They’re in! Meet the DEMO Spring 2012 Speakers

Above: Box's Aaron Levie speaks at DEMO last year

DEMO hits Silicon Valley on Tuesday!

We’ve got a blockbuster lineup of companies — about 80 of them — set to demonstrate new products.

We’ve also got a star lineup of investors, executives, and entrepreneurs to provide feedback. Others, including the CEOs of Netsuite, Box, Intuit and more, will provide insights into core trends right now.

VentureBeat co-produces the event.

Below are some of the speakers and sages. Most of the action will be Wednesday and Thursday. And no, it’s not too late to register for the event, to join the 1,000 or so folks on hand to see the action. A host of tech press, investors, and biz and corporate development ecosystem players will be networking in the halls.

 Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box, which he originally created as a college business project with the goal of helping people easily access their information from any location. Aaron will be talking at DEMO about how he keeps his company on the cutting edge of innovation, as well as about the powerful force that is mobile. Mobile is transforming the enterprise, and the field is wide open for companies like his, that are delivering simple-to-use apps, and not trying to cram everything down a single pipe in bundles, like legacy players SAP and Oracle.

 Brad Smith is Intuit‘s president and chief executive officer. Intuit is not only a leading provider of finance software, but it’s also taking on Square and PayPal in the hugely dynamic area of mobile. Intuit has consistently ranked as one of the most-admired software companies and best places to work in Silicon Valley. Smith became CEO in January 2008, culminating a five-year rise through the company where he successfully led several of its major businesses. Intuits serves small and mid-sized businesses, financial institutions, consumers and accounting professionals.

Zach Nelson is CEO of Netsuite, which has emerged as the leading cloud provider of ERP software. The little-known secret about Netsuite is that it has one of the highest value multiples of any software company right now, because of its significant growth rate. After going public right before the downturn hit in 2008, its stock has risen straight upwards. Nelson will be talking about how the real value for new tech companies lies in owning the “core transaction” of the business that it’s in. And playing in the cloud, as well as mobile and social — well, that’s just table stakes.

David Lawee is the Vice President of corporate development at Google. David manages a worldwide team responsible for all of the company’s acquisitions and investments. He’ll be talking about DEMO about how Google makes those acquisitions with an eye to keeping entrepreneurs engaged for years after the transaction, and will argue that Google has done this particularly well (think Android, for example). Before joining Google, David co-founded four start-ups, the most recent being Xfire, a fast growing social gaming service that was sold to Viacom in early 2006. Previously, David co-founded Mosaic Venture Partners, a leading Toronto-based venture capital firm.

Claire Lee moved to Silicon Valley in February 2011 to lead industry partnerships for the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft, engaging partners globally to support early stage software developers and startups. Claire formed part of the team that created the BizSpark program in November 2008, now with over 45,000 startups in 110 countries and 2,400 partners. BizSpark partnerships comprise leading incubators, accelerators, Government agencies, universities, entrepreneurship groups, foundations, technology community associations, banks, and organizations that enable and support early stage technology companies. Examples include HSBC and Startup Weekend.

Bill Gurley has spent over 10 years as a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.  Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston focusing on personal computer hardware and software. His research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. Current Investments and Board Seats: Demandforce, GrubHub,Linden Lab/SecondLife,  LiveOps, Nanosolar,  NextDoor,  OpenTable,  Scale Computing, Tropos Networks, Uber, and Zillow.com.

Aileen Lee is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; she joined in 1999. Her primary area of focus is working with consumer-oriented digital companies. Aileen has worked closely with the teams at companies such as ShopKick, Zazzle, Bloom Energy, Miasole, Blue Nile (NASDAQ: Nile), Friendster (acquired by MOL Global), Good Technology (acquired by MOT), and Tellme (acquired by MSFT). She currently works with companies including Callaway Digital Arts, Offermatic, One Kings Lane, Plum District, Rent the Runway and RMG Networks (formerly Danoo), where she was founding CEO for two years.

JJason Krikorian is a General Partner of DCM. He brings an entrepreneur’s perspective to DCM and its portfolio companies. Before joining DCM as a General Partner, Jason co-founded Sling Media, the pioneering digital media and device company. Among its many accolades, Sling Media received an Emmy Award for the Slingbox, the device that first introduced the world to the concept of placeshifting. Sling Media was acquired by EchoStar in October 2007.

Dana Stalder knows what it takes to turn a scrappy start-up into a strong, independent company. Dana has managed nimble ventures as well as 2,500-person teams. He has sat on both sides of the table in acquisition talks and sold to consumers, small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike. His experience cuts across multiple disciplines including sales, marketing, finance, technology and product management at companies such as eBay, Netscape and PayPal.

Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2011. He focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data.” He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment.

Joe Kraus has been with Google Ventures since 2009, and his primary areas of focus are mobile, gaming, and local services. Prior to Google Ventures, Joe was a two-time entrepreneur. In 1993, he co-founded Excite.com, an early Internet search engine, holding multiple positions in the company, including leadership roles in product, business development, and marketing. While at Google, Joe had multiple product management roles including Blogger, Picasa, Sites, Friend Connect, and OpenSocial.

Peter Pham is a partner at Science Inc. He is a passionate entrepreneur and advisor with roots in Southern California starting his career with 8 years in the enterprise hardware and software space. He moved to Silicon Valley in 2005 building companies like Photobucket. Peter then turned his energy in helping people save money as CEO of BillShrink from inception to their 1st Million users in a little over a year. Peter was also the Co-Founder of Color exploring the future of mobile and social interactions through proximity.

Frank Chen is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.Previously, Frank was the VP of products at Opsware. There he gained expertise in enterprise software development and sales, product marketing, change management, and competitive strategies. Prior to that, he was a director of client services at Loudcloud, where he ran data center operations for name of brand customers including Fox Sports, Nike, Fandango.com and Blockbuster.

David Friedberg is the founder and CEO of The Climate Corporation, a unique technology platform that helps people and businesses adapt to climate change. The company protects a $3 trillion global agricultural industry from the financial impacts of adverse weather – the cause of 90% of crop loss – with real-time customizable insurance. He was also one of the founding members of Google’s Corporate Development team, identifying and leading several of Google’s largest acquisitions. At one point he functioned as Business Product Manager for AdWords, which became Google’s primary revenue source.

Chuck Ganapathi, the man who created Salesforce.com‘s Chatter, the company’s largest product development effort ever, has left to join Accel Partners as Entrepreneur in Residence. During his time at Salesforce.com, he championed and led the acquisition of two start-ups: Dimdim, a real-time collaboration platform, and GroupSwim, a community platform with semantic filtering technology. He also integrated the acquired technology and teams from two file sharing and collaboration start-ups, Koral and SlideAware.

David Guteliusis Jive in the interesting title of chief social scientist and was previously founder and chief executive of Proximal. He was trained in economics but is a specialist in social network theory, developed machine learning at SRI International, working to help the U.S. military analyze data and people in a network and surface critical information.Matt Thompson is General Manager of Microsoft’s developer & platform evangelism efforts. His time is split between working with this influential community of technologists as they adopt Microsoft technologies advising a number of early stage startups; and working with Microsoft customers & partners as they implement solutions on top of the breadth of the Microsoft platform offerings.

Jeff Mullen founded and seeded Dynamics in 2007. Under Mullen, Dynamics sold arguably the largest paid pilots for on-card technology in the history of banking and closed one of the largest Series A investment rounds in 2009 in payments ($5.7MM). Mullen has won many of the world’s most prestigious international business plan competitions, including the Rice Business Plan Competition, Carnegie Mellon McGinnis Venture Competition, and the University of San Francisco Business Plan Competition.

Ross Fubini was the Co-Founder and a Board Member of Cubetree, a Gartner Visionary enterprise social collaboration company which is used by the Fortune 100 including SAP, Intuit, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He currently serves as an advisor to Kapor Capital, Palantir Technology, Facebook Causes, and other early stage technology companies. From 2010-2011 Ross was a Vice President for SuccessFactors which acquired his company CubeTree in 2010.

Tom Gillis is CEO of Bracket Computing, a company he founded in December 2011. Gillis started Bracket with a vision to re-imagine enterprise computing. Before starting Bracket, Gillis was VP/GM of the Security Technology Group at Cisco Systems. This Technology Group included the business units responsible for Cisco’s entire Network and Content Security product portfolio, including firewalls, IPS, VPN, and email security and web security gateways. Prior to Cisco, Tom was VP of Marketing and part if the founding team of IronPort Systems which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He has also worked at Silicon Graphics, the Boston Consulting Group, and Raytheon Corporation.

Christine Herron is a Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur. She is currently a Director with Intel Capital and a Venture Advisor at 500 Startups. Previously, Christine was a Principal with First Round Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm, where she worked with companies such asBillFloat, Double Verify, Get Satisfaction, Mint, and Xobni.

