Experts

Harry Stebbings is Founder at 20VC, Stride.VC.

Harry Stebbings

Toku

Geoff Teehan is VP, Head of Design, Meta FinTech. He began his career in digital media in 1996, working as a designer for an Internet startup. He moved on to run his own design firm, building some of the first Flash sites on the web. He then joined Modem Media in 1999, where he worked as Associate Creative Director. During his tenure there he created effective and award-winning work for a variety of US and Canadian clients. 

Geoff founded Teehan+Lax with his business Partner Jon Lax in 2002. He has been designing digital products there ever since. He and his company have been featured in countless publications and is often referred to as one of the premier product design firms in the world. In 2014, Teehan+Lax was named the Net Awards Agency of the Year.

Geoff lead a cross-functional team consisting of designers, engineers and planners that has help shape products for Google, Medium, Yahoo, Prismatic, Flipboard, YouTube, Kifi, Virgin, Shipwire, Nuvango, Weather Network, LG, Globe and Mail, Blackberry, Readability and more.

Throughout his career, he has received international acclaim for his work, winning Cannes Lions, ADDY awards, and CMA RSVP awards. He has also received top honours from W3, The WebAwards, MITX, Flash in the Can, Marketing Magazine, and the Advertising & Design Club of Canada. 

Geoff has received the honour of representing Canada as a Jury member for many top tier award shows like Cannes Lions, Clio, One Show, D&AD and the London International Awards. 

In 2015, Geoff went to Facebook after being acquihired alongside a number of his peers. He continues to act as the Product Design Director for News Feed—the largest surface on the internet.

Geoff Teehan

Michael Arrington most recently Co-Founded CrunchFund after leading TechCrunch to a successful exit with AOL. His venture investments include Uber, Airbnb and Pinterest. Michael was the Editor of TechCrunch, which he founded in 2005. In 2008 Time Magazine named Michael “One of the World’s 100 most influential people”. Michael also practiced securities law at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Michael graduated from Stanford Law School and  Claremont McKenna College.

Michael Arrington

Co-Founder and CTO of NEAR Protocol. Team of ex-MemSQL / Google / Tensorflow. Now building sharded mobile-first blockchain protocol.

Artificial Intelligence Researcher. Making this world better with software and data. Passionate about Machine Intelligence, understanding natural language.

Illia is an ICPC finalist and has more than 10 years of industry experience, including 3 years at Google where he was a major TensorFlow contributor and a manager of the team building question answering capabilities for the core Google search.

Illia Polosukhin

Tim Draper is founder of DFJ Venture Capital, Draper Associates, Draper University, Innovate Your State.

He helps entrepreneurs drive their visions through funding, education, media, and government reform. He has founded thirty Draper venture funds, Draper University, Bizworld, and two statewide initiatives to improve governance and education.

Tim Draper

David Marcus is Co-Founder & CEO at Lightspark. Formerly the Head of Messaging Products at Facebook.

David was President of PayPal from April 2012 to July 2014, where he has overall responsibility for establishing PayPal as the leading global payment service and helping to drive the future of money around the world. A mobile payments entrepreneur and product innovator, David brings a wealth of experience creating products that engage and delight customers – both businesses and consumers alike. Most recently, David was PayPal’s vice president of mobile, where he led the company’s mobile business and product strategy, including the development and launch of PayPal Here.

David has more than 15 years of mobile and telecommunications experience worldwide and has a proven track record of starting and leading successful businesses. He joined PayPal in the company’s acquisition of Zong, a leading provider of payments through mobile carrier billing. Under David’s leadership as founder and CEO, Zong developed relationships with more than 250 carriers and more than 1,000 online merchants.

A native of France, David grew up in Paris and Geneva. At 23, he started his first company, GTN, which became one of the top three alternative carriers in Switzerland and was acquired by World Access in 2000. David first began learning how to become a technology entrepreneur at age 8, when he taught himself how to code on a PC.

David Marcus

Jae Kwon is a blockchain software architect and co-founder of Tendermint, and the president of the Interchain Foundation.

After graduating from Cornell in 2005 with a B.S. degree in computer science, he worked as a professional developer in Silicon Valley, including at Alexa, and at Yelp where he led the mobile application development team. He also cofounded iDoneThis, a productivity service.

Jae has worked on numerous open-source projects, including a CoffeeScript compiler/interpreter written in Javascript, an end-to-end encrypted email system called Scramble.io, and a cryptocurrency exchange. These projects were inspired by the cryptopunk hacker ethos, which ultimately led to the current work with Tendermint.

Jae has been working on a project he created in 2014, called Tendermint. He initially invented and refined (with Ethan Buchman and Zarko Milosevic) the Tendermint consensus algorithm and implementation with the aim of liberating the blockchain from the costs and drawbacks of proof-of-work mining. His mission is to make this technology more accessible, in order to accelerate the adoption of decentralized ledger technology.

Jae is also the President of the Interchain Foundation, based in Zug, Switzerland. The Interchain Foundation (aka ICF) was founded with the mission to promote the vision of Cosmos, the internet of blockchains, to enable public blockchain interoperability and scalability.

Jae Kwon

Dan Morehead is the CEO of Pantera Capital, an investment firm focused exclusively on digital currency and blockchain technology. He also sits on the Board of Directors at Bitstamp, one of the world's largest Bitcoin exchanges. Previously, Morehead held senior roles at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Tiger Management.

Dan Morehead

AI, blockchain, Founder & CTO of BigchainDB, Ocean Protocol, IPDB Foundation.

Trent McConaghy has 20 years of deep technology experience with a focus on machine learning, data visualization and user experience. He was a researcher at the Canadian Department of Defense and in 1999, he co-founded Analog Design Automation Inc. and was its CTO until its acquisition by Synopsys Inc. In 2004, he co-founded Solido Design Automation Inc., once again in the role of CTO.

Trent has written two critically acclaimed books on machine learning, creativity and circuit design and has authored or co-authored more than 40 papers and patents.

Trent has a PhD in Engineering from KU Leuven, Belgium and Bachelor’s degrees in Engineering and in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan where he won awards for the top PhD thesis and top undergraduate thesis.

Trent McConaghy

Ryan Selkis is Founder and CEO of Messari. Entrepreneur, investor, and writer helping to build the bitcoin / digital currency ecosystem. Founder of Messari, and formerly an entrepreneur-in-residence at ConsenSys, and founding team member at the industry's most active investor (Digital Currency Group) and largest media brand (CoinDesk). Working on new ventures and angel investing.

Ryan Selkis was the Managing Director at CoinDesk, a site providing the latest news, analysis, and insights in the cryptocurrency and blockchain spaces. Prior to CoinDesk, Selkis was the Director of Growth for Digital Currency Group, an investment firm focused on the crypto space. He holds an MBA from MIT School of Business.

Harry Stebbings

Founder at 20VC.

Harry Stebbings Introduction

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