Pablo is committed to helping workers in the manual trades. Prior to WorkersNow, Pablo worked in marketing, sales, and fundamental analysis in the finance industry at Trust Company of the West, Prudential Equity Group, and Stadium Capital Management. Most recently, he worked at Progress Financial (aka Progreso Financiero), a financial institution lending to under-banked Hispanics in the U.S. Pablo enjoys snowboarding, kiteboarding, reading, and dogs. Pablo obtained a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Starting out as an entrepreneur in college, Johann launched a dozen businesses in collaboration with co-founder Greg Tseng before focusing on social networking in 2004. He pursued a Ph.D. in Physics at Stanford for several years, and holds an A.B. in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University.

Learn more about Johann at http://about-tagged.com/team/johann-schleier-smith

He has been a driving force in creating Tagged.com with his partner, co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. Previously, Greg co-founded Avivon Inc., which introduced the textbook comparison-shopping agent flyingchickens.com to the Harvard campus during the Fall semester of 1999, and served as COO of Limespot.com LLC, a leading network of 100+ local college portals.

Greg holds an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics & Mathematics from Harvard University, where he served as a Director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club (HEC) from 1998-2000 and co-authored The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). Greg is presently on leave from Stanford University, where he is pursuing the Ph.D. in Physics on a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His academic research lies in the field of nanotechnology and he has published his results in top journals such as Science.

Learn more about Greg at http://about-tagged.com/team/greg-tseng

Until February 2010, he was the VP of Business Development for Serious Business, a leading producer of social games for the social web. Zynga acquired Serious Business in February of 2010.

In addition to working at Serious Business, he also produce technology conferences focused on the intersection of gaming and social media. The two flagship conferences they produce are the Virtual Goods Summit and the Social Gaming Summit.

He also works with Justin Smith from Inside Social Games / Inside Facebook on a series of research reports on the virtual goods market. You can check out their research at Inside Virtual Goods.

Prior to joining Serious Business, he was the Sr. Director for Business Development at Gaia Online, a leading online hangout for teens and young adults.

Prior to Gaia, he worked in New Business Development at Google and focused on new partnership opportunities for early-stage products in the advertising, mobile, and e-commerce markets. Prior to joining Google, he was a Product Manager for IronPort Systems, a leading provider of anti-spam hardware appliances that was acquired by Cisco Systems for $830 million in 2007.

He spent several years working at In-Q-Tel, the strategic venture capital group for the Central Intelligence Agency. While at In-Q-Tel, he focused on identifying investment opportunities that could deliver significant value to the CIA and the commercial market in both the short and long term. He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from Stanford University. He is also on the Advisory Board for BizWorld, a nonprofit that educates students about business, and the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, a nonprofit connecting entrepreneurs, ideas, and capital.

Other organizations in which Mr. Kapor has played an important role include UUNET (founding investor), the first successful independent commercial Internet Service Provider; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (co-founder), which protects freedom and privacy on the Internet; Real Networks (founding investor), which pioneered the use of streaming media over the Internet; the Mozilla Foundation (founding Chair), maker of the open source web browser Firefox; and Linden Research (founding investor, Board Chair), the creator of the first successful open virtual world, Second Life.

Prior to Zynga, Laurence was the Global General Manager, Experience Management with Nike.com. He was responsible for developing and implementing the strategies and tactics necessary to position Nike, Inc.’s global digital commerce division as the leader in ecommerce.

I previously worked at TechCrunch as a blogger, project manager, designer and programmer. I grew up in Menlo Park, CA and attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, ME.

His report on engineering education dispelled many common myths about graduation rates in India and China being an order of magnitude greater those of the U.S. While both countries graduate many more “engineers” than the US, their definitions of those terms are loose and include everyone from mechanics to trade-school graduates. Elite institutions in both countries do turn out world class engineers, but the numbers are small.

Subsequent research revealed why companies were going offshore and highlighted new trends in the globalization of R&D and innovation. To explain how India was achieving success despite its weak education system, Wadhwa published a seminal research report which analyzed its surrogate education system and workforce development practices. Indian companies, in particular, have become global centers of excellence in high-skill areas including software development, chip design, pharmaceutical research and advanced engineering tasks like aircraft engine design. Wadhwa found that the best Indian companies simply accepted that the educational system in the country was inadequate and developed their own highly innovative training programs that more than compensated for this.

Wadhwa’s research on American competitive advantages focused on entrepreneurship, skilled immigration, and university research commercialization. This revealed key insights into the age, educational background and motivation of tech entrepreneurs. He also documented that over one-in-four U.S. technology startups were founded by immigrants. These immigrants tended to be highly educated with strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Wadhwa found that a flawed immigration system had created a backlog of over a million skilled workers who were waiting for permanent-resident visas. This backlog has the potential to cause a sizeable reverse brain-drain of talent from the U.S. to other countries which could lead to a weakening of U.S. competitiveness.

