LPV9 Startup Most Likely to Succeed

Stewart Butterfield

Stewart Butterfield is the president and co-founder of Tiny Speck, developer of the web based massively multiplayer game, Glitch, to be released late 2010.

Prior to Tiny Speck, Stewart co-founded Flickr and was the president of its parent company before Flickr's acquisition by Yahoo! in the spring of 2005. Until July 2008, he oversaw the development ofFlickr.com as its General Manager inside Yahoo! where it has grown to one of the largest web sites in the world with over 80 million unique visitors a month.

In 15 years working on the web, Stewart has had a distinguished career as a designer, entrepreneur, and technologist, named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine and one BusinessWeek's Top 50 Leaders.

Butterfield graduated from the Universities of Victoria and Cambridge, with degrees in philosophy and retains interests in cognitive science, the history and philosophy of science, and economics. He lives in Vancouver.

Debbie Landa

Debbie Landa, founder of Dealmaker Media, is an entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in business development, sales, marketing, and public relations. Before starting Dealmaker Media in 2000, Debbie was the director of business development for Double Impact, a venture catalyst firm focused on accelerating the growth of emerging startup companies. Prior to that, she was the founder of several companies including a PR and event production company. In addition, Debbie has 10 years of experience in the apparel industry, working with various clothing manufacturers, designing and developing private-label programs for major retailers.

Dean Prelazzi

Dean is Director of ICT, Wireless & Digital Media at BCIC and has been working and consulting in the technology industry in Canada & the U.S. (Silicon Valley) for the past 15 years in sales, marketing, and product management, primarily with startups including CrossKeys Systems (acquired by Orchestream), webHancer (acquired by Microsoft), and Vivonet Canada. His tech background spans telecommunications, networking, Internet, web 2.0, social networking, and SaaS. He earned an Executive MBA from the University of Ottawa specializing in high technology sales and marketing strategy and is a mentor with New Ventures BC and the SFU Technology Mentorship Program. Dean is also a technology marketing instructor at BCIT and a Board Member with the Kids Up Front Foundation in Vancouver.

Amar Varma

Amar has over 12 years of experience in the technology and investment arenas. Before joining EVP, Amar was a Director at VenGrowth Capital Partners where he focused on investments in the technology sector. Prior to that, Amar worked at a number of public and private technology companies in both Canada and the US including Jetstream Communications Inc., Cypress Semiconductor Corporation, ATi Technologies Inc. and Newbridge Networks Corp. Amar has a Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is a graduate of the Venture Capital Institute sponsored by the NVCA.

Rob Richards

Rob Richards is a seasoned executive of the technology industry with diverse experience in private and public companies. He joined the distinguished team of real estate developers and technology investors at Plazacorp Investments Ltd. in Toronto in the fall of 2007. Plazacorp Ventures is an advisory practice focused on helping emerging technology companies to implement growth initiatives including financing, capital markets strategies, business strategies, management augmentation and corporate governance. Rob sits on the boards of three private companies and a cancer research initiative at the Princess Margaret Hospital.

After graduating from the University of Waterloo Co-op Physics program, Rob started his career with a decade at Nortel Networks / Bell Northern Research doing core R&D in digital signal processing, where he achieved an award of excellence for a patent in voice processing.

Rob founded a successful consulting practice in the data communications industry, and in 1997 joined the internet startup E-Cruiter.com, which was a pioneer of the SaaS business model. He was COO of the company through a NASDAQ IPO in 1999 and multiple acquisitions through 2001. Rob then worked with several early stage technology companies as investor and interim CEO / advisor in Ottawa.

Jason Bailey

GM of Social Currencies, Adknowledge

Jason Bailey, GM of Social Currencies for Adknowledge , is a dynamic leader and entrepreneur known for his great sense of humor. He’s been involved in website building and development since 1998. His engineering specialties include SEO, SEM, CPA, Affiliate Marketing, Web usability, Web analytics, eCommerce, PHP, mySQL, and scripting languages. He is a game enthusiast and strategist and consults with game developers on a daily basis to help take their games to the next level. In 2006, Jason founded KITN Media, a leading CPA affiliate network, which evolved into Super Rewards in December of 2007. In just eighteen short months, Jason grew Super Rewards to become the world’s largest online virtual currency monetization platform, leading to the company’s acquisition by Adknowledge in July 2009.

Katherine Barr

Katherine Barr is a member of the investment team at MDV focused on Internet-enabled companies.

Prior to joining MDV, she was a Negotiator at Vantage Partners (spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project), helping high tech clients such as IBM, Cisco and HP to negotiate with customers, service providers, suppliers, and partners.

Before Vantage, she led a development team as a Senior Product Manager at HSA, an education technology startup in Boston.

Katherine teaches a yearly Professional Education Negotiation program for the School of Engineering at Stanford. During her graduate studies at Stanford, she was involved in running the E-Challenge business plan competition for BASES (Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students).

Katherine sourced MDV's investments in Visible Measures, Infusionsoft and VirtuOz, is a board observer for Wordnik, and has worked with various other portfolio companies such as PBworks and hi5. She is an advisor to Samasource, on the Organizing Committee for C100 and founding sponsor of Startup2Startup.

Katherine received her B.A. from McGill University, and completed an M.A. and the M.S. core curriculum in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University.

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news.

Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He also co-authored a book on initial public offerings.

In 1999 he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP Business Development and General Counsel. In 2000 he cofounded Achex, an online payments company. Achex was acquired by First Data Corp in 2001 for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.

Arrington worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner-backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including Verisign.

He founded TechCrunch on June 11, 2005.

In May 2008 Time Magazine named Michael Arrington as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.