Cyan Banister
Cyan Banister is the founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Zivity, a subscription and voting based artist-fan interaction platform for models, photographers and video artists. Since launching at TechCrunch40 in 2007, Zivity has raised $8M. Her angel investments include Topsy, OtherInbox, Powerset, Uber, Tagged, Space-X, Slide and EcoMom, and she is a consultant to several celebrities. Cyan is also a contributing writer at TechCrunch and host of "Speaking of..." on TechCrunch TV where she interviews founders and investors to show the human side of the tech business.

Gina Bianchini
Gina Bianchini is the founder and CEO of Mightybell, a new creative platform for projects with friends launched in September 2011. Prior to Mightybell, she co-founded Ning, the largest social platform for the world's organizers, activists, and influencers to create unique social networks online that was purchased by Glam Media for $160 million. She led Ning as CEO from its inception in 2004 to March 2010 as an exponentially growing top 100 global website and one of the most valuable start-ups in Silicon Valley with close to 50 million registered users and 100 million unique visitors around the globe each month.

Steve Bochner
Steve Bochner is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In his more than 30 years of experience practicing corporate and securities law, Steve has served as lead counsel for many of Silicon Valley's most prominent companies, assisting them in venture capital, public offering, and merger transactions valued in the billions of dollars. Steve also has represented numerous startups, as well as leading venture capital and investment banking firms. Steve served as the firm's CEO from 2009 to 2012, and is currently a member of its board of directors.

Matt Coffin
Matt Coffin is the CEO of FamilyFinds, a Groupon for families that launched in December 2010, and an angel/early-stage investor. He sold his web 1.0 company LowerMyBills to Experian in 2005 for $330M and was named Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2007. While at Experian, he served as president of online customer acquisition services and president of the incubator-like Experian Interactive Innovation Center. Matt's 30 investments include Hautelook, Machinima and Brighter, but he missed opportunities to invest in Pinterest and Facebook at $3 per share.

David Cohen
TechStars co-founder and CEO David Cohen has made the Boulder-based accelerator the heart of the local tech community as well as led its expansion to three cities, shared its successful model with innovation-hungry cities worldwide, and co-authored the instant classic "Do More Faster." Prior to TechStars, he founded several software and web technology companies. As an angel he has made about 170 investments in companies including Uber, Twilio, Sendgrid and Groupme. Conversation hint: he loves tennis (Andre Agassi is his favorite pro), and was previously the best (4.5 level) amateur player in Colorado.

"Every angel investor is a winner, right? You hear that all the time...only 10 to 20% are actually winners. Most people who play the angel investing game are going to lose, and just remember that as an entrepreneur." -- Presentation at Ignite Boulder on what angel investors are thinking.

Tony Conrad
Both an entrepreneur and a VC, Tony Conrad has founded two companies that AOL eventually acquired: About.me and Sphere. As a founding venture partner at True Ventures, he has invested in 30+ early stage technology companies, most notably Automattic, Milk, Typekit and MakerBot. He says his biggest missed opportunity was ZocDoc, which has raised nearly $100M to date. We find it hard to believe that this globetrotter, who has lived in Europe and Asia, grew up in a small farming community in Indiana.

Sky Dayton
Sky Dayton is the founder of EarthLink and chairman of Boingo Wireless, which he founded in 2001 and which went public in 2011. He has also founded, co-founded or helped build several other companies including JAMDAT Mobile (purchased by Electronic Arts in 2005), LowerMyBills (purchased by Experian in 2005), Neopets (purchased by Viacom in 2005), Business.com (purchased by RH Donnelly in 2007) and Helio (purchased by Virgin Mobile USA in 2008). He has made about a dozen investments, most recently in Viddy, Gobbler and Identified.com. Sky is an avid surfer -- but we were surprised to find out he has surfed a 25-foot wave in Hawaii.

