Wed. 07/12 – Microsoft Wins Big In The FTC Case

Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He was Former Chair (2011-2020) of the Department of Astronomy; Founding Director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative; and Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC).

He also chairs the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, serves as the Science Theory Director for all Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, and holds the Sackler Senior Professorship by Special Appointment at Tel Aviv University. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics, as well as Vice Chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. Within Harvard, Loeb serves on the President's Task Force on Diversity and Belonging, the Provost's Allston Academic Planning Committee, and the FAS Dean's Faculty Resources Advisory Committee.

Connie Chan is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley based technology venture capital firm with over $7B under management. Since joining Andreessen Horowitz in 2011, Connie has worked on the investment team sourcing deals and working closely with startups across the portfolio. She also spearheaded the firm’s Asia network to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley companies looking to navigate Asia opportunities and companies in Asia seeking to better understand Silicon Valley. Connie’s writing and speaking on the topic of innovation in China has brought renewed attention to the topic with her writing on WeChat winning a Sidney award in 2015.

Before joining Andreessen Horowitz, Connie worked at HP leading its webOS efforts in China. She started her career as a private equity investor at Elevation Partners, investing in media and entertainment. Connie received her B.A. in Economics and M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Peter Kafka is senior correspondent at Recode; host of Recode Media, the weekly podcast dedicated to the future of media and technology; and co-executive producer of Recode’s Code Conference, a premiere series that hosts hard-hitting interviews with the media and tech industry’s leading players.

He has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. He made the digital leap to Forbes.com in 2005. He may have been the first national business reporter to interview Steve "Stone Cold Steve Austin" Williams. In 2007, Peter became the first hire at Silicon Alley Insider, the predecessor to Business Insider, where he worked as the site's managing editor.

He began writing for AllThingsD.com in 2008. In 2011, he began producing and hosting the D: Dive into Media conferences; he will continue to work on other live events for Recode. Peter is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives in Brooklyn.

Chris Messina has spent over decade living on the edge of social technology. He has designed products and experiences for Google and Uber, founded startups, and changed the world by giving away many of his creations, including the hashtag. His skillset is broad, anchored in product and user experience design. Most recently, he led developer experience at Uber and co-founded Molly (YC W’18), a conversational social AI.

Chris has created movements online and off, and acted as catalyst for change in large and small organizations. In 2004, he helped organize the grassroots movement that propelled Mozilla Firefox to its first 100 million downloads. In 2005, he co-organized the first BarCamp and then popularized the unconference event model to over 350 cities around the world. In 2006, he opened the first coworking spaces in San Francisco, giving rise to a global movement. Then in 2007, he brought the idea of the hashtag to the world, changing social media forever and galvanizing social revolutions across the globe. He has spoken at conferences like TEDx, SXSW, Google I/O, and Microsoft’s Future Decoded, and is frequently quoted in media outlets like The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, Washington Post, and Wired.

Joshua Schachter is an American entrepreneur and the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. - Wikipedia

Brady Dale is a senior reporter at CoinDesk. He has worked for the site since October 2017 and lives in Brooklyn.

Josh Constine is a Principal investor and Head Of Content at venture capital fund SignalFire. He invests in early stage startups across verticals with a focus on social apps, visual communication, remote work, entertainment & media, and tech's transformation of new sectors. Constine also creates content for SignalFire, drawing on data insights from the fund's predictive recruiting engine Beacon and invested advisor network of 75 top tech leaders. SignalFire is currently investing from its $200 million seed fund and $300 million breakout fund, and has backed startups like Uber, Grammarly, Ro, Alchemy, and ClassDojo.

Constine currently writes a weekly newsletter called Moving Product at https://constine.substack.com/ where he discusses big ideas facing the startup industry, the most exciting new tech products, and interviews top industry talent about the most important recent launches.

Previously, Constine was the Editor-At-Large for TechCrunch where he wrote over 3500 blog posts about social tech giants like Facebook and Snapchat as well as early stage startups across verticals. His work was cited on the floors of the Senate and House Of Representatives, and led to the shut down of Facebook's Onavo market surveillance app.

Constine was formerly the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook through its acquisition by WebMediaBrands, covering everything about the social network.

Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master's degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interactio… Read More

Alex Kantrowitz is the founder of Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

His first book ALWAYS DAY ONE: How The Tech Titans Plan To Stay On Top Forever debuted in April 2020. His work has been referenced by dozens of major publications, from The New Yorker to The Wall Street Journal to Sports Illustrated.

Kantrowitz is a graduate of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

From Wikipedia: Rene Ritchie is a Canadian independent blogger and YouTube content creator. Ritchie is known for his podcasts including Debug, Iterate, Vector, ZEN & TECH, Review, The TV Show, and as co-host of MacBreak Weekly on the TWiT Network. Rene was formerly Lead Analyst & Executive Editor of iMore. Ritchie was also the executive producer of Mobile Nations Broadcasting.

He has been named by Business Insider one of the Top 100 most influential tech people in Twitter, one of the 15 most important Apple analysts and writers and one of the Top 25 Gadget Gurus.

Bryan is the founder and CEO of Argo AI. Bryan is passionate about incorporating promising robotics technology into products and systems that will improve safety and productivity while enhancing people’s lives. While at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), Bryan managed a portfolio of the center’s largest commercial programs, including autonomous mining trucks for Caterpillar. In 2007, Bryan led software engineering for Tartan Racing, Carnegie Mellon’s winning entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge. Bryan departed NREC and joined the Google self-driving car team in 2011 to continue the push toward making self-driving cars a reality. While at Google, Bryan was responsible for the development and manufacture of their hardware portfolio, which included self-driving sensors, computers and several vehicle development programs. He is the co-host of the No Parking Podcast, a show dedicated to demystifying and building trust in self-driving cars. Bryan graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering in 2002.

Alex Wilhelm is Senior Editor at TechCrunch. He previously worked for Crunchbase News as Editor in Chief as well as The Next Web, TechCrunch, and Mattermark.

Christopher Mims writes Keywords, a weekly column on technology. Before joining the Journal in 2014, he was the lead technology reporter for Quartz and has written on science and tech for publications ranging from Technology Review, Smithsonian, Wired, the Atlantic, Slate and other publications. Mims, who has degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology from Emory University, lives in Baltimore.

Steven Levy is Wired’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for his book Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Lloyd B. Minor, MD, is a scientist, surgeon, and academic leader. He is the Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine, a position he has held since December 2012.

Senior reporter at Gizmodo, formerly Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag.

Angela Strange is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where she focuses on investments in financial services including fintech infrastructure, insurance, real estate, and increasing financial inclusivity. She is currently a board member of Addi, SynapseFi, and Tally, and board observer for: Earnin, HealthIQ, Mayvenn, PeerStreet, and Point. Angela joined the firm in 2014.

Prior to joining a16z, Angela was a product manager at Google where she launched and grew Chrome for Android and Chrome for iOS into two of Google's most successful mobile products. Previously, she was the director of product management and business development at Ruba.com (acquired by Google) and a senior associate partner at Bay Partners where she focused on the consumer internet sector. Prior to that, Angela was a consultant at Mercer Management Consulting in Toronto.
Angela is a proud Canadian and served as co-chair of the C100, a non-profit that bridges Canadian entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley, and on the Canadian Finance Minister Morneau's Economic Growth Council. Angela has a Mechanical Engineering degree from Queen's University, in Canada, and an MBA from Stanford. Angela is a world-class athlete and spent two years training professionally as a runner; she has won several marathons and achieved a seventh place national ranking in Canada.

Dan Frommer is the founder and editor of The New Consumer, a new publication covering the intersection of technology and consumer brands. Before starting The New Consumer, Dan was the Editor in Chief at Recode, Vox Media’s tech and business news publication. Earlier in Dan's career, Dan helped create Business Insider as its second employee. Dan has also been the technology editor at Quartz and a reporter at Forbes. Originally from Chicago, and now based in Los Angeles, Dan graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Will is the founder of LiveDuel.com. LiveDuel is a fan engagement and fan activation platform that engages fans in fun and competitive games that delivers results to sports advertisers and sponsors.

Having spent time as part of his MBA in Asia, Europe and Silicon Valley being aware of global trends and usage patterns have been vital to the development of LiveDuel.

LiveDuel was shortlisted for the best startup in Ireland at the WebSummit.

Will is a Startup Weekend Organiser for Cork, Ireland. He is also a Startup Weekend facilitator and has facilitated events in Ireland, the UK and Canada.

