GrowLab Mentors

GrowLab provides mentorship to all of our companies through a network of some of the industry’s most successful veterans.

Chris Albinson, co-founder and Managing Director of Panorama Capital focused on mobile and internet technology investments.  Co-founder of C100 and currently sits on the boards of Federated Media, Jiwire, Belair Networks, Fixmo, Tynt, and Vyatta. Follow @twitter

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Dan Martell is the co-founder of www.flowtown.com, an informal angel investor (12 companies), and a board member of the non-profits Startup Weekend and propelICT. Dan was an award-winning entrepreneur at 25. He started Spheric, Inc, which grew an average of 152% per year until he sold it in 2008. Follow @twitter

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David Ascher heads the Social & Communications initiatives for Mozilla, with a dual role in Mozilla Labs and in the Thunderbird project. David’s particular interests are in the interface between the web and people, and how the internet and software systems can make the world a better place. Follow @twitter

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Michael Tippett was the First Executive Director at Growlab. He is a two-time Emmy nominee and successful entrepreneur for almost two decades. In 2005, he co-founded NowPublic, which was names as one of the top five most useful new sites on the web by The Guardian while Time Magazine dubbed it one of the Top 50 Websites for 2007. Follow @twitter

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Derek Ball is the CEO at Tynt. Before Tynt, he served as CEO at Sonic Mobility Inc, which was acquired by Avocent Corp (NASDAQ: AVCT) in 2004. Derek has published over a dozen books in emerging technology and has been a noted speaker worldwide. Follow @twitter

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Katherine Barr is a Partner at Mohr Davidow and focuses primarily on the digital media, consumer Internet, and mobile sectors. She is also an advisor to Samasource, on the Organizing Committee for C100, and founding sponsor of Startup2Startup. Follow @twitter

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Kenshi Arasaki has dreams of creating the next great mobile social experience.  Prior to co-founding A Thinking Ape, he helped to engineer at Amazon. Kenshi went through the YCombinator program in 2008 and now he’s joined forces with Eric Diep to create a new company and new worlds. Follow @twitter

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Kent Goldman, Principal, First Round Capital
Kent joined First Round Capital in 2008 and is based in the firm’s San Francisco office. Prior to joining First Round, Kent was a member of the Corporate Development team at Yahoo!. Follow @twitter

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Geordie Henderson is the co-founder and Director of Metalogix Software. Geordie manages product development and direction for several Metalogix SharePoint migration software products. Follow @twitter

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Matt Mickiewicz co-founded 99designs – the largest crowd sourcing marketplace for graphic design. Matt also co-founded Flippa.com, a company that is profitable and sells over $2 million worth of websites every month. Follow @twitter

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Martin-Luc Archambault is CEO of Wajam “Social Search Everywhere”. He is also co-founder and chairman of Bolidea where he invested in Wajam, Planbox, Artfox, Acadam, Modasuite, Anomalous Networks, Real Ventures and Montreal Start Up. Martin-Luc is also on the board on Anges Quebec, a network of 80 angel investors in Quebec. Prior to that, he founded CDT which he sold to Zango in 2005. Follow @twitter

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Cameron Herold is the Founder of BackPocket COO. His TEDx talk “Raising Kids To Be Entrepreneurs” was highly featured on TED.com homepage. Cameron was COO and a driving force behind 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Follow @twitter

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Ryan Holmes is the CEO of Hootsuite and his entrepreneurial endeavors include successes in a variety of industries. He founded Invoke, the agency that created the popular social media dashboard tool. Follow @twitter

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Scott Jacobson joined Madrona in 2007 and currently serves on the boards of Indochino, Teachstreet, and Yieldex. Scott worked at Amazon.com, where he held senior product and business management positions in the Amazon Kindle and Marketplace groups. Follow @twitter

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Kareem Mayan built products that did seven figures in revenue at ESPN and FIM/MySpace. He also co-founded an online learning site called eduFire and an online scheduling tool called EasyCal. Follow @twitter

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Lane Becker works with Freestyle Capital, the hippest VC firm in Silicon Valley. Lane co-founded Get Satisfaction, and Adaptive Path. Lane is currently working on a book about harnessing serendipity as a business practice. Follow @twitter

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Patrick Lor is President of Fotolia North America. Lor previously worked with iStockphoto, helping to pioneer the microstock industry. He currently serves on advisory boards at Aviary and Bumptop. Follow @twitter

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Kevin Swan is a Principal with iNovia Capital. He is passionate about building technology companies and working with the entrepreneurs behind them.  Kevin also founded Cardinal Venture Partners. Follow @twitter

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Michael Duda is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Consigliere, a hybrid marketing consultancy/venture capital firm. Before Consigliere, Mike spent 12 years at Deutsch Inc.  Follow @mikedudda.

