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Sean Sheppard

Sean is a serial entrepreneur VC and co-founder of GrowthX and GrowthX Academy, with three successful exits, who has successfully grown dozens of early-stage companies across a wide variety of products and markets. He was recently named the #2 Online Sales Influencer and contributor at The Huffington Post. He’s now committed to working with countries, companies, entrepreneurs and those who want to work with them on building startup ecosystems and developing the next generation of leaders for the innovation economy.

In today’s marketplace it is easier to start a company than it is to grow one. Sean will walk you through the foolproof formula for finding product-market fit used to find the truth about where your product fits in a market, create a functional learning organization out of the team pursuing that truth and determine if predictable, profitable revenue is possible at scale.

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Lucas Wang

The Partner of WIHarper Group in San Francisco, Lucas is with 20 years of experience in early stage cross-border business either as an entrepreneur, venture capitalist or an operation officer in tech companies.

He ran his startup, HWTrek: a global innovation manufacturing B2B service in Taipei, Shenzhen, Japan and the Bay Are before joining Legend Star / Comet Labs as the US lead Operation Partner. He is also a veteran of WIHarper in Beijing and Taiwan since 2006 as the tech partner which led IPO deals as LEDS and VNET, and started a RFID business before entering the investment world. He loves tech world as advanced manufacturing, AI/robotics, industrial applications, IOT, and cross-border development.

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Phin Upham

Phin Upham is the Managing Partner at Haymaker Capital a venture capital firm in San Francisco focused on technology & early stage fintech. Previously he was a Managing Director at Thiel Capital focused on private fintech investments.

Thiel Capital is an investment firm founded by Peter Thiel. Phin has also worked in banking at Morgan Stanley and Lazard Freres, as a journalist and in real estate private equity. He has been a Senior Fellow at Wharton Business School, a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Business School, New York University Department of Economics and a Lecturer at the Haas Business School at UC Berkeley. Phin earned a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.B.A. and Ph.D. from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

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Gary Fowler

Gary Fowler is the CEO, President, and Co-founder of GSD Venture Studios. Previously, he co-founded top CIS accelerators GVA and SKOLKOVO Startup Academy, where over 30% of the companies went on to achieve success.

He has founded 15 companies, including Yva.ai and DY Investments, and has a successful IPO and CKSW under his belt. At the AI startup Yva.ai, Gary Fowler contributed extensively to the growth of the company and helped it reach a significant valuation in just over three years. He has won numerous awards, and most recently he was named one of the «Top 10 Most Influential AI Executives» by Analytics Insight and one of the «Top Transformational Business Leaders of 2019» by IndustryWired Magazine. He was named «Top 10 AI Executives to Watch in 2020». He is also a contributing writer for Forbes.

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Victor Orlovskiy

Viktor Orlovsky has over 20 years of experience in international finance and banking. At Alfa Bank, he held the positions of the head of the transformation division, senior vice president and deputy head of the retail division. He worked at IBM Global Business Services, where he supervised finance and insurance activities.

In 2008, he joined Sberbank, where he became responsible for the IT transformation program. Within 5 years, his team has been able to turn a 20th century traditional banking institution into a flexible, digital and customer-oriented financial enterprise.

In 2013, Orlovsky took over as senior vice president of digital business development, and in 2015 moved to the position of director of Sberbank FortRoss Ventures fund managing company. The structure includes two funds: SBT Venture Capital I ($ 110 million, 90% of funds owned by Sberbank) and SBT Venture Capital II ($ 200 million, 20% owned by Sberbank).

In 2016, Viktor Orlovsky and his family moved to Silicon Valley to work more closely with startups and develop “Sberbank” FortRoss Ventures. The main areas of investment: fintech, marketplaces, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, high-load IT platforms. FortRoss Ventures funds are currently showing strong growth. For example, an Israeli company Tufin joined IPO and its capitalization is $ 734 million, another Israeli startup Dynamic Yield was sold to McDonald's.

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Pavel Cherkashin

About $ 200 million is currently managed by the GVA Capital fund. According to Pavel, the fund invests only in projects involving the creation of a new technology that can itself promote itself in the market.

Projects supported by the fund successfully go on IPO: for example, the shares of Establishment Labs, the creator of innovative medical implants, rose 34% on the first day of trading on the NASDAQ.

GVA Capital is the first investor in Luminar, the developer of a prototype computer vision system for self-driving cars. Currently, the company's value is estimated at approximately $ 1 billion

At the end of 2018, with business partner Roman Sobachevsky, Pavel Cherkashin launched the Mindrock Capital fund, which invests in infrastructure projects in the blockchain field.

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Igor Shayfot

Adventurer and wandering poet, partner in the TMT Investments fund. For 9 years, the fund’s shares have grown 5 times on the London Stock Exchange. 50 venture investments, 3 unicorns, 14 profitable exits.

Investor, member of the board of directors at 100+ startups with a combined valuation of several billion dollars. 25 years in American high-tech. Member of numerous investor ratings, the CEO of Epsylon Games, the largest gaming website on Microsoft’s web television in the 1990s (over 70 games).

He taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at New York University for 11 years, participated in the creation of the Recreating Silicon Valley course at Stanford University.

He headed incubators (Happy Farm and Tech Nation) in Ukraine and Asia. Numerous interviews and articles in Forbes, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, CIO, LA Times, etc.

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Cameron Turner

Cameron has an extensive background in venture investing, digital finance, software management, and industrial artificial intelligence. His recent projects include mobile financial retention research in sub-Saharan Africa for The Gates Foundation and the financial fraud prediction system for Starbucks.

He served as founder and CEO of ClickStream Technologies (acquired by Microsoft) and went on to lead Microsoft’s Telemetry practice, managing all inbound data systems globally.