Jorge Espinel
As EVP of Strategy and Corporate Development at News Corporation, Jorge Espinel oversees the group's long-term strategic direction, including M&A. Previously, Jorge was a partner at Velocity Interactive Group (recently renamed Fuse Capital), a leading digital media investment firm. Prior to Velocity, he spent five years as a senior executive at AOL in a variety of roles, ultimately serving as global head of corporate strategy and M&A. During his tenure, AOL acquired Tacoda, Third Screen Media, AdTech, Truveo, Userplane and Advertising.com. Prior to AOL, Jorge specialized in cable and broadcast television; publishing; and digital media at Booz Allen & Hamilton's media and entertainment practice.

Brad Gerstner
Brad Gerstner is founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital Management, a Boston-based hedge fund focused on internet, technology, travel, leisure, and hospitality. He is also the founder and chairman of Room 77, a hotel search engine that won Best Overall at LAUNCH '11. He has made over 40 private deals, including Zillow, Orbitz, Farecast, ITA, Silver Rail, Nor 1, Room 77, Trover, Real Self, Ostrovok, Fundly and Hotel Tonight. His biggest missed opportunity was Groupon. Outside of work, he loves adventure sports -- but you might be surprised to know he's a pilot too.

Dave Goldberg
Dave Goldberg, the CEO of SurveyMonkey, is a successful entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and technology and music industry executive. He founded and sold music-related content site LAUNCH Media to Yahoo! in 2001, serving as VP and GM of Yahoo! Music for a number of years before becoming an entrepreneur in residence with Benchmark Capital. As an angel he has invested in 20 startups over the last four years, including Peixe Urbano, Nextdoor, Small Demons and 99Designs. His biggest missed opportunity was Siri. But he's one of the few tech entrepreneurs who can say he started his first company before Netscape and Yahoo were founded.

Tony Hsieh
Tony Hsieh is a baller in his own right. In 1999, at age 24, he sold LinkExchange, an online advertising network he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265M. Since becoming CEO of Zappos in 2000, the company has grown from almost nothing to over $1B in gross merchandise sales annually; Amazon acquired Zappos in 2009 for $850M. Tony is also the author of the New York Times best-seller Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, in which he reveals how his failed attempt to become the "number one worm seller in the world" at age 9 sparked his entrepreneurial spirit. Now he runs a company that, not surprisingly, has ranked on Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list for the last three years.

Tim Lee
Tim works with mobile, cloud and software companies. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2009, Tim worked at Google where he managed European marketing and product launch strategy. While at Google, he also conceived the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. Earlier, Tim worked at McKinsey & Company in London and at microprocessor IP company, ARM, in Cambridge UK. Tim has a Masters in Electrical and Information Engineering from Cambridge University, and an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Sundeep Madra
Sundeep (Sunny) Madra is a technology visionary within the mobile and web applications community. Sunny co-founded Xtreme Labs with the goal of engaging the captains of industry in world-class development projects that will define the present evolution of the Internet experience. Sunny provides the vision for Xtreme Labs’ software development and business process that has been optimized for the highly iterative and agile nature of application software.

Dave McClure
Superangel Dave McClure hustles (and curses) better than anyone in Silicon Valley or the world for that matter, having invested in 250 startups across 15+ countries in addition to being the founding partner and leader of 500 Startups, a seed fund and accelerator. His most notable investments are Twilio, Wildfire and SendGrid, but his biggest missed opportunity is LivingSocial. While you may remember Dave's "raging boner" comment about a startup at last year's LAUNCH Conference, we bet you didn't know he received a standing O for his solo dance at a Neville Bros concert.

"Clear value proposition, great delivery. As long as you can do what you say you do, I'll write you a fucking check." -- Comment on stage at the 2011 LAUNCH Conference.

Chamath Palihapitiya
He wasn't immortalized in "The Social Network," but Chamath Palihapitiya was a major force behind Facebook's meteoric growth during his four years on its senior management team. He left last June to start his own VC fund, The Social+Capital Partnership, and is now one of the hottest investors in Silicon Valley. As an angel he's made over 60 investments, most notably Playdom (sold to Disney), Bumptop (Google), Pure Storage, SecondMarket and Yammer. The biggest opportunity he missed was shorting RIM, rather than not investing in a startup. If you've ever received a text from Chamath, you should know he pretends about autocorrect fail -- he's being lewd on purpose.

