Keynote Speaker

Marc Andreessen

Founder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Marc Andreessen is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Andreessen co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet browser and cofounded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also cofounded Loudcloud, which as Opsware sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He is now a founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, a stage-agnostic venture capital firm that provides seed, venture, and growth-stage funding to technology companies. Andreessen Horowitz has $2.7 billion under management across three funds, with portfolio holdings that include Box, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tidemark, and Zynga. Andreessen serves on the boards of Bump, eBay, Facebook, Glam Media, Hewlett-Packard, Kno, Mixed Media Labs, RockMelt, Skype, Stanford Hospital, and TinyCo.

Dick Costolo

CEO, Twitter

Dick Costolo has been chief executive officer of Twitter since October 2010, having joined the company as COO the preceding year. Before that he cofounded and ran several tech companies in Chicago, beginning in the 1990s with Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development firm, and the web-page monitoring service SpyOnIt. In 2004 he cofounded the blog syndication platform FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007. Costolo remained at Google for two years, serving as a group product manager responsible for social media ads. Earlier in his career, he was a senior manager at Andersen Consulting as well as an improv performer with Chicago’s acclaimed Annoyance Theater. He is @dickc on Twitter.

Keynote Speaker

James Dyson

Inventor & Chief Engineer, Dyson

A graduate of London's Royal College of Art, James Dyson was drawn to engineering principles from an early age. The company he founded in 1993 creates products—like bagless vacuum cleaners, bladeless fans, and high-speed hand dryers—that work in completely new ways. Dyson now employs 3,600 people and has sales of over $1.5 billion. James Dyson, whose first invention was a high-speed landing craft, describes his process as "Edisonian." In 1979, during a visit to a local sawmill, he noticed how large cyclones removed sawdust from the air. Frustrated with his vacuum cleaner's habit of losing suction as the bag filled, he went home and rigged it with a crude cardboard cyclone. Over 5,000 prototypes later, the Dyson DCO1 vacuum cleaner was launched and became a sensation. Today, Dyson is the market leader in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. James Dyson continues to work alongside his team of engineers and scientists, developing new technologies to solve everyday problems.

Keynote Speaker

Alan Mulally

President & CEO, Ford Motor Company

A 37-year veteran of the aerospace industry, Alan Mulally was named president and CEO of Ford Motor Company in 2006. He has been hailed for transforming the venerable carmaker into a technology leader, returning it to profitability, and steering the company successfully through the recent economic turmoil. Among his many honors, he was named Person of the Year by the Financial Times and CEO of the Year by Chief Executive magazine in 2011. A native of Kansas, Mulally began his career as an engineer with Boeing in 1969 and rose to become executive vice president of the Boeing Company and president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, where he is credited with leading the company's resurgence in its rivalry with Airbus. He is a past president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and has served on the advisory boards of NASA and MIT. Mulally is a member of President Obama's Export Council.

Mary "Missy" Cummings

Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mary "Missy" Cummings is an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. In 2004 she founded the Humans and Automation Lab (HAL), devoted to researching and improving the interaction between humans and complex autonomous systems. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, Cummings spent a decade in the military, becoming one of the Navy's first female fighter pilots. After earning a PhD in systems engineering from the University of Virginia, she joined MIT, where, among other things, she's working to design better supervisory control systems for autonomous aircraft. In addition to teaching in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, Cummings also holds appointments in MIT's Engineering Systems Division and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Curtis Hougland

CEO, Attention

Curtis Hougland founded the social media marketing agency Attention in 2006, transforming the traditional top-down model of business communications and marketing through the use of participatory social media. Attention's clients include Verizon, Mattel, Novartis, Blackstone, and CNN. A pioneer in online marketing, Hougland created his first agency in 1993, helping clients reach consumers through nascent bulletin boards, online forums, and ISPs. He established the new-media practice at Ruder Finn and was one of the PR industry's first creative directors at Middleberg, which he grew into a highly successful consumer technology agency before its sale to Euro RSCG in 2000. He also cofounded Film Movement (sold to Blockbuster in 2006), the first company to release films simultaneously in theater and on DVD.

