Business Today's 4th Annual Start @ A Startup Conference Booklet

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Co-Sponsored By

4th Annual Conference

October 10-11, 2015 | Metropolitan West, NYC


PRESENTED BY KEYNOTE SPONSORS

STARTUPS


WELCOME Kelly Zhou Conference Director

Dear Attendees, I am excited to welcome you all to the 4th Start @ a Startup Conference, presented by Business Today, Sequoia Capital, and Yik Yak. Business Today was founded in 1968 with the mission of bridging the communication gap between undergraduate students and leading executives. Forty-five years after its founding, Business Today took on the challenge of adapting its mission to take on the world of tech, startups, and entrepreneurship with its first Start @ a Startup Conference. Now in its fourth iteration, the conference has become the largest in Business Today’s 47-year history, with 250 outstanding students and 30 incredible startups participating this year. The overwhelmingly large and talented pool of applications we received for this conference is evidence of the incredible growth, excitement, and interest in the startup world today. As selected attendees, you have already distinguished yourselves as innovative leaders in the space, and we hope that you take full advantage of this opportunity to actively meet and engage with the students and startup leaders attending the event. This year’s conference brings together some of the most revolutionary and inspiring companies and tech leaders from the startup world. These people have developed ideas and built technologies from the ground up to transform the world we live in today. Varying in industry, size, and customer segment, these startups share the same unwavering determination to generate unique ideas and drive them to success. They have changed the way we live our lives—the way we travel, the way we learn, the way we invest—and continue to solve new problems each day. Over the course of this weekend, we hope that you are able to better understand the incredible technical and business challenges these startup leaders are tackling and the entrepreneurial approaches they are taking to do so successfully. We are confident that you will leave this weekend with a stronger sense of inspiration, drive, and excitement, and we look forward to the innovations you bring in the future. Thank you, and have a great weekend. Sincerely, Kelly Zhou Startup Conference Director


CONFERENCE STAFF

Startup Conference Organizers KELLY ZHOU Startup Conference Director SHEFALI JAIN Chief of Staff WAQARUL ISLAM Assistant Director of Startup Experience PETER HOLT Assistant Director of Student Relations MIHIKA KAPOOR Assistant Director of Marketing and Content SAM CABOT Assistant Director of Logistics NATALIA PERINA Assistant Director of Technology

Business Today Officers VAASVI GOYAL President ERIC DOBOSH Director of Strategy CHANDLER STERLING Editor-in-Chief of Magazine ISABELA PENA-GONZALEZ Editor-in-Chief of Online Journal COLLEEN KANG International Conference Director KELLY ZHOU Startup Conference Director OLIVER QUINTERO Seminar Series Director KRISTEN MCNIERNEY Director of Membership & Outreach EMILY SPEYER Director of Web,Tech & Analytics MIHIKA KAPOOR Director of Design STERLING SIPP Director of Finance & Corporate Contacts DANIEL TORO Director of Investments


2014

2013 Sponsors

Business Today would like to thank the following companies for their generous support. Our programs, including the Start @ A Startup Conference, would not be possible without them and the scores more who have supported us over the past

47 years.



SCHEDULE SATURDAY OCTOBER 10TH Start End

Description

7:00 AM 11:00 AM 11:30 AM 12:00 PM 12:30 PM 1:20 PM 2:00 PM 2:40 PM 3:30 PM 4:10 PM 4:30 PM 5:20 PM 6:10 PM 6:20 PM 7:00 PM 7:10 PM

Check-In at Hotel Students Check-In at Metropolitan West Lunch Opening Remarks from BT/Sequoia Yik Yak Keynote: Tyler Droll Discussion groups Break (informal networking) Panel 1 Discussion groups Break (informal networking) Stripe Keynote: Patrick Collison Discussion groups Break (informal networking) PlanGrid Keynote: Tracy Young Day 1 Closing Remarks Dinner/Networking

11:00 AM 11:30 AM 12:00 PM 12:30 PM 1:10 PM 2:00 PM 2:30 PM 3:20 PM 4:10 PM 4:30 PM 5:10 PM 6:00 PM 6:20 AM 7:00 PM 7:10 PM 8:00 PM

SUNDAY OCTOBER 11TH Start End

Description

8:00 AM 8:15 AM 9:10 AM 9:50 AM 10:10 AM 10:50 AM 11:00 AM 12:00 PM

Students/Startups arrive at conference center Breakfast Asana Keynote: Dustin Moskovitch Break (informal networking) Panel 2 Closing Remarks Lunch/Networking On-site interviews/Robinhood Keynote: Vladimir Tenev

8:15 AM 9:00 AM 9:50 AM 10:00 AM 10:50 AM 11:00 AM 12:00 PM 4:00 PM


ABOUT ABOUT SEQUOIA Founded in 1968 by three Princeton undergraduates as a student-run non-profit, Business Today aims to create a meaningful dialogue between students and business leaders through its four programs: Business Today magazine, conference series, seminars and online journal. BT brings together leaders of today and those of tomorrow from across the globe while prioritizing equal access and opportunity. After 47 years, over 100 magazines and more than 50 conferences, Business Today continues to be at the forefront of student-executive engagment.


ABOUT ABOUT SEQUOIA The Sequoia team helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. We spur them to push the boundaries of what’s possible. In partnering with Sequoia, companies benefit from our unmatched community and the lessons we’ve learned over 40 years working with Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, John Morgridge, Jerry Yang, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, Adi Tatarko and Jack Dorsey, among many others. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 20% of NASDAQ’s total value. We’re proud that their success also fuels great causes: since 2000 alone we have returned more than $10 billion to non-profits like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.

Bryan Schreier General Partner

Bryan Schreier focuses on consumer and enterprise companies. He is a Director of Dropbox, Hearsay, Inkling, Qualtrics, AgilOne, TuneIn, Mindsnacks, Clever, Codified, Good Eggs, and Thumbtack. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2008, Bryan was Google’s Senior Director of International Online Sales and Operations, where he oversaw advertising sales, operations and engineering across Europe, Asia and Latin America. He oversaw Google’s European headquarters in 2003 and 2004 and was President of Sales in China in 2006. Prior to Google, Bryan served in Morgan Stanley’s Technology Investment Banking Group. Bryan has a Computer Science Degree from Princeton University.



KEYNOTES

Tyler Droll CEO & Founder Yik Yak

Tyler Droll is the CEO and cofounder of Yik Yak, which he founded in 2013 with Brooks Buffington. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in medicine at Furman University, Tyler took a computer science class and immediately fell in love with the logic like challenge of programming. After graduating, Tyler decided to forego medical school in favor of app development. Tyler and Brooks created Yik Yak because they wanted to let people instantly be connected with the community around them. Today, Yik Yak is popular on over 1,600 college and university campuses. Tyler is originally from Duluth, Georgia. He is the ping pong champion at Yik Yak, a skill he attributes to his past in college tennis.


Patrick Collison C0-Founder | Stripe

Dustin is the co-founder of Asana. Prior to Asana, he co-founded Facebook and was a key leader within the technical staff, first in the position of CTO and then later as VP of Engineering.

Dustin

Moskovitz Co-Founder Asana

Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the online payments company that is expanding internet commerce by making it easy to process transactions from anywhere. Patrick and his brother John Collison started Stripe in the fall of 2010, while Patrick was studying mathematics at MIT. Their goal was to make accepting payments online simpler and more inclusive, after learning firsthand how difficult it was. Today, the 300-person (and growing) Stripe team powers online businesses around the world. Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which was later acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick resides in San Francisco, California, where Stripe is based.


After earning a degree in Construction Engineering Management, Tracy helped build several hospitals before founding PlanGrid. She likes to joke that, with PlanGrid, she went from working for one super intendent to hundreds of thousands of them.

Tracy Young CEO & C0-Founder | PlanGrid

Vladimir

Tenev Co-Founder Robinhood

Vlad cofounded Robinhood with Baiju Bhatt, his friend and roommate from Stanford, where he received his B.S. in Mathematics and Physics in 2008. He then started the PhD program in mathematics at UCLA, before leaving to build a business licensing technology to hedge funds and banks. Extensive experience with a large breadth of financial technologies provided Vlad the domain expertise he needed to start Robinhood.



PANELISTS


Pete Morelli VPE | Lyft

Rob built Inkling’s worldclass engineering team and now oversees its growth and development while managing both product and technical strategy for Inkling’s products.

Robert

Cromwell Co-Founder Inkling

Lyft’s VP of Engineering since March 2015, Peter brings more than 15 years of engineering and leadership experience with high growth technology companies. Most recently, Peter was Senior Director of Engineering at Twitter, where he globally scaled reliable, realtime web and mobile systems for the Twitter platform. Previously, Peter spent many years at Salesforce and oversaw APIs, query engines and the developer platform as Senior Director of Development and R&D. He also created and ran the Open Source program at Salesforce. A native of San Francisco, Peter has long been passionate about making urban transportation more affordable and reliable. His experience as an engineering leader, combined with his enthusiasm for making drivers’ and passengers’ lives better, further strengthens our best in class mobile experience. As we enter our next stage of growth, Peter oversees Lyft Engineering and aims to grow the team’s size.


Marco is the co-founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Thumbtack. Prior to Thumbtack, Mr. Zappacosta was the Director of Students for Saving Social Security in Washington, D.C. The group represented the student voice in the Social Security debate with over 10,000 student members in over 300 campus chapters nationwide. He is a graduate of Columbia University where he majored in Political Science and fell one class shy of another degree in Neuroscience.

Marco Zappacosta CEO & Founder | Thumbtack

John

Thimsen Senior Director Qualtrics

John joined Qualtrics in February 2015. Prior to Qualtrics, he spent 10 years at Amazon in various roles, most recently as an Engineering Director on the Amazon Echo team. His previous experience includes Microsoft, Active Voice Corporation, and Openwave. John’s career has been focused on building largescale, web-based products that impact millions of users, including recommendation systems, consumer hardware products, and e-commerce products. Working at Qualtrics is a continuation of that trend, as Qualtrics’ SaaS-based insights platform helps companies gain insights into their employees, markets, and users. John has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington. He is a long-time Seattle resident and he enjoys biking and snowboarding.



STARTUPS


About Affirm Affirm is a next-generation consumer finance company that began by providing shoppers with instant point-of-sale financing for online purchases. Affirm also provides education financing for students attending accelerated learning programs focused on coding, design, and business. Started by PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin, Affirm’s data-driven approach looks beyond a standard credit score to reach broader consumer and student populations. Affirm’s transparent financing solutions empower shoppers and students to pay their expenses over time in monthly installments and at reasonable interest rates. For more, go to affirm.com.

Libor Michalek CTO Libor is the CTO at Affirm. Prior to Affirm, Libor was an Engineering Director at YouTube responsible for Application Infrastructure & Site Reliability Engineering. Before YouTube, Libor served as CTO of Slide, Inc. which was acquired by Google in 2010. Libor holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ben Wolfson Software Engineer Ben Wolfson is a backend engineer working primarily on merchant services, building tools to give merchants insight into their loans. Prior to joining Affirm he wrote Clojure at ReadyForZero and taught philosophy at UCSB. In his free time he goes to concerts of experimental music, makes bread and jam, and pursues a variety of writing and coding projects.


About Asana Asana’s goal is to create a world in which teamwork feels effortless. No matter what organization you work at, you understand what all your coworkers are working on, and how all of their goals contribute to the company’s mission. You know exactly what you should be working on right now, and you have all the relevant files, conversations, and decisions right there. Balls never get dropped. Work is never accidentally duplicated. Leaders don’t micromanage — because they always know exactly what’s going on, and when their attention is needed. We are working to enable companies to embark on grand projects with the confidence they’ll succeed. We believe we can help build this future, and help every team do great things to create a more thriving world. All human progress comes down to groups of people working together. Asana is building software that makes working together easier, helping every team achieve their most ambitious goals more effectively.

Dustin Moskovitz Co-Founder

Dustin is the co-founder of Asana. Prior to Asana, he co-founded Facebook and was a key leader within the technical staff, first in the position of CTO and then later as VP of Engineering.


Sri Raghavan Product Engineer

A product engineer at Asana, Sri Raghavan has recently worked on Asana’s redesign, as well as the Conversations and Dashboards products. He attended Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science as an undergraduate, and graduated class of 2014. While an undergraduate, he interned at companies like Twitter, Gumroad, and Sosh. He loves rock climbing, video games, running, and just chilling.

Marco Gallotta Infrastructure Engineer Marco Gallotta, originally from South Africa, has been a software engineer at Asana for 2 years. Having worked on the stability and accessibility of data infrastructure, he now leads the Internal Systems team. On Internal Systems, he works on test infrastructure, monitoring, logging, server configuration and other systems with a focus on engineer efficiency. Marco has an avid interest in mentoring college students/graduates. He works with a team of all new grads, and is responsible for the experience of interns on the infrastructure team. Marco has previously worked at Google, NVIDIA, Facebook, and a small startup.

Sam Goertler Product Manager and Head of Office Sam Goertler is a product manager and head of office for Asana New York. She’s led the development of Asana’s first native mobile apps, a website redesign, and is now focused on forming new ways to monetize the product. Having worked with the team in San Francisco for over a year, she’s excited to meld Asana’s unique culture with New York’s magnetic energy in their first remote development office here. Sam has previously worked at Yammer and Capital IQ.


