Mentors
Jay DeckerBio: Jay is the Founder and COO of Sproutlet where he leads a product engineering team and works closely with tech Startups. Sproutlet focused on defining, building and deploying an MVP to align with startups\' business initiatives and position the startups for future growth. He also drinks way too much coffee and thinks of many ideas that he will never have time to execute upon.
Raj ValliBio: Raj is the Founder & CEO of PrazAs. PrazAs has developed an innovative real-time collaboration platform for tablets. Previously, Raj served as Chief of Marketing for WABCO Holdings inc. (NYSE, $3B). He has 14+ Yrs Experience as a seasoned executive with billion $ companies, has held leadership positions at Honeywell/AlliedSignal across multiple verticals, and has 17 yrs non-profit experience with K-12 education. Raj\'s academic and professional credentials include M.S. (IIT, India), MBA (Univ. of MD), MS (Univ of Virginia), Chartered Financial Analyst, and Six Sigma Black Belt.
Andrew CohenBio: Andrew Cohen is the founder and CEO of Brainscape - a leading mobile education platform based on an adaptive learning algorithm. Growing out of Andrew\'s cognitive science research during his Masters in Education Technology from Columbia University, Brainscape is now one of the most widespread education app networks on the iTunes app store with nearly 1 million downloads. The company soon plans to expand beyond languages & test prep to become the default global marketplace for all types of bite-sized learning. Before starting Brainscape, Andrew spent nearly a decade developing eLearning solutions for large corporations, U.S. government offices, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Bank, across four continents. He can be found on Twitter at @acohenNY.
Jan KleinertBio: Jan joined Google\'s Developer Relations team in 2008. She has worked with developers on Google Checkout, Google Docs and Apps APIs, Chrome and HTML5, and is currently focusing on Google Apps Script. Prior to joining Google, Jan worked in developer support and software engineering roles in both the financial services and computer networking industries.
Jason HoekstraBio: Jason Hoekstra is a Technology Solutions Advisor for the U.S. Department of Education. Jason plans and implements social media and web-based solutions for citizen engagement and information dissemination. While at the Department, he has led the construction and roll out for websites such as TEACH.gov, Data.ED.gov, and Innovation.ED.gov. Jason is also a frequent contributor to open data, open source, and open government efforts within the Department. He has more than 15 years of professional IT experience in software development and network engineering.
Aaron HarrisBio: Aaron is a co-founder and CEO of Tutorspree, an online marketplace for 1 on 1 tutoring. Tutorspree is a Y Combinator grad backed by Sequoia.
Ryan BednarBio: Ryan has been hopping around the NYC startup scene since 2008. He is the co-founder and CTO of Tutorspree (YC W11), and was previously the Lead Engineer at SeatGeek (DreamIt \'09).
Steven HodasBio: Steven has been building education businesses for 20 years, from NASA to startups to publicly-traded companies.
Alex Charest WeinbergBio: Alex is a former Teach For America corps member and Co-Founder of SnappSchool.
Trevor OwensBio: Trevor is the Founder of Lean Startup Machine.
Andrew CoveBio: Andrew is an entrepreneur who has worked with startups at AngelList and IA Ventures. He is a founder, engineer, and game industry alum.
Ryan DuquesBio: Ryan Duques, a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit in the traditional media industry, now focuses on e-Learning, real-time apps and prides himself in speed to execution. Follow @rduques.
Matthew MametBio: As head of product at Pearson Education\'s College and Career Readiness Division, Matthew is helping build Alleyoop.com, a college readiness network for teens and parents. For over 10 years, he\'s brought products to life at funded and pre-funded startups. Prior to Alleyoop, Matthew held co-founder roles at EditMe and Embarc - both of which had successful exits. Matthew is an active mentor at Lean Startup Machine, Founders Mentors, Startup Weekend, and Ubiqi Health, where he is currently a Board Advisor. Matthew graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Life is too short to spend lots of time and energy building products that nobody likes or worse - that nobody ever wanted in the first place.
