Adam Aronson

Adam is a NYU MBA focusing on Social Impact and Entrepreneurship. He also works professionally with education firms. Adam supports numerous local non-profits in a variety of areas and recently his passion has been criminal justice reform.

Brian Bordainick

Brian Bordainick started his career in education through Teach For America, teaching 11th and 12th grade at Carver High School. Brian founded 9th Ward Field of Dreams to support the construction of a state-of-the-art football field and track on Carver’s campus in the upper 9th ward. The organization has raised over $1.8M in less than two years.

Since then, he has worked for the Mayor of New Orleans transitioning the recreation department of 102 employees out of City Hall to a public/private partnership, and runs 4.0 Schools Investment Portfolio. 4.0 Schools invests in early stage ideas in education that have the potential to transform education in the Untied States. He was recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Andy Josuweit

Andy Josuweit has a wide breadth of experience as an amateur economist, UI/UX designer, serial entrepreneur and
competitive athlete. Starting his first company at 15, Andy has since launched 4 businesses ranging from landscaping, custom apparel manufacturing, software development, and most recently financial counseling. After both a few mild successes and failures, Andy is a
big proponent of agile customer and product development.

Andy hails from Pennsylvania and has a Bachelors of Science in Managerial Economics from Bentley University.

Fun fact: Andy has lived and worked on 5 continents since 2009.

Julian Miller

Julian Miller is a former high school teacher/department head turned technologist. As cofounder and CEO of Learnmetrics, he is focused on building a platform where big data, machine learning and human capital converge to increase the odds of student success.

Zane Ma

Zane works at OpenFin, a financial technology startup in NYC, where he leads the development of OpenFin's web platform and HTML5 applications. He has participated in several Startup Weekends, most recently winning 2nd place at the inaugural Financial Technology Startup Weekend, and being entered as a Finalist in the 2013 Fintech Innovation Lab. Zane has also worked on projects involving mobile phone health sensors, multiplayer gaming, and social video chat.

Christine Ortiz

Christine Ortiz is a social entrepreneur, with expertise in the fields of marketing and branding, youth empowerment, education and curriculum design. An MIT grad with two masters’ degrees, Ortiz spent her high school years working on the national, teen anti-smoking Truth Campaign and advising corporate executives on engaging youths for social change. At the age if 18 she founded her first company, Allen Ortiz Consulting, through which she developed youth empowerment curriculums, designed marketing and branding strategies for social change initiatives, launched state and country-wide change campaigns, and spoke in front of hundreds of thousands of youth and adults. She opened a tutoring and test prep center, a stepping-stone to her most recent venture, Knowledge Commons, an innovation lab that is rapidly prototyping solutions to education related issues. The Commons include Lawton Chiles Preparatory School, a K-12 school, with mixed-age classrooms, an integrated and thematic curriculum design, and a constant focus on individuality. Her background in entrepreneurship, branding, marketing and empowerment help mold her innovative approach to education.

Daniel Freidman

Dan is cofounder of Thinkful, the online school that uses one-on-one tutoring and personalized curricula to help students rapidly learn employable skills. Dan is in the inaugural class of the Thiel Fellowship, and previously worked at RRE Ventures and Elm City Labs.

Anna Curran

Anna Curran is the founder of a print-on-demand startup CookbookCreate.com. CookbookCreate.com combines the best of Web 2.0 and print-on-demand technology delivering a fun, easy to use tool to make your own custom cookbooks.

Saul Orbach

Saul Orbach is a seasoned management professional with over 25 years of executive leadership experience in a turning vision into reality and managing companies and business projects.

Prateek Aneja

Four years covering education technology and services companies at ThinkEquity Partners, an investment bank formed by the current co-founders of GSV Capital.

Sarah Hall

Sarah is the CEO of Harley&Co, a hybrid strategic management consulting and creative services group with an emphasis on working with startups. She has extensive experience working in a diverse array of industries including health, entertainment, and education.

Abran Maldonado

Abran Maldonado is the Co-Founder of NuSkool. After nearly a decade working in the music and entertainment industry, Abran decided to enter the academy to further explore Hip-Hop, digital media and other aspects of youth culture.

Chapman Snowden

Chap jumped into tech startups as the CEO of Kinobi, a startup that uses motion capture technology to provide people real-time feedback while they learn kinesthetic activities.

Douglas Hayes

Doug is an ed tech enthusiast with an investment background and diverse operational & leadership experience. Coming from a long line of public school teachers, he knows the benefits and challenges of getting the right technology into the hands of the nation's true engines of growth: our educators. He is passionate about helping great ed tech ideas become reality by focusing on market identification, business development, strategy, financial analysis, and fundraising. Doug has small town roots and landed in NYC by way of Dartmouth College.

Marissa Lowman

Marissa Lowman is the Executive Director and a co-founder of LearnLaunch. She is also the founder of EdTechup, an organization that brings together education technology entrepreneurs and educators in the Boston area to collaborate with one another. Most recently, she worked in sales and marketing at mobile payments startup AisleBuyer, which was acquired by Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU). Lowman taught in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship, worked for Teach For America and helped grow the National Partnership for Educational Access (NPEA) at The Steppingstone Foundation.