About Birchbox

Launched in 2010, Birchbox is a leading beauty and grooming ecommerce company for men and women. Birchbox redefines the retail process by offering consumers a personalized way to discover, learn about and purchase the best beauty, grooming and lifestyle products. With more than 800,000 subscribers, Birchbox users enjoy first touch experiences with new products each month and exclusive access to expert editorial content to help them get the most out of each item. Additionally, through Birchbox’s online store, customers can shop a handpicked selection of full-sized products from more than 800 top brands such as Smashbox, Caudalie, Jouer, Supergoop!, Cynthia Rowley, Baxterof California, Lab Series, and Art of Shaving. In 2012, Birchbox acquired an international competitor gaining outposts in France, Spain and the UK. In July 2014, Birchbox opened their first brick and mortar store in New York City, featuring full-sized product for sale, hair, makeup, and nail services and a Build-Your-Own-Birchbox (BYOB) section. To learn more about Birchbox, visit www.birchbox.com, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blog.

Liz Crowford

CTO

Liz Crawford is the CTO of Birchbox, the discovery retail company changing the way women and men shop for beauty, grooming and lifestyle products. Through its multi-channel platform, the Birchbox experience features personalized sampling, informative editorial content and a handpicked online store. Liz has a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and during her time there published papers on topics ranging from Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Robotics. Prior to working at Birchbox, Liz started her career as the co-founder and CTO of Crono, LLC and then the co-founder and CTO of Aprizi. Liz also has a BSc in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics from the University of Sydney. Originally from Sydney, Australia, Liz currently resides in New York City.

Jason Walker-Yung Senior Software Engineer Jason is a senior software engineer at Birchbox after having worked at companies as varied as Mamamedia, OK Cupid, and Jones Apparel Group. He was born and raised in Central New York, went to school at Stony Brook and NYU, and now lives in Brooklyn. Fun fact: Jason plays guitar and was part of a performance of a 100-guitar symphony at the World Trade Center.


About Cadre Cadre is building an investment platform that connects elite investors with high-end investment opportunities. Crowdfunding works for raising $100k, but where do you go to raise $100mm? We are using technology to disrupt the antiquated, opaque and massive private equity market. Our founding team includes the best finance and product minds in the world, joining from Blackstone, Starwood, Goldman Sachs, Google, Apple and Square. We’re backed by top VCs including Khosla Ventures, Founder’s Fund, Thrive Capital and General Catalyst. Our advisors are the most powerful players in the industry.

Alex Ambramov VP of Engineering

Alex is VP of Engineering at Cadre. With years of technology leadership experience behind him Alex is a serial entrepreneur passionate about developing great software. Prior to Cadre Alex served as a VP of Engineering at recently acquired fin tech startup Andera, where he led building first in the industry account origination platform used by 100s of Financial Institutions. Alex holds a BS in Computer Science from Brown University. When he isn’t glued to a computer screen, Alex spends time with his 3 wonderful children.


Andrew Borovsky Head of Product

Prior to joining Cadre, Andrew was Director of Product at Square. Andrew began his career in 2001 at Macromedia in San Francisco where he designed pioneering web development products like Flash and Dreamweaver. After Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia in 2005 he shifted his focus to mobile, designing products and services for the world’s top OEMs and operators, from Nokia and Samsung to Verizon and Vodafone out of Adobe’s London office. In 2007 he joined Apple to work on applications and services for the recently released iPhone. In 2008 Andrew co-founded 80/20 – New York City based design agency behind products such as Nokia N9, Motorola G2 and Google Maps for iOS. Four years later 80/20 was acquired by Jack Dorsey’s Square, where Andrew led teams of designers and engineers tasked with making Square the essential tool for running a business. Andrew attended Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Will Minshew Director of Investments

Will is a Director at Cadre, focusing on acquisitions. Prior to joining, Will worked at Blackstone in the Real Estate Private Equity group. Will’s primary responsibilities included evaluating real estate investments across various property types and geographies. He was involved in a variety of transactions, including the corporate investments in BXMT (f.k.a. CapTrust) and Edens, the follow-on acquisition of AmREIT, and the $2bn acquisition of ARCP’s multitenant retail portfolio. Will holds a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, where he graduated magna cum laude and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.


About Chartboost Chartboost is the world’s largest mobile games-only platform, helping developers grow their audience, monetize, and make better data-driven decisions. We work with 90% of the top-grossing iOS and Android game developers and are currently being leveraged by over 200,000 games, reaching 700 million active players around the world every month. We offer a simple SDK enabling cross promotion, direct deals, and a mobile ad network - all with 100% transparency and full control for our users, empowering them to run campaigns when, where, and how they want. We deal with an extraordinary amount of traffic, handling tens of thousands of requests per second from hundreds of millions of mobile devices worldwide. When we work with data, it’s in a petabyte-scale data warehouse. Our technology stack includes Scala, Spark, Python, JavaScript, Backbone, Hadoop, Hbase, AWS, Git, Jenkins and whatever new technologies we discover that will help us design better and more reliable products.

Don Neufield VP of Engineering

Don Neufeld is currently the VP of Engineering at Chartboost. He has previously been the CTO at Medium, Founder and CTO at Ohai Games, and Technical Director at Sony Online Entertainment. His focuses include leadership development, diversity and software development processes. In his spare time he likes to pretend he can write Go. He currently lives in Oakland, California.


Brian Refsdal Technical Lead

Brian Refsdal is a Technical Lead at Chartboost working on the mobile ad server. Brian led a team effort to migrate from a traditional PHP and Apache stack to Scala and Finagle. He currently pursues efforts to scale the Scala ad server and to unify dependencies around Cassandra.

Chris Kusaba Talent Acquisition Lead

Chris has spent the last 10 years working within the Recruiting Industry helping to identify top technical and non-techincal talent in Silicon Valley. He is currently the Talent Acquisition Lead at Chartboost, the largest mobile games-only ad and data platform solution. Prior to joining Chartboost he recruited top talent to Storm8 where he helped grow the team from 30-260+ within 3.5 years. He’s very excited to be part of Start @ a Startup and is looking forward to meeting some of the brightest college students in the country!


About Coursera Coursera is scaling a global platform to provide universal access to the world’s best education, and we’re driven by our mission to empower people to learn without limits. In just three years, we’ve brought over 1,000 courses to over 14 million learners worldwide. Come join us as we set out to do even more!

Jiquan Ngiam Director of Engineering

Ngiam was once pursuing research in machine learning, but had since been drawn away by the possibility of creating a future where education is scalable, personalized, and universally accessible. He was on the founding team at Coursera, where he now leads engineering. He also enjoys dark chocolate, hiking, and the outdoors.


Michele Esposito Software Engineer

Michele was born and raised in Italy. After moving to Illinois for school, Michele interned at Coursera, where he is now a fulltime employee. Michele enjoys making great product at Coursera, and thinking about ways to make Coursera profitable. Michele also loves the life-work balance at Coursera.

Josh Newman Software Engineer

Josh graduated from Princeton University in 2011, worked at Google, and joined Coursera in 2013. He started on Team Pineapple and has since worked on many parts of the platform. Josh happily lives in California (and near Yosemite) but likes visiting NYC, walking around Manhattan, and eating at new places. He’ll be happy to talk to you about Coursera and anything related to backend development and infrastructure.


About Drawbridge Drawbridge has built a technology solution that democratizes anonymous digital identity for brands and enterprises to seamlessly reach consumers across devices, in order to optimize consumer experiences on the Internet. The Drawbridge Connected Consumer Graph™ includes more than 1.2B consumers across more than 3.6B addressable devices, and was recently found by Nielsen to be up to 97.3% accurate. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley, is backed by Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, and Northgate Capital, and was named the fastest growing marketing and advertising company and 6th overall on the 2015 Inc. 5000 list. For more information visit www.drawbrid.ge.

Devin Guan CTO

Devin Guan joined Drawbridge in 2010 as a founding member of the engineering team, bringing over 15 years of experience as a leader, entrepreneur, and developer. Prior to Drawbridge, Devin was Chief Architect at Announce Media, where he built a technology platform that powered the business to secure $260M in annual revenue. Devin joined Announce Media from Netflix, where he was responsible for conducting Netflix Prize, a large-scale crowdsourcing machine learning contest. He has held various engineering leadership roles at prominent companies such as Yahoo and AdMob (acquired by Google).


Albert Huang Software Engineer

Albert is responsible for developing the data analysis pipeline in Hadoop that powers the Drawbridge device-pairing technology and prediction models. He also works closely with the Drawbridge data science team to develop next-generation technology and various machine-learning systems. Albert earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and was previously a software engineer at Applied Materials, where he developed real-time robotic controller software.

Zinzi Blackbeard Recruiter

Zinzi is tasked with recruiting brilliant, creative, technical and non-technical people that will have an impact on Drawbridge. Her philosophy on work is that you have to love what you do and know the importance of your work. People are what make Drawbridge great. She joined Drawbridge with experience in Recruiting and Management. She earned her B.S. in Business Administration and Marketing from the University of Oregon, Lundquist College of Business.


About Evernote Evernote transforms the way you work. We design products that fuel inspiration for your projects, from start to finish. With Evernote, collect and organize material that molds your work. Easily find everything when you need it, from handwritten notes to photos. As your project takes shape, present it to colleagues. Turn notes into a beautiful presentation you can display in a screen­-friendly format. Our goal is to make you work smarter. Our job is to make sure you get there.

Braeden Kepner Head of Web Service Engineering

Braeden heads engineering for the web service teams at Evernote. He joined in 2011 as an engineer working on Evernote’s browser client, and since then has contributed to many much ­used services like Evernote for Business, two­ factor authentication, note and notebook sharing and work chat. He’s also built some not­much­used projects like Evernote for Google Glass. Outside his work at Evernote Braeden is an avid cyclist, an importer of fine teas, and a proud member of the Princeton class of 2010.


About Flipboard You need great content to be better at what you do, and understand your world – whether you’re a parent or political leader, obsessed with pandas or space travel. Flipboard collects quality content on your favorite topics from the world’s most trusted sources, and presents them in a beautiful magazine format. See for yourself: try Flipboard on your smartphone, tablet, or desktop. As a Flipboard engineer, you tackle an assortment of ambitious projects. With millions of readers flipping tens of millions of articles per day, we are devoted to shipping products that personalize the reading experience. We love clarifying complex problems, experimenting with open source solutions and creating a culture that celebrates constant improvement.

Troy Brant

Head of Client Engineering

Troy is the Head of Client Engineering at Flipboard, and joined the company in 2010 as an iOS Engineer. He received his Master in Computer Science from Stanford, and did his undergraduate at Georgia Tech. He was a teaching assistant and traveling lecturer for Stanford and has written a book on iPhone application development.

Will Giese University Recruiter

Will leads the University Recruiting efforts at Flipboard, and has been with the company for 3 years. Prior to Flipboard, he has worked at Facebook and Yahoo! as well as some small to mid size start-ups. He graduated from Boston College with Bachelors in Communications, and is a huge fan of English Bulldogs.


About Houzz Houzz is the leading platform for home remodeling and design, providing people with everything they need to improve their homes from start to finish – online or from a mobile device. From decorating a small room to building a custom home and everything in between, Houzz connects millions of homeowners, home design enthusiasts and home improvement professionals across the country and around the world. With the largest residential design database in the world and a vibrant community empowered by technology, Houzz is the easiest way for people to find inspiration, get advice, buy products and hire the professionals they need to help turn their ideas into reality. Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Houzz also has international offices in London, Berlin, Sydney, Moscow and Tokyo. For more information, visit www.houzz.com.

Arya Goudarzi Infrastructure Engineer

Arya is primarily responsible for day to day infrastructure operations at Houzz. His goal is to ensure systems are running at all times, processes are automated, and backends are scalable. You can sometimes catch him on the stage doing improvisational comedy.


Deepa Ramachandran Full Stack Engineer

While Deepa is officially a full stack engineer, she’s touched everything from product-focused releases to business development projects during her time at Houzz. Outside of the office, Deepa can often be found hiking with her husband and their two dogs, or in the midst of a home remodeling project (they are currently working on project #3!).

Jian Shen Front End Architect

Jian works on the Front End team at Houzz and leads products that help professionals get the most out of the Houzz platform including Site Designer. Prior to Houzz, Jian was Director of Engineering at Meebo (which was later acquired by Google). Jian has a BS in Computer Science from Stanford. Outside of loving FE and designing consumer experiences, Jian enjoys hardware hacking and traveling the world in seek of designer art toys.


About Inkling

Inkling is pioneering a new way to create (sales training) content that is easy to build, share, and measure in a mobile world, reducing content creation time and improving your business’s bottom line.

Rob Cromwell Co-Founder & VP of Engineering

Rob built Inkling’s world-class engineering team and now oversees its growth and development while managing both product and technical strategy for Inkling’s products.


About Kahuna

Kahuna is a pioneer in communication automation, dedicated to empowering businesses to grow and thrive in the mobile era. We enable a new level of authentic engagement between brands and their customers wherever they are—the web, email, mobile, social channels—through personalized communication at scale. Powered by big data and machine learning, we help create delightful experiences for every customer with the perfect message, delivered on the right channel, at just the right time. Kahuna is trusted by Yelp, Overstock. com, The Weather Channel, and hundreds of other leading brands. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in New York, Kahuna was founded in 2012 and is funded by Sequoia Capital, SoftTech VC, Tenaya Capital, and others.

Fayyaz Younas VP of Engineering

Fayyaz Younas joined Kahuna in December 2014 as the VP of Engineering. Prior to Kahuna, Fayyaz served as the VP of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, where he was instrumental in building the engineering team and delivering analytic capabilities in the cloud. Fayyaz has also held engineering leadership roles at SignalDemand (acquired by PROS), Celequest (acquired by IBM COGNOS), and Informatica. Fayyaz received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Computer Engineering from SUNY at Stony Brook.

