Geeks. Founders. Startups. The Internet Revolution, Act II.

I am the founding general partner of 500 Startups, a $30M early-stage seed fund & incubator program focused on consumer/SMB internet & related infrastructure services. Selected areas of interest include financial services & e-commerce, search/social/mobile platforms, personal & business productivity, education & language, family & healthcare, web infrastructure, and tribbles.

MyGengo is an API platform for scalable, crowdsourced human translation. The company is HQ'd in Tokyo, Japan.

I helped create StartupVisa.com, a grass-roots project & website dedicated to immigration reform for non-US entrepreneurs. Our specific goal is to modify the EB-5 Visa to make it easier for startup founders with investor funding to come to the US, and thereby create more jobs & economic opportunities for everyone, including US citizens. We aim to accomplish these goals by working with Congress & other federal agencies, venture capitalists & entrepreneurs, and a diverse & motivated group of individuals.

GeeksOnaPlane.com is a travel and cultural exchange program comprised of top Silicon Valley, US, and Int'l entrepreneurs, technologists, investors, and bloggers. We travel all over the world, visiting other geeks and entrepreneurs, learning/sharing about our collective experiences, and attending/hosting tech, startup, and social events and conferences. We help amazing geeks meet other amazing geeks, and have a great time.

Twilio is a cloud-computing company that provides a hosted platform for voice applications and services. They have raised capital from Union Square Ventures, Founders Fund, and Bessemer Ventures.

I became an advisor to the company in October 2008, made the Founders Fund investment via FF Angel in December 2008, and also made a personal investment in the company in 2009. I became a boardmember in December 2009, when Union Square invested in the Twilio Series A round. 500 Startups also invested in Twilio Series b round led by Bessemer in 2010.

Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of internet startups. We meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience.

On behalf of Founders Fund, I ran two early-stage investment programs: 1) FF Angel: a seed-stage fund focused on $50K-250K investments in tech & internet startups, and 2) fbFund REV Incubator: a $25K-100K micro-seed fund for Facebook-related apps & startups (note: fbFund is run jointly with Accel Partners & Facebook). I also ran several Founders Fund events & programs that support entrepreneur education in a variety of areas including: startup finance, product development, product marketing, and startup metrics.

- FF Angel investments -- see http://bit.ly/FFangel.
- Facebook fbFund investments -- see http://fbFund.com.

The fbFund REV Incubator program (http://fbFund.com) provides micro-seed (up to $100K) investments in early-stage startups developing solutions using Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. I coordinated the program for 2009, which ran from June thru August at the Facebook offices in Palo Alto. In addition to representing Founders Fund, i also work closely with Accel Partners and Facebook to help review, select, and invest in the best & brightest fbFund finalists.

I helped run a microfinance non-profit (http://SVMN.net) focused on education & outreach in the SF bay area. I was a co-founder of the organization, and served as a boardmember since its inception. SVMN was created to connect and educate people about microfinance-related issues and topics, and host monthly events with notable microfinance industry speakers from the US and around the world. I created the SVMN website & related content, helped recruit speakers & market our events, and worked with the rest of the board to guide overall organization goals & objectives.

Unitus (www.unitus.com) is a leading organization in the global microfinance industry. We select promising microfinance institutions ("MFIs") and provide long term investment (grants, debt and equity) and consulting, geared towards greatly accelerated growth, financial transformation and massive poverty alleviation.

As of October 2008, Unitus has established 22 partner MFIs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and reaches over 5 million microfinance borrowers worldwide.

Advisor and consultant to consumer financial services startup on product & marketing. i helped the marketing team come up with a content strategy for blogging syndication, and contributed to the overall online marketing strategy via customer research & market positioning, channel strategies for customer acquisition, and search engine marketing. i also helped research web analytics and metrics tools for measuring user acquisition & engagement. i became an investor in Q2 2007.

Mint was acquired by Intuit in November 2009 for $170M.

I have helped advise/consult/invest in a number of startups, typically focused on consumer & SMB internet services. Areas of specialization include: financial services & e-commerce, personal or business productivity, education & language, family & healthcare, search & social networking, and web infrastructure.

