Damon Cortesi is CTO and co-founder of a social media company called Untitled Startup. Although addicted to web application development the past two years, Damon has spent the majority of the past ten years as a computer security consultant. Most recently, he worked in the payment card industry and web application security spaces. He provided consulting and training services for several financial industry and Fortune 500 clients. During that time, Damon has developed in a number of languages and built websites using classic PHP/MySQL as well as modern frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Django.
Brady Forrest is Chair for O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 and co-Chairs Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and NYC. Brady writes for O’Reilly Radar tracking changes in technology. He started Ignite, a geek event which has spread to over a hundred cities worldwide (including Seattle). Brady lives in Seattle, where he builds robots and cars for Burning Man and competes for Mayor of finer establishments. You can track his web travels at Truffle Honey or @brady.
Vanessa Fox, called a “cyberspace visionary” by Seattle Business Monthly, is an expert in understanding customer acquisition from organic search. She shares her perspective on how this impacts marketing and user experience at ninebyblue.com and provides authoritative search-friendly design patterns for developers at janeandrobot.com. She’s also an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and host of the weekly podcast Office Hours. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search and was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. She was recently named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Look for her book Marketing in the Age of Google available now.
Jeremy Lightsmith spends most of his time & energy building highly performant software development teams. A seasoned agile coach, trainer & facilitator, Jeremy excels at creating environments where teams can discover how they work best. He has a deep understanding of agile, and is constantly looking for better ways to share knowledge and collaborate. As a presenter, Jeremy favors interactive and group techniques and pulls from disciplines as diverse as Theatre Improv and Montessori.
Though Jeremy is now an independent consultant in Seattle, most of his 12 year career has been spent at companies like ThoughtWorks and Pivotal. He is currently writing a book about Facilitation Patterns.
Scott Porad is the CTO of the Cheezburger Network, the company behind the hugely popular I Can Has Cheezburger? and Failblog.org. The Cheezburger Network is a collection of web sites where every day millions of people share moments of joy through the humor and wonder of LOL.
Since 1995, Scott has been building industry leading web sites in online media, user-generated content, online communities and e-commerce. His previous experience includes launching drugstore.com, working on ESPN.com at Paul Allen’s Starwave Corporation and for Seth Godin at Yoyodyne Entertainment.
Scott lives online at http://scottporad.com and in real life with his family in Seattle.
Anthony Stevens is a software engineer and technical entrepreneur. In 2008 he started Crowdify (http://crowdify.com), the crowd-driven brand opinion network. Over the past 15 years he’s worked at a variety of Seattle-area software companies, ranging in size from one-person startups to Microsoft. He has a passion for Agile software development, lean startups, and best practices. On the side, he’s a writer, blogger, consultant, and startup junkie who can be found at many of the tech events around town. You can reach him at anthonys@crowdify.com.
Bob Walsh is the author of The Web Startup Success Guide, co-hosts the Startup Success Podcast and founded http://startuptodo.com (a training/productivity community for startups).
Over the years Bob has written 4 other books for startups including Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality, presented at both European Software Conference and the Software Industry Conference, and co-moderates the Joel On Software Business of Software forum and Answers.Onstartups.com answer board.
His blog, 47hats, covers topics interesting startups. Bob provides consulting services to startups including web site copywriting, market positioning, social media and product strategies.
Galen Ward is the Co-Founder and CEO of Estately.com a profitable real estate search website based in Seattle. He developed and designed Estately with Co-Founder Doug Cole on a vision and a shoestring budget through launch. Today Estately is in 10 states and is doubling in traffic every few months (they’re hiring developers!). Galen is passionate about building fantastic experiences that delight users, but he also enjoys A/B testing the resulting experiences to wring out the best experiences for users.
Tony Wright is Founder and CEO of RescueTime, a venture-backed startup that helps businesses and individuals understand how they spend their time. Before that Tony started and sold a software startup in the recruiting space to Jobster.
Tony has been featured in a front page article in “The New York Times” and has presented at several tech conferences. He blogs at tonywright.com although you may see him on “Business Week” and Venture Hacks.
Poornima Vijayashanker graduated from Duke University with a double degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. After graduating she headed out to Silicon Valley, where she first worked for Synopsys as an R&D Engineer, and started working towards a Masters in CS at Stanford. She left her Masters to join Mint.com in 2006 as the third employee, and stayed until its Intuit Acquisition in late 2009 for $170 Million. In January 2010 she left Mint.com to start BizeeBee.com, and is currently its CEO and Founder. Aside from being a coder, entrepreneur, speaker, and mentor to junior engineers, Poornima blogs on Femgineer.com, tweets @poornima and is an avid traveler, foodie, and a competitive Bikram yogini.
