Mentors


  • Denise Dudley Denise Dudley

    Bio: Denise began her career as a clinical psychologist and later moved into being a professional public speaker. After that, she co-founded SkillPath Seminars in 1994, which quickly grew to become the world\'s largest public seminar company. Denise left SkillPath in 2000, after selling it to Graceland University, and continues to make her expertise available to SkillPath on a daily basis as both a consultant and advisor.


  • Song Zheng Song Zheng

    Bio: Song started programming at the early age of 20, and he\'s been loving it ever since! He graduated from UCLA a month ago and is now a Developer Evangelist at TokBox.


  • Chris McCann Chris McCann

    Bio: Chris is the co-founder of StartupDigest, advisor at StartX (Stanford Accelerator), mentor at the Peter Thiel 20 Under 20 program, founding organizer of TEDx Silicon Valley, organizer of Geeks on a Plane Tokyo, and previously ran Innovation Quest & the Business Plan Competition at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.


  • Xander Pollock Xander Pollock

    Bio: Xander is a Visual Designer at Google, designing tools for small business owners. After graduating from Cal Poly in Art & Design, he co-founded Punchd (acquired by Google July 2011). His expertise is in branding, UX, user interfaces, and mobile and web application design.


  • Kyle Wiens Kyle Wiens

    Bio: Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and CEO of iFixit, the largest online repair community and Apple parts retailer. iFixit is dedicated to helping people everywhere keep their hardware running longer. In 2011, he started Dozuki, a software company that is revolutionizing online technical documentation. He co-authored the first free repair manuals for Apple hardware while studying Computer Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Kyle is a board member of Softec and the IEEE CE Society. He has spoken widely on cloud computing, technical writing, repair, making service documentation accessible to a global audience, and sustainable consumer electronics device design. In his spare time, Kyle kayaks and tinkers with robots.


  • Brian Riley Brian Riley

    Bio: Brian is co-founder of Slidepad Technologies, a company changing the way brakes work on bicycles. Brian\'s experience lies in fundraising, business development, intellectual property, designing and manufacturing physical products, and working with companies overseas, especially in Asia.


  • Matt Faustman Matt Faustman

    Bio: Matt is the Co-Founder and CEO of UpCounsel. Before starting UpCounsel Matt was a startup and venture capital attorney with Latham & Watkins LLP in their Silicon Valley office. Matt is a technology evangelist, political geek and extreme sports enthusiast. He graduated with a BS from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.


  • Dan Weeks Dan Weeks

    Bio: Dan is the Founder and Chief Operating Officer of BrightScope, a financial analytics startup, focusing on the day to day operations of the company. He is a 25-year HP veteran holding 5 engineering patents. His experience includes managing development of embedded software, Mac Software, Windows Software and Software Quality organizations to test the solutions before they are shipped to millions of customers around the world. Dan is a member of the Cal Poly Computer Science Department Industrial Advisory Committee and has served two times as Chairman. He is also is a member of the Founder\'s Circle for the Cal Poly Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Dan graduated from Cal Poly with a degree in Computer Science.


  • Reed Morse Reed Morse

    Bio: After graduating from Cal Poly in Computer Science, Reed Morse founded Punchd (acquired by Google \'10). He\'s a passionate developer with a great design sense and expertise in iOS and web applications.


  • Jim Hale Jim Hale

    Bio: Jim Hale is the founder of Brown Dog Partners. Jim has over ten years of senior marketing, strategic planning and management experience. He has a proven track record of building and leading technology development teams into wonderfully disruptive business successes. He has served as a small business/start-up team member as well as a senior executive in a Fortune 500 company. He is a proven performer who moves easily from business strategy to implementation to project completion. He has strong business acumen and has created strategies designed to establish market presence, product launch, operations and technology development teams. Prior to this, he founded Tramway Venture Partners and was on staff of Technology Ventures Corporation.


  • Jo Anne Mileer Jo Anne Mileer

    Bio: Jo Anne Miller is a partner with Milk Street Ventures, a Managing Director at Golden Seeds Angel Network and a Co-Founder of SLO Seed Ventures. She has over 29 years of telecommunications and computer industry experience in general management, software and hardware systems development, as well as software engineering and product management for wireless, wireline and data communications products . After ten years of entrepreneurial venture-backed start-ups in cellular and wire line infrastructure equipment manufacturing, she moved into early stage investing in 2003. Jo Anne has an MBA from the University of Chicago, MSCS from the University of Colorado and BS Mathematics from the University of Michigan.


  • Sasha Laundy Sasha Laundy

    Bio: Sasha Laundy founded Women Who Code; loves science, education, weight lifting, and startups; and will help you turbocharge your awesome Twilio application.


  • Jonathan Mumm Jonathan Mumm

    Bio: Jon is a Developer Evangelist at TokBox. He helps developers integrate video chat in to their applications.