’s largest mobile marketing companies and before that, she was the European Director of the Legal & Compliance Practice at the
Corporate Executive Board.

Alexandra holds a BSc from Appalachian State University and an LLB from the London School of Economics. An international mix, Alexandra is a quarter – Chinese, quarter-Jamaican and half Canadian. She grew up in in Ocho Rios, Jamaica and represented Team Jamaica in the Federation Cup and Commonwealth Games (tennis). Alexandra now plays for the Ladies First team at the prestigious Queens Club in London.

Nick D’Aloisio is the founder of Summly, a technology which automatically summarises and simplifies text based content. He has been profiled by publications such as Forbes, Fortune and the BBC for his entrepreneurial success and interest in Artificial Intelligence. Before founding Summly, Nick created Facemood, a service which used sentiment analysis to determine the mood of Facebook users, and SongStumblr, a geosocial music discovery service.

Nick founded Summly in July 2011 and secured a Seed Round from Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm of Mr Li Ka-Shing. Summly has had over 135,000 downloads since its launch in early December 2011 and has been featured by Apple as their App of the Week in the United Kingdom and other regions.

John has been building payments and anti-fraud systems on the internet for over 15 years and has advised many of the successful and less successful start-ups on their payment strategies. Originally a java certified developer and now an all purpose hacker and Seedcamp mentor. John runs PayPal new developer network PayPal X in the EU.

Ben Rooney is Technology Editor for The Wall Street Journal, Europe a post he has held since September 2010. An award-winning journalist both on and offline, he was launch editor of Europe’s first daily online newspaper, the Electronic Telegraph as was, launched in November 1994. Before that he was on the paper’s foreign desk.

He was launch editor of The Daily Telegraph’s technology supplement from 1996 to 2000 before leaving to become living proof that the dotcom bubble was truly ready to burst. He joined a start up. It went bust.

From 2005 until joining the WSJ he was a PHP and Rails developer having successfully bluffed his way into another start up on the (false) premise that he knew PHP.

Marcus Segal is COO of Game Studio Operations for Zynga. Based in San Francisco, Marcus is responsible for managing the International Production, QA, Community, and Central Art teams as well as contributing to the development of new global IP.

Prior to joining Zynga, Marcus served as the VP of Operations and acting CFO for Vindicia Inc., a technology company focused on providing advanced billing and risk solutions for digital merchants. Before Vindicia, Inc, Marcus was VP of Operations at eMusic.com where he led the organization through their acquisition by Universal Music Group in 2003.

Before starting his career in technology, Marcus worked in TV and film as the Executive in Charge of Production for The Documedia Group producing the Emmy Award nominated series “Sworn to Secrecy” for The History Channel and as a pyro-technician on one of the world’s true film classics, “Beastmaster 3.” Marcus is also proud to serve as a board member of The Climate Theater, a San Francisco-based theater company committed to bringing new works by local artists to the stage.

At the beginning of 2000 William Cooper established the UK office of European digital marketing company TradeDoubler, shortly after the launch of the business in Sweden. Having been MD of the UK office for 2 years, he took on various Group roles such as CMO, COO and finally CEO until the end of 2008. TradeDoubler is listed on Nasdaq OMX in Sweden, and by the end of 2008 operated in 20+ countries, had over 700 employees and annual revenues in excess of £300m.

William has invested in a number of early stage businesses, mainly in the technology sector in the UK, Europe and North America. In September 2009 he co-founded ACHICA.com, a members only luxury lifestyle store, with Quentin Griffiths (co-founder of ASOS). ACHICA launched in early 2010 and has grown strongly ever since.

Mark Read was appointed a director of WPP, the world’s largest advertising company in 2005. He has been WPP’s director of strategy since 2002 and is also chief executive of WPP Digital. He is a member of the Supervisory Board of HighCo and a director of CHI & Partners. He worked at WPP between 1989 and 1995 in both parent company and operating company roles. Prior to rejoining WPP in 2002, he was a principal at the consultancy firm of Booz-Allen & Hamilton and founded and developed the company WebRewards in the UK.

Self-confessed IT geek, Gareth Williams is the CEO of Skyscanner.  Born in Norwich, Gareth was a globetrotter from an early age spending his upbringing in Sussex, Canada and Switzerland.  Gareth became obsessed with computers going to Manchester University to study mathematics and computing.