Lorie Boyd VP of People Lorie Boyd joined Kahuna in January 2015 as the VP of People. Prior to Kahuna, she led global recruiting for Zendesk, growing the company to nearly 900 employees worldwide. Lorie also has a background in human resources, technology, and finance, having previously worked at Salesforce.com, Oracle, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Lorie received her Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Stanford University.


About Lyft Lyft is a mobile app that seamlessly connects passengers in need of a ride with nearby drivers. Simply download the app for iPhone or Android, then request a ride with the tap of a button. A friendly driver will pick you up at your location within minutes. Lyft was started in 2012 with the mission of building a peer-­to-­peer transportation solution that would help make cities safer, more affordable and better connected. Lyft now operates in 68 cities across the U.S.

Peter Morelli VP of Engineering

Lyft’s VP of Engineering since March 2015, Peter brings more than 15 years of engineering and leadership experience with high growth technology companies. Most recently, Peter was Senior Director of Engineering at Twitter, where he globally scaled reliable, realtime web and mobile systems for the Twitter platform. Previously, Peter spent many years at Salesforce and oversaw APIs, query engines and the developer platform as Senior Director of Development and R&D. He also created and ran the Open Source program at Salesforce. A native of San Francisco, Peter has long been passionate about making urban transportation more affordable and reliable. His experience as an engineering leader, combined with his enthusiasm for making drivers’ andpassengers’ lives better, further strengthens our best in class mobile experience. As we enter our next stage of growth, Peter oversees Lyft Engineering and aims to grow the team’s size.


About Nubank Nubank, the leading fintech company in Brazil, is a global team of engineers, developers, designers and analysts on a mission to reduce complexities in the financial industry. Sequoia Capital’s largest investment in the country uses forefront technology to offer users a feeless, app-controlled, MasterCard international credit card with seamless user experience.

Vitor Olivier

Chief Financial Engineer Vitor graduated from Duke University with a double major in Economics and Computer Science. Upon graduation, he joined BTG Pactual, Brazil’s largest independent investment bank, where he worked with credit, foreign exchange, and trading. Vitor joined Nubank as a partner to develop its financial engineering team. He is currently in charge of Nubank’s accounting systems, financial products, and securitization strategy.

Edward Wible Co-Founder & CTO Edward graduated from Princeton University with a major in Computer Science. He worked with the Boston Consulting Group in New York before joining Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm based in San Francisco and London. After completing an MBA at INSEAD in France, Edward co-founded Nubank in Brazil.


About Percolate Percolate connects marketing teams, tasks, creative, data and software tools to accelerate productivity, reduce operating costs and help businesses of all sizes grow their revenue. Combining enterprise-grade brand security and powerful, first-of-their-kind capabilities in an easy to use web and mobile interface, Percolate is flexible enough to power global marketing at brands like Unilever, GE and MasterCard, and accelerate high-growth companies like Chobani, Pandora and Shinola.Marketing is in transition to global reach, mobile audiences, and enlightened software, and Percolate is building the system of record that puts marketers firmly in control of their future.

Sudhakar Kaki

VP of Engineering

Sudhakar is a product development executive and entrepreneur with deep experience building enterprise SaaS products and high performance teams. He has over 18 years of experience innovating software businesses with easily configurable and extensible application platforms, highly scalable enterprise architectures, and data driven decision support systems. Sudhakar has worked at IBM, WebMD and Oracle in the Bay Area before moving to NYC to join Percolate. Known to evangelize an audacious product vision while bringing learning, growth, and fun to members of the engineering team.

Chetan Kadam Director of Engineering Chetan comes to Percolate with over twenty years of experience creating software and building world-class engineering teams. Prior to Percolate, Chetan worked at enterprise software companies including Oracle and Marketo. He currently manages the backend engineering team and is based in the NYC office.


About PlanGrid PlanGrid is construction software made for the field. Our cloud­based construction document collaboration platform is being used by major construction firms on more than 200,000 projects, and we currently store more than 20 million pages of digital blueprints, making us the world’s largest blueprint repository. PlanGrid’s platform allows plans and markups to be instantly shared with everyone on a construction project, no matter where they are. It lets contractors and architects collaborate from their desktop or mobile devices across all their project plans, specs, photos, RFIs, and punchlists. PlanGrid emerged from Y Combinator in 2012 and has since secured funding from Sequoia Capital, Box, 500 Startups, Y Combinator, Navitas Capital, Google Ventures, Sam Altman, Paul Bucheit, David Sacks, and Professor Raymond Levitt.

Tracy Young

Co-Founder & CEO

After earning a degree in Construction Engineering Management, Tracy helped build several hospitals before founding PlanGrid. She likes to joke that, with PlanGrid, she went from working for one superintendent to hundreds of thousands of them.

Ralph Gootee Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer Prior to PlanGrid, Ralph worked as a rendering pipeline engineer at Pixar and is credited on Cars 2. His passion for art, mathematics, and the elegance of functional design shines through in his work for PlanGrid. As CPO, he focuses on aesthetics, function, and feature implementation.


About Qualtrics Qualtrics is a rapidly growing software as a service company backed by three of the top venture capital firms in the world, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Insight Venture Partners. Our world-leading insight platform has transformed the way businesses collect, analyze, and act on valuable insights that drive better decision-making. We offer a single insight platform that captures customer, market, and employee insights in one place. Whether you are building voice of customer, employee engagement, or market research programs, you can do it all on Qualtrics. We are doing just that for many of the world’s most forward-thinking brands including: HP, Wells Fargo, JetBlue, and Marriott International. As a member of the Billion Dolllar Startup Club, Qualtrics has more than 7,500 enterprise clients worldwide, over 900 employees, and very strong quarter-over-quarter revenue growth. With offices in Seattle, Dublin, Utah, Sydney and Dallas, we continue to lead the world of data and insights. With a scrappy, start-up feel, and the amount of growth we’re experiencing, it’s no surprise Business Insider named Qualtrics one of 26 startups to bet your career on in 2015.

John Thimsen Senior Director and Seattle Site Lead

John joined Qualtrics in February 2015. Prior to Qualtrics, he spent 10 years at Amazon in various roles, most recently as an Engineering Director on the Amazon Echo team. His previous experience includes Microsoft, Active Voice Corporation, and Openwave. John’s career has been focused on building large-scale, web-based products that impact millions of users, including recommendation systems, consumer hardware products, and e-commerce products. Working at Qualtrics is a continuation of that trend, as Qualtrics’ SaaS-based insights platform helps companies gain insights into their employees, markets, and users. John has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington. He is a longtime Seattle resident and he enjoys biking and snowboarding.


Krista Heaton Recruiter

Krista joined Qualtrics in June 2015 to build out their university recruiting program. Prior to joining, she held several roles at Facebook most in which she helped students find internship and full time jobs. She’s spent the past 10 years building tech companies in the Bay Area. Her area of passion is helping companies grow by creating sustainable programs and finding scalable solutions. Recently relocating to Utah to join Qualtrics, she’s started to enjoy the world class outdoor adventure activities they are known for.

Scott Anson

Senior Engineer

Scott began his career at Microsoft where he spent nearly 10 years as a developer—first in Passport, working on the backend team servicing over a billion logins a day, and next in SQL Server, working on a distributed RDBMS incubation project. After SQL, he joined Microsoft Business Solutions Division where he played a key role moving web services and storage to the Azure platform. Scott left Microsoft to join downtown Seattle’s Medio Systems where he helped re-architect their data ingestion platform to support over a billion events per day. Scott left Medio to join an early-stage start-up, Nuiku, where he was developer number four and worked on modeling and caching systems, and other core infrastructure. He’s elated to now be part of the Qualtrics Seattle office where he runs a small team whose focus is pulling apart identity features from the “monolith” and transitioning to a microservice architecture. Scott earned his B.S. and Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and likes to stay active in his free time.


About Robinhood Robinhood’s mission is to democratize access to the financial markets. By focusing on technology and design, we cut out the fat that makes other brokerages costly. Just months after launching our stock trading app to the public, hundreds of thousands of users have transacted more than $1 billion through our platform. Collectively, the community has saved over $22 million in trading commissions. Paying $10 per trade is the equivalent of paying to send an email, and we’ve relegated it to a thing of the past.

Vladimir Tenev Co-Founder

Vlad co-founded Robinhood with Baiju Bhatt, his friend and roommate from Stanford, where he received his B.S. in Mathematics and Physics in 2008. He then started the PhD program in mathematics at UCLA, before leaving to build a business licensing technology to hedge funds and banks. Extensive experience with a large breadth of financial technologies provided Vlad the domain expertise he needed to start Robinhood.


Joseph Binney

VP Product Engineering

Joe received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. After finishing his degree, he joined Facebook, where he helped redesign and rebuild the Facebook homepage and newsfeed. Revamping one of the most widely used products on the planet prepared him to eventually oversee all product engineering at Robinhood.

Daesun Yim

Product Manager

Daesun received his B.S. in Computer Science from MIT in 2013. He held software engineering internships at Jane Street and Palantir, before joining Robinhood to lead our growth engineering efforts. He leads development of much of our internal tools and infrastructure, and is the PM for a number of exciting product initiatives.


About Sift Science Sift Science fights fraud with large-scale machine learning. Machine learning teaches a computer program to recognize patterns of fraudulent behavior based on past examples. By leveraging machine learning, our system has learned over one million fraud patterns, and counting! We’re able to identify specific page navigation sequences, suspicious IP ranges, email address patterns, graph connectivity structures, browser configurations, and even writing styles that predict fraudulent activity.

Jason Tan

CEO

Jason Tan (@jasontan) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sift Science, a San Francisco technology company that fights online fraud with large scale and real time machine learning. He previously served as CTO of BuzzLabs, a machine learning startup acquired by InterActiveCorp. Prior to that, he was an early engineer at two Seattle startups, Zillow and Optify. Jason graduated magna cum laude from the University of Washington in 2006 with a Computer Engineering degree.

Alex Paino Software Engineer Alex Paino received his Bachelors in Mathematics and Computer Engineering from the University of Missouri where he focused on machine learning and computer vision research. He has previously worked on control systems at Facebook and helped build out a landmine detection system at the University of Missouri. Alex now works at Sift Science as a software engineer focusing primarily on machine learning modeling.


About Square Square is making commerce easy for everyone. Whether a business needs to accept credit cards, manage a full point of sale system, or sell online, Square offers simple and affordable tools so businesses of all sizes can start, run, and grow. The company began with a free credit card reader for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices, allowing businesses to accept credit cards anywhere, anytime, for one low, transparent rate. Square now offers a full suite of hardware and software tools including Square Register, Square Market, Square Capital, Square Payroll and Square Stand. Square Cash is Square’s first peer-to-peer payment system that enables anyone to send money with an e-mail. Founded in 2009, and headquartered in San Francisco, Square is currently available in the United States, Canada, and Japan.

Saqi Mehta Campus Recruiting Lead

Saqi Mehta leads the University Recruiting team @Square. Prior to this role she worked in Career Services at MIT and Harvard Business School. She looks forward to bringing the next generation of talent to Square!


Matt Dolan Engineer

Matt Dolan is a Software Engineer at Square in San Francisco. He is working on scaling Square’s products to fit the needs of more businesses. He has worked on payment routing, receipt rendering, and employee management.

Eric Strathmeyer Engineer

Eric built his first website in 1994. He’s much better at it these days. Eric works mostly in Ruby (on Rails) and Javascript (on Ember.js).


About Stripe Stripe is the best way to accept payments online and in mobile apps. We handle billions of dollars every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world. We’re building economic infrastructure for the Web, and we’re dedicated to solving hard problems through good software, building technology that people love to use, and creating an effective and happy team along the way. Stripe powers payments for hundreds of thousands of businesses of every size--from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.

Patrick Collison CEO and Co-Founder

Patrick Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the online payments company that is expanding internet commerce by making it easy to process transactions from anywhere. Patrick and his brother John Collison started Stripe in the fall of 2010, while Patrick was studying mathematics at MIT. Their goal was to make accepting payments online simpler and more inclusive, after learning firsthand how difficult it was. Today, the 300-person (and growing) Stripe team powers online businesses around the world. Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which was later acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick resides in San Francisco, California, where Stripe is based.


Katie Bishop Technical Recruiter

Katie is a California native who tries to speak French, loves all things sports related, and has found her niche in technical recruiting at Stripe. She previously helped build engineering teams at Brightroll and Google.

Jordan MacDonald Technical Recruiter Before joining Stripe as a technical recruiter Jordan studied communications at UCLA and worked on the University Recruiting team at Facebook. She loves hanging around the parks of San Francisco with her dog and is an avid scuba diver.

Kiran Bhattaram Engineer Before joining the sys team at Stripe, Kiran studied EECS at MIT. She likes making things, and is currently hand-quilting a large silk map of Boston.


About Thumbtack We’re taking the best of the Internet – it’s efficiency and transparency and bringing it to the real world to transform the way customers and professionals work together. Thumbtack helps you accomplish the person projects that are central to your life. Whether you need to paint your home, learn a new language, or plan your daughter’s birthday party, Thumbtack is the easiest way to hire the right professional for your projects. Customers get started by answering a few questions about their specific needs. Within hours, Thumbtack will introduce customers to several available and qualified professionals. Customers compare custom quotes, reviews, and profiles and hire when they’re ready.

