Speakers and Panelists

Lean Startup Conference Speakers

Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits

Patrick and Brant are the authors of the book "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups". Brant Cooper has over 17 years of success bringing high tech products to market, directing the strategy, design, and launch of key technologies. Patrick Vlaskovitsholds Master's in Economics from UC Santa Barbara and he is an organizer at Twiistup and at the Los Angeles Lean Startup Circle.

Rishi Dean

Rishi Deanhas been part of the founding team at three start-ups: the digital video measurement firm, Visible Measures, a consumer product design company, Lime Design, and the e-commerce personalization platform WiseUncle. He has served as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at the MIT E-Center, and as a mentor at The Founder's Institute, helping entrepreneurs to launch and manage their new ventures. Rishi has been an advisor to companies trying to design and implement innovation strategies, and has experienced hundreds of startup product cycle; he holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a Systems Design Engineering Degree from the University of Waterloo.

Ash Maurya

Ash Maurya (@ashmaurya) is the founder of USERcycle. Since bootstrapping his last company seven years ago, he has launched five products and one peer-to-web application framework. He has been rigorously applying customer development and lean start-up techniques to his products, which he frequently writes about on his blog www.ashmaurya.com and recently turned into a book: Running Lean. Ash resides in Austin, Texas, with his wife, two children and two dogs.

Owen Rogers and Steve Jones

Owen Rogers works at Pulse Energy, where his team has been applying Lean Startup concepts for the past 2 years. He used to work as an Agile coach and consultant with ThoughtWorks and has helped many teams make the transition to Agile in the UK, India, China and Canada. He is a regular speaker at Agile conferences and is one of the original organizers of Agile Vancouver. Steve Jones is the Product Manager at Pulse Energy, where the development team leverages Agile principles. The combination of weekly product releases and large slow-moving customers has required Steve to use a hybrid of traditional and Lean Startup methods for product management. He has a degree in Engineering Physics and is a Canadian national paper airplane champion.

Rob Walling

Rob Walling is a serial entrepreneur and author of Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. His blog, SoftwareByRob.com, is a top 20 startup blog, and he runs the Micropreneur Academy, an online learning community of like-minded founders designed to get a startup from zero to launch in six months. Rob runs a dozen one-man technology businesses and has been building web applications professionally for 11 years. Rob is the author of the book "Start Small, Stay Small".

Lean Startup Conference Panelists

Jason Bailey

Jason Bailey was the founder of Super Rewards and KITN Media. In just 18 months Jason was able to take this 100% bootstrapped company from Zero to a 100mm a year run rate and then sell it on to online advertising giant Adknowledge in 2009. Jason is now an investor and advisor to a variety of local start ups in the consumer internet and social games space.

Rishi Dean

Brent Holliday

Brent is a Partner, heading the Technology Practice for Capital West Partners, a mid-market, transaction focused investment bank in Vancouver. He started the technology practice at Capital West in early 2008 after 12 years in venture capital investing in early stage technology companies across Canada and in the US with BDC and Greenstone Venture Partners. Prior to that, in the mid-90’s, he was General Manager and co-founder of an Internet start-up. Brent is a long time columnist and commentator on the BC technology landscape and is currently a monthly contributor to BC Business magazine. Brent remains very active in the technology finance community from start-up to late stage financing to public offerings. He currently sits on the Board of VIATec and is a former member of BC TIA and New Media BC Boards. He has an MBA from the University of British Columbia and an Honours B.Sc. from the University of Western Ontario. Partial List of Western Canadian companies that Brent has invested in, been on the Board of Directors or assisted as paid advisor to a transaction is:

Xantrex, Burnaby (sold to Schneider AG in 2006)
AnorMED, Langley (TSX IPO in 1999)
NCompass Labs, Vancouver (sold to MSFT in 2002)
Inkra Networks, Burnaby (sold to Nortel in 2005)
Radical Entertainment, Vancouver (sold to Vivendi in 2002)
ICEsoft Technologies, Calgary
Vivonet Inc., Burnaby
Delta-Q Technologies, Burnaby
Point2 Technologies, Saskatoon (sold to Yardi Systems in 2010)

Jim Lejeal

A Rally angel investor in 2002, and a board member from 2003-2008, Jim Lejeal joined Rally as CFO in 2008. A successful entrepreneur, Jim has founded and managed multiple companies, including several software and technology companies and a private equity firm. Most recently, Jim was co-founder, chairman and CEO of Oxlo, a company focused on delivering cloud based, real-time integration services to the health-care and automotive industries where he still serves as Chairman of the Board. Prior to Oxlo, Jim coordinated his own angel investing activities at Lejeal Investments, where along with local venture firms he invested in 14 venture backed startups. Prior to that, Jim co-founded Raindance Communications, a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: RNDC) where he held the positions of COO and CFO. Jim led operations, customer support, sales, marketing and finance efforts and successfully led the fundraising of $170 million in capital culminating in Raindance’s IPO. At the time of Jim's departure, Raindance had over 400 employees and annualized revenues in excess of $40 million.

Gary Yurkovich

Gary Yurkovich is an experienced and successful executive in the technology industry. He is currently the managing partner of Espresso Capital. Previously, Gary was the Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Service for Creo Products where he helped grow the company from $6M to over $125M in revenue over a 3 year period prior to being purchased by Kodak for $1B. He was also the VP Sales and Corporate Development for BrightSide Technologies which was purchased for $28M by Dolby Labs in 2007 and was also COO of Resolution Health in San Jose, Ca which was recently purchased by Wellpoint. Gary started his career with Digital Equipment Corporation where he served in a variety of management and operational positions, and was one of the most highly recognized contributors in the company’s history. He is a BCIT graduate in Electronics and has a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and Genetics from the University of British Columbia. Gary currently sits on the Board of Directors of several technology companies including Clevest Solutions, Rapid Electric Vehicles, Wolf Medical Systems, and BC Social Venture Partners.