TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon – Judges Announced

Howdy all. We’re a month away from the fourth annual TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon.

To meet the demand, we’re releasing more tickets to the public. If you haven’t already gotten your ticket, go get one now. This will be sold out.

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3689591668

It will be a great weekend of hacking and learning, culminating in minute-long presentations with hundreds of the Bay Area’s best on Sunday afternoon. To add to the pressure cooker, we’ve handpicked a crew of the industry’s best to lend their wisdom and good looks to the event. You’re bound to recognize some of these heavy hitters.

Kent Brewster
Web Guy
http://kentbrewster.com

Kent Brewster won the Ship It Now award at three different Yahoo! employee hack days. (Sadly, none of it ever shipped.) He built the iPhone app for Netflix using nothing but stone knives, bear skins, and open APIs, and is currently the guy whose fault it is if the Pin It button is broken on Pinterest.

You can follow Kent on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/kentbrew


Josh Elman
Principal, Greylock
http://bit.ly/joshelman

Currently a VC at Greylock, Josh has spent 15 years building products in Engineering, Product Management, and Platform roles. He led the team for RealPlayer and RealJukebox at RealNetworks, early growth at LinkedIn and launched LinkedIn Jobs, and led product at Zazzle. More recently, Josh led the launch of Facebook Connect at Facebook and helped user growth at Twitter grow by over 10x. Josh has a BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford.

You can follow Josh on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/joshelman


Bradley Horowitz
VP Product, Google+
http://www.elatable.com

Bradley Horowitz is vice president of product for Google’s social products, including Google+. He has also led product for Google’s consumer application division which includes Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs, Google Voice, and Calendar. Before joining Google in February 2008, Horowitz was Yahoo’s vice president of Advanced Development where he drove the acquisitions of Flickr and MyBlogLog, launched the Brickhouse incubator and developed new products like Yahoo! Pipes. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

Bradley has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan, and a master’s degree in media science from the MIT Media Lab.

You can follow Bradley on Google+ at: https://plus.google.com/113116318008017777871


Peter Pham
Co-Founder/Partner at Science
http://www.science-inc.com

Co-Founder and partner at Science in Los Angeles. Built a few startups in the past like Photobucket, BillShrink and Color. Now at Science is behind companies like Dollar Shave Club, Wittlebee, DogVacay, Eventup, and Uncovet.

You can follow Peter on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/peterpham


Vivek Ravisankar
Co-founder
http://rvivek.com

Vivek has a Bachelors degree in CS and graduated in India in 2008. Following that, he worked at Amazon for a year in the Kindle team. He started Interviewstreet in 2009, had three failed ideas, got rejected by YC twice and finally built a tool that helps companies screen programmers and was a part of YC last summer.

Currently, the team is building HackerRank – a fun social network for hackers to solve and learn interesting programming concepts.

You can follow Vivek on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/rvivek


David A. Shamma
Research Scientist, Yahoo!
http://shamurai.com

David Ayman Shamma is research scientist at Yahoo! Labs where he runs the Human-Computer Interaction Research group. He investigates how people interact, engage, and share media experiences both online and in-the-world. He is also the co-editor for Arts and Digital Culture for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on MultiMedia. When he’s not wearing a lab coat, Ayman has been known to choreograph dance & technology performances, design electronic fashion, and make mallets for hitting touchscreen devices.

You can follow David on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/ayman


Shervin Pishevar
Managing Director, Menlo Ventures
http://www.shervin.com

Shervin joined Menlo Ventures in 2011 and focuses on the social web, consumer internet and mobile. At Menlo, Shervin sits on the board or works closely with the teams at CouchSurfing, Getaround, Machine Zone, Uber, Fab, Warby Parker, Shaker, Mr. Number, and has led Menlo’s investment in Tumblr. Shervin also helped launch the Menlo Talent Fund, Menlo’s new $20m seed fund. Before joining Menlo, Shervin was chief application officer and GM at Mozilla Corporation after spending most of his career as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. Companies Shervin founded have reached an aggregate of 100 million users across companies like Webs.com (sold to Vistaprint for $117.5m), Social Gaming Network (SGN, merged with Mindjolt), and Hyperoffice, raising over $50m for those companies. Shervin angel invested in over 40 companies including Klout, Voxer, Aardvark (sold to Google), Blakjet, Dollar Shave Club, Branchout (advisor), Talent House, Gowalla (sold to Facebook), Milo.com (sold to eBay), TaskRabbit, Milk (sold to Google), Rapportive (sold to Linkedin), Likealittle (LAL), Qwiki, Votizen, Yobongo (sold to Mixbook), SpruceMedia, Medialets and SolveMedia. Shervin serves on the advisory board of Comscore (NASDAQ: SCOR). Shervin is one of 10 members of the UN Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council, serves as an Entrepreneurial Ambassador on several State Department delegations and at the President’s Summit on Entrepreneurship. Shervin was chosen by the US Government as an Outstanding American by Choice – one of only 100 naturalized Americans to be chosen since the beginning of the award. Giving back is very important to Shervin and is the reason he dedicates time to traveling abroad to Africa to volunteer with Invisible Children and charity:water. Shervin is a graduate of the University of California (BA, Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major), a published researcher in JAMA and Neuroscience Letters and the author of several US patents.