Marco Zappacosta Founder, CEO

Marco is the co-founder and the Chief Executive Officer of Thumbtack. Prior to Thumbtack, Mr. Zappacosta was the Director of Students for Saving Social Security in Washington, D.C. The group represented the student voice in the Social Security debate with over 10,000 student members in over 300 campus chapters nationwide. He is a graduate of Columbia University where he majored in Political Science and fell one class shy of another degree in Neuroscience.


Richard Whalen Software Engineer

Richard is one of our Software Engineers currently working on Thumbtack’s Growth team. He’s focused on helping optimize for our user request volume, repeat use and customer conversion through traffic. He joined Thumbtack two years ago after earning his Masters in CS from Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt, Richard helped teach a course in software patterns and worked as a freelance developer. He’s an avid outdoorsman – both a lover of the beach and the mountains. He enjoys the West Coast surf and sun but is just as excited about bouldering, climbing, cycling or any other mountain pursuit.

Ben Anderson Software Engineer

Ben, or as we like to call him – Bando, is one of our Software Engineers on our Marketplace Mechanics team. He joined Thumbtack three years ago after earning his degree from Carleton College. In school he majored in Mat and was especially interested in combinatorics. While at Carleton, Bando not only focused on the technical realm but also taught swing dance classes. Bando is currently working on how Thumbtack’s Pros and Customers connect as the marketplace scales in size. As our marketplace grows, the challenges continue – something Bando is especially excited about! He loves spending time outside hiking, enjoying San Francisco’s unbeatable weather, brewing beer with his co-workers and traveling the world.


About Wealthfront Wealthfront is the future of investing. Wealthfront is focused on taking the services typically reserved for the ultra-wealthy, automating them, then delivering them directly to all investors at an incredibly low cost. It’s a low-cost, automated investment service that invests your money for you, the right way. Wealthfront offers investors a customized diversified portfolio of index funds, and monitors accounts 24/7 to make sure that all the little things investors should be doing with their money—like rebalancing, reinvesting dividends and harvesting tax losses—are automatically taken care of. Wealthfront has clients in all 50 states who trust it with over $2.6 Billion in assets and growing.

Maya Grinberg

Director of Marketing

Maya Grinberg is the Director of Marketing at Wealthfront, leading the creative development of its marketing initiatives. Prior to joining Wealthfront, Maya was the Chief Evangelist of the Wildfire product at Google. Her specialty was educating brands and businesses on the value of social media marketing to their brands. Before Wildfire, Maya worked at IBM in the Strategy and Transformation group, and at TechCrunch, on the CrunchBase property. She earned her BS in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University. Follow her on Twitter as @papayamaya.

Qian Liu Director of Research Qian Liu leads research at Wealthfront in a variety of areas, including investment strategy development, trade execution scaling, client behavior modeling, prototype productization, research platform development, team development and thought leadership communication. Prior to joining Wealthfront, Qian worked at Credit Suisse in New York. Qian earned her CFA charter from CFA Institute, MS and PhD in Computer Science focusing on Machine Learning from University of Pennsylvania, and BS in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.


About Weebly Weebly gives millions of people a surprisingly easy and affordable way to create a site that is as unique as they are. With a Weebly site, people can start their own business, communicate with their clients, showcase their achievements, and be an authority on personal and professional interests. Weebly gives everyone the freedom to start a site, blog or online store that works brilliantly across computers, phones and tablets. Offering a range of pricing options including a free plan and premium plans starting at $4/ month, Weebly has everything you need to plan, build, publish and grow a site that meets your goals.

Darian Shimy VP of Engineering

Darian Shimy has over 20 years experience with Internet based technologies in various high-tech management as well as engineering positions. As the VP of Engineering, he manages the engineering team, and is responsible for keeping tens of millions of users happy. Prior to Weebly he was VP of Technology at Attensity and eHarmony.


Dustin Doiron Director of Core Engineering

Dustin Doiron is the Director of Core Engineering at Weebly, heading up architecture and special engineering projects. Dustin also leads Weebly’s anti-spam and distributed computing initiatives. Prior to his current role, Dustin was a senior software engineer at myYearbook, a social discovery company.

Jim Rottinger

Software Engineer

Jim Rottinger has over 3 years of experience working with start-ups as an engineer, during which he has focused on building highly functional and responsive front-end web applications. He was recruited at Start @ a Startup in 2013 to join Weebly, where he now works full-time helping to build the best website-creation experience for millions of users.


About Whisper Whisper is the largest online community where people share real thoughts and feelings, without identities or profiles. Whisper enables millions of people everyday to see a fresh perspective of the world around them. Founded in 2012, Whisper is backed by venture investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Thrive Capital, Shasta Ventures, Trinity Capital, and CAA Ventures. Whisper is available on iOS and Android devices.

Chad DePue

CTO

Chad is the CTO at Whisper. He was programming from the time he was 10 years old and has never stopped. Before Whisper, he worked at Microsoft, Good Technology, and also founded a consultancy that builds high-performance iOS and Android apps for funded startups. He enjoys building technology teams and speaks at startup conferences, participates in hackathons, and volunteers with non-profits that help students learn to code.

Chenyu Zheng Recruiting Coordinator Chenyu is the Recruiting Coordinator at Whisper. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Economics and Environmental Studies. Chenyu spent last year in China co-leading Whisper’s China operations. Prior to Whisper, Chenyu worked at Morgan Stanley Asset Management in NYC and Hong Kong, and built worldwide community at sustainability non-profit, Joint US China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE). She is a Business Today alumna.


About Yext Yext is the global Digital Location Management (DLM) leader, helping over 500,000 businesses engage mobile consumers across a network of 100+ app, map, directory, search engine, and social media partners including Apple, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Yahoo, and Yelp. Digital presence is a fundamental need for all 50 million businesses in the world, and Yext’s mission is perfect location information in every hand. The Yext engineering team drives the technology behind our revolutionary software. Our team works in an agile environment running two-week sprints that culminate with demos of features in progress. You will work alongside engineers from the top universities and tech companies in the world, hands-on with the code from day one. We are based in the heart of NYC with 400 employees.

Sean MacIsaac CTO

Sean MacIsaac serves as Yext’s Chief Technology Officer. Sean was co-founder and CTO of Intwine, a software consulting company that he helped grow prior to completing its sale to Datran Media. After the acquisition, Sean was promoted to CIO of Datran, where his team supported the development and operations of Datran’s core technology platform. Sean graduated with honors from Princeton University with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science.


Amanda Angulo Recruiter Amanda is a recruiter at Yext and joined the company in October 2014. Prior to Yext, she worked in HR/Recruiting at financial services & Accounting firms (Credit Suisse, KPMG, & S&P). In her free time, you can find Amanda hanging with her English Bulldog Lunchbox in Madison Square Park. Amanda graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in Communication and Psychology.

Chris Calabrese Software Engineer Chris completed his undergraduate degree in 2011 and a Master’s in 2013 at MIT. He left Third East/East Campus dorm and joined Yext as a Software Engineer in February 2013 following graduation. Prior to joining Yext, he had an internship at Zignage in Brooklyn, which was run by a really cool guy. Currently, Chris is a Software engineer at Yext on a team called Platypus (application platform team). In his free time, he hits up the NYC music scene, shoots pool and watches hockey.

Joel Stein

Software Engineer

Joel was the first software engineer at Yext hired out of college. Joel grew up in Toronto and graduated from MIT with degrees in Computer Science and Management. Before Yext, Joel did internships in research, IBM and Google. Joel has built a lot of Yext’s Listings infrastructure, as well as leading it’s customer acquisition engineering team and is currently leading its engineering team responsible for integrations with social media partners (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram & Foursquare).


About Yik Yak Yik Yak is a social app that lets people discover their local community. The app instantly connects people to everyone around them so they can share news, crack jokes, ask questions, offer support, and interact freely. Without names or profiles, Yik Yak levels the social playing field – allowing people to be themselves and get honest feedback. Yik Yak is home to the casual, relatable, heartfelt, and silly things that connect people with their community. It’s all about making the world feel small again.

Tyler Droll CEO & Co-Founder

Tyler Droll is the CEO and co-founder of Yik Yak, which he founded in 2013 with Brooks Buffington. While pursuing his undergraduate degree in medicine at Furman University, Tyler took a computer science class and immediately fell in love with the logic like challenge of programming. After graduating, Tyler decided to forego medical school in favor of app development. Tyler and Brooks created Yik Yak because they wanted to let people instantly be connected with the community around them. Today, Yik Yak is popular on over 1,600 college and university campuses. Tyler is originally from Duluth, Georgia. He is the ping pong champion at Yik Yak, a skill he attributes to his past in college tennis.

Michael Morrissey VP of Engineering Michael Morrissey is Vice President of Engineering at Yik Yak, where he leads the team that develops and scales the company’s messaging platform. Prior to Yik Yak, Michael spent eight years with Google as the Senior Director of Engineering where he was a key driver in developing, scaling, and improving the Android platform. Earlier in his career, Michael worked on mobile and embedded devices at Microsoft where he focused on developing social consumer phone experiences on top of Windows Mobile. Prior to Microsoft, Michael worked at several pioneering startups in SiliconValley. Michael received his BS from Stevens Institute of Technology and studied graduate mathematics at LSU. In his spare time Michael enjoys launching rockets with his kids and honing his newly developed guitar skills.



STUDENTS


STUDENTS Haley Acevedo

Chet Aldrich is a rising senior at Carleton studying Computer Science. A self-proclaimed music nerd, he spent last summer in the Bay Area interning as a software engineer at Pandora. After growing up in southern Iowa, he’s ready to code for food. Just no corn, please. Learn more at chetaldrich.com.

Alana Anderson

Haley Acevedo is a senior at Washington University in St. Louis with a major in Computer Science and a minor in English Literature.

Chet Aldrich

I am a current undergraduate (areas of study include: pre-med, engineering, biochemistry, economics, computer science, and mathematics) hoping to disrupt the world of health care. I am motivated by the digital health field and the potential that early-stage companies have to improve the quality and accessibility of health care.

Ali-Amir Aldan

Swathi Anand is a rising senior at Carnegie Mellon University majoring in Information Systems and minoring in Human-Computer Interaction. Her interests lie in the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship and design. Swathi aspires to design products that are useful to people and solve problems, while also providing an intuitive user experience.

Tadas Antanavicius

Ali-Amir Aldan (Ali) is a junior at MIT majoring in CS and Physics. During his sophomore year in school, Ali worked for a startup and became passionate about entrepreneurship. Apart from work, Ali used to compete in programming competitions and is a medalist in ACM ICPC 2015.

Swathi Anand

Tadas is an undergraduate senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science, with minors in Economics and Engineering Entrepreneurship. Born in Lithuania and raised in the northeastern US, Tadas has spent much of his undergraduate life in Greek Life leadership. His other interests include basketball, skiing, running, and travel.


Meiri Anto

Luciano Arango, originally from Colombia, is a senior at Harvard studying Computer Science with a secondary in Economics. Luciano loves implementing everything from memory leak monitors in C to interactive visualizations in Javascript/D3. A former KPCB and CODE2040 fellow, Luciano enjoys getting involved in entrepreneurship when he’s not coding.

Malika Aubakirova

Jay Bensal is a senior in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spends most of his time working with early-stage student startups when he’s not tossing around ideas of his own. It’s also his birthday on Monday (the 12th) so say hi and wish him!

Meiri is a senior at Swarthmore College studying computer science. She is passionate about creating technology to improve people’s lives and make a difference. She has interned as a software engineer at Apple, Yelp, and Facebook. Interested in full stack and backend software engineering roles at a mission-led startup.

Luciano Arango

Malika is a third-year at the University of Chicago. She loves attending hackathons and is also passionate about entrepreneurship. She competed in number of business competitions including College New Venture Challenge on campus. This summer she was learning how to make lattes on espresso machines and bike.

Jay Bensal

Eric Appel

Elaine Arbaugh is a senior studying computer science at the California Institute of Technology. She has previously interned at Google, Akamai Technologies, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she is especially interested in networking and systems, as well as

Shruthi Badri

Tushar Bhargava is a junior at Brown University. He is concentrating in Computer Science. He is the founder and president of a digital literacy student organization on campus. In his spare time he likes to write, both fiction and non-fiction.

Eric Appel is an iOS engineer with an eye for product design. He’s the founder and current president of CUAppDev a project team at Cornell University that creates a new iOS app every year and releases it on the App Store.

Elaine Arbaugh

Shruthi Badri is a senior at Amherst College, majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. She is excited by the potential technology has to help find scalable solutions to longstanding problems in healthcare, education, sustainability, nutrition and availability of resources.

Tushar Bhargava


Maggie Yunjie Bi

Julia Bindler is a senior majoring in computer science who’s interested in front-end development. In her previous engineering internships, she’s gained experience creating web features after delving into new technologies and code bases. Her passion is making the visions of product managers and UX designers come to life.

Ron Boger

Akshar Bonu is a junior at Harvard College studying computer science. He is building a local anonymous chat app on college campuses called Masquerade (download at getmasq.com). Before, he worked at Amazon, Hullabalu, and previously founded a food delivery-as-a-service startup called InstaNomz that was shutdown by Har-

Maggie is a senior at Cornell University studying Computer Science. Outside of school, she likes cooking, board games, badminton, jogging, and just hanging out with friends. She’s very excited to be back to the conference again and meet new people since she had a blast last time.