Alejtin BerishaBio: Alejtin Berisha is an educator, entrepreneur and an executive. He is the Executive Director of Universum University College, where he also lectures in the field of Organizational Studies, HE Management, and Entrepreneurship. Alejtin is a consultant in educational research and management for several organizations and has authored several important documents and policies in the field of Education. He is noted for his innovative approach to higher education management and teaching and learning and was featured in the cover page of CIO magazine for introducing for the first time in the region a project which incorporates \'Teaching through Social Media\'. He sits in the boards of several organizations and associations and is an Entrepreneurship Coach and Mentor for BiD Network, Prishtina Startup Weekend and Universum ThreeDay StartUp. He is leading Universum\'s new strategic plan which incorporates Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Responsibility as core student experiences. He is doing a DBA in the Higher Education Management at the University of Bath (UK), has an MA in Contemporary European Studies from the University of Sussex (UK) and a BBA from South East European University (Macedonia) and is currently a Visiting Scholar at New York University.
Marc WeilBio: Marc is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Software Engineering. He comes to CloudMine as its CTO and founder after a year at Oracle doing enterprise-level iOS application development and brief stint at RJMetrics working on their business intelligence and analytics platform. He was also an engineer at Apple in the Mac OS X Platform Experience group prior to Oracle, has worked on many freelance iOS projects, and ran a profitable company at the venerable age of 14. Marc is obsessed with functional programming and system architecture and enjoys world travel and delicious exotic coffee. Technical specialties include the following: Ruby (Rails, Sinatra, and non-web Ruby dev), Objective-C/Cocoa Touch/iOS, Javascript/jQuery, CSS, HTML, MySQL, MongoDB, CouchDB, Java, Scala, PHP, and everything Linux.
David SorinBio: Dave Sorin is a co-founding and co-managing partner of the firm. He focuses his practice primarily on privately- and publicly-owned startup, early stage, emerging growth, and middle market technology and life science enterprises, as well as the investors, executives, and boards of directors who support and lead them. Dave has a long track record of successful representation of growth companies, having been repeatedly recognized by well-known periodicals for a unique combination of legal acumen and sound business judgment. He also brings to bear his broad range of knowledge and experience in counseling enterprises and investors in diverse emerging growth markets, technology industries (including software, information technology, e-commerce, and communications), and life sciences. Many of the companies he represents are well-known names throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. A startup advocate in the most genuine sense of the word, Dave and his team at SorinRoyerCooper have won numerous awards and accolades, including the firm\'s most recent honor as Lawyer Monthly Magazine\'s \"Emerging Growth Company Law Firm of the Year.\"
Tom HallBio: Tom is Head of Partnerships at Pearson, where he works with businesses around the world on digital strategy for their educational and consumer products, and with technology communities to open more doors into Pearson content and services. With a background in licensing and sales, he is motivated by innovative consumer experience, business models, and the ever-changing digital commercial landscape. When not plotting his next flight connection, he is probably cooking in his kitchen, asking his wife about her startup, or chasing after a 3 year old.
Jason GoodhandBio: Jason is a Product Lead in the Pearson Future Technologies group where he focuses on new product development, and emerging technologies. He is passionate about “the details” of design, creating great mobile products, racing in Triathlons, and exploring the gastronomic delights of NYC.
Jonathan KestenbaumBio: Jonathan is the Chief Executive Nerd at DoesThatMakeSense.com. DoesThatMakeSense provides online tutoring and homework help for college students. Jonathan embodied the entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, having started two successful businesses before the age of twenty-one. Have a book and can’t find book notes? An exam and don’t know where to start? A DoesThatMakeSense Nerds will read your book, study for your exam, and teach you what you need to know.
Arthur TuBio: Arthur is co-founder and CTO of LearnBop, where he leads the engineering team on various user experience, data mining and web development initiatives. Prior to co-founding LearnBop, Arthur worked as a research staff member Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center and as a consultant for Carnegie Learning. Arthur graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with B.S in Computer Science and Philosophy, and M.S in Logic and Computation. Aside from his passion in education and in technology, Arthur also a street dance and social dance hobbyist.