"What I wanted to do, and what makes me tick, is just being involved with amazing entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world and who are trying to build something that will be truly long-lasting." -- Interview at Tiecon Live Studios.

Shervin Pishevar
Shervin Pishevar is a managing director at Menlo Ventures where he focuses on the social web, consumer internet and mobile. He also helped launch the Menlo Talent Fund, Menlo's new $20m seed fund. Before joining Menlo, Shervin was chief application officer and GM at Mozilla Corporation. Companies Shervin founded have reached an aggregate of 100 million users across companies like Social Gaming Network (now Mindjolt), Webs.com, Hyperoffice and Hotprints. Shervin has angel invested in over 40 companies including Aardvark (sold to Google), Milo.com (sold to eBay), Likealittle (LAL), Qwiki, Medialets, Milk, SolveMedia, Gowalla and SpruceMedia.

Naval Ravikant
It's not hyperbole to say that Naval Ravikant has blown up the angel-investing space with AngelList, which has attracted over 13K startups and 2.5K investors and led to at least 1K individual investments. Before co-founding AngelList, he co-founded Genoa Corp, Epinions and Vast.com. As an angel he's made 20 active and 30 passive investments, including Twitter, but he's most involved with SnapLogic, HeyZap, Context Logic and a few others. His biggest missed opportunities: Twilio and Dropbox. Don't forget, though, that he's still busting his butt as an entrepreneur with AngelList!

"Silicon Valley, like any magnet place, like Hollywood or New York, will attract a lot of very good talkers, and you have to separate them out from the do-ers. The way you do that is by looking at what they've built and how much they've managed to accomplish with very little resources." -- Interview with GigaOM.

Niel Robertson
Niel Robertson is a serial entrepreneur and former VC who most recently founded Trada, a crowdsourced paid-search marketplace, and Crowdsortium, a trade organization for crowdsourcing professionals. Prior to Trada he was CTO and founder of Newmerix, a software company specializing in change management for packaged applications; co-founder and CTO of Service Metrics, a website performance monitoring company; a CTO in residence at Mobius Venture Capital; and a venture partner with Fidelity Ventures in Boston.

Kevin Rose
Serial entrepreneur and angel investor Kevin Rose again impressed the tech world in November when his new development lab Milk launched Oink, a beautiful app for rating every thing that racked up 150K downloads in its first month. Kevin also created Digg, the Foundation newsletter and Revision 3, home to Kevin's popular Diggnation podcast from 2007 to 2011. He has invested in 30+ companies, most notably Twitter, Square, Foursquare, Fab and Zynga, but he missed out on Tumblr and Pinterest. Oh, and not only does Kevin love tea, he's a certified tea master.

"If you keep looking for that thing, I think that that's when you get into this state of unhappiness...I feel as though you can either go the route where you start buying the sports cars and start adding them up....and then you're like, What am I doing? Why am I wasting this money?... I don't care to go down that path or have the huge crazy house." -- On-stage interview at FOWA Las Vegas.

David Sacks
David Sacks, the CEO and founder of Yammer, has been involved in the Internet space for 10 years as an entrepreneur, executive and investor, starting with PayPal in 1999. He was PayPal's Chief Operating Officer and product leader, taking the company from startup to IPO and eventual sale to eBay for $1.5B. Subsequently, he founded Geni.com, which is a geneaology website that enables millions of family members to collaboratively build an online family tree. He also produced and financed the movie "Thank You For Smoking."

Kara Swisher
Kara Swisher, the co-executive editor of AllThingsD, started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 1997. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a conference whose interviewees have included Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other leading players in the tech and media industries. She is also the author of two books about Aol: “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web" and “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future."

Matt Thompson
As General Manager of Microsoft's developer & platform evangelism efforts, Matt has the first-hand opportunity to both observe and work with a number of Silicon Valley’s most unique technology startups. Previously, as senior director of Sun's Cloud engineering organization, Matt was responsible for the development of Sun's platform as a service offering and related cloud-developer tools. In a previous role, Matt was responsible for Sun's developer program and technology outreach worldwide. When not working you'll likely find Matt off an island somewhere following his passion, underwater photography. Check out his blog here.