Shantanu Narayen

President & CEO, Adobe

Shantanu Narayen joined Adobe in 1998 as a senior executive overseeing technology and product development. In 2005 he was promoted to president and COO, responsible for global operations. That same year he helped lead the $3.4 billion acquisition of rival software developer Macromedia, enabling Adobe to extend its reach in growth markets like mobile devices and multimedia publishing. He was named CEO in 2007. Prior to Adobe, Narayen cofounded Pictra, an early pioneer of digital photo sharing over the Internet. Before that he served as director of desktop and collaboration products at Silicon Graphics and held a variety of senior management positions at Apple. He is a member of the President's Management Advisory Board, which advises the White House on implementing best business practices, including the application of technology, in federal agencies. He also serves on the board of Dell and the advisory board of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

Stefan Olander

VP, Digital Sport, Nike

Stefan Olander has led many of Nike's trailblazing digital marketing initiatives over the past decade. As global director of digital and content from 2005 to 2007, he helped launch Nike+, the blockbuster performance-tracking platform that has changed the sport of running. The program has enabled Nike to forge an enviably close relationship with customers, engaging 5 million runners in its associated online community. In 2010 he spearheaded the creation of Nike Digital Sport, a new corporate division that aims to carry the digital revolution to all sports. Before that, Olander served as global director of brand connections from 2007 to 2010, overseeing all of Nike's advertising, digital marketing, and media content. He was also instrumental in creating widely recognized media and social campaigns around the 2002 and 2006 World Cup soccer tournaments.

Jennifer Pahlka

Founder & Executive Director, Code for America

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder, executive director, and board chair of Code for America, a nonprofit organization that brings the vitality and creativity of the tech community to local governments. Before starting Code for America in 2009, she spent eight years at CMP Media, where she ran the Game Developers Conference, Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the Independent Games Festival. Before that, she ran the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 events for TechWeb, in conjunction with O'Reilly Media, and co-chaired the successful Web 2.0 Expo. In 2011, Pahlka was named one of the top 25 Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers in Public Sector Innovation by Government Technology magazine and the leading Game Changer in Business and Technology by the Huffington Post. She spent her early career in the nonprofit sector.

Daniel Pink

Author, Drive and A Whole New Mind

Daniel Pink is the author of four best-selling books on the changing world of work. His most recent is Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which draws on behavioral research to challenge conventional thinking on how companies can get the best out of their employees. Others include A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, and Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself. A free agent himself, Pink held his last real job in the White House, where he served from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. He also worked as an aide to Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Pink is a contributing editor of Wired.

Eric Ries

Entrepreneur & Author, The Lean Startup

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. His book The Lean Startup, published last fall, is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller. Ries has himself started three companies, including the 3D social network IMVU, where he served as chief technical officer. He is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and has advised startups, large companies, and venture capital firms on business and product strategy.

Yancey Strickler

Cofounder, Kickstarter

Yancey Strickler is a cofounder of Kickstarter, the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of people pledge millions of dollars across the site to projects in music, film, art, technology, design, games, fashion, food, publishing, and other creative fields. Since its launch in April 2009, the site has channeled more than $150 million in funding to creators who maintain full ownership and creative control of their work. Prior to Kickstarter, Strickler was a music journalist. His writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Pitchfork, Spin, and The Village Voice, among other publications. He has personally backed more than 550 Kickstarter projects.

Sebastian Thrun

Google, Stanford, Udacity

As director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Sebastian Thrun led the development of the robotic vehicle that won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. Currently the head of Google's self-driving car project, he's among the youngest people ever elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences. Thrun began teaching at Carnegie Mellon in 1995, where he developed the graduate program in machine learning, and joined the Stanford faculty in 2003. Passionate about democratizing higher education, he relinquished his tenure at Stanford last year (though he remains a part-time research professor) and cofounded Udacity, a company that offers free online education in computer science; a first class in AI reached 160,000 students worldwide. In 2011, Thrun received the prestigious Max Planck Research Award and the inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize.