Bryan Finkel
Bryan Finkel
Bryan Finkel, Managing Director of Greenwich Venture Management, has over 25 years of investment banking and operational consulting experience in the information technology and financial services sectors. Recent client engagements include the development of lead generation and call center analytics for a major student loan consolidator and the design of a multi-retailer loyalty incentive program for a $20 billion oil company. Prior to GVM, Bryan ran two venture funds for Advanta (NASDAQ: ADVNB), where he reported to the Office of the Chairman. Earlier in his career he was a Senior Associate at Broadview Associates where he participated in the valuation and sale of Iris Associates (creator of Lotus Notes!) and the venture round for Checkpoint Technologies (NASDAQ: CKPT). Prior to Broadview he founded a manufacturer of scientific computing products for movie special effects and communications. Bryan earned his MS and BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and his MBA from Stanford. He recently stepped down after ten years as Chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC and continues to advise a wide variety of private companies.
Erik Freed
Erik Freed
Erik Freed has been active in the computer industry for over two decades, comfortably switching between multitudes of demanding roles. He has at various times been a hardware/software engineer, architect, consultant, writer, manager, executive, board member, spokesman, and founder. He is currently the principal at CoDecision, specializing in CTO level consulting to startups. Erik studied Math, Physics and Music at Yale University.
Dan Martin
Dan Martin
Dan Martin works with The Trust for Public Land as a project manager on the Sierra Team, where he purchases land from ranchers and timber companies to create or expand parks in the region. He is on the Campaign Committee for the Northern Sierra Partnership and is a Board Member of Sempervirens Fund. Prior to his work in land conservation, Dan served as Vice President of Business Development at HomeGain, Inc., where he led Online marketing efforts that brought approximately 5 million unique visitors per month to the company's website. Today Dan advises start-up companies in the software, Internet, energy efficiency, and real estate space on all phases of raising capital, marketing, and business development.
Sam Shank
Sam Shank
Sam Shank is the Co-founder and CEO of HotelTonight, the on-demand mobile hotel booking app. A travel-obsessed serial entrepreneur, Sam previously founded and was CEO of DealBase.com, a travel deals search engine, and was CEO of TravelPost.com, a hotel reviews site. SideStep acquired TravelPost.com and Sam stayed on as VP of business development until its fortunate acquisition by Kayak. Sam also worked in comparison shopping at Excite, CNET and NexTag. Sam attended the University of Virginia and received an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Jonathan Abrams
Jonathan Abrams
Jonathan Abrams is the founder and CEO of Nuzzel, a social, real-time platform that allows users to see the news that their friends share. He was also the creator of the pioneering social network Friendster in 2002. Previously, he founded social event sharing site Socializr and bookmarking community HotLinks after working as a software engineer at companies such as Netscape and Nortel. He is the co-owner of San Francisco's new modern speakeasy Slide, and an investor in Vintage 415's restaurant Mamacita. Jonathan has also co-hosted parties in San Francisco with organizations such as GenArt, Hands on Bay Area, Delicious Karma, Mixed Elements, Donovan, and Martel & Nabiel. He is a member of the advisory board of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs and has been extensively involved in the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial community, including past roles such as co-chair of the SDForum Venture Finance SIG. He's been a judge for the Stanford Entrepreneur's Challenge business plan contest, the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, and the Stanford-Berkeley Innovators' Challenge. Jonathan holds an Honors BS in Computer Science from McMaster University.
ChengXiang Zhai
ChengXiang Zhai
ChengXiang Zhai is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University in 1990 and another Ph.D. in Language and Information Technologies from Carnegie Mellon in 2002. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning and bioinformatics, and he has published over 100 papers in major conferences and journals in these areas, including five award papers. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems and Information Processing and Management, and serves on the editorial board of the Information Retrieval Journal. He is a program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004 , NAACL HLT 2007, and ACM SIGIR 2009. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has received many awards, including the 2004 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the 2008 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2007 Microsoft Beyond Search - Semantic Computing and )nternet Economics Award, the 2009 IBM Faculty Award, the 2010 UIUC Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2011 HP Innovation Research Award.