Tuesday, April 28th, 2015

9:00 AM - 10:15 AM

ThinkTank I, Poolside Tent I

Silicon Beach Strategies: Accelerate, Incubate, Crowdfunding, Start-ups & Angels

Brian Mac Mahon, Chief Community Officer, Pay it Forward Labs & Expert DOJO

Andrew Heckler, founder and CEO, Hone

John Shiple, founder, FreelanceCTO.com

Addison McCaleb, Founder and CEO, MediaHound

Andrés Diana, Managing Director, SeedInvest Los Angeles

Victoria Silchenko, Ph.D., Chair of Global LAVA, Los Angeles Venture Association, Moderator

John Shiple, FreelanceCTO.com is an acclaimed technology consultant to CEOs throughout the U.S. John creates success for his clients by building companies and products for businesses and investors. He architects award-winning technologies that scale businesses while concurrently building, training, and mentoring development teams. John's work brings forth new products, optimizes business processes, lowers operating costs, and enables operational scalability. He has a special expertise in working with emerging and disruptive technologies. John has founded, raised capital for, and launched multiple companies and products. His successes include: A recent startup secured two Fortune 50 contracts within the first year of operation while another gained traction as a Tech Crunch 50 Finalist. At Bigstep.com, John enabled Business Development to sign 50+ co-branded partnerships including AOL Time Warner, Compaq, NBCi, and Office Depot. There he patented a product that won the majority of industry awards for customer satisfaction and quality of service offering within the first year of launch. BigStep.com went on to be acquired by a leading hosting company within 5 years of launching the company. John also redesigned GeoCities, the 4th largest site on the Internet, increased ad inventory by more than 10,000 times, and enabled a purchase by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock. John's clients include Fortune 50 (like Samsung and NTT) and Fortune 500 companies (like Hilton). His startup clients have included GeoCities, Bigstep.com, Mota Motors, MindMixer, and HotWired/Wired Digital.

Addison McCaleb is Founder and CEO of MediaHound, Inc. The Los Angeles based startup’s data platform, The Entertainment Graph, powers apps that enable search, sharing, and discovery across all entertainment content. At MediaHound, Addison oversees product development as well as general management. An alumni of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and native of San Antonio, Texas, Addison previously founded and managed a successful commercial and video production company.

Andrew Heckler, founder and CEO of Hone (www.gohone.com): Andrew leads Hone, a content marketing and native advertising technology company. He founded Hone to solve the problem of creating branded content by both publishers and brands, and saw the opportunity to provide tools to produce one of the most engaging forms of original, digital media - interactive visual quizzes, surveys and polls.  Prior to Hone, Andrew’s diverse entrepreneurial experience has spanned the clean technology and digital media space. In addition to his position at Hone, he also serves as founding partner and chairman of Brightfield Energy, a clean energy business developing utility-scale, renewable power on contaminated sites, returning these wastelands back to productivity. Andrew is also a partner at Workhouse Capital, an early stage investment technology fund focused on U.S. and South American opportunities. He entered the clean tech space as a consultant at Sequoia Capital.  Previously, Andrew founded and served as president of Catchwater Entertainment, a production company with actor Aaron Eckhart, known for his roles in Erin Brockovich, Thank You for Smoking and the Batman film, The Dark Knight.  Andrew has been responsible for an array of investments, including Plain Vanilla Games, the studio behind QuizUp, the fastest growing iPhone game in history; Useek, a video advertising platform; Black Book, a digital magazine; and Modern Meadows, a company developing novel biomaterials.  He holds a B.A. in Government and Economics from Cornell University.

Andrés Diana is the Managing Director for SeedInvest Los Angeles. SeedInvest is a leading equity crowdfunding platform connecting investors with high quality startups seeking Seed, Bridge, or Series A funding. SeedInvest provides investors with insider access to highly vetted startup investment opportunities and makes investing in the startup asset class as easy as buying shares of stock. Before joining SeedInvest in 2014, Andrés spent most of his career driving innovation in the public financial markets. In previous roles, he founded and managed a broker dealer and trading floor, and spent most of his career working as a quantitative proprietary trader in the equities markets. Andrés received his degree in entrepreneurship, information systems, and marketing from The Wharton School and loves all manner of action sports, especially Kitesurfing.

Victoria Silchenko,Ph.D., Chair of Global LAVA, Los Angeles Venture Association; is an economist turned entrepreneur who devotes much of her time to helping other entrepreneurs succeed. She is the founder & CEO of Metropole Capital Group (www.metropolecapital.com) which she launched in 2004 in Los Angeles, CA to provide strategic and capital formation advisory services to venture capital-backed startups and other emerging growth and innovative companies in a broad range of industries throughout the U.S. and Russia/BRIC. Victoria strongly believes in ethical conduct of any business and actively supports solving market needs in the most intelligent, innovative and socially responsible way. She is also a writer and contributes to the Huffington Post and Los Angeles Business Journal on the subjects of entrepreneurship, venture capital, angel investing and crowdfunding. Most recently she organized and produced the first annual Next Generation Entrepreneurship and Crowdfunding Forum which was an unprecedented and exclusive gathering of world class entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs, accelerators, and crowdfunding experts and advocates from the United States and all over the globe. Victoria is also the chair of Global LAVA group, a strategic interest group of the Los Angeles Venture Association (www.lava.org), the oldest LA based non-profit that supports entrepreneurship and innovations. Victoria initiated and launched Global LAVA group in 2011 on a mission to unite entrepreneurs, business executives, and capital providers interested in leveraging the existing global marketplace's opportunities and capital sources for companies based in Southern California and came up with the group's motto “Think Outside The States”. Under her leadership over a short period of time, Global LAVA has evolved into a preeminent monthly forum of international entrepreneurship and foreign direct investment for the entire greater Los Angeles area and beyond. Dr. Silchenko is a frequent speaker on entrepreneurship and financing & growth strategies for early stage companies at numerous seminars and international conferences including the Association of Corporate Growth (United States), LAVA (United States), Horasis: The Global Visions Community (Luxemburg) and other events. Victoria formerly held an analytical position at the Milken Institute, a leading Southern California economic “think - tank” managed by Michael Milken. Previously, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher directly with Dr. Arthur Laffer, (former economic advisor to President Reagan) at Laffer Investments, an economic research and consulting firm. Dr. Silchenko holds degrees in Economics and Finance from the State University of Demidov (1997) and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (2000). Additionally, she completed her coursework in Financial Modeling, Business Valuation, and Business Strategies at the University of California San Diego, and she holds a Certificate in Recognition of Satisfying the Requirements for the Advanced Management and Business Program from San Diego State University. In her spare time Victoria likes to read philosophy, play piano, paint and write poetry. Her recently published poetry book, “No Limits: Modern Poetry For Modern People,” is available now on Amazon.