Lineup

Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor–founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3–is an entrepreneur, startup investor, and philanthropist. He currently spends much of his time at Kapor Capital, which invests in seed and early-stage startups whose success in business generates positive social impact.

Brad Feld

Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur for over twenty years. Brad is the co-founder of Foundry Group and also a co-founder of TechStars.

Rich Miner

Rich is based in Cambridge, MA, where he’s a Partner at Google Ventures. He has over 25 years of experience growing businesses with innovative communications and interface-intensive applications. Rich came to Google through the acquisition of Android, a mobile platforms company that he co-founded. During his early years at Google, he helped lead the development of the Android platform and ecosystem. Prior to Android, Rich was a Vice President at Orange, where he led R&D activities in North America and was an original principal at Orange Ventures when it was founded.

Brian Halligan

Brian Halligan is CEO & Co-Founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company he co-founded four years ago to help businesses transform the way they market their products by “getting found” on the internet. Brian was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011 New England award recipient. He is also an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at MIT.

Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh is the founder and CTO of HubSpot. HubSpot provides marketing software for small businesses. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has raised $59 million in venture capital, has over 5,000 customers and 260 employees. He also authors OnStartups.com, a popular startup blog with over 200,000 members in its online community. He is an active member of the Boston area entrepreneurial community, an angel investor in over 20 startups and a frequent speaker on the topic of startups and internet marketing.

Eric Paley

Eric Paley is a Managing Partner at Founder Collective, an early stage fund started by a team of entrepreneurs that launched companies and led them through successful exits. These founders are focused on helping the next generation of great entrepreneurs build important and lasting businesses. Previously, Eric was the CEO and a co-founder of Brontes, which was acquired in 2006 by 3M.

Erik Nordlander

Erik joined the Google Ventures team in 2010 as an engineering partner. He is based out of New York City. Along with his technical knowledge, he brings expertise in building top notch engineering teams and scaling complex systems. Prior to joining Google Ventures, Erik led the team that built Google’s next generation display ad serving system. He helped Google’s acquisition and technical integration for Doubleclick (DCLK) and led a team that built statistical modeling and machine learning models for Google’s ad businesses. Erik was also a developer on Google’s core engineering infrastructure, including a distributed file system that key products, such as Google.com and Gmail, rely on today.

Matt Lauzon

Matt Lauzon founded Gemvara as a student at Babson College. Gemvara was born when Matt uncovered a niche in the jewelry industry at the intersection of eCommerce and mass customization. His “meCommerce” vision provides everyone with a seamless online shopping experience to discover the perfect piece of jewelry. Taking notes from how Dell transformed PC customization, Zappos revolutionized online customer service and Netflix enabled the seamless discovery of movies, Matt is leading Gemvara to becoming the world’s fastest growing online jeweler. Matt already secured three rounds of funding totaling over $25M in financing from Highland Capital Partners, Canaan Partners and Balderton Capital, and is one of the only founders in the New England area, under age 30, to obtain VC funding in the past five years.

Reed Sturtevant

Reed is co-founder of Project 11, a firm that invests in and assists early-stage startups. He is a Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation. In his career Reed has written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, co-founded several companies, raised tens of millions of dollars of venture capital and built R&D teams at Microsoft, Eons and Idealab.
Reed is an MIT dropout and holds two software patents that perhaps should never have been issued.

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty has almost 30 years of diverse operating experiences in both IT and information services as CEO. Jim’s early career was at Lotus Development where he served as the General Manager of the Internet Division and a member of the Executive Committee at the time of the sale to IBM. After that Jim led four consecutive turnarounds for investors: IntraLinks, Gartner, Prodigy, and MataMatrix. All resulted in excellent outcomes for investors, such as Silver Lake, Kleiner Perkins, Integral Capital, Rho Capital, among others. He then joined Great Hill Partners as the Operating Partner working with 7 portfolio companies on their boards of directors and as an advisor to the CEOs, and in one case, as interim CEO. Jim is now co founder of a startup called Madaket, a Healthcare IT company based in Boston.

David Cancel

David Cancel is the Chief Product Officer at @HubSpot. He previously founded Performable a marketing software platform, as well as Ghostery, Lookery and Compete.

Andrew Cove

Andrew cove is a Venture Hacker at AngelList. He is the founder of Quirk, a mobile platform leveraging QR codes to make connections across social networks.

Frederic Lalonde

Fred Lalonde is the founder and chief executive of Hopper.
Previously, Fred was a vice president at Expedia, running product planning for Hotels and Packages for expedia.com.