Going on to work as a programmer, Gareth became annoyed that it was so difficult to find cheap flights to ski with his brother in Val d’Isere so worked on the idea of an easy-to-use way of tracking the best travel deals … and Skyscanner was born!

Gareth lives in Edinburgh with his sons, Noah and Arthur.

Cindy’s background is brandbuilding, marketing and advertising – she started up BBH New York in 1998 and was voted Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003. She’s an entrepreneur, working on startups www.ifwerantheworld.com and www.makelovenotporn.tv (Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.) She consults, describing her consultancy approach as ‘I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.’

A serial entrepreneur and angel investor, Tariq has a passion for building highly disruptive new products. He is founder and CEO of Jolicloud, a pioneer in personal cloud computing. Prior to Jolicloud, Tariq founded Netvibes, the personal startpage used by millions around the world.

A thought leader and regular speaker at global technology and media conferences, he was recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the world’s “Top Innovators Under 35″ (2008), by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, and most recently was honored by the President of France as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

As a former journalist for La Tribune, Tariq has been a keen observer of the Web since its genesis. He holds a degree in Physics from the University of Paris VII and a Master’s in Telecommunications from ENST (Telecom Paris).

Edial Dekker is 27 years old and co-founder and CEO of Gidsy, a community driven marketplace where anyone can offer and book activities to do. Prior to Gidsy, Edial co-founded Hack de Overheid, the most important open-data organization in The Netherlands and he is a co-founder of Your Neighbours, an interactive design studio based in Berlin.

Travis Kalanick is a successful entrepreneur in the areas of consumer internet, transportation, and enterprise content delivery.  His most recent company, Uber, an on-demand black car service, seeks to be “Everyone’s Private Driver” by bringing disruptive technology and business innovation to urban transportation challenges.  Prior to Uber, Travis founded Red Swoosh, an enterprise content delivery company that he sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007.  Prior companies include Scour, the world’s first p2p search engine where Kalanick also attained the dubious distinction of having been sued for $250 billion.  In addition, Kalanick has been an active angel investor in, and advising, kick-ass startups founded by truly awesome entrepreneurs.  You can connect with Travis on Twitter, read his blog, or ask him anything on Formspring

Steve is the co-founder and CEO of Schematic Labs, the makers of SoundTracking. SoundTracking is one of the fastest growing social music apps on the iOS platform, combining music, photos and location into a fun and easy-to-use sharing application and community. Previously, he was one of the co-creators and CMO at imeem, the pioneering social music service and platform that reached over 43 million registered users worldwide, and was eventually sold to MySpace. Steve is also an investor and/or advisor to Animoto, StackMob, StumbleUpon and Uber.

Outside of mobile apps and music, he loves surfing, snowboarding, skateboarding, and multimedia art & design.

Ben is a Partner at Index Ventures, focusing on investments in games, consumer services and ecommerce companies. He represents Index on the boards of Just-Eat, Mind Candy, Notonthehighstreet, Rebtel, Shapeways and Stardoll, iZettle and Grey Area.  He is also an observer on the board of King.com was a director of Playfish (acquired by Electronic Arts).

Prior to joining Index Ventures, he worked at the NewMedia Spark investment fund, before becoming Vice President at EO plc, a Spark portfolio company in the consumer financial services sector. Previously he spent four years at OC&C Strategy Consultants, advising firms in the retail and IT sectors.

He has a Masters degree in Engineering, Economics and Management from Oxford University.

Ben’s blogs sporadically at: http://www.ben.vc/

Nick dreams of a world where he has the largest Hadoop cluster in the world. Back in the heady days of Web 2.0, Nick created the worlds first Twitter-powered Social News site and social sharing plugins, serving 30Bn clicks/month. As it grew, Nick had the epiphany that resulted in DataSift – a social big-data platform that gulps down Tweets and posts from the social firehose, filters data in real-time, and democratises how entrepreneurs and enterprises can create socially intelligent applications and insights. Nick comes from Reading in the Silicon (Thames) Valley, proving there is entrepreneurship outside the Silicon Roundabout.

PeerIndex was founded by Azeem Azhar, an internet investor and entrepreneur. Azeem started his career covering the tech sector for The Guardian and The Economist. During the bubble he ran a dotcom incubator, before moving into senior management roles in various tech companies (including a search engine and blogging platform). An active internet investor in media-tech firms such as Daylife, Powerset, New Energy Finance and Dopplr, he now concentrates exclusively on PeerIndex.