Julia Bindler

Ron is a junior at Johns Hopkins University, studying Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics. He is heavily involved in the tech and entrepreneurship scene on campus, being the founder and director of MedHacks as well as a mentor to the student-run venture fund A-Level Capital.

Akshar Bonu

Laura Biester

Michael Bishoff is a passionate developer who strives to create the future, learn as much as he can, and use his knowledge to help others. When he’s not working on a side project, he’s teaching others how to create their own side projects.

Derrick Bonaflia

Serena is a senior at Harvard College, where she studies computer science. She’s interested in robotics and theoretical computer science. In her free time, Serena likes to imbibe caffeine, write, and travel.

Laura Biester is a senior at Carleton College in Minnesota studying computer science. She has completed two internships, most recently at Gumroad, a startup in San Francisco. She is excited about senior year, but can’t wait to graduate and start her career as a software engineer.

Michael Bishoff

Derrick Bonafilia is a student at Williams College, where he is pursuing a degree in Computer Science and considering a second major in either Math or English. He has professional experience interning on the Search team at Google and doing both full-time and part-time research at Williams.

Serena Booth


Leigh Braswell

Jason Brooks is a senior at Yale University studying Computer Science. He just finished a summer as a software engineer at Facebook, and has previously worked at companies including MongoDB, Thinkful, and Fog Creek Software. Jason is the director of YHack, Yale’s hackathon, and plays bass and cello around campus.

Cristina Buenahora

Hector, born and raised in Mexico, is a junior studying computer science at the University of Rochester. He has done research in cache locality management and distributed systems, worked at wall street during the summer of 2015, and with help of the NSF co founded a crowdsourcing-based company called ShipIT.

Leigh Marie is a sophomore at MIT studying computer science. She spent most of her life in Alabama, discovered her love for computer science at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and developed it at Phillips Exeter Academy. Leigh Marie has worked for MITx, Expii, and Jane Street Capital.

Jason Brooks

Cristina Buenahora is a Junior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Systems Engineering and Computer Science. On campus, she is immersed in several engineering related organizations. Last summer, she interned at Microsoft, where she focused on designing and prototyping a phone-tailored version of Excel.

Hector Cardenas

Samuel Brebner

Steven Buccini is a senior at UC Berkeley, where he studies EECS. He is passionate about fostering a culture of hacking and entrepreneurship on campus. In his free time, he continues his search for a place that serves authentic Carolina BBQ in the Bay Area.

Adam Canady

Austin Chan is a junior at Cornell pursuing a degree in Computer Science, deeply passionate about building impactful web and mobile applications. He has engineered software as an intern at Google and Yahoo! and is a true hustleologist. The way he makes it rain, you could call him a meteorologist.

Samuel Brebner is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Computer Science and Political Science. Sam senior thesis focuses on the intersection of these two areas by focusing on companies’ data privacy policies. In his free time, Sam enjoys rock climbing and playing Ultimate frisbee.

Steven Buccini

Adam Canady, known locally for flying quadcopters around Carleton College’s arboretum, enjoys a well-organized RESTful API, a good security CTF, and meticulously crafted user interface icons. In addition, he’s also quite interested in small, fast-moving companies and would love to speak with anyone who fits the bill.

Austin Chan


Calvin Chan

Michael is a senior at Brown University studying computer engineering. This past summer, he was a KPCB Fellow and interned at Shape Security, an anti-automation web security startup. There, he worked on building the company’s cloud infrastructure. Previously, he was a product manager Intern at Delphix, a database virtualization company.

Kevin Chen

Eugene is a junior at MIT studying math and computer science. He is interested in technology and finance. Eugene previously interned at Jane Street Capital, Five Rings Capital, Addepar, and Quora.

Calvin Chan is a CS/Business Student @ UWaterloo (Co-op), VC Intern @ Anthos Capital, PM Co-op @ D2L, Started two startups (Spurstart. com)

Jesse Chand

Jesse Chand is a senior at USC with twelve months of experience as a developer at Facebook. His last project was implementing support for animated GIFs on Facebook for iOS. He was also the lead developer of EnvoyNow, a USC startup that received $100,000 in funding by Mark Cuban.

Amy (Yuanyuan) Chen studies Computer Science, Maths and Economics at Cornell University.

Michael Chang

Kevin is a senior at Northwestern University, currently studying computer science. He’s a full-stack developer, problem solver, scientist, musician, and TA. Kevin’s primarily interested in tech and ideas that fundamentally question “accepted” interactions, empower individual causes, or drive the limits of what people conceive of as possible.

Eugene Chen

Yuanyuan Chen

Cissy Chen

Jacqueline Chen is a junior Computer Science major and Business Analytics minor at the University of Maryland. She was hired by a startup as a designer right after winning a design competition at a hackathon. She combines her technical background and love of art to develop delightful front-end experiences.

Cissy Chen is studying Computer Science/Applied Math at Princeton University. She was a KPCB Fellow at Nextdoor last summer. She values learning - about engineering, product, business, and marketing, as she is fascinated by the intersection between technology and humans. She also loves to write/read poetry and play the piano.

Jacqueline Chen


Daniel Chen

Lucy Cheng is: Currently interning @LinkedIn as an APM. Formerly creating caring cities @MITMediaLab, figuring out inequality @HCEOEconomics and all things freaky @ Freakonomics. Studying computer science and economics @ Wellesley and @MIT by way of Chicago’s Southside. Always down to talk tech, especially about product design at international startups!

Michael Chiang

Parth Chopra is a student in the dual-degree Management and Technology program at the University of Pennsylvania. Here he is studying Computer Science from Penn Engineering, and Finance/Management from Wharton. Parth is fascinated by the intersection of technology and business, and has tried to pursue this passion through various experiences.

Daniel Chen is a rising senior at Dartmouth. He was previously a full-stack developer at Scribd, Exablox, and the DALI Lab. A generalist at heart, he not only has a background in web, mobile, wearables and more, but also entrepreneurial experience as a co-founder of his school’s hackathon, HackDartmouth.

Lucy Cheng

Michael Chiang is a Junior at Princeton University studying Operations Research and Financial Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. He previous worked at Verbling and Massdrop. Currently he is Princeton’s Sequoia Campus Ambassador and a DormRoomFund NYC Investment Partner.

Parth Chopra

Annie Cheng

Annie Cheng is an undergraduate at Cornell University majoring in Computer Science and double minoring in Information Science and Business. Experienced in iOS mobile app development, web development, and user interface/user experience design, she is also interested in exploring careers in software engineering and product

Yenny Cheung is a Computer Science major at Swarthmore College. She enjoys front-end development and product design. Her approach to problem-solving is informed by experiences working as a software engineer, designer, and illustrator. She looks forward to working with a team that shares her passion and energy. Check out yennycheung.com!

Yenny Cheung

Jonathan Choi

Jonathan Choi is pursuing Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at McGill University. He has previously worked as a software developer at an adtech startup and as a TPM at Facebook. He is particularly interested in fintech, social enterprise and hardware consumer products.

Michelle is a junior at Harvard University studying computer science with an interest in backend development.

Michelle Cone


Albert Cui

Alexandre de Faveri is a sophomore at Princeton University, interested in Computer Science and Mathematics. His background in Mathematical Olympiads gives him a clear and formal way of thinking, while his evolving interest in CS and his recent industry experience make of him an amazing software engineer.

Nikhil Dev Deshmudre

Henry Dornier is a sophomore at Harvard studying computer science and passionate about entrepreneurship and tech. He is currently building MeetingBird, a team-calendar solution, and is a Regional Executive for the Kairos Society. His interests and hobbies include tennis, history, writing, photography, and startups.

Albert Cui is a senior at Columbia University, studying computer science. In his free time, he likes playing video games, programming, and reading about the latest news in the tech industry.

Alexandre de Faveri

Nikhil’s interests are in scalable web backends, databases and machine learning. After a summer each at Google and Facebook, Nikhil is seeking an opportunity at a smaller company where he hopes to have a broader impact.

Walker Davis

Jack Dent is a sophomore studying Computer Science at Harvard College. He has founded three of his own startups, and re-architected Stripe’s recur payments infrastructure in the summer of 2015.

Hillary Do

Walker Davis is a student at Princeton University where he acts as the chair of Princeton’s Association of Computing Machinery and sits on the CS Council. He has worked at Bloomberg and Bell Labs.

Jack Dent

Hillary Do is a Social Studies (no, not GIS or fourth grade geography) major and Computer Science minor. She can type a measly 113WPM and is a former aspiring K-Pop star. In the startup world, she is hoping to contribute to a project with a social impact.

Jonathan is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science and Mathematical Economics. At school, he is involved with Hack4Impact, an organization that develops software for non-profits across the country.

Henry Dornier

Jonathan Dubin


Hannah Dunn

Daria is a developer based in San Francisco. She’s currently on a leave from Harvard where she was pursuing a degree in Computer Science to work at ZenPayroll as a backend software engineer. She previously worked at Google as an engineer on Android and Machine Learning teams.

Hannah Dunn is a junior at Cornell University. Her major is Computer Science, and she is pursuing minors in Psychology and Information Science. She is interested in human-computer interaction and has experience doing full-stack development.

Daria Evdokimova

Atty studies computer science and design at Brown University, and helps lead the student organization Hack@Brown. In the past, he worked at Facebook and KAYAK. His interests span human-computer interaction, usability, and web standards.

Athyuttam Eleti

JN is a senior at Harvard studying Computer Science and Global Health and Health Policy. She is passionate about social impact technology and advocating for women in CS. She is an outdoors enthusiast, dog lover, and horrible singer.

Vahid Fazel-Rezai is a sophomore at MIT studying CS. He has experience in fintech, clean electricity, education, and web development.

Zachary Fein

Vahid Fazel-Rezai

Marielle envisions bios as introductions to people she is soon to meet; here’s an ice breaker: three truths and a lie! Marielle... 1) is an avid dancer. 2) went to Morocco to compete at the ICPC/ ACM finals. 3) hasn’t been to start@. 4) invented the internet. A:3 (Marielle attended start@2014)

Marielle Foster

Jack Gao is a computer science student at the University of Waterloo. Having started his own companies and raising over $55,000 in angel funding, Jack is convinced a startup is where he wants to be. He previously interned at Palantir, Google, Square and Microsoft.

JN Fang

Zachary Fein is a senior at Caltech majoring in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He enjoys machine learning and has extensive experience from previous data science internships and projects. His hobbies include bowling.

Jack Gao


Utkarsh Garg

Nicole Glabinski is a senior at MIT studying electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in mechanical engineering. Her main focus is software with particular interest in systems and AI. When she’s not busy programming, she enjoys singing, watching scifi movies, and running educational

Utkarsh Garg is an senior in computer science, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is passionate about applying computer science in general, and machine learning more specifically, to solve real world, customer facing problems. He has worked in various teams across numerous interdisciplinary projects.

Nicole Glabinski

Anton Gilgur

Amanda Glazer is a sophomore at Harvard concentrating in Mathematics and Statistics with a secondary in Computer Science. At Harvard, she is Co-President of Gender Inclusivity in Mathematics, webmaster/secretary of the Applied Math Society and involved with the Math Association, WHRB radio and the College Democrats.

I’m a software engineer with a knack for entrepreneurship. I design, build, and ship software that makes the world a better place. Connect with me @karangoel.

Karan Goel

Kshitij is a student at the California Institute of Technology, currently taking a fall term to hack on productivity at Asana. In the past, he’s worked at NASA and Apple. Perhaps you’d find him in a coffee shop in San Francisco or buried under a philosophy book.

Max Greenwald

Kshitij Grover

Shivam Gupta is a sophomore at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He interned at Bloomberg LP during summer 2015. Shivam enjoys participating in programming contests. In his free time, he enjoys drawing and playing the guitar.

Having cofounded two companies, led teams across the world, worked full-time through college, programmed since middle school, and architected and developed some seriously* full stacks, Anton is looking to join a small, passionate startup for his next adventure in life!

Amanda Glazer

Max Greenwald is a Computer Science & Public Policy major at Princeton University. He plays rugby, runs hackathons and makes Snapchat geofilters for fun. He is also an independent data security researcher. If, like Max, you’re interested in how hackathons can disrupt education, come to his NYC April conference IgniteSTEM.

Shivam Gupta


Saleh Hamadeh

Michael Han is a senior at Duke University double majoring in Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was a software engineering intern at Appian this past summer and worked as a general lab TA for the Electrical and Computer Engineering department during the school year.

Christopher Hay

Justin Ho is a student at the University of Maryland. He likes to travel a lot and can often be seen at hackathons around the country. He has also been to both the RED and 1989 Taylor Swift concerts.

Saleh is a student at Georgia Tech pursuing a degree in Computer Science. Last summer, he interned at Yahoo and worked in Yahoo’s search front-end team. He has experience building web applications and Android apps, and he is constantly looking for opportunities to improve his engineering, design, and communication skills.

Michael Han

Christopher Hay is a junior majoring in computer science at Princeton University. In general, he loves to build and make things come to life. In computer science, he’s particularly interested in visualizing data through machine learning as well as constructing intelligent robots.

Justin Ho

Aaron Hammond

Amna Hashmi is a senior at Harvard College studying computer science on an honors mind, brain, and behavior track with a secondary in global health and health policy. In addition to academic responsibilities, she co-chaired WECode 2015 and serves as an executive news editor for the Harvard Crimson.

Ian Hill

Eric Ho is a senior at Yale University where he spends his time eating, drinking, and being merry. When he isn’t in the gym or on the intramural fields, he can be found deep in thought, surmising about the profound mysteries of life.

