Prior to joining Google, Tara was the President of Visible World, the leading targeted TV advertising platform for media buyers, advertising professionals, and marketers.  She was also an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company, where she was a leader of the Global Media & Entertainment and Sales & Marketing groups.  Tara began her career in print and online advertising sales and has worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs and a consultant for The LEK Partnership.

Tara writes and speaks frequently on the shifting advertising landscape and has been named by Advertising Age as one of the top “Women to Watch”, by Crain’s as one of NYC’s “40 Under 40”, and by Fast Company as one of the  “Most Creative People in Business.”
Tara currently serves on the alumni advisory board of McKinsey & Company, is a member of the Young Presidents Organization, and is on the Board of Directors of F.E.G.S., a non-profit focused on health and human services.  Tara is also an angel investor in, and advisor, to several media and marketing startups in the NY area.

Tara received a B.A. in economics from Harvard University and a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.  She currently lives in Manhattan with her husband and twin boys.

Alexander Torrenegra (@torrenegra) is a serial entrepreneur. Alexander founded his first IT business at the age of 14 in Bogotá, Colombia, his country of origin. Alexander started studying Automation Engineering and dropped after two years. He moved to the US in 1999 and worked at McDonalds as a cook. Next year he became a technology consultant for Terra-Lycos and Yahoo! en Español in Miami.

He started studying Management of Information Systems at FIU, but dropped again two years later. In 2002 he moved to NYC and co-founded several sucessful startups, including Voice123.com, BookingMarkets.com, inBed.me (now WeHostels), HubBOG, and Torrenegra Labs. He is now the founder and CEO of VoiceBunny. You can learn more about him at http://torrenegralabs.com/#alex

Joanne has had several careers starting out as a buyer at Macys to running a company in the rag trade eventually leading to spearheading sales for a start-up magazine/e-zine/events company called Silicon Alley Reporter.  On to the non-profit world where she chaired MOUSE (Making Opportunities in Upgrading Schools in Education) an organization focused on technology in inner-city schools.  She has sat on a number of profit and non-profit boards and has been involved with a variety of real estate transactions from beginning to end.

Joanne has been blogging since 1994 under the name Gotham Gal.  She is involved with the start-up community as an angel investor and adviser.  She has been a champion of women in tech by starting and co-chairing the Women’s Entrepreneurial Festival with the ITP division of NYU.  Many of the companies she is working with are owned or started by women.  The tech companies are Food52, Catchafire, Dailyworth, Talk Market, Editd,  Lover.ly, Mouth Foods, How Good, , Little Borrowed Dress, Kitchsurfing, littleBits, Nest.io, Red Stamp, Have to Have, Curbed (Eater/Racked) as well as Ricks Picks, The Moon Group and Cacao Prieto.  She also sits on the board of Hot Bread Kitchen and the Highline.

Her most successful venture is being married to her best friend, Fred and raising her three kids, Jessica, Emily and Josh.

Chris Genteel, Head of Diversity Markets, Google
Chris Genteel leads Google’s efforts to make its products useful and accessible to diverse businesses and their communities. His team works with customers and partners to support the ecosystem of underrepresented US businesses using online tools for business success.

Chris was Online Sales Manager in Google’s sales where his customers were a range of mid-sized to Fortune 500 B2B businesses looking to the web for aggressive growth and customer acquisition online. In 2011 Chris received the President’s Award from the Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council for his dedication to advancing minority business development.

Chris’ early career was in nonprofit management, first as New Haven Symphony Orchestra’s Operations Manager, then at EmcArts Consulting in New York where he managed planning and evaluation projects for arts and education organizations and their funders. There he helped bring web-based tools for knowledge-sharing to his clients and the industry.

Chris holds an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan where he received the MBA Innovation Award and the Cause-Based Entrepreneurial Leadership Award for founding Arts Enterprise. He received his BA from Yale University, where he also managed and toured the globe with the Yale Whiffenpoofs singing ensemble.

Chris flexes his right-brain by writing, recording and performing his brand of rock/soul/hiphop music at home in Ann Arbor and in his hometown of New York City. His next music project may be a kids songs album–he and his wife Dara just welcomed baby Chiara to the world in December.  @chrisgenteel  +Chris Genteel

Alex Diaz-Asper

Principal, VentureCount

Alex has extensive experience in finance operations, mergers and

acquisitions, venture capital and private equity with multinationals and

start-up companies in a wide range of industries, from

telecommunications to marketing services. Over his 20 years of

experience in the U.S., Europe and Asia, Alex has been a venture

capitalist, CFO, company founder and M&A advisor. Alex has held

leadership positions at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, TARP Worldwide,

Inc., Alfred Street Partners, MCI Communications, PSINet, among others.

He has a BA in Quantitative Economics from Tufts University and an MBA

with Honors from the University of Michigan.

Daniel began his career at The Boeing Company, overseeing the sale of Boeing’s next-generation reconnaissance jet to foreign militaries. He later moved to Boeing’s commercial business, working on supply chain optimization for the 787 Dreamliner.

Daniel studied Supply Chain Management at Washington State University, where he founded a sports nutrition company. He enjoys adventure sports, traveling, and exploring his current city of San Francisco.

William is a Managing Director with DreamIt Ventures, a leading global startup
accelerator with programs in New York, Philadelphia, and Tel Aviv. Entering its fifth
year , DreamIt has now launched 65 companies spanning the full spectrum of the
technology landscape with plans to launch 30 more companies in 2012. At DreamIt
William leads DreamIt Access, a groundbreaking effort focused on the launch and
development of high value minority-led startups.