PeerIndex is a social ranking service that measures your status and reputation across the social web. Awarded the Grand Prix award at this year’s Europas, PeerIndex offers insights for social media users and brands about topic communities and influencers.

As Partner, Reshma co-manages Seedcamp. Her investment focus is on B2B, Fashion, Gaming, Travel, and Financial Services.

Reshma helped found Seedcamp in 2007. During her tenure, she has managed companies like Mobclix(acquired by Velti), Zemanta, and Ubervu.

Reshma was also on the board of Zoombu before it was acquired by Skyscanner and advises Launch48.She joined Seedcamp from the Venture team at 3i. Prior to 3i, Reshma spent over 3 years at Vodafone in their Commercial Strategy team, working across the Europe and Japan footprints in marketing strategy and pricing functions. Her venture capital career started with eVentures India where she actively supported companies like Make My Trip (NASDAQ – MMYT), Contest2Win, and Clubgreetings. Reshma started her career in the US in investment banking with Broadview (now part of Jefferies).

She has a MBA from INSEAD and dual undergraduate degrees in Engineering and Business from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is also on the Advisory Board of Credo Ventures and the European Board of All Hands a non-profit organization that provides hands-on assistance to survivors of natural disasters around the world.

In the limited to none spare time, Reshma enjoys having a laugh with friends and family; seasonal adrenalized sports, and pretending to cook.

Bradford grew up in Baltimore and currently lives in New York City. He has degrees from Goucher College and Parsons The New School for Design. He has launched retail concepts for both Blu Dot and Design Within Reach and contributes to Sundance Channel, Full Frontal Fashion, and Dwell. His homes have been featured in The New York Times and Dwell. He owns 137 pairs of shoes and has a weakness for paisley, all things Eames, and Scandinavian electro-pop.

Mark Little is the founder and CEO of Storyful, a news agency for the social media age. In his previous life, he worked for Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE. During his 20 years in journalism, he has been a primetime news anchor, Washington bureau chief and foreign correspondent, reporting on the major conflicts of the past decade.

Laurent is the Technical Director responsible for driving strategy, architecture, open source and community relationships around RIM’s Web Platform. He joined RIM in the Spring 2010 and has been focused on the WebKit browser, WebWorks, Ripple, and recently, experimental projects such as AliceJS. Before that, he was at IBM for 14 years, working on enterprise Web projects such as eCommerce, Web frameworks and tooling, Search and Social Software, and participating in open source strategies in the company.

Laurent has been deep in web technologies since the mid 90′s and is an avid JavaScript/HTML/CSS, Java and SQL developer for both Desktop and Mobile. He codes and watches at least two movies every day, and he has funny hair.

Jacob de Geer is the founding CEO of iZettle, a social payments company that creates services for person-to person and business-to-consumer commerce. iZettle’s service includes a free iPad, iPhone and iPod touch app and a mini chip-card reader that lets anyone take payments anytime, anywhere.

Prior to iZettle, Jacob was one of the founding members of Tre Kronor Media, an award-winning agency (Media Agency of the year in 2009 and 2010) for performance based marketing, integrated media and advertising, online and offline. Jacob was also the managing director of TradeDouble for xx years where he was responsible for Nordic operations helping the company to build one of the largest advertising networks in the world.

Sonali has been active in the European venture business for 12 years focusing on investments in the consumer internet and digital media sectors. Sonali is responsible for investments in KupiVIP, Wonga, Seatwave.com, StylistPick, Spotify, Top10 and Fantasy Shopper. Sonali is also an independent director on the board of IAC. Prior to Accel, Sonali was a Partner at Atlas Venture in London where she invested primarily in internet and software as a service businesses. While at Atlas Venture she led investments in Moo,Globoforce, Skinstore (acquired by Drugstore.com) and Seatwave (where she was the founding investor). She was also a board member at Magicalia (acquired by Exponent Private Equity) and Moreover (acquired by Verisign).

Peter formed the basic idea for Flattr in 2006 with a belief that people should have the right to share money and pay for things they like — as they like. Now he’s going around the world to talk about why the internet should be treated as something important and not just an entertainment platform. He’s a vegetarian and socialist, active within the discussions about copyright, animal rights and freedom of speech.

