FN Summit

Vishal Gurbuxani was the co-founder of Mobclix, the Largest Mobile Ad Exchange, which was acquired by Velti in October of 2010 for $50M. He then led Velti through an IPO as Chief Technology Officer. He has worked in 5 startups and been through 3 successful exits. He has seen first-hand the differences between what makes a company great versus what makes a company fail as a Founder as well as Angel Investor. Vishal graduated with honors with a Bachelor of Science and Masters in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University. 

Paul Caswell is an award-winning innovator, technologist and educator. He founded Weave Technology in 2008, a milestone reflecting the significant difference he has made in the lives of businesses and people over the last 20 years. Weave Technology’s first product is Weave The People, launched in 2009. Weave The People helps companies unleash the potential of their people through more effective, face-to-face meetings. Paul has been coding since he was 13, when he developed simple games on a personal computer that his uncle built from a kit. Early in his career, Paul worked with—and was mentored by—a group of pioneers who enabled computers to talk to each other before the Internet became mainstream. Paul graduated with honors and received a bachelors of science degree in mathematics from Imperial College in London. He did graduate studies in education at Oxford University.

Fundraising facilitators include:

Nina Bhatti, Ph.D. is the scientist who created the world's first accurate color cosmetics app. Color Match, one of Nina's inventions at HP Labs,"the holy grail of the industry" is a mobile cosmetics advisor application. In 2013, with the spirit of being a true innovator, Nina founded Kokko Inc. It's mission: to bring the accurate color sensing technology to mobile devices enabling greater consumer confidence in online shopping. She has raised funding from several Angel Investors and will be sharing her story and learnings. Prior to Kokko, Nina spent 17 years building and delivering first-of-a-kind products in web services, mobile, and cloud technologies at HP, Nokia, and Tektronix. She holds 22 patents, 16 in imaging.  She is a renowned business and leadership speaker. She holds a PhD from Univ. of Arizona, and a BS from Berkeley. 

Tejal Shah is Co-Founder & CEO of KidAdmit. KidAdmit is a fast growing marketplace for children’s programs. Tejal also co-founded Peninsula Wealth, an independent wealth management firm. Before co-founding KidAdmit, Tejal focused on implementing special programs in elementary schools. She has 10+ years of professional experience to building successful businesses and her passion lies in early childhood education. Tejal holds an engineering degree from University of Rochester as well as a 2nd degree black belt in Karate. 

Matt Oscamou is Founder/CEO of Frontier Snacks. Frontier Snacks is a a new bite-size snack using only simple, clean ingredients. After perfecting the recipe, the Frontier brand was born. Months later, Nate (Matt's brother and co-founder) passed away in a river-rafting accident. Struck by the loss of his brother, he knew the best way to honor Nate was to continue what they had started. Via bootstrapping, crowdfunding and now investment from Jeff Weiner and others, Matt has scaled the Frontier Bites brand and has scale and distribution to Whole Foods, Costco and more. Matt will be sharing his interesting story about penetrating Silicon Valley with an a-typical product and fundraising approach. Matt holds a BS in Civil Engineering from Santa Clara University.

Consumer Internet, Enterprise, Mobile & More

J. Galen Buckwalter is Chief Scientist for Payoff. He works to identify traits and characteristics that will allow a broader segment of the population to access financial services. The algorithms he's developed over his career provide information toward the solution of a range of real world problems, from finances, the work place, the family and even dating. Galen was founding CSO of eHarmony. Prior to the launch of eHarmony he worked to develop and validate the patented process for assessing and matching couples for long-term relationship satisfaction. He is lead inventor on the patent for this matching process. After the launch of eHarmony, he developed a world class R&D Department as the company's original Chief Scientific Officer. Galen holds a PhD. in Clinical Psychology from Fuller Theological Seminary. 

Arun Agrahri co-founded Airseed in 2012 and served as its Chief Technology Officer before its acquisition in April 2015. Prior to that, Arun worked at NetApp where he enjoyed building large scale systems. Currently, he is Vice President, Engineering at Vurb. Arun has expertise in search relevance, distributed systems, security, e-commerce, full stack development, building distributed scalable systems, technical recruiting and is an entrepreneur at heart.  Arun is a University of Minnesota graduate with 2 Computer Science degrees.

Mark Fromson is the co-founder and CEO of LocalSolo.com, a curated talent marketplace of over 17,000 top local freelance professionals. Prior to LocalSolo, Mark was a boutique agency owner and freelance digital project manager and user experience architect with 17 years’ experience at 12 digital agencies in the US and Canada. He’s played roles in over 500 digital projects for such clients as Starbucks, Sony, Nike, Adobe, Microsoft, Disney, Time Warner and CBS. Mark is an avid surfer and former pro high diver, trapeze artist and international diving judge. He holds a Masters in Communications from Illinois State University.

William Hsu, Founder of Mucker Capital spent his career as both an entrepreneur and executive of a Fortune 100 company.  Prior to Mucker Capital, William was SVP and CPO of AT&T Interactive. In 3 years at AT&T, he doubled revenue to over $1B. At 23 he founded BuildPoint – the leader in bidding management & marketplace services for the commercial construction industry. William helped the company grow to over 250 employees and raised $50M+ and was acquired in 2004. William received an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Stanford.

Daniel Hoffer, Partner at Tandem Capital, focuses his efforts on new consumer Internet and related opportunities. Dan was previously Founder/CEO of CouchSurfing. He has expertise in product ideation and development in the pursuit of new opportunities, team and company building, fundraising, business development, and deal structuring, strategy. He received an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Harvard College.

Sanjit Dang is an Investment Director at Intel Capital. He drives investments in Client Computing across Consumer and Enterprise sectors. He has also driven several investments in Big Data, IoT and Cloud Computing. Sanjit has over a decade of Exec leadership experience in Product Design, Business Development and Strategy across several domains: Big Data, Natural Language Processing, 3D Camera/Apps, Supply-Chain Analytics and Flash Memory. He has managed Billion dollar accounts and executed >30 partnership deals in $100M-$2B range. Sanjit holds a PhD in Engineering from University of Illinois.

Prashant Shah is Managing Director of TiE LaunchPad, an accelerator for enterprise startups. He is also an active Charter Member of TiE Silicon Valley, a member of its Board of Directors, and Co-Chair of TiE Angels. Prashant has been an early stage venture investor since 2001. Previously, he was with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an early stage VC focused on enterprise and infrastructure software. Prior to Hummer Winblad, Prashant spent many years defining and launching high tech products. His background spans all seven layers of the OSI stack with product management roles at enCommerce (acquired by Entrust), Cypress Semiconductor and AT&T. Prashant received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Biodynamic wines

Hosted by fract

Gil Penchina is a serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor. He currently runs a $4mm per deal seed fund via AngelList that is crowd-sourced from 500+ influential Silicon Valley angels. He is a co-founder of Fastly, Board member at Vouch Financial. Previously he was CEO of Wikia, now a top 50 website and a member of the pre-IPO team at eBay.  He has a Bachelors in Engineering from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Kellogg.

Ranan Lachman is Founder & CEO of Pley. Pley is a sharing economy platform for families and building the next generation of play. Pley allows families to create and consume educational toys in a more affordable and eco-friendly way. Aside from growth, Ranan has expertise in early-stage fundraising (pley has raised $15M) and crowdsourcing.  He is also working on his first book. Previously Ranan was Managing Director & Co-Founder at Greencrest Capital Management, a tech investment banker at Oppenheimer, and an Israeli Air Force fighter pilot.