Rowan Trollope
Rowan Trollope leads Symantec's sales, marketing and product development teams in the SMB segment as well as Symantec.cloud, the company's SaaS business. Most recently, he was senior VP of Symantec.cloud, where he focused on driving Symantec’s SaaS strategy and expanding cloud-based delivery and customer support models across the Symantec technology portfolio. Rowan holds a variety of patents in computer security and operating systems maintenance. In addition to his work with Symantec, he is a co-founder and board member of Software Shelf, Inc.

Greg Tseng
Greg Tseng is the co-founder and CEO of Tagged, a social network for meeting new people that has over 100M members in 220 countries. Tagged spun out of Jumpstart Technologies, a viral marketing company that Greg co-created while at Harvard. From 1998 to 2000, Greg served as director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club and co-authored The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business. He is a viral marketing expert who has advised several Silicon Valley startups including LinkedIn, hi5, Flixster, Pinger and TrialPay.

Aarron Walter
Aarron Walter is the lead user-experience designer for MailChimp, where he socializes with primates and contemplates ways to make interfaces more human. Aarron is the author of the recently published "Designing for Emotion." He is gratified to see the ideas in his new book making their way into startups and big companies, and he's happy to see designers playing an increasingly important role in product strategy. A wannabe barista, Aarron has also been blessed by the Pope, run with the bulls, and rubbed elbows with two presidents and the chancellor of Germany.

Stefan Weitz
Stefan Weitz is a Senior Director of Search at Microsoft and charged with working with people and organizations across the industry to promote and improve search technologies. Prior to search, Stefan led the strategy to develop the next generation MSN portal platform and developed Microsoft's muni WiFi strategy and implementation. Stefan has been writing code since he was 8 years old and is fluent in both hardware and software architecture, trends, and potentials. He also serves on advisory boards for many startups ranging from biometrics to advertising to virtualization.

George Zachary
George Zachary is a general partner at Charles River Ventures with more than 20 years of operating and investing experience in computing and consumer technology. He led CRV's early-stage investments in Twitter, Yammer, Millennial Media, CloudShare, and Geni. Previously, he was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and was on the boards of companies including Accrue Software, Critical Path and Shutterfly. Prior to MDV, George led the Nintendo 64 development business at Silicon Graphics and managed sales and marketing for virtual reality pioneer VPL Research.

Paul Bragiel
Paul Bragiel is a co-founder and managing partner at i/o ventures, an early-stage startup accelerator in San Francisco. He previously founded and served as the CEO of three companies: Lefora, Meetro and Paragon Five. He has advised governments on entrepreneurship and policy that encourages startup ecosystems including those of Tanzania, Brazil and Malaysia. As an angel he has made a handful of investments while i/o ventures has made 16, among them Mobbles, Pieceable and Appstores. He vividly remembers missing a chance to invest in Mint. No one can question his endurance, however -- Paul rode a bicycle across the United States and recently canoed down the entire length of the Mississippi River.

Gigi Brisson
Gigi Brisson is a co-founder and general partner of Attractor, a fund with long-term investments in public technology companies, with a focus on software, internet, and infrastructure companies. Additionally, Attractor Ventures invests in private technology companies, and current investments include Bespoke Innovations, Invuity, catch.com, Cheers, Launch Media, and Mahalo. Her most notable investment was salesforce.com, and her biggest missed opportunity was half.com, which was sold to Ebay. Gigi loves animals and has a rescue ranch for farm animals in Hollister.

Steve Chen
Steve Chen has spent almost 20 years as a serial entrepreneur and investor in both online and "brick & mortar" businesses. He is the owner of 5A5 Steaklounge, founded TC50 2008 finalist GoPlanit, and started ALIST, one of the largest social event planning companies in Northern California. Seemingly eons ago, Steve was a management consultant at Accenture and also started his own DJ company while still in high school. Steve is currently working on a new startup called ScreenDate, where you select in advance who you'd like to meet in person at their social & dating events.

