Tony Wheeler. When Tony and his wife arrived in Sydney in 1972 after a six month trip through Asia from Europe toward Australia, they decided to start Lonely Planet Publications to publish the story of their journey - Across Asia on the Cheap. From those humble beginnings, Lonely Planet Publications has grown to become the world’s largest independent guidebook publisher with more than 500 titles in print and over 400 staff around the world. In 2011, Tony completed the sale of Lonely Planet, and though he doesn’t have a formal role in the company, he still keeps busy writing books such as Tony Wheeler’s Dark Lands.    Lets listen into Tony wheeler interviewed by our Startup Grind Melbourne Chapter Director.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

United States Congresswoman Suzan DelBene. Prior to her election as the representative for Washington’s 1st congressional district in 2012, Suzan held various tech exec roles including as the Co-Founder and VP of Drugstore.com which sold to Walgreens for $409M. Suzan has also served as the CEO of Nimble Technology and as Microsofts VP of Mobile Communications. Earlier in her career at Microsoft, Suzan worked on the famed Windows 95 operating system. She has a degree in biology from Reed College and a MBA from the university of Washington.    Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Daehee Park & JT Marino. The two founded Tuft & Needle with the idea that it is possible to create high quality products and charge a fair price to customers.  Launched in 2012 by two software engineers, Tuft & Needle was the first vertically integrated ecommerce mattress company to focus on selling one perfect product: an unbeatable mattress at an unbeatable price. With a background in ecommerce and marketing, prior to Tuft & Needle Daehee Park served as a consultant at Acxiom Corporation. Daehee received his bachelor’s degree in Security & Risk Analysis at Penn State University. John-Thomas (“JT”) Marino leads product and software development. With a passion for thoughtfully designed customer experiences, JT started his career at Hashrocket helping startups build just that. With roots in Northeastern Pennsylvania, JT studied Computer Science at Penn State University.   Startup Grind is Brought to You By:    Soylent: Easy, sustained energy that goes where you go. Learn more at Soylent.com

Matt Barrie is an Australian technology entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Freelancer.com: the world's leading freelancing and crowd-sourcing marketplace and Eight-time Webby-award winner. Matt was named Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011 by BRW and in 2014 he was named the most influential person in technology in Australia by Smart Company.  After graduating at Stanford University Matt worked as a venture capitalist at Innovation Capital. Then he founded Sensory Networks that was acquired by Intel Corporation in 2013. In 2009 Matt foundedFreelancer.com and listed it on the ASX in 2013. It is today valued at over $600 million and grows at the rate of 40% per year. We will sit down for a fireside chat with Matt at Startup Grind London to talk about freelancing, crowd-sourcing, the future of work and building globally successful companies. 

Today we have a great episode with the co-founder of Genius, formerly rap genius Mahbod Moghadam whose current project is helping to run everipedia, the encyclopedia for people and more. in 2014 Genius had raised a total of 56.9 million from investors such as Andressen Horowitz. Moghadam and his co-founder came up with the idea for Rap Genius in the summer of 2009 when Lehman asked Moghadam about the meaning of a Cam'ron lyric. Moghadam was a Fulbright scholar to France and following Yale Undergrad, a graduate of Stanford Law School. After a departure from Genius in May 2014 he met Everipedia co-founder Sam Kazemian when he was giving a talk at UCLA, and immediately fell in love with Everipedia. He had planned on retiring because of traumatic brain surgery but Everipedia lured him out of retirement. Everipedia's mission is to make information on the internet more accessible by connecting individuals to their digital footprint.  

Juan Diego Calle the Founder of the .CO domain business. Prior to founding .CO which was  by Neustar, Inc. in April of 2014, while at the university of Miami, Juan Diego launched and ran TeRespondo.com, a performance-based advertising network, which he sold to Yahoo in 2005.    Juan Diego also currently serves as the chairman of STRAAT, a company builder software based in Miami, Florida. Juan Diego also co-founded Building.co,  a collaborative work space for growing tech companies, Classic.com, a classic car restoration business, POP.co,  a platform designed to help entrepreneurs and businesses get online, and BoutiqueHotels.com a hand-curated list of boutique hotels around the world.  He’s an alumni of the Harvard Business School OPM program.  lets listen into Juan Diego Calle interviewed by our Bogota Colombia Chapter director. 

Jason joined Maveron in 2007 and is now a partner focused on investing in education, e-commerce and web-enabled consumer businesses. He is involved with the firm's investments in General Assembly, Common, TrueFacet, Julep, Everlane, CourseHero, Dolls Kill and Lively.  Prior to joining Maveron, Jason served as senior director of strategic operations for Career Education Corp., where he co-founded and led admissions and marketing for IADT Online, a for-profit design school. He has also served as an associate at Spinnaker Ventures, an expansion-stage venture capital fund.  Jason graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in economics from the University of Michigan  and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adam Nash, CEO of Wealth Front. As president and CEO of Wealthfront, Adam has built the company around a centralized mission to always put the client first and change the bad practices that plague the financial services industry. Adam joined Wealthfront from Greylock Partners, where he was an Executive-in-Residence. Prior to Greylock, he was VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, where he built the teams responsible for core product, user experience, platform and mobile. Adam held a number of leadership roles at eBay that included Director of eBay Express, as well as strategic and technical roles at Atlas Venture Preview Systems and Apple. Adam holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University.    

Tony Xu founded Door Dash as a local delivery service for Stanford students and participated in the Y Combinator incubator with his co founders while polishing the business model. Prior to co-founding Door Dash, tony worked in product at Square, led special projects for the CEO and CFO at eBay, and began his career at McKinsey and Company. He holds a B.S. with High Honors in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from UC Berkeley and a MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. 

William Pence who is the CTO of AOL. As the CTO of AOL William leads all aspects of AOL’s global technology strategy, platform development, and external technology partnerships. He also plays a key leadership role in the overall strategy and direction of AOL.  Before joining AOL, William served as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of WebMD from 2007 to 2014 as well as Chief Operating Officer of WebMD from 2012 to 2014. Prior to WebMD, William served as Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at Napster from 2003 to 2007. From 2001 to 2003, he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of pressplay, a Universal Music Group/Sony Music Entertainment joint venture, and from 2000 to 2001 he served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Universal Music Group. Previously, William spent more than a decade at IBM.   William received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Virginia, and a PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.