Peter has previously served as the spokesperson for The Pirate Bay (founded in 2003 and which at its peak accounted for over 40% of the world’s internet traffic). In 2009, Peter and 3 other individuals were criminally convicted in Sweden “for promoting the copyright infringement of others”. Last month (Feb 01, 2012) the Swedish Supreme Court refused to hear a further appeal and reduced sentences for Peter and the other individuals were upheld. Peter is currently awaiting terms of an 8 months prison sentence and potential fees due in aggregate of US $4 million.

Alexia Tsotsis is a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending New Media Business courses at New York University she returned to Los Angeles in order to continue her career in new media — first as LA Weekly’s internet culture reporter, and then as SF Weekly’s web editor.

Before she joined TechCrunch, Alexia ran the SFweekly.com website while staying on top of memes, the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age.

Serge is responsible for building the team, supply base and investor base of Ostrovok.ru, the leading online hotel booking company for Russian speakers.

Ostrovok.ru is staffed by a team of engineers from Yandex, hotel experts from Booking.com, and marketing experts from leading Russian ecommerce companies. The company is backed by Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom, and a number of leading online travel investors.

Serge began his career at the head office of Google in California and was youngest in his MBA class at Stanford GSB. Before returning to Russia was founder and CEO of video communications company TokBox where together with his partner he raised $14 million from top VC Sequoia Capital and the founders/top managers of YouTube, Google, PayPal and Cisco.

Ben Milne, CEO and Co-Founder of Dwolla, started his first company, Elemental Designs, at the age of 18. Ben began leveraging the Internet to ship custom made speakers. His adventures lead him all over the world, establishing operations in Southern Asia and California. An original $1,200 investment would turn into a multi-million dollar company by the age of 22.

After heavy research in 2008, Ben approached a Midwestern bank with an idea to establish a new payment network that would upend the financial services industries. They called it Dwolla. Ben would sell Elemental Designs to focus on the new project. In 2009, the privately funded Dwolla launched in Iowa and California, boasting the nation’s cheapest payment platform of only 25 cents per transaction. December 1, 2010, Dwolla would go national, introducing the first technology to seamlessly transfer payments leveraging users’ social networks.

In 2011, Dwolla launched the world’s first geo-location based mobile payments. Ben also has extensive community experience in speaking, mentoring, and leadership programs.

Jamillah Knowles is the UK Editor of The Next Web, host of BBC Radio 5Live’s Outriders and Podcast Editor for Global Voices. She also likes robots.

Milo founded and serves as Editor-in-Chief at the Kernel, an online technology and culture magazine. He was previously technology columnist for the Telegraph and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Observer and many other newspapers and magazines in Britain and America. Milo also serves as Chief Feature Writer for The Catholic Herald and a columnist for Real Business. He is an advisor and board member for several start-ups and serves as mentor on the 500 Startups and Springboard accelerator programs, where he advises on marketing and public relations strategy.

In 2011 Milo was ranked one of the 100 most influential people in Britain’s digital economy by Wired magazine.

Matt is the European Technology Correspondent for Reuters TV and  an occasional contributor to WIRED UK as a feature writer.

Chris Grew, a partner in the London office of Orrick since 2008, is a member of its Emerging Companies Group, which advises emerging companies and venture capital firms.

Before joining Orrick, he was a co-founder of the London office of Heller Ehrman and a member of the Venture Law Group at that firm.  Prior to that, he was a partner at WilmerHale in London and a partner at Brobeck Hale and Dorr, the joint venture between Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison and Hale and Dorr.

Grew advises technology companies in venture capital transactions, public offerings and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. He regularly advises high technology (particularly Internet and computer software and hardware) companies with respect to their international business operations and transactions, as well as investment banks, venture capital firms and other financial intermediaries that serve technology companies.

Grew is also an active participant in Seedcamp, both as a mentor and a judge, and represents many of the Seedcamp winning companies.

Tim Bradshaw was appointed as the Financial Times first digital media correspondent four years ago, after several years of writing news and features on technology, business and investing. As a reporter for the FT in London, he covers a wide range of media, technology and marketing stories for the newspaper and the FT TechHub. He writes about trends in the tech industry, media company news, government policy and new innovations from the UK and Europe, as well as global social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. www.ft.com www.timbradshaw.net www.twitter.com/tim

Max has been working in the European technology industry for ten years. He joined Accel in 2012 to focus on consumer internet, mobile, gaming and SaaS investments. Prior to joining Accel, he founded, ran and sold Qwerly, a consumer data marketing business. Before Qwerly, Max was an investment professional at Atlas Venture in London, where he worked with portfolio companies Seatwave, DailyMotion, Zoopla and MOO. He began his entrepreneurial career by co-founding Myblog.de, Germany’s largest blogging community.

