We’re excited to announce Chris DeWolfe, Sean Parker and Jeff Weiner will be joining our lineup of TechCrunch50 expert panelists. They, along with Marc Andreessen, Roelof Botha, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg and Yossi Vardi will be judging and questioning the fifty startups selected to participate in TechCrunch50.
TechCrunch50 is our annual conference where fifty new startups will launch over three days. There will also be a number of topical panels and workshops. The event will be held at the San Francisco Design Center on September 8 – 10. More details on the conference can be found here.
There will be 24 experts in all, more will be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets for the event can be purchased here (early bird pricing is available until July 15). The submission process to launch your startup is here.
|
Chris DeWolfe
Chris DeWolfe is the co-founder and chief executive officer of MySpace.com, the leading online lifestyle portal. DeWolfe, alongside co-founder and president, Tom Anderson, created a new platform for a generation to communicate and discover culture based around the self expression and connectivity of the site’s 110 million active users. As MySpace’s CEO, DeWolfe is responsible for all aspects of the site’s strategic vision and the execution of its global business initiatives. Along the way, DeWolfe has led strategic initiatives that have extended the site’s reach into a number of vertical categories – such as online video (MySpaceTV), politics (MySpace Impact), news, music and film – and at present a total of 29 international markets. Under DeWolfe’s leadership, MySpace has grown exponentially since its launch in 2004, with an average of 300,000 new users signing up daily. More than 70 million people in the U.S. visit the site each month, creating a user composition that includes politicians, bands, filmmakers, comedians, photographers, and people wanting to communicate with friends and plan their social lives. Crunchbase profile. |
|
Sean Parker
Sean Parker is the co-founder and Chairman of Causes on Facebook and MySpace, a new network that aims to enable large-scale political and social activism on the Internet. Sean is also a Managing Partner at The Founders Fund, an early stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco . Previously, Sean was the co-founder of the category defining Web ventures Napster, Plaxo, and Facebook. At Napster, Sean helped to design the Napster client software and led the company’s initial financing and strategy. Under Sean’s leadership, Napster became the fastest adopted client software application in history. Following Napster, Sean co-founded and served as President of Plaxo, where he pioneered the viral engineering techniques used to deploy Plaxo’s flagship smart address book product, ultimately acquiring more than 15 million users. In 2004, Sean left Plaxo to become the founding President of Facebook, one of the most rapidly growing sites on the Internet today. Sean sits on the boards of several private companies. Crunchbase profile. |
|
Jeff Weiner
Jeff Weiner is the Executive Vice President of Yahoo!’s Network Division. Yahoo!‘s global reach of over half a billion users worldwide serves as the foundation for the division’s objective to be the leading starting point on the Web for the most consumers. In his current role, Weiner oversees the company’s category leading consumer web products, including Yahoo.com and My Yahoo!; Communications and Community products including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Groups, and Flickr; Search products including Yahoo! Web Search, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Local; and Media, including Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Entertainment properties. From 2002 to 2006, Weiner served as Senior Vice President overseeing the Yahoo! Search and Marketplaces division. Beginning in November 2005, Weiner added responsibilities for Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Small Business. Prior to Yahoo!, Weiner was the co-founder of Windsor Digital, a private equity firm focused on digital and media investments. From 1994 to 2000, he worked at Warner Bros., where he helped conceive the initial plan for Warner Bros. Online and played a key role in developing and overseeing the division. Crunchbase profile. |
Additionally, many thanks to our partners: Sequoia Capital, Mayfield Fund, Clearstone Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, Fenwick & West, Perkins Coie, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.