Web 2.0 Expo (2006-2008)
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As a consultant to O'Reilly Media, I helped create & co-chair the first-ever Web 2.0 Expo tech conference (http:/web2expo.com). Along with Tim O'Reilly, John Battelle, and the staff of O'Reilly Media & CMP Media, I defined conference objectives, designed conference tracks & programs, recruited program committees & advisory board members, and reviewed over 500 submissions for conference talks. For the 2007 and 2008 conferences, I was solely responsible for designing 2 of the 7 conference education tracks on Marketing & Community and Strategy & Business Models, for which I selected & organized over 60 talks & panel sessions and recruited more than 150 notable industry speakers. I also helped promote & market the conference to the overall technology community, including tech press & bloggers, software developers, designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, venture capitalists, and tech executives, resulting in over 10,000 conference attendees.

Graphing Social Patterns (2007-2008)
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As a partner with O'Reilly Media, I was the co-founder and conference chairperson for Graphing Social Patterns, a business & technology conference about facebook, social networking platforms, and social applications. Along with O'Reilly Media, I produced 3 conferences in 2007 and 2008 attended by over 1,000 web developers, media & advertising executives, investors and press. For more info visit http://graphingsocial.com and http://gsp2007.com to see content & presentations from our events in 2007 & 2008 held in San Jose, San Diego, and Washington, DC.

In fall of 2007, I was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University and co-instructor along with Prof. BJ Fogg for CS377W, Creating Engaging Facebook Applications, the nation's first-ever university course on how to build viral & engaging web applications for Facebook Platform. The class also emphasized applying metrics to improve product development & product marketing. We brought in industry speakers from companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, & several venture-backed startups to provide real-world examples of internet technology & entrepreneurship in action. Collectively the class created over 50 Facebook applications resulting in over 20M installs and ~1M active users in December 2007. 5 of the teams in the class created apps which generated more than 1M installs and were among the top 100 Facebook apps as measured by installs and active users. After the class was over, several apps were acquired by commercial entities, and one of the teams successfully raised venture financing.

Simply Hired (http://SimplyHired.com) operates the world's largest search engine for jobs, with millions of job listings indexed from thousands of job boards, classifieds, and company websites.

As Director of Marketing, I ran the Simply Hired marketing team before, during, and after launch of the company website in March 2005. Thru the end of 2005, I managed all aspects of marketing, PR, website content, search engine marketing, site metrics, community, and customer support. Along with our product team, I helped create the Simply Hired brand, voice, and overall site look and feel. I was personally responsible for strategic partnerships with LinkedIn and O'Reilly Media, and my team was responsible for the SimplyHired.com launch at Demo Fall 2005 and for the SimplyFired.com website and campaign that achieved national news coverage. I spoke on behalf of the company at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit conference, and created the first-ever conference on vertical search with speakers from over two-dozen search startups along with Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. I was also an investor in the company's Series B round financing in August 2005.

In December of 2005 I was promoted from Director to VP, and continued to handle outbound marketing & evangelism functions for the company. Prior to leaving my full-time position with the company in 2006 and moving to an advisory role, I also ran the Product group for a short period and helped manage the company partnership with MySpace.

Simply Hired has received awards from Time and BusinessWeek, and has been featured in national publications and websites including: NY Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, USA Today, Washington Post, San Jose Mercury, PC Magazine, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Business 2.0, and The Economist. As of October 2009 Simply Hired has raised over $22M in funding from both angel and institutional investors including Foundation Capital, Garage Technology Ventures, IDG Ventures, and News Corp.

I started and managed the PayPal Developer Network, a community of ~300,000 web designers and developers who use PayPal to build E-Commerce websites, solutions, and services.

I managed a team of technical evangelists to help deliver technical education & marketing, create site content, build PayPal add-on solutions for various web development and productivity tools (including wizards for Dreamweaver, Visual Studio, FrontPage, Outlook), community message boards & forums, documentation, conferences, etc.

I also interacted closely with the PayPal Product and Marketing teams to help drive product strategy, marketing communication strategy, and provide regular customer feedback on current and requested functionality.

Primary responsibilities involved business management, developing and managing marketing and sales efforts, recruiting and hiring technical staff, developing and managing strategic partnerships. Additional responsibilities included client account management, accounting and finance, general startup management. Aslan was acquired by Panurgy Corporation in January 1998.
• Founded, bootstrapped professional services startup from 0 to $2M in revenues in 3 years.
• Won “Microsoft Partner of the Year” award Northern California 1997, from pool of over 500 companies.
• Won business with key clients: Intel, Microsoft, Netscape, Stanford, The Gap, Intuit, VentureOne.
• Averaged 200% growth in annual revenues from ’95 to ’98.
• Recruited, interviewed, hired company employees; grew staff to 20 people.
• Arranged competitive company acquisition in ’98 from among 3 interested companies.
• Continued to grow business unit by 50% in the year after acquisition (also profitable).