William also serves as Lead Advisor of the Co mcast Ventures Opportunity Fund, a
$20 million venture fund dedicated to investing in early stage minority technology
companies. The Opportunity Fund provides a unique approach to connecting its
investments with the broad and deep resources of one of the world’s leading media
companies to create significant and sustainable value for minority ventures.

Prior to these roles, in 2008, William founded Growth Strategy Advisors, a strategic
advisory and business development compan y. Since its inception, William has
overseen the firm’s growth and nationwide expansion. He has been directly
involved in the formation and implementation of new growth strategies,
assessments of new business opportunities, an d the launching of new ventures for a
wide variety of digital and traditional media companies. Throughout his career he
has served as a trusted advisor to senior executives at companies such as AOL,
Radio One, Interactive One, and Thoms on Reuters . He has over 15 years of strategy
and operations consulting experience; many of them with technology and digital
media businesses.

Early in his career William was a software developer specializing in the areas of data
networking and large-scale data analytics. William received his MBA from the
Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He also holds BS and MS degrees in
Computer Science from North Carolina State University where his research efforts
focused on the performance evaluation of high -speed data networks.

David S. Rose is an Inc. 500 CEO, serial entrepreneur and early stage investor who has founded or funded over 80 pioneering companies that are helping to define the future. He has been described by Forbes as “New  York’s Archangel”, by BusinessWeek as a “world conquering entrepreneur”, by Crain’s New York Business as “the father of angel investing in New York”, and by Red Herring magazine as “patriarch of Silicon Alley”.

From his initial involvement with the first online communities in the 1970s, through founding one of the first personal computer training companies in the 1980s, one of the first wireless data information networks in the 1990s, and the first global angel investing platform in the 2000s, David has been at the forefront of innovation in business and technology.

Among the fields in which he has been actively involved as an executive, board member or investor are: wireless communications, consumer electronics, crowdsourcing, international finance, social networking, space tourism, user-generated content, online video, mobile network security, biological testing, electronic music, citizen journalism, out-of-home advertising, fiber-optic networking, concierge medicine, online marketing, interactive voice response, and many others.

As an entrepreneurial executive himself, David is the founder and CEO of Gust, which operates the international standard collaboration platform for startup financing, used by hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs in 92 countries to connect with over 40,000 accredited investors.

He is also Managing Director of Rose Tech Ventures; Founder and Chairman Emeritus of New York Angels; and Founding Track Chair for Finance and Entrepreneurship at Singularity University, the Google/NASA-sponsored post-graduate program in exponential technologies.

He is a member of the boards of directors of Comixology; KoolSpan; Pond5; Social Bomb; Por ti, Familia; Magnify Networks; TekServe and the NY Tech Meetup,  and serves as an active early stage investor in companies including BioScale, Mashery, Space Adventures, SayMedia, LearnVest, and PublicStuff.

David is well known in the business startup community for discovering and mentoring high-potential entrepreneurs, and has been profiled by BusinessWeek as “The Pitch Coach” for his ability to help CEOs perfect their fundraising skills. He is a regular speaker at business schools including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Pace, Stevens and Penn State, and was named 2009 Mentor of the Year by NYU’s Stern School of Business.

Prior to founding AirMedia Corporation in 1988, for which he served as CEO for over ten years, his career included over fifteen years in real estate development, government, teaching and urban planning. David was co-founder and Chairman of The Computer Classroom and Vice President at Rose Associates, Inc. Earlier, he served as Deputy Director of the New York office of US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

A native New Yorker, David has a BA in Urban Affairs from Yale University, an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School and a D. Eng. (hc) from Stevens Institute of Technology. He is a graduate of the New York City public school system and Horace Mann High School. He is an Associate Fellow of Pierson College at Yale University and a member of the Entrepreneurship Advisory Boards of Columbia Business School and Yale University.

David can be followed online @davidsrose.

For additional background:

Website: www.rose.vc

Blog: www.rose.vc/angelnotes

Quora answers: http://www.quora.com/David-S-Rose/answers

Neil Anderson is New York & London based entrepreneur and early stage investor with operational experience in corporate strategy, enterprise software & innovation management, international outsourcing and infrastructure development.
A founding partner of the Hubitat incubator and founding investor of Angel Round Capital Investment, the ‘Arc Angel’ Fund, L.P., the first Angel-led venture fund in the New York metro region (www.arcangelfund.com),
and Mentor to the Pipeline Fellowship, Entrepreneur’s Roundtable Accelerator Program and the Startup Leadership Program (NYC Chapter). MA and BA degrees in Classics and Linguistics from Cambridge University.

Jennifer Arguello is a Silicon Valley native, first generation Costa Rican American. At 6, she started programming by accident. Many years later, she went on to get a computer science degree at the University of California, San Diego. STEM education and entrepreneurship, especially for women and minorities, are her passions hence she is part of various socially focused organizations. Last year she co-founded the Latino Startup Alliance, which is an organization to promote and nurture Latinos in the tech startup community. She is on the national board of directors for the Society of Hispanic Professionals Engineers the largest organization of Latinos in STEM. She also serves on the alumni advisory board for the computer science and engineering department at her alma mater.

Throughout her career, Jennifer has won numerous awards and received various honors, including most recently being named to the Top 50 Women to Watch in Tech by Femm-o-nomics.  Her day job is a product manager at Mozilla where she helps define the next generation of apps and the future of the web.  Aside from her professional and community service activities, you can find Jennifer out in nature or on a soccer field. She is based in San Francisco, California.