Bharani RajakumarBio: Prior to starting his MBA program at the Tepper School of Business in 2009, Bharanidharan Rajakumar worked at Lehman Brothers and Neuberger Berman where he developed an operations management system to control approximately $300 billion in transactions. While in New York City, Bharani started two socially oriented non-profit organizations, nyties.org and ufchi.org, to develop young professional mangers in New York City and poverty alleviation businesses in India respectively. Bharani graduated from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Finance. His experience in the for-profit and non-profit sectors led him to develop a for-profit business model to one of the world’s most challenging social dilemmas, education. Bharani is a co-founder of LearnBop, a start-up that enables educators to develop lessons that simulate a one-on-one learning experience online.
Steven FranciscoBio: The President of Innovation Teaching, Steven led the winning team at the first Startup Weekend EDU. A native of the south Bronx, Steven taught third grade English language learners there from 2003-2007 as a member of Teach For America. Recognizing patterns in his student data and bottlenecks in his work-flow, he developed Jeven: a rubric based system that collects and reports on real-time student performance data to compliment testing without the need for typing. Today, his passion for alternative assessments and reducing teacher workload resonates with the dozens of schools across the world which use Innovation Teaching\'s software and hardware solutions.
Andrew MercandoBio: Before joining Skillshare, Andrew worked as an interaction designer at R/GA working on projects for Converse and Nike+. When not working, he enjoys getting lost in strange cities around the world, toy making (little animals with security cams as heads), and the occasional indie rock/gangster rap concert. Andrew attended Carnegie Mellon University and doubled-up in Communication Design and Human-Computer Interaction.
Boris KudryavskyBio: Co-founded a number of Companies in the telecom and healthcare spaces over the last 10 years. I focus on developing strong industry partnerships, and contribute a fair share to product development and team building
Leo Newball, Jr.Bio: I believe in three things: Development, Design, and Data. I believe in the power of Web Development, and any solution can be conquered using a breadth of web-based tools and technology. I believe in the power of great Web Design, believing that both the code and the presentation can be well-organized, presented, and provide amazing experiences. I believe in the power of asking questions, performing Data Research, analyzing the results, and presenting them in ways best disseminated for public use. Email: contact@leonewball.com
Sarah Judd WelchBio: Product Storyteller + Community Developer I create emotional connections to draw people into communities and leverage those relationships for community and business growth. I’m obsessed with people - how and why people work, what they do to fulfill themselves and the tools that they use to get there. This shapes how I think about business, community and products. I consult with early stage startups and have worked with TaskRabbit and Catchafire. In a former life, I worked for Goldman Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton. For more details on what I’ve worked on in the past, check out my resume. This is what I’m currently working on: iDoneThis (seed-stage, MVP, Angelpad) - Customer Development, Product Roadmapping, Content Marketing; W/i three weeks, landed blog on Tumblr’s spotlight page for startups Kik (Series A, USV/RRE/Spark) - Community Management, Social Media, Content Marketing; Preparing community engagement strategies and processes for new product launch Have a project that we can work on together? Let’s chat! Email me at sarahwelch.sjw@gmail.
Jose Maria TomeBio: Jose Maria has worked across Latin America and Europe, with over 15 years in leadership responsible for Finance and Operations. Multi-lingual and having worked across many territories, he has great experience in steering companies through growth and change, helping the business move from a publishing company to a service provider. He is also responsible for M&A in the region.
Kyle JasterBio: Kyle has a background that blends computer science and art, and a passion for making things that \"just work.\" After graduating with a BS in Computer Science he recently spent four years as Production Director at Rayogram - an NYC design firm - where he led his team in developing innovative solutions to design problems and made significant contributions to open source software products. As VP of Product Development Kyle brings this unique perspective to all of Noodle\'s biggest challenges. In his spare time he climbs rocks and farms chickens.