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Alex Baker oversees direct investments for Relay Ventures  in a broad range of mobile payments application and services companies. Alex worked as a management consultant with BearingPoint. Follow @twitter

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Adam DoppeIt is a hacker and serial entrepreneur. He co-founded Urbanspoon. Prior to Urbanspoon, Adam co-founded Strangeberry, a digital media startup that was aquired by TiVo in 2004. Follow @twitter

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Matt Van Horn is VP of Business Development for Path. Matt ran business development for Digg where he led partnerships and started the publisher Digg button program. He was co-founder of Zimride a top online ride sharing site. He worked at Apple managing higher education marketing. Follow @twitter

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Andrew Wilkinson is the founder the CEO of MetaLab, a Victoria-based interface design agency that has worked with everyone from fledgling startups to Fortune 500 companies including Apple and Google. They have also built two successful web apps: Ballpark, an online invoicing system, and Flow, a collaborative task and project management tool geared towards teams. Follow @twitter

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Olivier Vincent is the President & CEO of Ziplocal. Olivier spent more than 20 years as a senior executive in the technology and local search directory industry in several continents. He recently was the founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Canpages. Follow @twitter

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Max Teitelbaum, Co-Founder and COO of WhatRunsWhere, a competitive
intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up
what advertisers are doing online, where they are running ads, from who
they are buying inventory, and what exact ads they are using. Follow
@whatrunswhere

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Anthony Lee is a General Partner of Altos Ventures, where he focuses on software and digital media investments. He serves as a director of BrightEdge, Demandbase, Hooked Media, Kontagent, Koofers.com, Netbase Solutions, Roblox, and Xignite. Follow @twitter

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Danny Robinson has been starting and advising early-stage technology companies for over 15 years. He was co-founder of Bootup Labs, as well as Bootup Entrepreneurial Society along with his wife Maura Rodgers. Danny was also the co-founder and CEO of Strutta and Peerflix. Follow @twitter

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Rafe Needleman covers startups and new technologies for CNET News, and produces the tech issues podcast for CNET, Reporters’ Roundtable. He’s been covering new business models since the first dotcom bubble in 1998, when he wrote a daily column about startups for Red Herring. Rafe receives a lot of bad pitches, which he chronicles on his blog, Pro PR Tips. Follow @twitter

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Dave MacLaren is the founder and CEO of VRX Studios, a global full-service photography company that produces, manages and licenses content for over 10,000 hotels; and of MediaValet, the first 100% cloud-based, enterprise class, digital asset management system. Follow @twitter

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 Andrew Lugsdin is Partner, IT Venture Fund. He joined BDC Venture Capital in 2001 and is based out of Vancouver, BC. He has over 18 years’ experience in the IT and telecom sectors. Prior to joining BDC Venture Capital, Mr. Lugsdin was the founder and president of a consulting firm for early-stage high-tech companies. Previously, as VP of Sales and Client Strategy, he helped transform a Vancouver-based professional Web services firm into a Canadian leader. Mr. Lugsdin  also worked for a number of years as a software engineer at Nortel and as a consultant for the DMR Group.
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George Karidis Chief Strategy Officer, SoftLayer. George Karidis joined SoftLayer in January of 2008, and is responsible for all of the company’s strategic and international initiatives. Prior to joining SoftLayer, Mr. Karidis spent seven years with Devonshire Investors, the private equity arm of Fidelity Investments. There he drove the strategic planning efforts of portfolio companies focused on the telecom, hosting, and software markets, taking active roles in each company from inception through domestic growth and international expansions. Follow @twitter

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Paul Ford, Vice President, SoftLayer Technologies. Paul Ford is a serial entrepreneur, global technology evangelist, innovator, strategist and visionary currently serving as the Vice President of Community Development and Chief Ecosystem Builder at SoftLayer Technologies in Dallas TX. Paul was recently chosen as on of five Entrepreneurs in Residence of the United States of America. This Executive Branch appointment is designed to help the Administration understand how to better shape Visa policy and guidelines to allow more foreign entrepreneurs into the United States. Follow @twitter

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Dennis Pilarinos. Dennis is a technical product guy and entrepreneurial by nature. He’s built and managed both product and engineering teams (as large as 50 people). He has an enterprise / cloud infrastructure background, but is generally interested in products that target businesses/consumers with a clear value proposition which entices them to pay for the product/service. Follow @twitter

 

Dave’s an engineer at heart whom was writing JavaScript well before it was so damn cool. Having started a web consulting business in high school, no one’s quite sure if it’s through naïvety or technical skill that Dave has co-founded, bootstrapped and sold two companies. Let alone the fact that he earned a PhD in physics somewhere in between. Lean startups, open source and all manner or tech acronyms are of interest to Dave as well as a desire to help make Vancouver a world class hub for tech startups. Follow @twitter