Chris Arsenault
Chris Arsenault is managing partner at iNovia Capital and has been an early-stage investor and entrepreneur for the last two decades. Chris currently serves as a director or observer on the boards of Airborne Technology Ventures, Fixmo, Gamerizon, Localmind, Reflex Photonics, Well.ca and Woozworld. Chris is an active board member of the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), is Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) and is active Charter Member of Silicon Valley based C100 (the Top Canadians in the Valley organization), and member of the Quebec Angel Network.

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.

Shane McRann Bigelow
Shane McRann Bigelow is a financial advisor and principal with Bernstein Global Wealth Management. He is responsible for advising high-net-worth families and institutions, as well as their respective trusts, estates, foundations, endowments and pension plans. He works closely with his clients’ trusted tax and legal advisors on a wide range of matters, including tax and estate planning, concentrated stock positions and the sale of privately held businesses. Previously, Shane was the global financial products manager for Cisco Systems Capital, a subsidiary of Cisco Systems, Inc. Prior to that, he owned a California-based banking software company, which he sold in 2002.

Jose Caballer
Jose Caballer is the CCO and chief visionary of digital agency The Groop, as well as the host of This Week in Web Design. After helping countless startups with their brand and monetization strategies, he founded The Skool to teach ambitious entrepreneurs how to successfully launch their online brands.

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.

Ric Fulop
Ric Fulop is a general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners who spent 15 years as a venture-backed entrepreneur. Most recently he co-founded A123 Systems [NASDAQ:AONE], which makes advanced energy storage solutions. Ric is currently a board member and investor at Disqus, the largest comment platform on the web, and Gridco Systems, the leading developer of solid state systems for the grid. He is an avid pilot and was involved in the development of several FIA world speed records, including the fastest electric vehicle and the fastest quarter mile on an electric motorcycle.

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.

John Harthorne
John Harthorne, founder and CEO of MassChallenge, has more than 10 years of top-tier strategy, technology and startup experience. Before joining Bain & Company as a strategy consultant, John received an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. While at school, John received Grand Prize in the 2007 MIT $100K Business Plan Competition as the sole MBA student working with two MIT engineers to commercialize a medical device that facilitates the early detection and treatment of lung cancer.

Rob Hayes
Rob is a Managing Partner at First Round Capital where he runs the San Francisco office. Rob has led investments in companies such as Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), HomeRun (acquired by Rearden Commerce), Uber, TaskRabbit,AppFog, Get Satisfaction, and DNAnexus. Previously, Rob was at Omidyar Network where he led most of their initial venture capital deals and later built and ran the technology investing group. Before that, Rob was at Palm where he started up their corporate venture fund and managed the strategy effort around Palm OS that led to the spinout of PalmSource.

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.

Raj Kapoor
Raj Kapoor is a managing director at Mayfield Fund. He invests in the online advertising, e-commerce, consumer internet/digital media and internet infrastructure services and software segments. Previously, Raj was co-founder and CEO of Snapfish, a leading global online photo service. He orchestrated the sale of Snapfish to Hewlett-Packard in March 2005. Prior to Snapfish, Raj was an executive at Excite@Home, where he led the company’s e-commerce and broadband applications business. Raj also held various positions in consumer interactive television services at Bell Atlantic Corporation, which is now Verizon.

Manu Kumar
Manu is the founder and Chief Firestarter at K9 Ventures, a technology-focused microVC fund based in Palo Alto. K9 invests in teams of technical founders in the Bay Area who are creating new technology or opening new markets, with a direct revenue model. Manu founded SneakerLabs (acquired by Octane/E.piphany), iMeet (merged with Netspoke, acquired by Premiere Conferencing) and CardMunch (acquired by LinkedIn). Manu is an investor inCrowdFlower, Twilio, DNAnexus, HighlightCam, CardMunch, Lytro, Zimride, IndexTank (acquired by LinkedIn), BackType (acquired by Twitter), EasyESI, card.io, Baydin, LucidChart, Torbit, Occipital and TapCanvas.

Robb Kunz
Robb Kunz is co-founder of BoomStartup, Utah's mentorship-driven seed accelerator and charter member of the Global Accelerator Network. He is also the Founder/Managing Partner of ventureblue Capital, an early-stage seed investment firm, and has invested in more than 25+ high tech startups with active hands-on mentorship and involvement. As an entrepreneur, he has founded three software companies, all of which, are still in full operation and scale. In his spare time, as a ham radio operator, you can find him talking to the astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

Dan Levine
Dan Levine joined Accel in 2010 and focuses on early stage investments. Prior to joining Accel, Dan founded chart.io, a Y Combinator-backed company specializing in visualizing data. Before chart.io Dan was at TechCrunch where he conducted industry research and published quarterly reports about industry trends, funding and M & A.

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.

Jason Nazar [ moderator ]
Jason Nazar is the co-founder and CEO of Docstoc.com, which provides the best quality and largest selection of documents and resources for small businesses. He was previously a partner at Venture LLC, a venture consulting group where he helped grow dozens of companies. He holds a JD/MBA from Pepperdine University and a BA from UC Santa Barbara. Like us, you might be surprised to know that Jason was a suicide hotline counselor (no deaths on his watch!) and a stage hypnotist.

Manish Patel
Manish works on early stage consumer and technology investments for Highland Capital. Prior to that he spent a number of years at Google where he led the company's 3D mapping and advanced geo-imagery programs, built some of the key components of AdWords and AdSense, and started a couple of experimental initiatives like GoogleTV. Before he figured out how to get paid by playing with computers, Manish worked at a non-profit focused on immigration issues.

Peter Pham
Peter is a partner at Science Inc, a new incubator in Los Angeles. Most recently he was a second-time entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures identifying great LA companies to invest in. He co-founded and served as president of Color, which is exploring the future of mobile and social interactions through proximity, and before that was CEO of BillShrink. While VP of business development at Photobucket, he helped drive growth to 61M users and led its $300M acquisition in 2007 by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp.

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.

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.

Andrew Warner [ moderator ]
Andrew Warner runs Mixergy, a project where proven entrepreneurs teach how they built their businesses. Participants include the founders of LivingSocial, 37signals, Sun Microsystems, Y Combinator and LinkedIn, though he notes he gets the least amount of traffic for his most meaningful interviewees: founders of failed companies. Andrew previously built Bradford & Reed, a $30+ million a year online greeting card company. In case you were wondering, Andrew plans to continue interviewing founders until he dies -- "and then I plan to interview Andrew Carnegie in heaven," he says.

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.