Aaron Hammond is a junior at MIT, where he studies computer science and literature. Beyond the classroom, he has spent his semesters working at Boston-area startups (Bridj and SessionM) and his summers interning in NYC (MongoDB) and SV (LinkedIn). His academic interests include UI/UX engineering, machine learning, and mass media.

Amna Hashmi

Ian Hill currently studies computer science at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA, and has interned at both IBM and Google. His passion lies at the intersection between public policy and technology where he hopes to join or found a startup.

Eric Ho


John Holliman

Ping is a junior studying Computer Science and Russian at Brown University. She’s previously interned at Twitter, and is a teaching assistant and computer lab consultant at Brown. She’s interested in computational linguistics, functional programming, backend and iOS development.

Hirsh Jain

Liu is a Management Science and Engineering and Computer Science student at Stanford. She serves as Managing Partner of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund and a Sequoia Capital Ambassador. Her work experience includes Stanford’s Board of Trustees, Goldman Sachs, Bain and Company, StartX, Morgan Stanley, and the World Bank.

John Holliman is a student at MIT. He received a S.B in CS this past June and is set to graduate this year with a M.Eng. in CS with a concentration in computer systems. He’s worked at a variety of finance and technology companies, including Aerospike, SIG, VMware, and Fidelity.

Ping Hu

Hirsh Jain is a junior at Harvard studying mathematics and computer science. He has assorted academic interests, ranging from cryptography to natural language processing to computational biology. In his free time, he likes to dance, play basketball and poker, and lament the performance of his beloved Detroit sports teams.

Liu Jiang

Kelsey Hrubes

Jade is a senior at UC Berkeley studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She enjoys full-stack software development as well as hardware hacking with Raspberry Pis or Arduinos. In her free time, she loves playing tennis, listening to JCole, and riding her bike.

Kelsey Hrubes is a Computer Science major from Iowa State University, interested in front end development. She has interned at Google, Rockwell Collins in Germany, and a startup in Iowa. Kelsey is the Founder and Head Organizer of InternHacks, a web development hackathon for tech interns in the Bay Area.

Jade Hua

Kevin is a senior computer science major at Yale University.

Kevin Jiang

Hannah Jin likes to break the norm. During her three years at UCLA, she has been very involved in computer science student groups and created effective programs and events impacting hundreds of students. Her exceptional leadership is also evident in her nonprofit work in education.

Hannah Jin


Esha Joshi

Cole is a rising third year Computer Science major at the University of Kansas school of Engineering. When not exploring the world of computing, he is an avid home-brewer and competitive BBQ enthusiast.

Jonah Kallenbach

Shivan is a rising senior at McGill. Recently switched from CompEng (where everything is real) to Software, he is currently interning at a biometric smartwear startup. Shivan is obsessed with becoming a better engineer, and is looking to work with smart people. He’s happy to be back here this year!

Esha is a senior at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo majoring in Software Engineering. She is an avid traveler, passionate dancer, and huge tech enthusiast. She has spent her last two summers interning at Intuit and Apple and is looking to explore her passions further in the startup arena.

Cole Jurden

Jonah Kallenbach is currently a Junior at Harvard University, where he is studying for an A.B. and S.M. in computer science. He is a teaching fellow for the introductory systems class, and participates in several computer science related extracurricular activities. He is interested in systems, machine learning, and computational biology.

Shivan Kaul Sahib

Alyssia Jovellanos

Joe is a South African born entrepreneur and investor studying CS at Harvard. Last year he founded a startup in the identity management space and has since then worked as a software engineer at Final (YC W ’15). He’s also a past world debating champion, avid surfer, and dog lover.

Jonathan Kau

Nilesh Kavthekar is a Senior in the Jerome Fisher program at Penn majoring in Computer Engineering and Economics. Currently, he is Managing Partner of Dorm Room Fund Philadelphia. Previously, he was a KPCB Fellow at Indiegogo and interned at FundersClub. He’s fascinated by VC, product management, basketball, hip-hop, and China.

Alyssia Jovellanos is a computer science student from McMaster University. New to the game, she possesses a relentless desire to drive positive impact while developing her own technical skills. Naturally curious and programmed with an entrepreneurial mindset, her motto is “love the hustle”. She’s currently seeking a summer 2016 opportunity.

Joseph Kahn

Jonathan is a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park studying Computer Engineering and Technology Entrepreneurship. He has interned as a Software Engineer at Facebook, Shyp, and Yelp. Currently, Jonathan is working on ICOW, a platform aimed at undercutting the cost of college application assistance for international students.

Nilesh Kavthekar


Aran Khanna

Ashwini Khare is a student at Georgia Tech studying Computer Science specializing in Machine Learning. He did his undergrad from Indian Institute of Technology - Roorkee and is one of the cofounders of startup - Instalively.

Raymond Kim

Aneesha is a full stack, web developer who has interned at Google, Apple, and Bank of America. She sits on the Student Advisory Board of the CS department. Aneesha also founded the Minority Alliance in Computer Science for which serves as President and directs an annual diversity in tech conference.

Aran Khanna is currently a Computer Science and Math major at Harvard College. He is interested in technology and its impact on our future. He has previously worked in biotech, financial tech, cloud services, and machine learning. He also is involved in academic work in privacy and technology.

Ashwini Khare

Raymond Kim is a senior at Harvard University studying Computer Science and Psychology. He is primarily interested in front end developer roles at a startup in the Bay area after graduation.

Aneesha Kommineni

Nikhil Khanna

Christina Kim is a senior at Northwestern University studying computer science with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. She is currently the Vice President of Northwestern’s student government and is researching social computing and crowdsourcing at Delta Lab. Christina is a self-proclaimed Gopher and foodie.

Nikhil Khanna is a student at University of Washington. Full stack developer (with expertise on iOS, web frontend, and nodejs). Machine learning enthusiast.

Christina Kim

Zhiwen Sidwyn Koh

Design-driven full-stack programmer with vast experience in the field of startups. Versatile in both front-end and back-end. Built iOS applications for popular startups such as Roomorama, Parse & Seesmic. Started and sold revenue-generating businesses to teach students how to make mobile applications. Extremely focused on tasks at hand.

Neel Kothari is a rising senior in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign. Neel is always down to talk about startups and bounce off new ideas. When he’s not building product, you can catch him playing his guitar or experimenting in the kitchen.

Neel Kothari


Jeff Kraus

Aishvarya Krishnan is a graduate student at Georgia Tech pursuing MS in Computer Science, specializing Machine Learning. Her main areas of interest are: Data Science, Web App development and Mobile App development. She enjoys solving complex and real-world problems in machine learning, big data, and software engineering.

Bec Lai

Kevin is a junior at the University of Waterloo studying Systems Design Engineering. He is a co-founder and co-director of Hack the North, Canada’s largest hackathon, and Techyon, a student run non-profit for tech-entrepreneurs. Kevin is also currently a Sequoia Ambassador and is interning at an AI/Robotics stealth startup.

Jeff’s work experience includes engineering internships with NASA, Garmin, and RSA. However, he is looking for opportunities to apply his software engineering skills to advance a technology product/ service at a startup company. So far, his primary interests for software development include financial technology, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and Android development.

Aishvarya Krishnan

Bec Lai is a student at Duke University majoring in Computer Science and Visual Arts. She has a background in human-computer interaction, product management, user experience, and design.

Kevin Lau

Ranjay Krishna

Jimmy Kwon is a senior at Wharton, UPenn majoring in product design and management. He has previously worked with Andreessen Horowitz, True Ventures, and most recently Redfin as a product manager intern. He may have named himself after his favorite cartoon character, Jimmy Neutron, when he moved to the states.

Nicholas Larus-Stone

Kyle Lee is a third-year computer science student at Columbia University. Originally from New Jersey, Kyle spent most of his free time in high school managing a YouTube channel and streaming on TwitchTV. He loves playing music, exercising, and learning new tech in Project M.

I am a graduate student at Stanford University in the Artificial Intelligence lab co-advised by Fei-Fei Li and Michael Bernstein. My main interests are in computer vision and building models the combine language and vision. I also work on optimizing crowdsourcing efforts and building systems to efficiently utilize human intelligence.

Jimmy Kwon

Nicholas is a junior at Harvard College studying Computer Science. He is passionate about the intersection of computer science and biology, building lots of software, and making a difference. His interests include systems, app development, and machine learning.

Kyle Lee


Yuna Lee

Jeff is a Junior studying Computer Science and Mathematics at New York University. He is currently doing medical machine learning research and developing apps when he is not busy making other things. Ask him about some of the Android apps he’s built over the summer!

Xueqi Liao

Nicholas Lillie is a junior at Claremont McKenna College, a liberal arts school in Southern California. He is double majoring in Computer Science and Economics and is seeking employment with technology startups or in technical investment fields. Nick also plays NCAA baseball and enjoys indulging in Taylor Swift’s sick beats.

Yuna Lee is a student at Georgia Institute of Technology. She studies Computer Science, and, is currently working as a software developer intern at Manhattan Associates. Her involvement at school includes Alpha Kappa Psi. She is the most excited about all the leaders she plans on meeting at the conference.

Jefferson Lee

Andee is a 3rd year CS student at the University of Waterloo looking to make a difference. She would like to make or work at a startup in these three fields: Education, Healthcare and Sustainability. She’s currently training for a full marathon.

Nicholas Lillie

Richard Lee

Alex is a senior from Caltech majoring in Computer Science. He likes solving problems with a combination of math and code, and is really interested in the way human interactions and society affect and are effected by technology. Finds advertising fascinating; come talk to him if you do too.

Cody Lieu

Zhicong (“Z”) is hoping alphabetical sorting puts him last so you’ll actually be reading this. He’s worked at several Bay Area startups, and co-founded another back home in Singapore. He’s currently juggling EE/CS, hiphop dance and an existential crisis at UC Berkeley. Talk to him about web and Android development!

Richard Lee is a senior in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He was a KPCB Fellow and Software Engineering Intern working as a full stack developer at Lending Club this past summer. Previously, he was at The Climate Corporation working on the commercialization of proprietary research.

Alex Lew

Cody Lieu is a senior at Duke University majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Electrical Engineering. After spending his summer as a KPCB Engineering Fellow at Indiegogo, he is set on working at small, impactful startups and is excited to continue exploring the intersection of entrepreneurship and technology.

Zhicong Lim


Xilin Liu

Zachary Liu is a CS student at Princeton University. He’s passionate about technology, and is actively involved in incorporating technology into campus through organizing HackPrinceton and by working with campus app developers. He interned at Square this past summer and looks forward to meeting other great companies at the conference!

Tianyu Liu

Jo-Anne is a senior in Columbia University studying Operations Research and Computer Science. Having completed two software development internships, she is now looking for a full-time job in technology and engineering. Jo-Anne is a quick learner, a good communicator and is very interested in working at a start-up.

Xilin is a senior computer science major at Rice University. He is currently the president of the Rice CS Club and one of the organizers of HackRice. He has interned at companies both big and small, and finds that startup environments are the most fun.

Zachary Liu

Tianyu Liu is a Harvard student who is passionate about surround himself with tech and design. In his free time, Tianyu is very passionate about building personal projects. Tianyu fully believe in the transformative power of tech & design, and he is committed to improve China byte by byte.

Jo-Anne Loh

Jerald Liu

Jason Liu is a senior at Yale University majoring in Chemistry and Computer Science. Most recently, he interned as an Associate Product Manager at Google. He is interested in the application of technology to connecting the world and improving the quality of people’s lives.

Sharon Lo

Setareh Lotfi is a junior at Carnegie Mellon University school of computer science. She enjoys solving different artificial intelligence problems and developing iOS applications is one of her specialities. She has experience working with companies such as Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn. When not coding she enjoys soccer and reading.

Jerald is a Master’s student studying CS at Johns Hopkins University. His experience ranges from technical internships (Qualcomm and Salesforce) to competing in the final round of the 2015 JHU Business Plan Competition. Jerald aspires to understand the business landscape of the tech industry through Start @ a Startup.

Jason Liu

Sharon is a senior at Brown and is super passionate about the intersection of design and technology. She most recently worked at Google, launching a feature with Youtube Gaming and has also interned at Microsoft. In her spare time, she helps plan Hack@Brown and loves all things traveling.

Setareh Lotfi


Jackie Luo

Rahul is from Cupertino, California. Yes, Rahul knows how to surf. No, Rahul didn’t surf to school. Rahul is a sophomore at Cornell University studying Computer Science. If you want to talk about cool startup ideas and learn how to surf, chat with Rahul!

Manav Mandhani

Erin Masatsugu is a junior studying Computer Science at Harvard University. She has completed 2 internships with Google but is interested in learning more about startups. Originally from Honolulu, HI, she enjoys all things outdoors and with friends and family.

Jackie Luo is a junior at Columbia University studying computer science and philosophy. At fifteen, she started an online fashion magazine with 1.5 million readers worldwide. On campus, she’s on the board of the Columbia Organization of Rising Entrepreneurs (coreatcu.com), and she was an engineering intern at Percolate this summer.

Rahul Madanahalli

Manav Mandhani is a senior studying Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He likes to travel and spends most of his time planning his next escapade. He also likes to work on pet projects and creating new music.

Erin Masatsugu

Debbie is a designer, programmer, and artist. She has experience as a product designer for Ruse Laboratories for the first Algorithm Auction and as a software developer for Amazon.com.

