Top Founders

Philip Soffer has been the CEO of test IO since May of 2016, splitting his time between Berlin and the SF Bay Area. Prior to test IO, he held senior leadership roles in product, development, and marketing at Plumtree Software, Lithium Technologies, and Piazza.

In 2010, Drew Sheahan started a GPS Fleet Tracking Business from his up-stairs bedroom that would eventually rank #126 on the 2014 INC500 List. He sold that company in 2016 to pursue solving the #1 issue he encountered while scaling a business that generates website leads. That business became BirdSeed.io

Alex Bates is an angel investor and a Member of Peter Diamandis's Abundance 360 Network. He has spent the last decade bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the forefront of the industrial market. From leading DARPA funded research in neural networks, to applying analytics for the world's largest data warehouses at Teradata, to creating Mtell, a machine learning company acquired...

Matthew is a seasoned growth-stage technology investor and career VC, having originated, managed and completed dozens of transactions. As General Partner at Plaza Ventures, Matt specializes in deal flow, investment transaction processing, ecosystem development and investor relations. He sits on the board of numerous companies, as well as various accelerators and charities.

Software veteran Dave Keil brings a growth-oriented leadership approach to his job as CEO of QASymphony. For more than 25 years Dave has built a strong track record of business success. Prior to QASymphony, Dave was CEO of Digistrive, a provider of e-commerce solutions to large membership based organizations. He grew and eventually sold that business to a large private company. Before joining Digi...

Jeremy has spent the last 15 years in the tech-industry as a serial entrepreneur, startup adviser, and occasional investor. Jeremy has helped dozens of B2B companies drive adoption of digital commerce, and is still an active board member at a number of fintech companies. He started his career in technology as an engineer at nanotech startup Digital Instruments, which was acquired by Veeco (NASDAQ:...

After working inside newspapers for 10+ years, Lloyd started OwnLocal to fix the business of news. With initial seed investment from Y Combinator, OwnLocal has grown to work with 276,000 SMBs through 3,500 newspaper partners all over the world. Today, OwnLocal is profitable and growing with 8-figure revenues.

James is the founder and CEO of Adzerk, an API company that powers native ads, promotions, and sponsored listings for companies like Ticketmaster, Wattpad, imgur, and many others. Prior to Adzerk, James co-founded TekPub which was acquired by PluralSight.

Web entrepreneur with an IT background working on his second startup.

Chad Rubin (Ecommerce Renegade) builds e-commerce businesses. Fresh out of college and Wall Street, he took his family vacuum business online and built his own direct to consumer e-commerce business called Crucial Vacuum. He grew it from 0 a $20 million dollar valuation in just 7 years. He happens to be a top 250 Amazon seller. He co-founded Skubana with DJ Kunovac and built one of e-commerce's ho...

For the first 18 years of my career, I built and scaled sales organizations at both Gartner and CEB. The corporate cultures instilled a sales rigor and discipline that has helped me to appreciate the complexities of sales management, operations, as well as the development of reps and their managers.

Serial Entrepreneur (1 Acquisition & 2 disastrous failures prior to this venture) and Online Advertising expert with more than 8 years of experience in advertising for retail brands and their retail locations.

Deb Noller is the dynamic CEO and co-founder of Switch Automation, a smart building software company specializing in building performance optimization. With 20+ years of experience in real estate, technology and sustainability, she is passionate about helping enterprises leverage next-generation facilities management technology to execute more efficient business operations.

Chris started Versium six years ago with the vision of helping marketers to utilize data and data technologies to improve their marketing and ROI. He lives and breathes technology innovation. Being involved in several early-stage technology ventures, his success spans enterprises in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS spaces.

Angam Parashar is a founder of ParallelDots. He is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. After his graduation and before starting ParallelDots, he worked as a consultant at Opera Solution, a niche big data consulting firm.

Lover of dogs, people, uncontrollable laughter, and of course water fountains

Nicole Verkindt is the Founder & CEO of Canadian technology company, OMX (theomx.com). Previously, she led a high tech manufacturing business selling to Governments around the world. Nicole is on the Board of the Canadian Crown Corporation, CCC (Canadian Commercial Corporation) that performs government to government contracts between Canada and other countries around the world. She is also on the...

CEO & founder of Pingboard, which provides live org charts & planning software to thousands of companies. Prior to Pingboard, Bill was CTO & co-founder of Webmail, the largest B2B email provider before Gmail. After Webmail was acquired by Rackspace, Bill co-founded Capital Factory, which helps entrepreneurs in Austin build great companies