Advisors
Joel Benenson
The chief pollster and a senior strategist for President Barack Obama since the beginning of his 2008 campaign and President and CEO of Benenson Strategy Group, which he founded in 2000. Benenson has served as a strategic advisor and consultant to heads of state, members of Congress and other national political leaders, Fortune 100 CEOs, and major advocacy and charitable institutions. Benenson has worked with some of America’s largest businesses including AOL, Campbell’s Soup Company, ESPN, Hertz, the NFL, Paramount, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota.
Ryan Peterson and Trent Shumay
Ryan is the CEO and Trent is CTO of Finger Foods Inc. Trent has over 15 years of game development experience spanning three generations of game consoles for industry giants like Electronic Arts, Sony, and Nintendo. He is an expert iOS, Android and Web developer. Ryan was Senior Director of Business Development at Flashman Studios Inc. and was responsible for the success and growth of multiple studios including Flying Lab, A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Games, Red Fly Studios and Zen Studios.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati
Yokum Taku is a corporate and securities partner in the Palo Alto, California office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. In that capacity he represents technology and growth companies at all stages of development, through private financings, strategic transactions, public offerings, and mergers and acquisitions. He represents investors in venture capital financings and advises numerous entrepreneurs from initial company formation to liquidity event. In 2011, he completed more financings than anyone else at WSGR.
Bryan Mason
The co-founder at Typekit and current Chief of Staff at Adobe Creative Cloud. Bryan founded Typekit in 2009 and sold it to Adobe in 2011. Before Typekit, he was the COO with the user experience consulting firm Adaptive Path. While there, they made the analytics tool Measure Map, which sold to Google in 2006. Bryan was also an early advisor to Twitter and Blogger.com
Sameer Gupta
Sameer is a serial entrepreneur with degrees from the M&T Program at the University of Pennsylvania/Wharton. His companies (SimpleC, h.wood) have been featured in the New York Times, LA Times, and the Food Network. Sameer specializes in computer and cognitive science, with a focus on GUIs and Artificial Intelligence. He is a founding member of the Innovation Fund at the Weiss Tech House, Penn’s incubator.
Sameer is currently launching his newest company, RivalMe. The first product is like WordsWithFriends for Trivia. Powered by a patent-pending Smart Game Engine, RivalMe asks engaging questions across all platforms.