Jennifer Lum

Jennifer Lum is a co-founder of Apricot Capital and a mentor for TechStars and 500 Startups. She was also a former VP at Quattro Wireless which was acquired by Apple in 2010. She has also worked at VeriSign, HP, Compaq, WebHosting.com and m-Qube.

Lee Hower

Lee’s spent his entire career as an entrepreneur and investor in startup companies. He’s currently a partner at NextView Ventures, a seed stage VC fund based in Boston. Previously he one of the co-founders of LinkedIn and served as Director of Corporate Development from inception through the company’s early growth years. He started his career as an early employee at PayPal, through the company’s IPO in 2002 and sale to eBay.

Antonio Rodriguez

Antonio is a general partner at Matrix Partners. Prior to Matrix, Antonio was CTO of HP’s consumer Imaging and Printing division. Prior to HP, Antonio was founder and CEO of Tabblo. Antonio’s areas of investment include consumer Internet, mobile, software and Internet infrastructure.

Drew Volpe

Drew Volpe is co-founder & CTO at Locately, a Boston-based company that specialized in location analytics for marketers, retailers, restaurants and consumer brands.

Philip Tan

Philip Tan is the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore.

Pedro T. Santos

Pedro earned an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2010 and launched OsComp Systems during his 2nd year at MIT. He has launched and sold two smaller ventures before joining grad school and was a member of the Dominican Republic junior national table tennis team in high school. Since the age of 6, he’s been involved with compressors in engineering, technical/field service, sales, and management roles, paying his way through college by working up the ladder in a compressor company.

Vanessa Green

Vanessa is CEO of OnChip Power, a MIT spin-out building miniature power supplies (think making the brick on your laptop the size of a quarter). Previously, Vanessa co-founded Community Water Solutions where she is still on the board, led the cleantech practice at TECOM Investments in Dubai, and earned a M.Eng. CEE and MBA from MIT Sloan.

Russell D. Greiff

Russell D. Greiff is the Chief Strategy & Development Officer for Grockit, Inc, an educational games company. Greiff leads the global adaptive and collaborative learning gaming platform for high school and university students.

Catherine Havasi

Catherine Havasi is a Research Scientist at MIT, and also organizes the Common Sense Computing Initiative. She co-founded an educational non-profit called Learning Unlimited and Luminoso, a text analytics consulting company.

Jeff Seibert

Jeff Seibert is a serial-entrepreneur, programmer, and designer. In his current role at Box.net, as Engineering Manager for the company’s Boston office, he oversees development of Apple-related software as well as Box’s backend content manipulation systems.

Nick Grossman

Nick is a civic technologist and entrepreneur, focusing on the intersection of cities, governments and the Internet. He is the co-founder and Managing Director of Civic Commons, a new nonprofit organization that helps governments collaborate on technology projects. Previously, he was a director at OpenPlans, where he led an incubator for new software businesses serving the urban planning and public transportation markets. Nick also serves on the board of directors of Code for America.

Karan Singh

Karan earned an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management as part of the dual-degree Harvard-MIT Health Science & Technology program, and a fellowship through the MIT Legatum Center for Development. He has worked at Humedica (venture-backed healthcare informatics), ZS Associates (management consulting for life-sciences clients) and Signal Point Partners (mobile ventures).

Daniel Zaharopol

Dan Zaharopol is the founder and CEO of Learning Unlimited, an education nonprofit that enables college student leaders to create programs where middle and high school students learn about everything from black holes to the history of video game music. He is additionally the founder and program director of the Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving for underserved NYC middle school students with talent in mathematics, and chairs the board of directors for the Mathematics Foundation of America.

Matthew Pearlson

Matthew Pearlson is a chemical engineer, and analyzed techno-economic and environmental impacts of the hydrotreating of renewable oil process for his master’s thesis at MIT. His work explored the details and nuances of this technology and provided an opportunity to think critically about the business potential of this project.

Ravi Mehta

Ravi Mehta is VP of Product at Viximo and an advisor at Fire Hose Games. He worked at Microsoft on a variety of entertainment initiatives including Xbox Live, several different game titles, and the MSN Gaming Zone. Prior to Microsoft, he started an entertainment software company, called Terminal Sunset Software, which developed and commercially released four titles.

Sean Lindsay

Sean is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Viximo, the largest independent platform connecting social applications with premium social networks. An experienced technical entrepreneur with a strong history designing and delivering new products to emerging markets, Sean is also an advisor to several early stage startups and coordinates the independent FounderMentors program. Previously, Sean served in a variety of engineering and technology leadership roles at PanGo, BEA, Upromise, and Novera.