She also served as a member of the steering committee of the Boston Leaders for the Future of Education (BLFE) from 2010-2011. In addition, she served as the Marketing Director for DartBoston, which helps emerging entrepreneurs start companies. Lowman received her BA from Johns Hopkins University.

Marcela Guaman

Marcela is the Northeast Regional Sales Director for Avantica Technologies, where she manages new accounts and strategic partnerships with established and start-ups software companies. She possesses strong Account Management experience in Business Development, Sales & Marketing roles. These roles included International assignments in Eastern Europe and Latin America.

Marcela co-organizes the Stamford Tech Meetup and is also a frequent volunteer and participant at the NYC Startup Weekend. She got her first taste of the vibrant NYC Tech community when she participated at the NYC Startup Weekend back in 2011, where along with her team won second place with the inbed.me idea (now Wehostels.com), a company that has grown into a game changer in the world of social and hostel bookings.

Marcela brings a positive attitude and creative mind to every project she tackles. Being a ‘go-giver' vs. just a 'go-getter’ is the best way to describe her style of connecting and desire to help others succeed. Marcela is fluent in English and Spanish, and holds a BBA in International Management from the Lubin School of Business at Pace University.

Waine Tam

Waine is the founder of Careerosity, a startup focused on building a collaborative community around career advice. Careerosity is currently being incubated by Socratic Labs in NYC. Most recently, Waine was COO of iMentor, a Gates-funded mentoring non-profit in NYC. He also founded a hedge fund, worked at Goldman Sachs, and majored in electrical engineering.

Beau Randall

Beau is the primary developer behind Careerosity, a startup focused on becoming a community for pertinent career advice. In an earlier life he spent 12 years working as an engineer in enterprise healthcare.

Beau led a team in SW San Diego #2 focused on crowdsourced legal defense -- the experience was awesome and he's looking forward to participating in another SW.

Steven Hodas

Education and online-communities entrepreneur for twenty years, with experience ranging from startups, to publicly-traded companies, to NASA.

Kyle Jaster

Kyle Jaster creates beautiful, useful experiences that solve problems.

He has 7 years of web development experience including front and back end software development, product concept and project management

Kyle works closely with customers & engineering teams to deliver thoughtful, engaging websites on time and on budget and has significant experience in product definition, planning and execution.

Brian Frumberg

Brian Frumberg is the Founder of VentureOutNY, an Entrepreneur-At-Large with DFJ Gotham Ventures, and a startup mentor with iCatapult, a CEE-focused technology incubator. With vast experience in sales, business development, and product management, Brian's career has spanned finance and technology, startups and venture, and now he is firmly planted as a member of New York's technology community.

Pascale Mevs

Pascale Mevs is an Innovation Manager at the NYC Department of Education's Office of Innovation (iZone), where she focuses on data analysis and budget management. Prior to joining the iZone, Pascale served as a research analyst at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform where she published briefs on college readiness initiatives across the nation and on the NYC Department of Education’s Leaky Pipeline data analysis project. Her interests include research/data analysis and innovation investment strategy. Pascale is an experienced English teacher and holds a B.A. in English Education from NYU and an M.A. in Urban Education Policy from Brown University.

Angela Lee

Angela Lee is the founder of 37 Angels, an angel investment network and training bootcamp for women investors. She is an entrepreneur and angel investor with a passion for education. She is a consultant and educator and teaches Strategic Problem Solving, Entrepreneurial Thinking and Executive Communication at Columbia Business School, NYU, and General Assembly

Farb Nivi

Farb Nivi is the founder of Grockit and Chief Product Officer. He has been an Entrepreneur and Teacher since he was in his teens. The first company he started is Michigan-based Vision Computer Solutions which he ran from 1995-1998. He then joined The Princeton Review where he was a teacher, a trainer, and wrote curriculum and pedagogy. In 2001, Farb was honored with The Princeton Review’s National Teacher of the Year Award. Just prior to founding Grockit, Farb was a center manager and academic director for Kaplan. In his advisory role to the Kennedy Centers Millenium Stage and the World Peace Institute, Farb has begun working with youth artists and musicians on adaptive learning efforts designed to create real acts of peace throughout the world.

His favorite teacher was his 8th grade teacher Mr. Rodriguez.

Farimah Schuerman

Nell Derick Debevoise

Nell Derick Debevoise is the founder of Inspiring Capital LLC, which uses practical experience, analysis, and theory to help develop, fund, and launch socially-minded ventures. Previously, Nell was the founding director of Tomorrow's Youth Organization, a nonprofit that promotes social and economic development through educational programs for children and women in the Middle East. Her love of education has earned her degrees from Harvard College, Columbia and London Business Schools, Cambridge University, and the Università di Roma in psychology, education policy, and entrepreneurship. Nell speaks French and Italian, as well as conversational Arabic, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese as a result of an incurable travel bug that has brought her to 44 countries.

Anya Kamenetz

Anya Kamenetz is a contributing writer at Fast Company Magazine and Fastcompany.com and the author of several books and book chapters about the future of education. In 2011, Learning, Freedom and the Web (http://learningfreedomandtheweb.org/) and The Edupunks’ Guide (edupunksguide.org) were published as free ebooks by the Mozilla and Gates Foundation respectively. Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006), dealt with youth economics and politics