FRED SEIBERT

Founder Frederator Studios and Next New Networks

Fred Seibert, a television and film producer and serial media entrepreneur, was MTV’s first creative director and shaped its unique voice. In 2007 he co-founded Next New Networks, the leading online television company, attracting over 200 million views per month on YouTube. When acquired by YouTube, Seibert concentrated again on his own company, Frederator Studios, and launched in 2012 the YouTube Channel “Cartoon Hangover”, with more than 92 Mio. views and growing.

Lauren Zalaznick

Digital Media Executive & Former Executive Vice-President NBC Universal

From her start as an independent feature film producer to her most recent role as Executive Vice President, NBC Universal, Zalaznick has built great expertise at the intersection of content, technology, and data. She has been recognized as an industry pioneer, e.g. by Time Magazine as one of the 100 “World’s Most Influential People”. Zalaznick advises and invests selectively in digital media startups and sits on the Board of Directors at Shazam and Penguin/Random House.

Thomas Hesse

Media Executive and Entrepreneur & Former Member of the Executive Board Bertelsmann

Thomas Hesse was President of Corporate Development and New Businesses as well as Member of the Executive Board of Bertelsmann. Hesse oversaw the company's worldwide corporate and digital development, as well as its music rights division, BMG Rights Management, and its venture capital arms, Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments and Bertelsmann Asia Investments. Prior, he was Sony Music Entertainment's President of Global Digital Business, US Sales, and Corporate Strategy.

Brian Welle

Director of People Analytics Google

As Director of People Analytics Brian Welle has conducted research and designed programs that strengthened Google’s HR initiatives. He leads a team of Analysts that has three main goals: (1) guide Google's talent management, learning programs, career development and diversity practices through the strategic use of data; (2) launch surveys that take the pulse of the organization and empower clients to act on the results; and (3) conduct basic HR research through the People and Innovation Lab (PiLab), an internal HR think-tank.

Don Kingsborough

Vice President Global Retail PayPal

As vice president of global retail, Don Kingsborough is a driving force behind PayPal’s quest to transform the way people shop. Being head of PayPal’s Global Strategic Development group, he oversees the company’s business development. Prior, Don played a central role in the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States. From there he founded World of Wonder, where he launched Teddy Ruxpin and laser tag. After that, Don founded Blackhawk Network and was CEO for a decade.

Guru Hariharan

CEO Boomerang Commerce

Guru Hariharan is CEO of Boomerang Commerce. Their flagship product is a multi-channel price optimization platform which currently powers pricing decisions across the world’s biggest retailers. Prior, he was responsible as General Manager at ebay for the global marketplace experience, where he launched eBay's brand and personalization engine for fast and free fulfillment. As Head of Amazon Dev Center he co-founded the Amazon WebStore program and took it from idea to free cash flow positive in 28 months.

Monika Kochhar

Founder and CEO SmartGift

Monika Kochhar is a visionary entrepreneur, business leader and technology evangelist with a passion for advancing the role of women in business. In her current position as Founder and CEO of SmartGift, Monika is responsible for corporate leadership, product and advancing the company's mission of becoming the standard in online gifting for brands and retailers. Prior to SmartGift, Monika advised winning e-commerce start-ups into strong exits and spent over a decade on Wall Street trading and structuring investment opportunities.

ANDY KATZ-MAYFIELD

Co-Founder and Co-CEO Harry's

Katz-Mayfield is the co-founder and co-CEO of Harry's, a brand of men's shaving products sold directly to consumers at Har-rys.com. He and his co-founder Jeff Raider created Harry's to provide men with a return to the essential shaving experience - simple, high-quality, well-designed products offered at a fair price. Worldwide it’s the only fully vertically integrated shaving brand: all razor blades are manufactured with its German manufacturing subsidiary, Feintechnik, which they acquired for $100 Mio. after being only nine month in business.

