Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher is an actor/producer and co-founder of Katalyst, a studio for social media – creating original digital media, television and film properties. Based in Los Angeles and New York, the Katalyst mission is to create thought-provoking and compelling content for multiple platforms. Founded in 2000 by partners Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, Katalyst film credits include...

Baratunde Thurston

Baratunde Thurston is a technology-loving comedian from the future who cares enough about the world to engage with it politically. Yes, he votes. Regularly. With an ancestry that includes a great-grandfather who taught himself to read, a grandmother who was the first black employee at the U.S. Supreme Court building and a mother who took over radio stations in the name of the black liberation...

Ben Mezrich

Ben Mezrich has created his own highly addictive genre of nonfiction, chronicling the amazing stories of young geniuses making tons of money on the edge of impossibility, ethics, and morality...

Biz Stone

Biz Stone has been named Nerd of the Year by GQ, one of most influential persons in the world by TIME, and dubbed Most Useless by Valleywag. Biz Stone means different things to different people but the main thrust of his work over the past decade plus has been developing collaborative web systems freely accessed by hundreds of millions of people worldwide...

Cenk  Uygur

Cenk Uygur is host of The Young Turks, the first ever live, daily web television talk show. The Young Turks are on XM Satellite Radio 8-9PM ET (XM 167, America Left) and on Sirius Left 146. The Young Turks is one of the Top 100 You Tube Partners, with over 18 million views a month on their You Tube Channel...

Curt  Smith

Curt Smith is best known as a musician, singer and songwriter who co-founded the multi-platinum group Tears For Fears, with which he continues to tour worldwide. He also produced and hosted the groundbreaking live music web series "Stripped Down Live With Curt Smith" and pursues his own solo music career. His most recent releases include the single "Perfectly...Still (featuring Universal Hall...

Gary Vaynerchuk

The world of business is coming full circle. The rise of the Internet and the empowerment of the common consumer has created a fundamental shift in how businesses are expected to behave. To take advantage of this opportunity, businesses will need to look backwards and scale the caring their grandparents' businesses exhibited towards their customers or watch their competition pass them by...

Matt Hicks

Matt helped build the communications team at Facebook and define its public voice as one of the first members of its PR team. Most recently, he led social media and content strategy for it main communications channels--including the Facebook Blog, official Facebook Page and Twitter account—which reach millions of people every day. Before that, he managed the company’s advertising and business...

Nev Schulman

Yaniv "Nev" Schulman can currently been seen in the critically acclaimed film, CATFISH, which had its world premiere at the Sundance film festival, selling in a bidding war to Relativity and Universal. In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel's brother, Nev. They had no idea that their project would lead to the most...

Randi Zuckerberg

Randi Zuckerberg ran marketing at Facebook for six years, where her team led the company's U.S. election and international politics strategy, launched the live streaming industry with her media partnerships around the U.S. Presidential Inauguration, and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2011 for her innovative TV/online coverage of the 2010 mid-term elections. Randi has appeared on CNN...

Shira Lazar

Shira Lazar is an Emmy-nominated TV and web personality. She is a co-founder of Disrupt Group, a digital production company behind such popular online shows as What's Trending with Shira Lazar and The Partners Project (YouTube). A digital trailblazer, she is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post as well as Bloomberg TV, CNN, and Fox News. She is also a weekly social media columnist for...

Tony  Hsieh

In 1999, at the age of 24, Tony Hsieh (pronounced Shay) sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded, to Microsoft for $265 million. He then joined Zappos as an adviser and investor, and eventually became CEO, where he helped Zappos grow from almost no sales to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually, while simultaneously making Fortune magazine's annual "Best Companies to Work For"...

Alexandra Wilkis Wilson

Alexandra Wilkis Wilson has over thirteen years of international experience in luxury goods and retail. She is Founder and Chief Merchandising Officer of Gilt Groupe, an innovative online lifestyle shopping destination that launched in November 2007 revolutionizing the fashion industry and ecommerce in general. Gilt Groupe was valued at $1 billion in the spring of 2011. Prior to co-founding...

Frank Rose

Frank Rose is a recognized authority on the future of media. In his new book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, he argues that we are seeing the emergence of a new form of narrative that’s native to the Internet in the same way the novel is native to print. Told through many media at once in a nonlinear fashion...

Alexis Maybank

Alexis has dedicated her career to building and launching innovative and compelling ecommerce experiences for consumers. In 2007, Alexis became a founding CEO of Gilt Groupe, working to expand the company's sales categories from women's brands to include lifestyle categories such as sporting goods, home decor, children's apparel, local experiences and luxury travel services. Prior to founding...

Kevin Colleran

Facebook's pioneering sales executive and among its first ten employees, Kevin Colleran was an integral part of the social networking behemoth's sales force. As the company's Global Partnership Lead, he was responsible for creatively monetizing the site without hampering user experience. In 2010, he was named one of New York's 100 Coolest Tech People by Business Insider. While at Facebook, Coll