Alex Algard founded WhitePages in 1997 to provide consumers a free, accurate, and fast online alternative to directory assistance. Incorporated in 2000, WhitePages has been profitable since its inception. In 2007 Alex was selected as the Software Entrepreneur of the Year, Pacific Northwest by Ernst & Young and as a finalist for Inc. magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year. He is also founder of CarDomain Network, the leading online community for car enthusiasts. He began his career in investment banking with the Goldman Sachs High Technology Group. Alex holds a BA in economics and a MS in engineering, both from Stanford University.

In early 2000 Alex joined Blue Nile, Inc. - an online retailer of diamonds and jewelry. As the Director of Website Development, Alex dramatically increased site conversion; managing two major site redesigns resulting in significant revenue gains. Alex left Blue Nile to take a position as Creative Director overseeing Expedia.com's editorial and design teams. After defining Expedia’s visual merchandizing strategy for a retail site experience, he spearheaded the first significant site redesign in five years. Alex holds graduate certificates in Business Administration and Product Management from the University of Washington and Berkeley as well as a B.A. in History with an English Minor from Washington State University.

Alex has deep product and management experience from Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Trilogy. At Microsoft, he was the group program manager for the MSN Entertainment business unit, which included the MSN Music, Video, Movies, and TV Web sites. He also drove the company's device synchronization strategy for Windows Vista and was a key member of the CRM team. At Trilogy, Alex led the successful deployment of a complex CRM solution for Toyota. He was responsible for the marketing and program management of Amazon's Web services and oversaw the launch of the Mechanical Turk online marketplace. Alex holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science from Cornell University, where he also completed coursework at Cornell's Johnson School of Management. As an undergraduate, he was named an AT&T Bell Laboratories Scholar, which provided a full scholarship to the college of his choice and an opportunity to work on digital media, voice over IP, and speech recognition at Bell Labs. As a graduate student, Alex was a recipient of a full-tuition scholarship from Microsoft Corporation.

Ben is the CEO of Pet Holdings, Inc., the company behind the hugely popular blogs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and others. The success of his sites can be attributed to his knowledge of memes, viral content and crowd-sourcing.

Colin Wong is the CEO of Sharein, a Web 2.0 startup that helps you to share links with your friends, family and customers. Sharein enables you to save your favorite links and share them to Facebook, Twitter, and email. Sharein also tracks your influence and impact by analyzing reach, clicks and re-shares. Prior to this, Colin worked at Google and helped launch the successful Google AdSense product. Colin also managed many of Google's largest AdWords customers in the Pacific Northwest, including Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, Drugstore.com, Blue Nile and more.

Dave Schappell is the founder & CEO of TeachStreet.com. TeachStreet's goal is to create a Marketplace for Lifelong Learning, where people can Teach or Learn Anything. Prior to TeachStreet, Dave worked at online pioneers Amazon.com and JibJab, and microfinance innovator, Unitus. He has a B.S. in Accounting from the Pennsylvania State University and attended the MBA program at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hillel founded Jackson Fish Market in November of 2006 with co-founders and partners Walter Smith and Jenny Lam. Since its inception, JFM has shipped six hand-crafted consumer web experiences including They’re Beautiful!, Invitastic, and What a Lovely Name. Before JFM, he worked for Microsoft from mid-1997 to late 2006 as a program manager, a product unit manager, and all the positions in between. While at Microsoft, he helped ship Internet Explorer for the Macintosh, several versions of MSN Explorer, and the Windows Vista program. Before Microsoft, he worked at two small software companies creating products for the Macintosh. He also founded and writes for Tastingmenu.

Jonathan is a serial entrepreneur and is co-founder and chief executive officer at Picnik.com. Prior to Picnik, Jonathan was the founder and CEO of Phatbits, which he sold to Google in 2005. This allowed for the deployment of Google Desktop Gadgets & Sidebar, which was awarded PC Magazine’s "Best Gadgets Platform." Phatbits has since become a key component of Google’s overall desktop applications strategy that continues to reach millions of users daily. Prior, to that Jonathan was a senior manager in Microsoft’s consumer division and and drove the development of many award-winning consumer software applications in games and MSN. He was also the director of MSN UX and personally delivered the next level of thought to chairman Bill Gates regarding the future of MSN, Messenger, Hotmail, Spaces and MSN Mobile.