Debbie Ly

Nina Lu is a senior at UPenn studying computer science and finance from Maryland. She is a former Apple, Microsoft, and Morgan Stanley intern and a two time Apple WWDC student scholarship recipient. Her interests include fintech, volleyball, computational biology, and Spanish literature.

Bernard Marger

Johshua Meier is a sophomore at Harvard College, studying Chemistry and Computer Science. Programming since age 8, he has worked on projects and research in CS and biology with a variety of startup companies and research institutions. For his work, Joshua has appeared in CNN, People Magazine, and Scientific American.

Nina Lu

Bernard Marger is a Computer Engineering student at the University of Florida. Aside from intern experience as a developer at Grooveshark, Sandia National Laboratories, and Facebook at their Menlo Park HQ, he is the president of the UF ACM student chapter and founder of UF’s MLH hackathon: SwampHacks.

Joshua Meier


Shirley Miao

Riya Modi is a CS major and Entrepreneurship Fellow at Georgetown University. She wants to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. She been a Software Engineering Intern at Google and Sauce Labs (startup). Riya is the Director of Software Development for the largest student-run, non-profit corporation in the world.

Shirley is a third-year Computer Science student at the University of Waterloo. This past summer, she was a Software Engineering Intern at Google, working on the front end Sales Platform team. She is currently taking a semester off school to intern at Facebook.

Riya Modi

Merry Mou

Suhas is a Computer Science Master’s student at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interest include Data-Mining, Information Retrieval and Big Data Analytics. Suhas has hands on experience using open-source technologies like Hadoop-Spark-Storm-Kafka-Cassandra. He is passionate about Data engineering and love to contribute in the field of Big-Data Analytics.

Student. Engineer. Entrepreneur. Computer Science @ MIT. Chief Software Architect @FoxtrotSystems. Proudly Canadian!

Mohamed Yasyf

Eric studies Product Design and Data-Centric Systems at Cornell University. In his “free time”, he’s the Creative Director for Cornell University Sustainable Design and an advocate for the design and open data communities at Cornell.

Merry Mou is a senior studying CS at MIT, and plans to follow this year with a masters. She has previously interned at MongoDB, Twitter, and Nextdoor, and is interested in full-stack internships at startups. She also enjoys teaching, photography, and singing a cappella.

Suhas Hoskote Muralidhar

Siddharth Murching is a Computer Science major at Caltech passionate about machine learning and education technology. Siddharth Murching

Eric Morris

Prem Nair is a sophomore at Princeton. He’s worked on HackPrinceton and now is co-directing TigerLaunch at the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club. He did graph search at Bloomberg last summer. If he is well watered and given adequate exposure to sunlight, he always delivers.

Prem Nair


Gopi Krishnan Nambiar

Gopi Krishnan Nambiar is a second year Masters in Computer Science student focusing on Machine Learning and Big Data and Georgia Tech. His most recent internship was at Salesforce.com this summer. Prior to this, he has worked at Intuit as a Senior Software Engineer for 3 years.

Daniel Ni is a third year student at the University of Chicago. Over the summer, he interned as a software engineer at Uber. Daniel enjoys watching basketball and playing poker.

Daniel Ni

Jose Nino

Chinmay Nirkhe is a junior at Caltech majoring in Mathematics and Computer Science. He is interested in approximation algorithms, probability theory, and machine learning and looking for software engineering, and product manager positions. Past experiences include software engineering internships and research.

Jose is a Computer Science Masters Student at Johns Hopkins University. He is pursuing research in scalable systems, and machine learning to provide faster and more valuable insights to healthcare providers. He is an avid biker and runner, and is training to run his first marathon this fall.

Chinmay Nirkhe

I am an iOS developer who loves to shape people’s lives through their experiences on their phone. I focus a lot of my attention on ensuring that the UI/UX are smooth and enjoyable.

Dominic Ong

Oluwatobi “Tobi” Oni-Orisan is a Junior at Amherst College who is studying computer science. He is interested in learning more about networking, software security systems, cryptography, artificial intelligence, mobile systems, and the development of software applications that will benefit the greater good.

Emily Pakulski

Chintan is a student at Georgia Tech, founder of Capp.io and Startup Exchange. He’s been on CNN twice for security related hacks and was a part of DreamIt Ventures’ 2015 class. When he’s not coding, he dancers for a nationally competitive dance team.

Oluwatobi Oni-Orisan

Emily Pakulski is a senior at Columbia University interested in hard problems relating to scalability and systems programming. For fall 2015, she’s taking a semester off to work at Alphabet’s Nest and live in San Francisco. Emily previously interned at MongoDB and Xbox.

Chintan Parikh


Rootul Patel

Mandela Patrick is a sophomore at Harvard University interested in studying computer science and statistics. Over the summer, he interned at Facebook for their FBU program. He is also a member of the Harvard Varsity Squash Team, the reigning Ivy League Squash Champions. Other interests include music and soccer.

Lingjun Pei

Valentin Perez is a student at Brown University concentrating in Computer Science and Applied Math. He was a hackNY Fellow for 2015 interning as an iOS Software Engineer at Matchbook. He’s built 20+ iOS apps, 7 in the AppStore, and is an Apple’s WWDC 2015 Scholar. Interested in Machine Learning.

Rootul Patel is a senior studying Computer Science at Boston College. Last summer he interned at Palantir as a Forward Deployed Software Engineer. The summer before that he participated in Dev Bootcamp. On campus he is the Co-president of the Boston College Computer Science Society.

Mandela Patrick

Linda (Lingjun) Pei is a senior at Cornell University majoring in CS. She interned this past summer at AirBnB, working as a full-stack engineer to build a new reservations page for Customer Service agents. She has previously worked at Google, and is looking forward to meeting new and exciting startups.

Valentin Perez

Ethan Perez

Pedro Perez studied a degree in Computer Science in Spain, doing an exchange program at the University of Texas at Austin. During his undergraduate studies, he did two internships at Google. Now, he is be pursuing a program focused on Machine Learning at Columbia University, graduating in December 2016.

Matthew Piccolella

Jared is a junior at Harvard studying computer science. He’s been programming for as long as he can remember, with a particular love of systems and languages. A New York native, he hopes to see more of Silicon Valley moving to the city.

Ethan Perez is a student at Rice University passionate about Math, Algorithms, and Machine Learning. Ethan has worked on structural analysis software for a startup, BLE beacon signal processing algorithms for Google Maps, and machine learning/computational biology research for Rice. He’d love to work for a fast-paced, data-driven company.

Pedro Perez Sanchez

Matt Piccolella studies computer science and economics at Columbia. He loves building great products, having helped launch products at both Google and LinkedIn. He’s an organizer of Columbia’s DevFest hackathon, and gets really excited about the ways technology and education intersect.

Jared Pochtar


Alex Pong

Antoine Pourchet is a senior studying Computer Science at Cornell University. Born in Germany and raised in France, he loves to travel and has visited over 20 countries spanning four continents.

Noah Presler

Dhruv is a senior at Columbia University studying Computer Science and Math. He has interned at Spotify in NYC and Lending Club in San Francisco as a KPCB Engineering Fellow. He is also passionate about education, traveling, food and photography.

Alex Pong is a photographer, programmer and a DJ. Originally from New York City, he’s currently a senior studying Computer Science at Harvard College (‘16).

Antoine Pourchet

Noah is a junior at the Johns Hopkins University, studying computer science. Noah has spent his early career developing both technical and business skills. Interning at Google, he developed parallel object detection software optimizing performance by over 300%. He also leads 9 ventures as the CEO of Hopkins Student Enterprises.

Karolina Pyszkiewicz

Evan is a senior undergraduate at the University of Maryland majoring in Computer Engineering. He has interned for two startups, Fundrise and Whisper, over the last two summers. Evan is mainly interested in back-end development. In his free time, he likes to lift weights, play table tennis, and rock climb.

Stefan Rajkovic

Karolina is a junior studying Computer Science at the University of Washington. She is a current Facebook intern, and previously worked twice at Google and once at Microsoft as a software engineering intern. Karolina has also held leadership roles on campus as an ACM officer and Google Student Ambassador.

Evan Qi

Stefan is a junior at Harvard studying Computer Science. He spent the last summer in San Francisco working for Square. He loves the outdoors, ultimate frisbee, and football. His blood is mostly actually just coffee, with a little bit of tea mixed in.

Ralph Recto is a senior at Cornell University studying Computer Science and Mathematics. Dhruv Purushottam

Ralph Recto


Siddarth Reddy

Sam Redmond is a sophomore at Stanford University studying Computer Science and Mathematics. He is passionate about improving education through technology and enjoys hackathons, hiking, and high voltage electronics.

Connor Regan

Tomas is a junior attending Harvard College studying computer science. He started writing code before college, and since coming to college has picked up an interest in startups. The past two summers he’s worked at Yelp and Pinterest, and he was a teaching assistant for the intro CS course.

Sid is a student at Cornell University, studying computer science and applied mathematics. He’s interested in machine learning, adaptive education, and startups.

Chloe Revery

Chloe Revery studies Computer Science and History at Amherst College in Massachusetts. She enjoys solving puzzles, from crosswords and riddles to complex technical problems. Chloe is seeking full-time opportunities in Software Engineering at a company that shares her core values: hunger and humility.

Steph is a senior at Yale. She has interned at Facebook and Microsoft doing mobile and web development. Say hi at stephrhee.com.

Sam Redmond

Connor Regan is an undergrad at Northwestern studying Learning and Organizational Change with minors in Business, Economics, and Entrepreneurship. He is passionate about technology and has interned at Google twice, first in Global Communications and most recently in Product Marketing Analytics. He’s interested in product, marketing, and business development roles.

Tomas Reimers

Steph Rhee

Manuela Rios

Jack Roberts is a computer science undergrad at Georgia Tech interested in full-time product management positions. He enjoys working on difficult problems and hopes to be in NYC after graduation.

Manuela Rios is an enthusiastic senior at Cornell University who is extremely interested in Product Management and HCI. Last summer, Manuela was a PM intern at Whisper, and the summer before she studied Mobile Software Development in Budapest. In her free time, Manuela likes to drum and redesign websites.

Jack Roberts


Michael Rosenfield

Julian is a junior at Harvard studying Mathematics with a secondary in CS. He’s worked at HubSpot, JPMorgan Chase, and Top Hat, and done summer research at Cambridge University. His interests include data science, quant finance, web/iOS development, and VR/AR.

Kartik Sathappan

Eric Schneider is a junior at Princeton University, majoring in mathematics and earning certificates in computer science and finance. He has interned as a software engineer at Facebook and Google. Eric’s key strength is his ability to “problem-solve”, and he loves a good challenge, thriving under pressure.

Originally from the Bay Area, Michael Rosenfield is currently a junior at Case Western Reserve University pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science. In the past, Michael has interned within the Advanced Technologies and Projects group at Motorola focusing on cutting-edge consumer products, as well as Google Robotics building multi-agent robotics.

Julian Salazar

Kartik Sathappan is a computer scientist with an infinite imagination and passion for the user experience. He is an aspiring product manager with a strong technical background honed at companies such as HBO and Apple. Let him tear your idea apart and build it back up, you won’t be dissapointed.

Eric Schneider

Edo Roth

Jayant Sani is a junior at Harvard University studying Computer Science. During his freshman summer, Jayant worked on the iOS team at Handy in NYC, and he studied abroad in Venice during his sophomore summer. Jayant is interested in both product management and software engineering roles for Summer 2016.

Dan Schlosser

Daniel Shanker is a Dartmouth senior studying CS and Math. His favorite course was Artificial Intelligence, his favorite Beatle is George, his favorite milkshake is mint chocolate chip, his favorite Frisbee throw is the low-release IO flick, and his favorite riddle is the one with 100 prisoners and a lightbulb.

Edo Roth is a student at Columbia University studying Computer Science. He is passionate about using math and technology to solve interesting problems.

Jayant Sani

Dan Schlosser is a rising senior at Columbia University studying Computer Science. Professionally, Dan has done software engineering internships at Facebook and Venmo, as well as the Associate Product Manager internship at Google. In his free time, he enjoys web development, making music, and writing.

Daniel Shanker


Amanda Shi

Monica Shi, a sophomore at Princeton University, studies at the intersection of CS and economics, and is passionate about using technology to enact meaningful social change. She directs HackPrinceton, runs the Princeton Social Impact Competition (a seed funding competition for socially focused student ventures), and blogs for the Huffington Post.

Katie Siegel

Rachit Singh is a sophomore at Harvard College in Cabot House. He’s involved with the data science community at Harvard and is interested in distributed systems, NLP, and philosophy.

Amanda is a sophomore at Princeton University excited by social entrepreneurship, learning new technologies, & building tools for inclusion, equality, & transparency. Amanda directs Princeton’s Social Impact Competition, organizes HackPrinceton, & blogs for The Huffington

Monica Shi

Katie Siegel is currently a student at MIT. She will be graduating in 2016 with a master’s degree in computer science, concentrating in computer systems. Previously, she interned at MemSQL, Dropbox, and Square. She also directed HackMIT ‘13 and ‘14. Ask her about her baking experiments this past summer :)

Rachit Singh

Connie Shi

Michael Shum is a student at MIT interested in building things that make differences in people’s

Nipun Singh

Aaron Smith is a junior at Vanderbilt University triple majoring in computer science, economics, and mathematics. He enjoys functional programming and machine learning, and is the president of VandyApps, the software club at Vanderbilt. When he’s not coding, you might find him at the boxing gym or playing guitar.

Connie is a senior at New York University studying Computer Science. She’s the President of NYU’s Women in Computing and has been a TA for several semesters. She dreams of making technology that will change the world for the better.

