Meet the Panel
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Parker Thompson

Partner | AngelList

Parker Thompson is a Venture Partner at AngelList.
He likes to help startups in any way he can, but he will respect a restraining order if you're going to be like that.
Parker is usually right, except when he's left. His illustrious past includes helping and building startups at 500 Startups and Pivotal Labs, co-founding PlaceSite, preserving the interwebs at the Internet Archive, and wonking on digital copyright at UC Berkeley's iSchool.
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Shruti Gandhi

Managing Partner | Array Ventures

I’m a managing partner at Array Ventures. I am a VC, engineer, and an entrepreneur. Passionate about AI, Robotics, and Data.
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Jocelyn Goldfein

Managing Director | Zetta Venture Partners

Jocelyn Goldfein is a Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners, where she invests in early stage enterprise software startups. She is a widely recognized industry expert on product strategy, infrastructure and organizational scale. Her career as an engineering leader spans from early stage startups to high-growth years at Facebook and VMware.

As an angel investor, she’s backed over 20 startups with an emphasis on infrastructure and AI. She serves on several boards, including Harvey Mudd College, and is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, where she received her BS in Computer Science.
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Itamar Novick

Seed Investor | Life360

Itamar Novick is a prolific Seed stage Investor working with over 30 Mobile, IoT and SaaS companies. His portfolio includes companies like Peerspace, MileIQ, Honeybook, Zendrive and Airdog. Itamar was previously a venture capitalist at Morgenthaler Ventures and a partner at UpWest Labs, the Israeli accelerator in Silicon Valley. Before moving to the "dark side" of VC, Itamar was head of product at Gigya, the leading social tools provider for web and mobile publishers, and spent several years in product and engineering management roles at a variety of companies big and small.

Itamar also serves as Chief Business Officer at Life360, the biggest mobile Family Network, with over 80 million registered families globally. The Life360 app keeps families safe when they're out and about, in their car, or at home - through its IoT location-based technology and partnerships with Nest, ADT, BMW and MINI.

He holds an MBA from Berkeley-Haas and a Computer Science undergraduate degree from the Tel-Aviv Jaffa College.

Panel Moderator
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Pete Soderling

Founder | Hakka Labs & DataEngConf

Pete is a software engineer, 3x founder and angel investor. As the founder of Hakka Labs and DataEngConf he loves to build community for software engineers and has some bumps and bruises to prove it. Previously, he was the founder of Stratus Security (a cloud-based API platform) and mechanikal (a software development agency in NYC). Pete has spoken across the globe at conferences like RSA Security and O'Reilly Strata, been an organizer of the QCon conference series, and had his moment of fame as a TEDx speaker. He's currently a mentor at 500 Startups in San Francisco, even though he lives in Jackson Hole, WY, where the snow is far better.