His research has been supported by several grants from the Kauffman Foundation and by the Sloan Foundation. Wadhwa has collaborated with highly regarded academics from Harvard, Duke, NYU, UC-Berkeley and other universities. His work has been cited in over 2,000 national and international media outlets over the past five years. This has garnered the attention of policy makers Wadhwa has spoken at dozens of conferences including the National Governors Association and the National Academy of Sciences.

Before joining Duke University, Wadhwa was a technology executive known for being a pioneer of change and innovation. He started his career as a software developer and gained a deep understanding of the challenges in building computer systems. His quest to help solve some of IT’s most daunting problems began at New York based investment banking powerhouse CS First Boston, where he was Vice President of Information Services. There he spearheaded the development of technology for creating computer systems which was so successful that CSFB decided to spin off this business unit into its own company, Seer Technologies. As Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Wadhwa helped grow the nascent startup into a $118 million publicly traded company.

With the explosion of the Internet, Wadhwa saw an even greater opportunity to help businesses adapt to new and fast changing technologies, and started Relativity Technologies. As a result of his vision, Wadhwa was named a “Leader of Tomorrow” by Forbes.com. Relativity was named as one of the 25 “coolest” companies in the world by Fortune Magazine.

Mr. Wadhwa holds an MBA from New York University and a B.A. in Computing Studies from the Canberra University in Australia. He is founding president of the Carolinas chapter of The IndUS Entrepreneurs (TIE), a non-profit global network intended to foster entrepreneurship. He has been featured in thousands of articles in worldwide publications including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Washington Post, New York Times, U.S. News and World Report and Science Magazine. He has also made many appearances on U.S. and international TV stations including CNN, ABC, NBC, CNBC and the BBC.

David is a active startup advocate, advisor, board member, and technology advisor who comments on these topics on his blog at DavidGCohen.com. He is also very active at the University of Colorado, serving as a member of the Board of Advisors of the Computer Science Department, the Entrepreneurial Advisory Board at Silicon Flatirons, and the Board of Advisors of the Deming Center Venture Fund. David is also a member of the selection committee for Venture Capital in the Rockies, and runs the Colorado chapter of the Open Angel Forum.

David’s hobbies are technology, software/web startups, business history, and tennis. He is married to the coolest girl he’s ever met and has three amazing kids who always seem to be teaching him something new

Tristan holds a B.A. degree in Economics from Stony Brook University, where he graduated as valedictorian and he also holds a MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He currently lives in Palo Alto with his family and is originally from New York.

Lars also works with one of Accenture’s top 10 global clients.

His work has focused on wireless, mobile, software and internet technology and services. He also acts as an investor, shareholder and advisor to start-ups in the US and Europe, including Yobongo, Flurry, Orderbird, Tap11 and Sponge.

In addition, Louis is an advisor to MyLikes, Teens In Tech,SocialToo and Qwotebook. Louis graduated from UC Berkeley with a double major in Political Science and Mass Communications, and is father to three kids under three, including boy/girl twins.

Areas of Practice

Riaz has structured and negotiated numerous complex, long-term technology-based and service-based alliance agreements relating to business process outsourcing, information technology infrastructure outsourcing, manufacturing outsourcing, research and development outsourcing, software application development and management, software OEM transactions, internet search and display advertising alliances, university technology transfer transactions and traditional corporate joint ventures. Riaz has extensive experience in assisting clients with the legal and strategic aspects of all phases of outsourcing transactions including the planning of the request for proposal to potential vendors, evaluation of vendors, the negotiation of the transaction documents, transition planning, relationship governance and the handling of contractual disagreements.

He is dedicated to helping brands on the web increase user engagement by leveraging proven techniques in social gaming and loyalty. A sought-after speaker on gamification and user engagement, Kris is a thought leader of innovative ways to incorporate game mechanics and real-time loyalty programs into web and mobile experiences.

Kris believes the next decade of the web will focus on loyalty, user segmentation, and motivation techniques linked to deep engagement analytics. Prior to founding Badgeville, he worked in leadership roles at a variety of successful companies, including WebEx, and across a wide variety of verticals.

He also closely advises Palantir Technologies.

His background and experience is diverse in Venture Capital (Intel Capital alum); Treasury Transactions; M&A; Insolvencies & Restructurings; IP acquisitions; Corporate & Securities Law; Semantic Technologies (inference, search, discovery, machine learning, NLP, recommendation and matching, data mining, etc.).

Representative VC investments included: Betaworks; Buzzintown (india); Cerebra; Grooveshark; Sense Networks; SmartZip; TextDigger; Voxify; Vriti (india) & Yatra (india).

Representative angel investments include: Retailigence, Stipple, MisoMedia, Frid.ge, 500Friends, and SpeakerText

Eghosa is also an advisor to start-ups on product, finance, strategy, bizdev, operational excellence, recruiting, m&a, and competitive analysis.  He is an ASTIA advisor; SIBOS/Innotribe VC Advisor and the 2010 Recipient of Moss-Adams Award for Mentorship of Women Entrepreneurs.