Peter Borum

Co-Founder and CEO Reelio

Peter Borum is the co-founder and CEO of Reelio, where he oversees the business, creative, and engineering teams that power some of YouTube's most effective branded content partnerships. Prior, Pete was the Director of Communications at Revstone, where he led the brand consolidation of 18 portfolio companies in 4 countries. Before that, he founded Aspirént, a strategic consulting firm whose projects included, e.g. a massive direct marketing campaign for Michael Bloomberg's successful 2009 mayoral campaign.

Bryan Wiener

Chairman 360i

Bryan is an Internet entrepreneur with almost 20 years experience, and a track record for growing businesses in disruptive markets, including the meteoric rise of 360i. In addition, Bryan also currently serves as Chairman of social enterprise software company Expion. Previously, Bryan was Co-CEO of Innovation Interactive, the privately held parent company of 360i and IgnitionOne, which was acquired by Dentsu. Bryan currently serves as Chairman of the 4A's Digital Board, as a member of the 4A's National Board of Directors and on the IAB Agency Advisory Board.

Erick Schonfeld

Co-Founder TouchCast & Executive Producer of DEMO

Erick Schonfeld is the co-founder of TouchCast, the executive producer of DEMO, a technology journalist, and a partner at bMuse, a startup studio in NYC. Schonfeld is the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. Prior, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, and a senior writer for Fortune magazine.

DR. AMOL SARVA

Serial Technology Entrepreneur & Founder Knotable

Sarva is a technology entrepreneur who co-founded Peek and Virgin Mobile USA. Virgin was among the first to market prepaid phone service in the US whilst Peek introduced the world's first mobile device dedicated to email, SMS, and social networking. Currently he is developing Halo Neuro, a cognitive enhancement technology, and an application for better discussions called Knotable. He is an advisor to Fon (world's largest wifi network), Payfone (mobile payments), and Work Market (platform for labor resources).

Joe Kessler

CEO and President Noise

In 2014, Noise merged with The Intelligence Group (IG), a leading consumer insights firm focused on youth culture, and Joe was appointed CEO and President of Noise. As President of IG, he led the company as it doubled its revenues and expanded its offerings to better help marketers engage young consumers effectively. An expert in Millennial insights, Joe has presented at events ranging from the TedX New England to The MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Prior to joining IG, Joe was a Partner at SS+K, an integrated, non-traditional marketing agency.

Geoff Ramsey

Chairman & Co-Founder eMarketer

Geoff Ramsey is on the cutting edge of consumer trends and marketing best practices in a digital, multichannel world. He is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Washington Post, CNN, Businessweek and Advertising Age. He is the author of “Digital Impact: The Two Secrets to Online Marketing Success” and a highly regarded speaker at major industry and corporate events around the globe (e.g. ad:tech, IAB, ANA, 4As, the Economist Conferences, e-G8 Forum, and Google).

Leif Abraham

Partner Prehype

Leif Abraham is a Partner at Prehype, a venture development firm that incubates new digital companies on behalf of corporations and VCs and also acts as the Creative Director of Bark&Co. Prior, he was a Creative Director, Product at West, a marketing accelerator that helps tech startups grow. He is also Co-Founder of Pay With A Tweet and has worked with companies like Rdio, Jawbone, Google, MasterCard, and Guitar Hero. At Good School Hamburg and Miami Ad School he inspires new talents and C-Level executives.

Lisa Church

President eMarketer

Lisa Church has been President of eMarketer since 2007. She oversees all activities related to client acquisition and retention, including development of new products and building of strategic partnerships. Church spent more than 20 years leading high growth technology companies to positions of market dominance. She served executive positions with Advent Software, (ADVS), decalog (now a division of SunGard) and Compliance Tools (now a division of Wolturs Kluwer). She has been a Director of The Advertising Council since Oct. 2013.