Eitan Glinert

is the founder of Fire Hose Games. He makes games that are educational, accessible, and have a focus on interesting user interfaces. Before Fire Hose Games he was a graduate student at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT game lab, with research focused on intuitive and meaningful video game user interfaces.

Dhiraj Malkani

Dhiraj is a Principal at RockPort Capital. At Rockport, Dhiraj is an active member of the screening and diligence teams and has worked on multiple transactions in solar energy, transportation, advanced materials, energy storage, smart grid, consumer focused businesses, water and wind technologies. His passion is to incubate and nurture companies that will solve some of the most crucial energy and climate-change problems facing the planet. Dhiraj began his career at Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies as a Senior Product Engineer developing next-Generation optical components for Telecommunications. He received several U.S. patents for his inventions in MEMS technology before transitioning from pure engineering to evaluating early-stage photonics and life-science companies for Boston University’s Photonics Center business incubator program.

Rob Day

Rob Day is a Partner with Black Coral Capital, based in Boston. He has been a cleantech private equity investor since 2004, and acts or has served as a Director, Observer and advisory board member to multiple companies in the energy tech and related sectors.
Rob serves as the Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Clean Economy Network Education Fund (www.ceneducationfund.org), and also is the Chairman of the Cleantech Open – Northeast Region. Rob was previously a co-founder of the Renewable Energy Business Network, a non-profit organization which was acquired in 2009 by the Clean Economy Network. Since 2005 he has also authored the website Cleantech Investing (www.cleantechvc.com), which currently appears on GreentechMedia.com.

Matthew Nordan

Matthew Nordan is a vice president at Venrock, a premier venture capital firm originally established as the venture arm of the Rockefeller family. He focuses on breakthrough energy, environmental, and materials technologies from the firm’s Cambridge, MA office. Prior to Venrock, Matthew was president of Lux Research, an advisory services firm for science-driven innovation that he co-founded in 2004; earlier, he held a variety of senior management positions at emerging technology advisor Forrester Research in the U.S. and Europe. Matthew has testified before the U.S. Congress four times on emerging technology issues, advised the Committee to Review the National Nanotechnology Initiative of the National Academies, and is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies.

Soren Harrison

Soren Harrison is a scientist and entrepreneur with a strong background in engineering and physics, and a passion for energy and the environment. Soren completed his doctoral research at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center in October 2008, where he is now continuing related R&D. He founded Fusion Research Technologies, LLC in 2006 to perform R&D in the field of nuclear fusion research and transfer technology from the this field to mainstream commercial industries. In 2007, Soren founded SolSolution, an innovative nonprofit in the solar and education spaces. In 2008, Soren co-founded ARRIBA Solar, a metrology and process control company, to commercalize the technology developed for use during his Ph.D. in the solar PV manufacturing industry.

Mina Hsiang

Bio Coming

Jordan Meranus

Jordan Meranus has been an entrepreneur and education investor for the past twenty years. Jordan is a Partner at NewSchools Venture Fund and has led investments in and sits on the board of a variety of innovative education ventures, including Presence Telecare, BetterLesson, Revolution Foods, Acelero Learning, and a number of others. Previously Jordan was a co-founder of Jumpstart, a national nonprofit organization focused on early childhood education, and helped start MoverGuide Online, e-government business with the U.S. Postal Service.

Julia LeStage

Founder and CEO of Weathermob, a social weather service launching next month. LeStage is a 25-year veteran of the media industry. She is a former Head of Daytime and Strategy at Channel 4 (a UK National TV Broadcaster) and was responsible for commissioning the first series of Big Brother in the UK, which has continued to be the most successful television show in the history of British Television. LeStage’s programming has won Royal Television Awards, Broadcast Awards, People’s Choice Awards and BAFTAs.

Rene Reinsberg

Rene is the CEO and Co-Founder of Locu, a Cambridge-based company that came out of MIT and is creating the world’s largest semantically-annotated repository of real-time small-business data. Rene holds a diploma from WHU, Germany and a MBA from MIT Sloan.

Workshop Leaders

Hack/Reduce Infrastructure led by Fred Lalonde, Sebastien Rainville, Pascal Rainville and Greg Lu

Details about their workshop: Hack/Reduce is a big data hackathon where you can learn how to control big data and play around with a 500 node cluster. We have Hadoop and Map/Reduce experts present, datasets and the cluster.