Josh Petersen is CEO & Founder of the Robot Co-op, Inc. Begun in 2004, The Robot Co-op has created 6 commercial web sites in 5 years, including the Webby Award winning 43Things.com. Josh began working on the web in 1996 at Amazon.com as a program manager and oversaw several parts of Amazon's early expansion including Music, DVDs, and Auctions. In 1999 Josh co-founded Amazon's personalization and recommendations group and served as Director of Personalization until 2002. In 2003, Josh joined the Microsoft Corporation to lead a team building personalized and local services for news and web search.

Kelly is the founder of Curious Office, a Seattle seed-stage incubator. He was the founder of Imagekind, the largest market for buying and selling art, which was acquired by CafePress in 2007. In 2000, he founded an online video company called RocketVox which was acquired by thePlatform (part of Comcast). Before founding Inkd, Kelly served as VP of Product Marketing for Myrio, and worked at RealNetworks from 1994 to 1999 in various marketing and business development roles. Curious Office has invested in SEOmoz, Imagekind, Wishpot, CoolSpotters, Shelfari (acquired by Amazon) and FeedDigest. Kelly is also a board member or advisor for NetConcepts, PatentExpress, SEOmoz and Rouxbe.

Ksenia Oustiougova is founder and CEO of Lilipip, a company that creates animated videos explaining products, services, and concepts for businesses, start-ups, and non-profits. After the birth of her second child, Ksenia quit her job as an architect to make educational animations for toddlers. She turned to UW for help with her business plan, and her team won the Best Product Idea Prize in the 2006 Business Plan Competition, which served as a launching pad for the company. Over the course of the past 3 years, she changed the business model twice, first from production company to licensing content as a filtered "YouTube" for kids in 2007, and then to the current model in the summer of 2008. Ksenia's "tell it like it is" style combined with her strategic use of social media in business development set her apart as a clear example of the contemporary female entrepreneur.

Marcelo Calbucci is the Founder and Publisher of Seattle 2.0, a resource for tech entrepreneurs and startups in Seattle. Marcelo was the Founder & CTO of Sampa, a startup focused on the family and baby website space he founded in 2005 and closed its door in mid-2009. Marcelo is also the organizer of the StartupDay 2009, a conference he would have enjoyed attending if it existed when he left Microsoft in late 2004. At Microsoft, Calbucci worked on MSN Search (now Bing) for 4+ years and on Exchange Server since 1998.

Mike is Chairman and founder of Front Seat, a civic software company based in Seattle. Prior to Front Seat, Mike spent six years as founder and CEO of All Star Directories, an INC 500-listed publisher of online and career school directories that he bootstrapped until selling to a private equity firm in 2006. During the 1990's Mike was General Manager of MSN.com and the MSN Search engine at Microsoft, and helped build Microsoft Excel and Word into the leading office applications. He is a partner in Social Venture Partners, a leading venture philanthropy network and holds a BA from Harvard.

Rich Barton is the Chairman and CEO of Zillow.com. Before co-founding Zillow, Rich founded the online travel site Expedia.com. Expedia was started within Microsoft in 1994, and then spun out in 1999 as a public company; Rich served as the President, Chief Executive Officer and Board Director until 2003. Rich also co-founded and is the Board Chairman of Glassdoor.com, where you can rate and review your company and see how your salary stacks up. Rich is also a venture partner at Benchmark Capital in Menlo Park and on the boards of directors at Netflix, Avvo, RealSelf.com, and CommonSenseMedia.Org. Rich holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.

Shelly Farnham is a leading expert in applying research, theory, and best practices to the incubation of new social technologies. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology at the University of Washington in 1999, and spent seven years as a researcher on innovation teams at Microsoft Research. In 2006 she joined the startup world, founding her own research and incubation company, Waggle Labs. Through Waggle Labs she has both consulted for numerous startups including Zillow, Trusera, and Strands, and incubated several new technologies including Pathable (now an independent company), a social networking system for helping people meet at professional events.

T.A. McCann serves as founder and CEO of Gist. His past experience includes entrepreneur-in-residence roles at both Vulcan Capital and Polaris Venture Partners. He also held senior positions at Microsoft, leading product planning for the Exchange Server Group and developing the Service Delivery Platforms group focused on mobile applications development. In addition, he is a founder of Jump2Go, HelpShare, and Soft Labour. He currently serves on the board of Art with Heart and is an advisor to Wishpot, Asset Archives, and Notary One. In addition to his technology background, T.A. has won sailing's America's Cup and sailed around the world.