John Saroff

Chief Business Officer Chartbeat

John Saroff is responsible for leading the Chartbeat's operations including corporate development, finance, legal and human resources. John has worked at the cutting-edge of media and technology for over 15 years, working in the daily operations and business development of companies such as Google, NBC Universal and vente-privee USA. Prior he was a corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine and Moore. John was named one of the 40 most influential media executives under the age of 40 by Multichannel News in 2011.

Pau Sabria

Co-Founder and CEO Olapic

Pau is co-founder and CEO of Olapic, the visual commerce platform company that helps brands and retailers increase sales by integrating customer photos and videos into the shopping experience. Sabria studied Electrical Engineering at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona and graduated with a thesis in distributed video coding at Purdue University, Indiana. He then joined The Boston Consulting Group, where he worked for 3 years and co-founded Olapic while completing his MBA at Columbia University.

Eldar Sadikov

CEO Jetlore

Eldar Sadikov is CEO of Jetlore - real-time merchandise targeting platform for email that powers newsletters of the world’s largest retailers. Jetlore makes real-time decisions about the merchandise seen by each consumer in email based on product sales data, user's behavioral profile, and email open context, like device or location, resulting in dramatic increase in user engagement, conversions, and revenue. He is a longterm data scientist. Prior, he developed predictive statistical models for big data at Stanford University, Google, and Microsoft.

Elian Pres-Gurwits

President and Managing Director GLOSSYBOX U.S

Elian Pres-Gurwits heads the U.S. division of the global luxury beauty discovery platform, Glossybox. In 2010 he joined Rocket Internet and played an instrumental role launching the company, consequentially driving its European expansion. In 2012, Elian was appointed to head the Asian operations. Finally, in 2013 he oversaw the company’s U.S. launch. Under his leadership, Glossybox has signed on prestigious beauty brands like La Prairie and collaborated with luxury retailers like Net-A-Porter.

Janet Balis

Partner and CRO betaworks

Janet Balis is a Partner and Chief Revenue Officer for betaworks, a highly innovative studio of startups and investments in NY's meatpacking district. Before joining betaworks, she served as Publisher of The Huffington Post. Janet repositioned HuffPost in the marketplace and launched HuffPost Live, a large-scale original video offering. Prior, Janet served as SVP, Sales Strategy, Marketing and Partnerships for AOL Advertising, growing relationships with key clients and agencies, leading branded entertainment, and helping launch AOL On.

Ryan McLaughlin

Chief Strategy Officer Tribal Worldwide

Ryan McLaughlin is Chief Strategy Officer at Tribal Worldwide, NYC. He is charged with the management and leadership of all strategic disciplines at the agency, including, Social, Mobile, CRM, SEO, Research, and Analytics. Prior, McLaughlin served as Director of Social and Mobile Platforms at R/GA and led strategic work on Converse, Walmart and L'Oreal, as well as taking a key role in the agency’s new business efforts. Before R/GA, Ryan honed his craft at Initiative, Rapp, Saatchi & Saatchi, Arnold, and Modernista.

Sebastian Kaufmann

CEO & Founder Kaufmann Mercantile

Sebastian Kaufmann is founder and CEO of Kaufmann Mercantile, an online store for a wide range of well-selected, high quality products for the home, kitchen, office, outdoors, beauty, and garden. Originally conceived as a blog, the site quickly became a resource on top-grade materials, featuring interviews with pioneering craftsmen. Prior, he co-founded the music video, and commercial film production company Draw Pictures. He headed the company as CEO until December 2009.

Romney Evans

Co-Founder Product and Marketing True Fit Corporation

Romney is product and marketing leader, and entrepreneur of True Fit. Being experienced in disruptive innovation from working at HBS innovation guru Clayton Christensen’s Innosight – Romney has helped grow True Fit into a retail software company providing personalized recommendations powered by the world’s largest collection of footwear, apparel, and consumer fit data from millions of consumers and a network of more than 1,000 brands and leading retailers.