Michael Shum

Nipun Singh is a former DJ who founded RapStock. io - a stock market for rappers. He’s constantly thinking about ways big data can better drive product management decisions and marketing campaigns. He previously used data engineering to help find terrorists for the Navy and to intelligently monitor payments at Microsoft.

Aaron Smith


Alex Sommer

Shreya Srinivas is a rising senior at Brown University majoring in Computer Science. She has been working at Spotify for the past two summers as an Android developer. She is involved in Brown’s Women in Computer Science mentorship program and is developing an app to find free food on campus.

Philip Su

Angela Sun is a product manager and Android developer. Interested in Internet of Things. Likes moving fast. Graduating with a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science in 3 years. She’s previously worked at Hidrate, a smart water bottle startup, and Google.

Alex Sommer is a Junior at Cornell University studying applied engineering physics and computer science with a minor in Philosophy. He enjoys working on complicated and difficult problems across a wide issue space, focusing particularly on those which intersect with philanthropy and social good.

Shreya Srinivas

Philip Su is a Master’s student at Cornell University studying Computer Science. He attended UC Berkeley for his undergraduate where he receieved a degree in IEOR with a minor in EECS. He strives to explore the intersection between the optimization aspect of IEOR and the programming aspect of Computer Science.

Angela Sun

Ambar Soni

Jasmine is a senior at UC Berkeley studying Business and Design. Last summer, she was a Product Management Intern at Alation, an enterprise database startup backed by A16Z. At Cal, she co-founded a startup incubator called Free Ventures. In her free time she likes obsessing over chess and playing tennis.

Alice Sun

Aravind Sundaresan is a student at UIUC, pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science and graduating in Spring 2017. After interning at larger tech companies, Aravind is focusing his interest towards the startup scene, where talented and passionate engineers are making a much bigger impact on their product and company.

Ambar Soni is a senior at Cornell University seeking full time positions for both software development and product management roles. He has 4 summers of internship experience and last summer he was a software developer at LinkedIn. Furthermore, he is involved with two startup ventures of his own.

Jasmine Stoy

Alice Sun grew up in Klamath Falls, Oregon and is currently a senior studying Computer Science at Brown University. In the tech industry, she has interned at Facebook, Elemental Technologies (Amazon), and Google. Outside of tech, she enjoys English, hiking, and theater.

Aravind Sundaresan


Tejas Sundaresan

Harini is a senior at MIT studying computer science. She’s interested in how data analysis can be used to tell compelling stories, make products more intelligent, and better understand the world. In her free time she loves rock climbing, hiking, being outdoors, painting and sketching.

Andrea Sy

Denise Szeto is a student at University of California Berkeley, who is passionate about technology and solving new technical challenges. After her amazing internship at a mid size company with a startup culture, she decided that she wanted to invest herself in a startup.

Tejas Sundaresan is a junior at MIT majoring in computer science. He enjoys learning about how computer science and business challenges are solved in industry, and his favorite subjects include AI/Machine learning-based engineering. He has previously interned at Red Hat, Goldman Sachs, and Uber.

Harini Suresh

At Stanford, Andrea explored data science and organizational behavior through leading BASES, the largest entrepreneurship student group, and being a TA at Stanford GSB. Andrea wants to learn how to think like an entrepreneur by working in product and data at a startup that tackles pain points with global scope.

Denise Szeto

Shun Da Suo

Daniel is a software engineer with experience at Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Sequoia-backed cybersecurity startup Skyhigh Networks. He is interested in an infrastructure engineering role at a breakout company, handling massive amounts of data/traffic by ensuring reliability, efficiency, and security. Daniel holds a B.S/M.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.

Angela Sy

Bryan Tan is a software developer and student at Penn State. As a Penn State Engineering Ambassador, he enjoys teaching science and engineering concepts to grade school students. To further his passion for positive change, he is also living in a coworking space this year.

Simon Suo is a third year student at the University of Waterloo studying computer science and business administration. His aspirations in life involve toppling the Harper regime and installing the Rhinoceros Party of Canada as the sole ruling party. He also enjoys coding, photography, rock climbing.

Daniel Swann

At Stanford, Angela is studying CS with a focus on AI and is the co-president of Stanford’s student entrepreneurship organization, BASES. Angela hopes to be an engineer at a startup - using technology to help communities worldwide. She believes food connects people and hopes to continue sharing her passion.

Bryan Tan


Yuxiao Tan

Jason is a junior studying computer science at Stanford University. This past summer he worked on the Angular core team at Google to implement WebWorkers directly into the Angular framework.

Ashley Thomas

I’m a 4th year computer science student at Georgia Tech. I’ve been involved in startup life since my freshman year. I’ve worked at startups (Twilio & Chartboost), I’ve helped create startups by organizing hackathons (HackTbilisi) and I’ve co-founded startups. Currently I’m a co-founder and CTO of Maiaki, B2B Food Marketplace.

Yuxiao is a senior studying Computer Science at Cornell. He is very interested in distributed computing, system security, and anything related to quantum programming!

Jason Teplitz

Ashley Thomas is currently a senior at Wellesley College majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Mathematics. She is interested in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, and she most recently completed a software engineering internship at Linden Lab in Seattle and a research internship involving Hierarchical Temporal Memory at IBM.

Giorgi Tkeshelashvili

Tsvi Tannin

Krishna Thiagarajan is a junior majoring in computer science and math at Rice University. He interned for Google over this past summer and is very interested in entrepreneurship. He has also participated in and is currently planning HackRice, the annual hackathon hosted by Rice University.

Grant Timmerman

A current physics major at Princeton university, Aditya is also working towards minors in computer science and engineering physics. The past two summers, he worked at a nonprofit developing a tool to predict wind energy generation and as an iOS engineer on the Language Technology team at Facebook.

Tsvi Tannin is a computer science major studying in the college of engineering at Cornell. He’s worked at Palantir and Flipboard and is looking for a job in the consumer space as a PM or product focused engineer.

Krishna Thiagarajan

Grant Timmerman is a senior at the University of Washington studying Computer Science. He’s interned at Google, Sift Science, LinkedIn, Tableau Software, and Nor1, building full-stack web and mobile applications. In addition, he founded DubHacks (dubhacks.co), serves as Chair of UW’s ACM and avidly contributes to open source (github.com/grant).

Aditya Trivedi


Lillian Tsai

Saravanan (Sav) Vaithianathan is a Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo. He has interned at several startups that were in different stages throughout his university career. He enjoys working at startups as it is more exciting. Aside from programming, he enjoys biking, running watching tv and (recently) skateboarding.

Anyi Wang

Adam Wang is a student at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He comes from Shenzhen, China. He is fascinated by artificial intelligence after watching a movie when he was young and is currently taking a robotics class. He believes that machine learning and artificial intelligence will change the future world.

Lillian (Lily) Tsai, Harvard ‘17, enjoys studying computer science, mathematics, and philosophy, and plays in the Kerberous piano trio. This past summer, Lily worked on SOA as an intern at Thumbtack. When not coding, Lily performs as a concert violinist, loves to read SciFi, and explores the great outdoors.

Saravanan Vaithianathan

Anyi Wang is a graduate from Columbia University majoring in Computer Engineering. She obtains outstanding problem-solving skills, extensive experience in machine learning and software development and excellent communication skills and leadership. She has been working for Columbia Machine Learning Lab and she co-founded Riely (http://www.textriley.com/).

Siran Wang

Vicky Tu

Chris is a junior at Yale University studying computer science. He is a 2015 HackNY Fellow for Magnetic and an organizer of YHack, Yale’s premier hackathon. His tech hero is Elon Musk, and his interests include backend development, algorithm design, and Taylor Swift.

Lisa Wang

Alan (Zihao) is a computer science and math senor at the University of Virginia. He enjoys learning new technologies and taking programming challenges at his spare time. After interning as an Android developer at Google twice, he is now focusing on building mobile development skills, both in iOS and Android.

Senior at Yale University pursuing double major in Mathematics and Computer Science. As Director of Sponsorship of YHack, I reach out to companies to partner with YHack, a 36-hour hackathon with over 1000 hackers. This summer I worked as a Cloud Administrator Intern at the Yale CS Cloud Project.

Christopher Wan

Lisa Wang is a senior at Harvard College studying computer science and mathematics. She is a partner at Rough Draft Ventures, a student-led venture group that funds student entrepreneurs, and heavily involved with the start-up community in Boston.

Zihao Wang


Cliff Weitzman

Winnie Wu is a senior at Harvard studying Computer Science. She’s interested in photography, travel and making beautiful, but more importantly useful, things. Talk to her if you want to find out more! :)

Yuwei Xu

Kevin is a junior at Harvard studying Computer Science and Statistics. Currently, he is President of the Digital Literacy Project, a program that brings computer science to middle school students in Boston. He has experience with web development, and wants to explore opportunities in making insights from data.

Cliff is a senior at Brown studying Renewable Energy– a mix of physics, engineering, and computer science. Companies Cliff has founded won 1st place at MIT’s Startup Pitch Night and 2nd place at Stanford’s E-Bootcamp and range from attachable longboard brakes, to biotech products, to iPhone Apps he has built.

Winnie Wu

Yuwei Xu is a computer science and statistics student at the University of Waterloo. He is interested in applying machine learning to practical problems.

Kevin Yang

Shaochen Wu

Kevin is a junior studying CS at Columbia. He’s been interested in application development for a whilebuilding and launching a few apps of his own. This summer, he worked on the G+ Android app at Google. Recently, he’s been interested in learning more about AI, NLP, and Robotics.

Edward Yang

Sijia Yang is a senior student majoring in architecture and econ/math at Yale. She’s got the refined artistic sensibilities of an architecture student mixed with a healthy dose of hard-nosed pragmatism. She’s bounced around industries like architecture, finance, consulting only to find her true passion in Startup.

I am a hard-working and self-motivated graduate student at Brown University. I major in Computer Engineering. I worked as a software engineering intern at Alibaba for the summer. I am currently looking for a fulltime software engineer position in the big data and web development field.

Kevin Xiao

Edward is a hacker and builder. He has won awards at several hackathons, including a 1st place at Hack the North 2014 for a VR Pokemon world. He was selected for Canada’s The Next 36, an entrepreneurship program for top students, and has completed internships at Facebook, NVIDIA and Microsoft.

Sijia Yang


Yiru Yao

Evelyn “Fifi” Yeung is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying Computer Science and Robotics. Attracted to technology at a young age, she loves learning and playing with all different areas of tech, and hearing about what other people are doing! She is excited to be here!

Noah Yonack

Brian Zeng is a student at Columbia who likes to think about philosophy, cognitive psychology, and tech. At school, he’s very involved in ADI, the tech club on campus. His favorite question is “why?” and he is a big fan of baseball and classical piano.

Yiru is a student at Carnegie Mellon University and co-founder at Jumpit. She is passionate about inter-disciplinary innovation and is constantly exploring creative ways to combine media, design, sociology and data. Most recently, she worked as a growth hacker at Newsbeat in SV and software engineer at SmartStudy in Beijing.

Evelyn Yeung

Noah Yonack is a junior at Harvard College studying computer science. Originally from Dallas, TX, he’s an avid web developer and software engineer. Last summer, he was a web developer intern at LinkedIn. During his free time, Noah teaches a leadership class at a local high school in Boston.

Brian Zeng

Kevin Yeh

Sierra is in her third year at the University of Pennsylvania, studying Computer Science with a minor in Fine Arts. On campus, she is a teaching assistant for an intro CS course, and does natural language processing research. In her free time she enjoys watching soccer and biking.

Abdullah Yousufi

Irvin Zhan is graduating senior at Princeton University. Having loved working as a full-stack engineer at four startups for the past three years, Irvin is particularly excited about joining an early-stage startup next year. Irvin’s research interests are in information security and artificial intelligence. Find him at www.irvinzhan.com

Kevin Yeh is a hackNY Fellow and BS/MS student at UT-Austin. He is the Innovation director for HackTX and has worked with Android, databases, and distributed systems at MongoDB, AWS, GeoTrellis, Blastro, and Cerebri. His many research interests balance a love for improv, film, and short walks on the beach.

Sierra Yit

Abdullah Yousufi is a student at Brown University studying computer science, with a focus on computer graphics and animation. He enjoys playing guitar, and I sometimes change grammatical perspective mid-sentence.

Irvin Zhan


Leanna Zhan

Kevin Zhao is a software engineer who spent his last summer at a fast growing startup in Menlo Park. He enjoys working on side projects involving crawling online data, building web apps, and Bitcoin.

Jonathan Zong

Leanna Zhan is a senior at Duke University majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Finance. She is interested in UI/UX design and research as well as product management. In her free time, you can find her taking pictures, eating food, or taking pictures of food.

Kevin Zhao

Jonathan Zong is a student at Princeton University studying Computer Science and Visual Arts. Previously he has held software engineering internships with Square and the KPCB Fellowship at Coursera. He also directs the design team for Princeton Entrepreneurship Club and organizes Design Summer, a community for Bay Area interns.

Harrison Zhao

I’m a software engineer from Princeton University experienced in iOS development and interested in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision.

Roger Zurawicki

Harrison is a senior at the Cooper Union majoring in Computer Engineering. This past summer he was a software engineering intern at Yext.

Victor Zhou

Roger has experience at every level of the stack, from distributed systems and scaling infrastructure to native mobile development and modern front-end development. Roger is a senior at Harvard, a member of the Harvard Lampoon, and co-director of HackHarvard.


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