Max is an active angel investor in companies such as OneFineStay, Boticca, Skimlinks and Last.fm (acquired by CBS). He holds a Ph.D. in management from WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany, an M.Sc. from WHU as well as an M.Sc. from Ecole de Management Lyon in France

Jessica leads a team focused on growing Badoo’s diverse user base, enhancing the existing product, and expanding into new markets and languages. As well as contributing to the company’s product strategy and feature development, her team is responsible for business development, brand and marketing strategy, corporate communications and business analytics.

Powell has over a decade of experience in the digital space, working in Europe, the US and Asia as an executive. Most recently, she was Google’s Senior Director of Communications & Public Affairs, leading all aspects of external and internal communications strategy for the company in Asia-Pacific.

Rohan works across all areas of government policy, but has a particular passion for technology and innovation. He has led the development of key policies to improve the environment for enterprise in the UK, such as the EIS tax changes announced in Budget 2011, the Entrepreneur Visa, the Hargreaves Review of IP and the development of the Tech City cluster. Rohan is also driving the creative use of technology in government, for example through opening up government procurement, using crowdsourcing platforms to develop policy and setting government data free.

In September 2011, Rohan was appointed as a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is also a trustee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Battersea Arts Centre, Entrepreneur First and the Citizenship Foundation, and serves on the advisory board of Nick Hornby’s ‘Ministry of Stories’.

Omid Ashtari is Director of Business Development for foursquare and is focused on expanding the European footprint through strategic partnerships. Before joining foursquare, Omid spent 7 years with Google in Dublin, London and San Francisco. During his Google tenure he held multiple positions in sales and business development, working with a broad range of clients and partners across the globe. Omid holds a bachelor’s degree in European Business Administration from Cologne Business School Germany and graduated with Honors. He is currently based in London, UK.

His third internet start-up, Alastair founded Huddle with Andy McLoughlin as he was frustrated by existing enterprise technology’s inability to help people work together. Spending millions of dollars on a SharePoint implementation, only to watch it fail dismally, was the final straw. In contrast, collaboration apps in our social lives just worked. As a result, Huddle was born. Since setting up the company in 2006, Alastair has grown Huddle to 100 people in London and San Francisco, raised $15 million in funding and seen sales triple year on year.

Before Huddle, Alastair worked with Dunhumby, joining its board in 2005 to head up a 300 person global team, running their shopper loyalty practise. Prior to this he worked in online exchanges, building the first global soft commodities marketplace.

Alastair co-founded the popular DrinkTank event and spends his free time investing in and mentoring other start-ups.

Nancy Nemes, MBA, German-French double degree in Economics, is a tech trendsetter with 15 years of global experience in the IT&C industry, in various locations including Europe, USA, Canada, South America. Nancy is currently responsible for Microsoft’s entire Consumer Marketing capability with the objective of driving sales for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Windows Live, Internet Explorer, MSN, and Windows Phone products in Central & Eastern Europe.

In recent years, Nancy has pioneered, implemented and studied the impact of social network sites, twitter, blogging and other forms of Social, Mobile, and Local interactions aiming at building larger brand affinity and awareness. Nancy has taught business economics classes at the Wiesbaden Business School, and various languages at various centers for adult education across Germany, France, and Italy. She is also engaged in charitable activities benefiting her native country, Romania.

Alec Balasescu, PhD in Anthropology (2004 University of California, Irvine), author of “Paris Chic, Tehran Thrills. Aesthetic Bodies, Political Subjects” Zetabooks 2007 specialized in material culture and urban studies. Taught at the American University in Paris, UC Irvine, UC Critical Center in Paris, Royal University for Women in Bahrain, and National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest. Worked for Alpine Wealth Management in Bahrain (markets advisor) and Renault Technologies (responsible for socio-cultural and economic prospectives in Euro-mediterranean and Eurasia regions).

Based in Istanbul, currently deputy director of Romanian Cultural Institute, continuing his work as “stand-up Anthropologist”. His latest contribution is “Investment, Fashion and Markets in the Muslim World” in Handbook of Islamic Marketing.

Blogger, entrepreneur, small-time startup investor and advisor, as well as conference organizer.

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London.

She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect.

When it comes to work, she feels most comfortable speaking in English but can also speak Russian, Spanish and French (in descending order of competence).