Chelsea Rao

Vice President Digital & New Media Development Empire State Development

Chelsea Rao serves as a liaison to technology firms looking to expand their businesses in NYC, connecting them to available resources and addressing policy issues affecting the industry. She was previously Assistant Director at the NYC Economic Development Corporation, helping to develop NYC's strategy for expanding the tech and bioscience sectors, and launched programs including NYC Media Lab, the NYC BigApps Competition, Connect NYC, and PILOT Health Tech NYC.

Magnus Lambsdorff

Partner Egon Zehnder

Magnus Lambsdorff is a trusted advisor and executive coach to the founders and CEOs of fast growing companies, particularly in the digital space in his position at Egon Zehnder. He counsels CEOs of large companies with his immense experience in senior executive assessment and development. Prior, he served as commercial director for a mid-sized company in the packaging industry. During a temporarily leave from Egon Zehnder, he founded an internet-based start-up in the travel industry and sold it to an investor.

Carolin Silbernagl

Co-Founder & CEO dotHIV

Carolin Silbernagl is the Co-Founder and CEO of the charitable initiative dotHIV that collects money for combating AIDS with sales of “.hiv” domain names. Led by social entrepreneurial thinking she strives to make .hiv domains the leading way to raise HIV/AIDS awareness and solidarity on the internet. She previously worked for various large German Foundations and directed a start-up qualification program as a project manager at sdw.

TROY YOUNG

President Hearst Digital Media

As president of Hearst Digital Media, Troy Young oversees content, technology, operations, product, and business development strategies for the magazine division’s digital portfolio, which includes 18 brand websites such as Cosmopolitan, ELLE, and Esquire, and attracts nearly 100 million unique visitors and 740 million page views monthly. Young, a media executive and entrepreneur with 20 years of digital publishing and advertising experience, was previously president of Say Media, and before that, chief experience officer of the Omnicom digital agency Organic.

Ben Relles

Global Head of Creative Strategy YouTube

Ben Relles is Global Head of Creative Strategy at YouTube as part of the YouTube Spaces team.  In this role he is responsible for helping content creators build audience through effective creative strategy.  Ben began working in online video when he founded the comedy network Barely Political, which has over 2 bn. views to date. Ben later joined Next New Networks where he was Vice President of Programming and launched networks including the massively popular Vsauce channel.

Kyle Kimball

President NYCDC

Kyle Kimball has served as President of the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) under Mayor Bill de Blasio since January 2014, leading NYCEDC’s efforts to position NYC as the global center for innovation and to increase economic empowerment and mobility for all New Yorkers. Kyle was first appointed NYCEDC President in 2013. Since joining NYCEDC in 2008, Kyle has helped to implement its strategy to diversify the City’s economy while developing new career paths that strengthen the middle class.

Alex Winter

Founder and CEO Placemeter

Alex Winter is the founder and CEO of Placemeter, a real-time, open data platform that uses sensors implemented by the community and public video feeds to quantify and index the physical world. Before starting Placemeter, Alex was the co-founder and CEO of LTU Technologies, the first large scale image search platform. Earlier in his career, Alex worked as a researcher at INRIA focusing on image segmentation, and as a software engineer at EADS focusing on missile guidance and remote sensing systems. Alex has a PhD in Image Recognition from Telecom Paris and holds seven patents in the field.

Ian Sigalow

Co-Founder and Partner Greycroft Partners

Ian has been a venture capitalist since 2001, and has spent his career working with early stage technology companies. He currently manages a number of Greycroft investments, including industry leaders such as Collective, Extreme Reach, and JW Player. Ian previously led the firm’s investments in Buddy Media (acquired by Salesforce.com), Braintree (acquired by eBay), and Vizu (acquired by Nielsen). Prior to joining Greycroft, Ian founded StrongData Corporation, a pioneer in digital encryption, and spent several years as a venture capitalist with Boston Millennia Partners, where he focused on the Software, Wireless, and Internet sectors.