Strategy to Execution in One Page led by Shajahan Merchant

Shajahan Merchant is a Serial Entrepreneur; his current venture is an enterprise technology consulting firm which was listed in the Inc fastest growing privately held companies list. Shajahan has received many awards for his online contributions and volunteer work; he is passionate about creating financially viable companies that can create social impact through innovation.

Machine Learning in Python using Divisi led by Rob Speer

Rob Speer is a co-founder of the text analytics company Luminoso. In his research at the MIT Media Lab, he has led the development of the semantic network ConceptNet and the inference tool Divisi, and he has also contributed to NLTK, the library for natural language processing in Python.

Tours of MIT Hobby Shop led by Brian Chan

Brian Chan is an artist and craftsman with more than 10 years of experience at MIT and Mass Art. Some of the specialties he has had over the years are Japanese swords, replica props, and musical instruments. Brian also enjoys designing complex origami (he is currently working on an origami book to be published through Origamihouse Japan) and painting. He works at the MIT Hobby shop, and hopes to continue teaching fine craftsmanship and design

The Tinkerer’s Guide to Motion Control led by Amir Hirsch, BS ’06 EECS/Math, MEng ’07 EECS

Once a 6.111 TA, after MIT, Amir built a PDP-11/70 emulator on FPGAs as a hardware replacement for a Ontario Power Generation nuclear reactor controller. Amir started ZigFu, an app-framework for motion control apps, which recently went through YCombinator in Summer 2011.

Rapid Prototyping, Creativity, and Open Hardware led by Kawandeep Virdee

Kawandeep Virdee researches group and societal behavior at the New England Complex Systems Institute and creates hackable tools, social environments, and generative art through his organization Which Light

Visualizing Ideas led by Nathan Cooke

Nathan grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives somewhere in between Cambridge, Nairobi and Delhi. Working for D-Lab at MIT, and Sanergy. He spends his free time reading, running, drawing and photographing things.

Unity for Beginners led by Naomi Hinchen

Naomi Hinchen is a recent MIT alum and first-year MEng student in Course 6-3 (Computer Science). She’s worked with the GAMBIT lab for two years, including two summer projects (Poikilia and The Snowfield).

Leveraging Design led by Mario Bollini

Mario Bollini is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering. His research interests include design, robotics and international development. He is a co-inventor of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a
novel lever powered wheelchair for developing countries. He has worked in East Africa developing projects through the MIT Mobility Laboratory.

Analytics with a Dash of Data led by Fred Benenson

Fred Benenson has been with Kickstarter since they were a 6 person startup with no office space and only a thousand launched projects. He works on data analysis, feature development, and community outreach and support. Previously, he was Creative Commons‘ representative in NYC, and led a generation of student activism focused on free culture. He’s taught undergrad and graduate students at NYU in copyright and cyberlaw and is a contributor to Wired Magazine.
http://www.twitter.com/mecredis

DIY Bio led by Charles Fracchia and Mac Cowell

Charles Fracchia is currently at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School doing bionanotech research. He just finished a research internship at IBM and recently graduated with my BSc from Imperial College London in Biology. Previously he worked at Ginkgo Bioworks and the Pasteur Institute.

Mac Cowell

Mac Cowell cofounded diybio in 2008 and Cofactor Bio in 2011.

Diybio is an open-ended community that promotes the democratization of biotechnology, comprised today by thousands of self-identified participants worldwide and about a dozen community labs. See diybio.org for more info.

Cofactor Bio is a small bay-area startup focused on building tools and services that simplify molecular biology and synthetic biology tool-chains. Cofactor’s first product, GENELASER, is a radically affordable kit that includes the entire reagent and equipment toolchain needed to extract and amplify fragments of genomic DNA. GENELASER lets anyone read DNA for about the price of a t-shirt. Consider reading some genes at cofactorbio.org.

Feedback – Creating an Instrument led by Jason Sidney Sanford and Zachary Katz

Jason Sanford is a professor, artist and performer. He is the founder of Neptune, a band for which Jason has been building instruments, writing songs, and performing continually since 1994. Neptune continues to tour internationally and their seventh full length album, “Silent Partner”, will be released in October. Jason currently teaches the “Electronics for Artists” course at the Massachusetts College of Art and has taught performance art at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Zachary Katz

Zachary Katz is an entrepreneur and educator. With Jason he has been organizing and teaching Electronic Projects Night, an informal DIY electronics workshop for artists, intermittently since 1999. Zach is the founder and owner-operator of King’s Tutor Tutoring which teaches creative approaches to problem solving in conventional educational settings.