Speaker:
Moderator:
Panelist:
Event Description:
Several innovative startups will participate as this forum delves into examining a range of ad-driven business models that are tapping emerging media channels from mobile phones, to the desktop, to advertising marketplaces. Attendees will receive an overview of a wide-range of companies in this space and will hear from two featured companies whose founders will discuss novel ways to turn profits in the new media sector.
Over the past few years, the market has seen a proliferation of new media channels go mainstream. From blogging to online video, to podcasting, to mobile TV and gaming, these emerging media channels present new avenues of distribution and revenue opportunities. Advertising is one of the primary streams of revenue that startups are hoping to monetize. With these waters still unchartered however, there remain many unknowns for all constituents involved from Madison Avenue, to the investor community, to entrepreneurs disrupting traditional advertising, to consumers who will ultimately decide which approaches win. Founders from the panel of startups will share their unique perspectives, invaluable insights and steps they are taking to make their ad model succeed. Experts will round out the panel to interject real-world perspective and advice to the entrepreneurs.
Speaker:
Jason Feinsmith 
CEO and Co-Founder
Accomplice
Accomplice addresses a pervasive problem for 75 million professionals: how to manage all the things you and your team need to do to achieve your goals. Accomplice delivers a networked desktop application that organizes your activities (todo’s, goals, related notes) and synchronizes them with your team. In so doing, Accomplice captures the timely intent of its users, while offering a persistent channel for content delivery. Meanwhile, advertisers hunger to reach these same busy people via cost-effective and well-targeted channels. Accomplice accurately matches relevant ads from advertising networks with users based on their timely intent. Just as advertising via search is effective because it leverages what the user is searching for, activity advertising works because it leverages what the user needs to get done.
Accomplice was born out of fourteen years of iteration by CEO, Jason Feinsmith, addressing activity management problems. Prior to Accomplice, Jason Feinsmith was an executive at Silicon Storage Technology, a business unit manager at Xilinx, and at Intel, he was in sales and was part of the Intel Inside(r) program. He has a B.S. from Cornell University, and a CS Masters and MBA from Stanford University.
Robert A. Leathern CFA
VP and GM
Root Markets
Rob was a founding member of ROOT’s Advisory Board before joining the company full time in January 2006. Prior to joining ROOT, he was General Manager of Advertising at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, Rob was responsible for all advertising strategy and revenues, and helped craft acquisition programs that increased LinkedIn’s global user base to over 5 million professionals. Rob worked as an investment banker in New York with ING Barings Furman Selz, and then spent four-and-a-half years as an Internet and technology analyst with Jupiter Research and Nielsen//NetRatings. He received the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation in 2003. During his time at Jupiter and Nielsen, Rob assisted clients with their online business strategies, revenue models, marketing and consumer adoption. As an industry commentator and thought leader he spoke at numerous events including before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and was frequently sought out by media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fortune and Business Week. In late 2003, he moved to NexTag where he drove multi-million dollar revenue increases in NexTag’s online consumer lead generation business, and designed and built leading-edge adserving and consumer marketing technologies. Rob received a B.S. in Computer Science and Economics from Dartmouth College.
Moderator:
Mark Kvamme
Partner
Sequoia Capital
Mark Kvamme is a Sequoia Capital US partner and focuses on services and software investments. He is currently a Director of AdBrite, Cast Iron Systems, EMN8, LinkedIn, Mark Logic, MotoSport.com, Popular Media and StrongMail Systems. He is also involved in portfolio companies including FON Wireless and PodShow. Previously, he had been a Director of Corvigo (acquired by Tumbleweed Communications) and Allocity (acquired by EMC Corporation). Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 1999, Mark was Chairman of USWeb/CKS and Chairman and CEO of CKS Group prior to the merger with USWeb. Earlier in his career Mark was a Director of International Marketing for Wyse Technology, the President and CEO of International Solutions, and was a founding member of Apple France. Mark has a B.A. in French Economics and Literature from the University of California at Berkeley.
Panelist:
John Cate
Vice President, National Media Director
Carat Fusion
John drives Carat Interactive’s media planning and buying services. These services include all forms of digital media as well as cross-media programs that include direct response elements of traditional vehicles. His focus has been on a number of Carat’s larger clients including Kodak, Ofoto and TiVo. John spearheaded the launch of Carat Interactive’s blogging practice and is working closely with clients to determine how best to integrate blogging into their overall marketing programs. He oversees Carat’s behavioral marketing practice, combining pre-marketing segmentation and post site visit re-targeting. Ultimately the practice will merge the behavioral offerings of several major providers, providing a single-source publisher agnostic resource for behavioral targeting.
John has almost 20 years of traditional and online media experience working with major agencies including McCann-Erickson, Chiat Day and Leftfield LLP. His clients have included Sun Microsystems, Nestle Beverage Company, multiple divisions of SBC, Levi’s, and Microsoft. He has a B.A. in Advertising from School of Journalism & Mass Communication, San Jose State University.
Philip J. Kaplan
CEO
AdBrite
As CEO of AdBrite, Philip J. Kaplan sets corporate strategy and oversees all operations and product offerings. Prior to founding AdBrite, Philip founded and sold several businesses, including PK Interactive, a software company that developed Web-based applications for clients including Toyota and Mead Paper. Philip also founded Fu**edcompany.com, which was Yahoo! and Rolling Stone’s Site-of-the-Year, and #6 in TIME Magazine’s “Best of 2000”. Previously, Philip held engineering and management roles at Booz-Allen & Hamilton and Think New Ideas. Philip is the bestselling author of F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts (Simon & Schuster) and has a Bachelor of Science, cum laude, from Syracuse University.
Gokul Rajaram
Product Management Director, Google AdSense
Google
As Product Management Director for Google AdSense, Gokul Rajaram develops and implements the product strategy for Google AdSense, an advertising program that enables publishers to monetize their websites while making their site more useful for visitors. In this role, Rajaram’s duties include defining new features and enhancements to the AdSense program and working with engineering on implementation.
Earlier in his career, Rajaram was a Technical Lead at Juno Online, an early internet service provider that is now part of United Online, the second largest ISP in the US. At Juno, he was part of the team that developed Juno’s online advertising platform. Rajaram has also worked as a Software Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and as a Product Manager at Onetta, a telecom hardware company.
Rajaram earned his M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Management, his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and his B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian institute of Technology, Kanpur, where he was awarded the President of India’s Gold Medal for being class valedictorian.