Jeff Jarvis

Director Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism

Jeff Jarvis is the director at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. Prior to this, he was a former Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News and a former columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. He was president and creative director of Advance Internet—the online arm of Advance Publications—until 2005. In 2005 he became an associate professor at City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, directing its new media program. Jeff wrote several bestselling books, such as “What Would Google Do?” (2009).

Andreas Haug

Co-Founder & Managing Partner e.ventures

Andreas is Co-founder and Managing Partner of e.ventures, a global venture capital firm with $750+m under management investing in early stage digital businesses in Europe, USA, Brazil, Russia and Asia. Andreas has started several digital businesses himself and has invested as a business angel for years. He also co-founded dgroup. Andreas founded infoMedia Group, which was sold to Thyssen Telecom as Germany´s third largest digital media agency. Previously, he worked for Bertelsmann.

Nick Coronges

Chief Technology Officer R/GA Ventures

As R/GA's Chief Technology Officer, Nick Coronges leads technology capabilities across the agency's global network. In this connected age, Technology is a critical element of R/GA's work with clients, infused into consulting and business transformation strategy, product and service development, and communications and campaigns. Nick oversees a global staff of developers and technologists, and works closely with clients such as Samsung, Nike, Beats by Dre, and Google as well as early stage and emerging startups to anticipate and strategically integrate advances in technology.

Scott Silverman

Principal Scott Silverman Associates

Silverman is an active digital retail connector and organizes events and conferences that facilitate information-sharing opportunities among e-commerce leaders. He co-founded two conferences in 2014 - the Global E-Commerce Forum and GrowFashion. In 2010 he co-founded Ifeelgoods in 2010, a digital rewards technology company, where he served as the VP of Marketing. Their clients included Gap, Walmart.com, Ice.com, FTD, Meijer, Shoebuy.com. Prior Silverman spent 10 years as Executive Director of Shop.org, where he launched the Shop.org Annual Summit, the Merchandising workshop and several research studies.

Dr. Rainer Hillebrand

Vice Chairman Otto Group

Rainer Hillebrand has been a member of the Executive Board of the Otto Group since 1999 and was appointed Vice Chairman in 2007. He is responsible for the company's major fields of Corporate Strategy, E-Commerce, BI, and Knowledge Management. He is Advisor and Chairman of the Advisory Board of e.ventures Capital Partners and Project A Ventures as well as several Multichannel retailers and online pure players.

Alastair Bruce

Former Senior Director, Google

Alastair Bruce has over 25 years of international management experience in FMCG, consulting, e-commerce and digital. He held senior leadership roles at Unilever and Mars in Europe and West Africa and is former Managing Director of Mercateo and Senior Director at Google. He is a member of the advisory board at EHI Retail Institute and Hamburg School of Business Administration.

Prof. Dr. Gerrit Heinemann

Director eWeb Research Center Niederrhein University

Gerrit Heinemann is Director of the eWeb Research Center at Niederrhein University, Germany. Prior to this, he occupied different top management positions in the retail sector as well as in international consulting. He is author of several best-selling books on multichannel and online-retailing, and a member of the Supervisory Board of buch.de internetstores AG.

Dietmar Dahmen

Creative Consultant and Enricher of Brands

Dietmar Dahmen is a highly decorated creative. He was Creative Director with DDB, Executive Creative Director with Ogilvy, and Chief Creative Officer with BBDO. As a creative consultant he emphasizes on up to date marketing, digital trends and solutions. Dahmen lectures modern brand success, change and digital transformation with the European Association of Communication Agencies.

Fred Seibert

Founder Frederator Studios and Next New Networks

Fred Seibert, a serial media entrepreneur, was MTV’s first creative director and shaped its unique voice. In 2007 he co-founded Next New Networks, the leading online television company, attracting over 200 million views per month on YouTube. When acquired by YouTube, he concentrated again on his own company, Frederator Studios, and launched in 2012 the YouTube Channel “Cartoon Hangover”.