Cameron serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at StartX, is a Venture Studio Advisor at Stanford’s GSB, Venture Advisor to Stanford’s Spike Ventures, and co-manages the Oxford Angel Fund. He serves on the External Technology Advisory Board for Accenture.

Cameron holds a BA from Dartmouth College, an MBA from Oxford University and MS in Statistics from Stanford.

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Xavier Wartelle

Xavier is a serial entrepreneur who has started six start-ups in Silicon Valley and France, resulting in four acquisitions. Xavier founded and led the French Tech Hub, that became the largest accelerator of French start-ups in the US. In addition, Xavier was the CEO of PRIME a leader in Corporate Open Innovation Services while promoting the Paris Region in the US.

Xavier’s career spans over 35 years of executive leadership in startups and mature companies, in telecom, enterprise software, and online ventures. He serves as board member of American Friends of Arts et Métiers, member of French Foreign Trade Advisors and French Tech Ambassador. Xavier holds a Master engineering degree from Ecole Nationale des Arts et Métiers, Paris.

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Jonathan C. Baer

He was a general partner at a Sand Hill Road venture fund and the founder and CEO of two venture backed companies.

He now spends his time teaching, mentoring, and advising early-stage companies at leading accelerators and universities as well as serving on several boards.

Jon is expert at training startups, mentors and early stage investors around the world in Silicon Valley best practices. He believes that startups require tough love; and need to focus on money, metrics, and milestones. Jon teaches startup CEOs to say less, because less is more.

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Jeff Wallace

Jeff Wallace is a long-time Silicon Valley, Bay Area resident who for many years has dedicated himself to serving the needs of companies, both locally and abroad, in their understanding of how to best deploy mobile technology and create an environment for innovation and disruption. Additionally, he consults with global startup ecosystems, including governments, corporations and startup accelerators/entrepreneurs, to help catalyze startup environments and to create a bridge for global startup entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley.

Jeff is President of Global Kinetics, a Bay Area based corporate advisor & market development partner to early-to-mid stage clients seeking to establish or expand operations within the U.S. He is co-founder of Silicon Valley in Your Pocket, an online platform allowing global entrepreneurs to access Silicon Valley content, coaching & connections as they build viable businesses. In addition, he is a Founding Investor, former President / Managing Partner of Batchery, a global incubator for seed stage startups.

Jeff is a SkyAdvisor at UC Berkeleys startup incubator, SkyDeck, and an investor in SkyDeck Fund. He is also a member of the Berkeley Angel Network, an angel investment group comprised of alumni and faculty of UC Berkeley.

He is a mentor to several startup accelerators where he advises early stage companies. He is an active angel investor. Previously, he worked for Cognizant as founder & Global Head for Mobility, IoT & UX practice areas.

He is a frequent keynote speaker at global technology and startup conferences. Jeff earned a BA in Economics from Rutgers College & an MBA in Strategy, Entrepreneurship & Technology from UC Berkeley.

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Kal Deutsch

His programs hone in on the key drivers for startup success, including go-to-market strategies, value proposition, growth hacking, business model optimization and financial metrics.

Kal is co-founder of the virtual SaaS accelerator, Silicon Valley in Your Pocket, a program focused on market traction and investor readiness, and available to any entrepreneur anywhere in the world. With a proprietary data scoring model, the program de-risks startup deal flow for both founders and investors.

Kal is a founding Investor-Advisor and Partner at Batchery, a Berkeley-based startup accelerator. Batchery was founded by angel investors from Sand Hill Angels, and features partners from over a half-dozen different angel investment groups. Kal served as Batchery CEO and Managing Partner for the launch and scaling phase, during which time the company developed its core curriculum and mentorship program, signed up and graduated its first several company cohorts and achieved positive cash flow. Since launch, Batchery has graduated over 130 companies in fields ranging from SaaS software, hardware, robotics, artificial intelligence, fintech, virtual reality, multimedia, food-tech and many others.

With a background in finance, strategy and product management, Kal has held a number of executive positions at companies ranging from Fortune 100 companies to early-stage startup companies. At Visa, he managed the consumer credit product portfolio and launched a company-wide product development process. At Wells Fargo Bank, he served as a division CFO and managed the strategic expansion of the banking network in retail stores, developed business cases for emerging fintech initiatives related to ATM, telephone and Internet banking, and contributed to the US launch of e-cash platform Mondex (acquired by Mastercard). Startups include real estate tech companies Homegain (acquired by Classified Ventures), EscapeHomes (acquired by HomeAway), and TotalMove (acquired by MostHome).

Kal leveraged his passion for independent film-making by producing a mockumentary film about a widely-maligned and failed Internet startup company called IceVan.com. This five-minute short was accepted into film festivals across multiple continents, including Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival. This fictitious company even became a case study in Kal’s curriculum.

Kal holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business with an emphasis in finance. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Management Science from UC San Diego. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

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Konstantin Vilk

Konstantin has over 20 years of experience in technology infrastructure, product design and development, and a strong background in Cyber Security. Having worked in Financial Services, US Government, Consumer Goods and Biotechnology sectors over the course of his career.

He is a proven entrepreneur, founder of several companies such I-SPAN, and most recently QuSecure. Under Konstantin’s leadership, I-SPAN grew from an early stage startup to a full services provider with several datacenters serving Large Enterprise clients and with some “first to deploy” innovations. Since his exit from I-Span he has been leading Technology and Cyber Security in the financial services sector. His security and technology initiatives protect up to $18 Billion in assets.

Today, he is fueling his passion by focusing on product development in the Quantum Computing and Security field. He is interested in creating advanced technology to protect the US Government and Enterprise Security in an ever-evolving threat landscape. His vision for QuSecure is to take Cyber Security to the next generation with evolution of quantum computing and build resilience through innovative use of technology.