Sitar Teli joined Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in London in 2005.  She’s currently a board member of SoundCloud, MegaZebra, Secret Sales and Handmade Mobile.  Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, she spent three years with technology M&A bank Broadview (now part of Jefferies), then she realized she enjoyed working closely with young technology companies far more than she enjoyed being a banker.  

Sitar’s focus is on early-stage consumer-focused internet and mobile companies based in Europe.  She prefers companies that have global ambition and are product and design oriented.

An entrepreneur with a strong tech background, Glenn began his computer career at the University of Kent with a degree in computer science. He has since built a tech career in a number of fields including television and media, banking and now as the founder of bookingbug.com. He is also involved in the East London Tech City initiative and was part of the UK delegation at the eG8 in Paris.

As Chief Scientist at salesforce.com, Rangaswami will focus on helping
salesforce.com’s European customers think about innovative ways to use Salesforce apps and the
Force.com platform.

Rangaswami joined salesforce.com in November 2010 as salesforce.com’s
first Chief Scientist.

Prior to joining, Rangaswami spent four years at BT in London, most recently
as Chief Scientist of the BT Group. He brings over 30 years’ of technology
experience to salesforce.com with large multinational companies.

Rangaswami is chairman of School of Everything, an educational start-up that
teaches a broad range of socially focused topics via the web. He is also a
venture partner at Anthemis Group.

Peter oversees LivingSocial’s UK, Ireland and Netherlands markets, communicating LivingSocial’s core strategy and overseeing growth as the next great consumer brand. Based in London, Peter is responsible for LivingSocial’s numerous markets in the UK and has developed a strong footprint in the UK & Irish group-buying space.

Prior to LivingSocial, Peter held senior positions at Microsoft and Thomson Reuters. He has also successfully built and managed a number of technology startups including VoIP company Howler Technologies, Gissing Software, and iView Multimedia where as CEO Peter oversaw its acquisition by Microsoft. He also founded Biometric Distribution, supplying fingerprint readers and iris scanners to leading companies before being acquired by Kyotec Securities.

Peter graduated from Bristol Business School with a degree in Business Studies.

Jason D. Whitmire joined Earlybird as a Venture Advisor in 2008, and was elected as Partner in 2010 and promoted to General Partner in 2011.

Jason has over 15 years of senior management experience in mobile platforms, wireless applications, and embedded and system software. At Earlybird he focuses on mobile internet, devices and networks, cloud computing, and digital media segments. He is currently on the board of Peak Games (Istanbul), Socialbakers (Prague) and conject (Munich).

Prior to Earlybird, Jason has been General Manager and Vice President at Wind River Systems Inc, where he founded and managed the company’s mobile business sector. After the acquisition through Intel in 2009, he advised Intel Corporation on its mobile
software strategy.

After co-founding Web 1.0 online auction company GoIndustry which disrupted the industrial asset resale space and was listed on AIM in 2006, Alex has invested in and advised several early stage businesses, including Skimlinks, MyBuilder, UserVoice, RentMineOnline, Conversocial, Brainient, Seedcamp I, Brave New Talent.  He has also co-founded explosive snowsports brand Faction Skis.

Alex is CEO of Latitude, one of Europe’s leading digital marketing firms which operates in Europe and the Middle East, and has a long history in internet and media stretching to work at Disney and McKinsey.  While American by birth, Alex is an outspoken advocate of the assets and advantages of internationally-focused companies drawing on European talent.

Alex has worked and lived in the UK, Germany, the US and Latin America and speaks the respective languages to varying degrees. While obtaining his BA from Stanford and MBA from Harvard, ever the entrepreneur, he co-founded the wine club at both.  Outside of his hectic schedule, Alex enjoys skiing, kite surfing and running.

Nic has been in Venture Capital since 2000. In that time he has worked in London, Europe and Silicon Valley. His main areas of focus have been
software and media. Nic’s investment experience includes Zeus Technology (acquired by Riverbed for $140m), buy.at (acquired by AOL for $125m) and
UltraDNS (acquired by Neustar – NYSE NSR). He currently sits on the boards of Conversocial, Tribold, and WAYN.

Prior to joining DFJ Esprit Nic was with Reuters Venture Capital, a software and services start-up called Operis; and Cap Gemini.

Nic also authors a popular blog commenting on the European technology and venture capital markets. Please see www.theequitykicker.com.