Will Price is the CEO of Flite, an online advertising technology company.  Flite pioneered the category of cloud-based advertising, helping brantds and publishers deliver ads, powered by the real-time web, that outperform traditional display by 10+ times.  Today, the company powers advertising solutions for Yahoo!, LinkedIn, IDG, CBS, L’Oreal, Microsoft, Toyota, Schwab, and other leading companies.

Larry Augustin is CEO of SugarCRM, the leading provider of Open Source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. One of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Prior to SugarCRM, he spent five years as an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies including JBoss, XenSource, DeviceVM, Fonality, Hyperic, Pentaho, and SpringSource. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Appcelerator and DotNetNuke. From 2002 to 2004 he was a Venture Partner at Azure Capital Partners. In 1993 he founded VA Linux, where he served as CEO until August 2002. While CEO he launched SourceForge.net and lead the company through an IPO in December 1999.

Bill Nguyen has spearheaded seven technology startups. In 2009, Bill led the sale of Lala to Apple. Lala was the first full-service cloud music experience and the only online music service ever acquired by Apple. Prior to Lala, Bill founded SEVEN Networks. Under Nguyen’s leadership, SEVEN achieved successful commercial deployments of its mobile email software with over 100 of the world’s largest mobile operators. Bill has been named to Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list, MIT’s Technology Review 100 and the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow.

Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of SoftTech VC, one of the most active seed stage investors in Web 2.0 startups. Since 2004, Jeff has invested in close to 100 consumer internet startups in areas like social media, monetization, search, gaming or B2B/B2C web services. In September 2007, after successfully investing as a business angel, Jeff announced the formation of SoftTech VC II, L.P. a $15M seed fund backed by a mix of institutional and private investors to invest in 60+ consumer Internet companies over 3 years.

John Lilly joined Greylock as a partner in 2011. Prior to Greylock, John was CEO of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, an open source Web browser used by more than 450 million people. John also co-founded Reactivity, an enterprise security infrastructure company acquired by Cisco in 2007, where he served as founding CEO and later CTO. Earlier in his career, John held positions on the executive team at Trilogy Software and as a Senior Scientist in Apple’s research labs.

Harshul Sanghi is the managing partner of American Express Ventures, Enterprise Growth at American Express, with extensive corporate venture and mobile experience and relationships. He’s focused on strengthening American Express’ existing online and mobile services through partnerships with the technology and venture community with the goal of retaining American Express’ strong leadership position.

Nirav Tolia is Co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor.com, a consumer Internet startup that is dedicated to helping neighbors create stronger and safer neighborhoods. Nextdoor is funded by Benchmark Capital, where Nirav served as an Entrepreneur in Residence. Prior to Benchmark, Nirav was COO of Shopping.com, a company created through the merger of Dealtime and Epinions, where Nirav was Co-founder and CEO. Prior to Epinions, Nirav was an early employee at Yahoo!. He graduated from Stanford University and is originally from Odessa, Texas.

Jody Holtzman has more than two decades of experience helping companies develop and implement competitive strategies and achieve their strategic market goals. At AARP he leads AARP’s new Thought Leadership efforts which support the organization’s new brand positioning around a focus on living not just aging and for people 50+ to live their best life. Previously, Jody led AARP’s research, competitive intelligence and strategic analysis functions.  Jody is a member of AARP’s Leadership Team and Brand Council.

Sheila Jordan is senior vice president of Communication and Collaboration IT at Cisco Systems, reporting to CIO Rebecca Jacoby. Sheila is responsible for delivering and integrating key IT services that touch Cisco’s global workforce.  Her goal is to drive productivity and a superior, holistic end-user experience for all employees through an integrated architectural approach. She oversees a worldwide team of more than 500 IT professionals.

Shervin Pishevar joined Menlo Ventures as a Managing Partner in 2011 after a successful career as an entrepreneur and angel investor. His focus is on consumer technology investments, specifically in the gaming, mobile and social web industry sectors. Shervin works closely with portfolio companies Uber, Shaker, Warby Parker and Mr. Number, and was the driving force behind Menlo’s investment in Tumblr. During his first few months at Menlo Ventures, Shervin helped launch the Menlo Talent Fund, a $20M seed fund that invests in innovative early stage deals within a 24 to 72 hour timeframe.

James Slavet’s primary areas of investment focus are e-commerce, online advertising and Web-enabled business services. James has been a founder and early employee of several startups, as well as a senior executive leading business units with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue. James’ investments include Cardspring, Coupons.com, Groupon, High Gear Media, One Kings Lane, Redfin, Revision3, and TellApart. He previously represented Greylock in its investments in Auditude, Farecast  and Kongregate.