Don Dodge
Don Dodge is a developer advocate at Google helping developers build new applications on Google platforms and technologies. Previously he was a startup evangelist at Microsoft. He is also a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet and Groove Networks. As an angel investor he has made over 30 investments, including Forte Software, WebLogic, Virage, Swype, Vkernel, Path, Milk, Parse and AirTime (he missed out on Facebook, alas). He was born in Maine and lives in New Hampshire.

Thomas Korte
Along with a team of fellow ex-Googlers, Thomas Korte founded AngelPad, a mentorship program for startups, in 2010. AngelPad has since helped launch 37 companies, 31 of which have raised funding. He spent eight years at Google in roles including product evangelist and global team manager. He is passionate about scalable technologies that improve the way people live. Geeks can appreciate his patents for online advertising and search results.

Bill Lee
Bill Lee is an angel investor and the former CEO and co-founder of Remarq, acquired in 2000 for $265M. His recent investments include Tesla Motors, Posterous, Tweetdeck, Zelfy, Social Concepts, Playhaven, Appmakr and Mighty Meeting.

Jay Levy
Jay Levy is a co-founder and partner at Zelkova Ventures in New York who shuns the limelight while working hard to find startups he can go to bat for. He started a web services company in high school and a portal for college students while at Rutgers, later helping launch a financial services consultancy that got acquired and an online monitoring solution. Jay has made 42 investments in four years, including Fab.com, Rapportive, Klout, Ribbit and Crimson Hexagon. He missed investing in Fab founder Jason Goldberg's previous startup and was determined not to miss out a second time. He lives in Manhattan but is no city slicker -- he loves camping, fishing and mountain biking.

Jennifer Lum
Jennifer Lum is the co-founder of Apricot Capital, which invests in early-stage companies in the U.S. and Canada, and a mentor at TechStars and 500 Startups. Apricot Capital's investments include awe.sm, Crashlytics, Habit Labs, Kinvey, Massive Damage, MomentFeed, OnSwipe, Placester, TribeHR and Peekaboo Mobile (acquired by nSphere). Jennifer contributed to the evolution of mobile advertising and marketing while working at Apple iAd, Quattro Wireless and m-Qube. She has also worked at VeriSign, HP and Compaq.

Rafe Needleman
Rafe, editor at large at CNET, has covered technology for over 20 years. He critiques mobile apps and startups in Rafe's Radar blog, and runs a weekly tech issues podcast, Reporters' Roundtable. He recently launched a new series for entrepreneurs, Startup Secrets. Prior to CNET, Rafe was editor of Red Herring Online and editor-in-chief of Byte Magazine. When he covered a startup a day in Red Herring's Catch of the Day email newsletter, each column was exactly 200 words (just to see if he could). His favorite interviews: authors Stephen Baker and Brian Christian for a Reporters' Roundtable episode on artificial intelligence.

Mark Pesce
Mark Pesce is an inventor, writer, entrepreneur, educator and broadcaster. Famous in Web 1.0 for co-inventing VRML, he now spends his time Down Under as an Honorary Associate in the University of Sydney’s Digital Cultures Program and a panelist and judge on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s hit series "The New Inventors." Startups he advises include ClassMate and TaskWant, and he is deeply involved with Startup Weekend Sydney, Startup Weekend Melbourne, and Bizspark Australia. Oh, and despite his shaved head, he really does have hair.

Bill Warner
Bill Warner is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor best known for founding Avid (which won an Oscar for transforming film editing) and speech-recognition software company Wildfire. Passionate about helping entrepreneurs, he is one of Boston's new crew of super-angels and is a mentor for TechStars Boston. He has made 18 angel investments, most notably GreenGoose (a LAUNCH '11 winner) and myLanguage. He planned to invest in two startups while at Y Combinator, completing the Posterous deal but dropping the ball on Dropbox (doh!). We love the fact that he could solo an airplane before he could drive a car.

Tim Young
Tim Young is a successful entrepreneur and pioneer of the social software industry, building social tools that have impacted the lives of employees and consumers. As the founder at Socialcast (acquired by VMware) and co-founder of About.me (acquired by AOL), Tim has had tremendous success building and selling both companies in less than a year. Today, Tim is the VP of Social Enterprise at VMware and an active investor and advisor to startups. He lives in Mill Valley with his wife and son.