Christina Farr is a San Francisco-based health-tech investor with a background in journalism. She's a principal at OMERS Ventures based in the Bay Area.

Previously, she was a writer and frequent on-air contributor for CNBC, Fast Company and Reuters News, among other publications. She was raised in London, UK, and received graduate degrees from University College London and Stanford University.

Flynn Coleman is an author, an international human rights attorney, a social justice advocate, a Harvard fellow, a professor, a public speaker, a former competitive athlete, an ethical fashion designer, and a founder and CEO.

Flynn has spoken, written, and taught on war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, truth and reconciliation commissions, emerging technologies, behavioral economics and behavioral science, political reconciliation, human and environmental rights, the future of autonomous weaponry and war, post-conflict and transitional justice, artificial intelligence, ethical design and leadership, gender equality, access to justice and education, social entrepreneurship, global citizenship, storytelling, and the future of work, technology, democracy, and humanity.

Flynn writes and speaks about what it means to be human, and what it means to be humane.

She is the author of the book, A Human Algorithm, a groundbreaking narrative on the urgency of humanely designed AI and a guidebook to reimagining life in the era of intelligent technology.

Flynn is a contributing writer for such publications as The Boston Globe, The Irish Times, Literary Hub, HuffPost, Global Citizen, The Next Web, Darling Magazine, Caring Magazine, Thrive Global, Nautilus Magazine, and Dame Traveler. She wrote the foreword to Liderazgo, Emprendimiento y Género: Motores de la transformación. Her work has been translated into multiple languages and appears in educational textbooks and global campaigns.

Flynn has worked with the United Nations, the Unite… Read More

Mark Bergen covers technology for Bloomberg News and Businessweek.

Mike Murphy is an editor and writer at Protocol, a new tech publication from the publisher of Politico. Prior to that, he spent many years at Quartz, most recently leading its tech coverage.

Jay Yarow is Senior Vice President and Executive Editor for CNBC Digital, responsible for setting the editorial direction for all CNBC Digital products and services.

Yarow joined CNBC from Business Insider, where he was Executive Editor responsible for overseeing and implementing the editorial strategy.

He began his career with Business Insider working as an intern when there were only four people at the company.

Yarow holds a Master’s degree in Journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Delaware.

Farhad Manjoo became a Times Opinion columnist in 2018.

Before that, they wrote The Times’ State of the Art column, covering the technology industry’s efforts to swallow up the world. They have also written for Slate, Salon, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. To their chagrin, their 2008 book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact World,” accurately predicted our modern age of tech-abetted echo chambers and “alternative facts.”

Farhad Manjoo was born in South Africa and emigrated with their family to Southern California in the late 1980s. They live in Northern California with their wife and two children.

Steve Case is one of America’s best-known and most accomplished entrepreneurs and a pioneer in making the Internet part of everyday life.

He currently serves as Chairman and CEO of Revolution LLC, a Washington, D.C.- based investment firm he co-founded in 2005, where he partners with visionary entrepreneurs to build significant “built to last” new businesses. The mission is to establish Revolution as the premier firm outside of Silicon Valley.

Steve’s entrepreneurial career began in 1985 when he co-founded America Online (AOL). Under Steve’s leadership, AOL became the world’s largest and most valuable Internet company, driving the worldwide adoption of a medium that has transformed business and society. AOL was the first Internet company to go public and among the best performing stocks of the 1990s, delivering an 11,616% return to shareholders. Steve also ensured that AOL led the industry on issues such as making the Internet a safe place for children, bridging the “digital divide” and investing in online philanthropy.

At its peak, nearly half of Internet users in the United States used AOL. In 2000, Steve negotiated the largest merger in business history, bringing together AOL and Time Warner in a transaction that gave AOL shareholders a majority stake in the combined company. To facilitate the merger, Steve agreed to step down as CEO when the merger closed.

Steve’s passion for helping entrepreneurs remains his driving force. He was the founding chair of the Startup America Partnership—an effort launched at the White House to accelerate… Read More

Harry McCracken is the technology editor for Fast Company, based in San Francisco. Harry was previously editor at large for Time magazine, founder and editor of Technologizer, and editor of PC World.

Satish Jeyachandran is the Head of Hardware at Waymo. Satish was previously Director of Hardware Engineering at Tesla.

Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is Founder and CEO of Robust.AI, and was Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of five books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and The New York Times best seller Guitar Zero, as well as editor of The Future of the Brain and The Norton Psychology Reader.

He has published extensively in fields ranging from human and animal behavior to neuroscience, genetics, linguistics, evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence, often in leading journals such as Science and Nature, and is perhaps the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU. His newest book, co-authored with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI: Building Machines We Can Trust aims to shake up the field of artificial intelligence.

John Voorhees is MacStories’ Managing Editor, and has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015. He also co-hosts MacStories’ podcasts, including AppStories, which explores of the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, a weekly recap of everything MacStories and more, and MacStories Unplugged, a behind-the-scenes, anything-goes show exclusively for Club MacStories members.

Julia Alexander is a reporter at The Verge.

Charles Fishman is the acclaimed author of One Giant Leap, A Curious Mind (with Brian Grazer), The Wal-Mart Effect, and The Big Thirst. He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business journalism.

Charles Nix is a Creative Type Director, designer, typographer and educator. He designed a number of popular typefaces in the Monotype Library, including Walbaum and Hope Sans, which received a Certificate of Typographic Excellence in the 22nd Annual Type Directors Club Typeface Design Competition. He’s also designed custom typefaces for Google Noto, Progressive Insurance and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Prior to his position at Monotype, Charles co-owned a small publishing firm, where he designed hundreds of books, while also orchestrating all aspects of book production, from writing proposals to supervising printing. His experience in marketing, publicity and advertising gives him a unique perspective into the importance of type in branding.

Charles is also an educator, having chaired the Communication Design departments at the Center for Advanced Design in Malaysia and the Parsons School of Design in New York. He has taught dozens of courses in graphic design, typography and publication design, and recorded a number of type design courses for LinkedIn Learning. Charles is also chairman emeritus of the board of the Type Directors Club, an international organization dedicated to furthering typographic excellence.

M.G. Siegler is a general partner at GV, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and adviser.

Before joining GV, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes regularly for 500ish, his Medium publication and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku format.

Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.

Rafat is the CEO/founder of Skift, the largest industry intelligence and marketing platform in travel, providing news, information, data and services to all sectors of the world’s largest industry.

Previously, he was the founder/CEO of paidContent and ContentNext, which he sold to UK's Guardian News and Media in 2008, and left in 2010. Prior to that, he was managing editor of Silicon Alley Reporter.

Rafat was the Knight Fellow at Indiana University, where he completed his Masters in Journalism, 1999-2000. Prior to that he completed his BSc in Computer Engineering, from AMU in Aligarh, India.

Garry is a designer/engineer turned early stage investor. He was a partner at Y Combinator for nearly five years where he advised and funded over 600 companies and more than a thousand founders. He was cofounder of YC-backed blog platform Posterous (Top 200 Quantcast site, acquired by Twitter in 2012). Before that he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir's financial analysis product, and also designed Palantir's logo. He has a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford.

Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Andrew Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he invests in consumer technology, including social, marketplace, entertainment, and gaming experiences. Today, Andrew serves on the boards of All Day Kitchens, Clubhouse, Envoy, Hipcamp, Maven, Reforge, SandboxVR, Singularity6, Sleeper, Snackpass, and Substack.

Sonal Chokshi is Editor in Chief at Andreessen Horowitz aka "a16z", which she joined nearly 7 years ago to build the editorial operation — which many people have observed as being a "media outlet that monetizes through VC". For podcasts, this includes building, growing, hosting, and showrunning the popular and influential a16z Podcast, now a network; conceiving of and hosting the shortform news analysis show 16 Minutes; conceiving of and shepherding the launch of Journal Club (now part of Bio Eats World), including training all editors into podcasting; bringing on outside voices and a network of book publishers, publicists, and authors onto the podcast; and much more.

Howard has more than 20 years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a unique vision for starting, managing, and successfully advising innovative companies, Lindzon is the public-face of the Social Leverage. In 2008 Lindzon co-founded StockTwits, and is Chairman today. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by Fast Company and one of the “50 best websites” by Time.

Previously, Lindzon founded and created more than 400 original videos with Wallstrip, acquired by $CBS in 2007. The connection to StockTwits gives Social Leverage access to a community of professionals who continuously surface and evaluate fintech opportunities.