Founders

Skinner Layne
Chairman
Skinner has founded both successful and failed start-ups, and has raised more than $10 million in early-stage financing in addition to acting as a private equity advisor to multiple energy projects in excess of $100 million and has established formal relationships with global energy funds. He has previously been an Enterprise Web 2.0 consultant to NASDAQ companies and was, at the age of 23, the youngest person to sit on the board of directors of a Sarbanes Oxley-compliant publicly traded company in the United States. Skinner is a former speechwriter and senior strategist to U.S. Senator John Boozman.

Carlos Miceli
CEO
Carlos is a business strategist and communicator who has worked in many different successful projects. He founded JumpLab, an innovative learning experience in Buenos Aires. He worked as Innovation Advisor in the Buenos Aires Government, and was Coordinator for the Ashoka Accelerator of Argentina. Carlos is the author of the ebook “El Poder de tu Contexto,” and has helped market two best-selling books. He sold his first internet company, and also worked as a Top Clients Sales Executive in Telecom Argentina, where he beat his sales objectives with clients such as Visa, AMEX and ADT.

Antonio Manno
Vice Chairman
Antonio founded the first Internet Service Provider in Southern Italy in 1994. He also founded the first auction online company in Italy in the 1999, which was valued at €200 million at its peak, but then met the fate of many other dotcom bubble era companies. Antonio spent 5 years in Estonia working in an investment consultancy company studying and opening the Baltic market for the Italian SME enterprises. He was the production manager of the Snia Bpd, the then chemical conglomerate company of the FIAT Group, and served as chief production manager of Fapack Spa.

Advisors

Andy Ellwood
Andy is the Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer of BOND in New York City. He began his career in finance, moved on to luxury sales, and then dove head first into the world of entrepreneurship. Prior to BOND, he served as the Senior Director of Business Development for Waze, acquired by Google in June 2013. Before that he helped build Gowalla through to its acquisition by Facebook in 2011. He is a sought after speaker, start-up advisor, and frequent contributor to Forbes.

Suzie Baleson
Suzie is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Wellthily, Co., a firm that is on a mission to help the world redefine wealth by focusing on health. Wellthily, Co. is the optimal living and wellness partner for Downtown Project, Tony Hsieh’s $350 million city as a start up. After leaving a career in financial consulting working with both Deloitte and Alvarez & Marsal, LLC; Suzie is working to combine the knowledge she learned on Wall Street with the passion she has to make a positive impact through entrepreneurship. Suzie is also combining her skills and passions as the Sr. Advisor of Women’s Capital Markets & Health of the California Stock Exchange, the first conscious capitalism stock exchange.

Gonzalo Aranda
Gonzalo’s professional career began at a famous consulting company when he was only 18 years old. He co-founded an advertising company and has worked for over 15 years leading regional Finance sectors for many multinational corporations. Currently, he’s a business consultant that advises both growing companies and startups.

Matías Rivera
Matías Rivera is General Manager of Patagonia Sur. He launched Reforestemos Patagonia, the largest reforestation campaign in Chile’s history, which has received over US$800,000 in donations. Matías was Innovation Advisor to Chile’s Minister of Economy, and part of the team that created the Start-Up Chile program. Matías has been selected to join the ML50 group, a network of Latin America’s 50 top entrepreneurs and business leaders under the age of 40. He currently serves on the board of TNX Corp, Latin America’s leading Telecom Expense Management (TEM) provider, with sales of over US$6M.

Kelly McCarthy
Kelly is the Managing Director of VaynerMedia, a 300-person full service social media and digital consulting firm. Kelly has coached CEOs, penned enterprise-level marketing strategies, developed branding/innovation programs for conglomerates and helped position deep tech firms. Kelly’s work with start-ups in the Bay Area early in her career began a deep love of emerging technologies and disruptive business models which continues in her work at VaynerMedia.

Faculty

Matías González

Matías González co-founded Meet Latam in 2012, network of international successful entrepreneurs and investors. Participants represented a combined net worth of over US$ 3 billion. Matías is Executive Director for Latin America at PVBLIC Foundation, non-profit grant-making organization that harnesses the power of unused media assets to drive social change. He Co-founded Latamstartup, a mentor driven accelerator program for Latin based startups.

Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall has interviewed hundreds of well-known writers, academics, artists, and thinkers in over a dozen cities around the world. His public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas and subsequent podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture feature in-depth conversations with luminaries like Seth Godin, Pico Iyer, Merlin Mann, Ben Casnocha, Kevin Kelly, Tyler Cowen, and Alain de Botton. He also writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics, and is at work on a forthcoming book, A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City.

Stephen Johnson
Senior Developer at Extrabux – a recently acquired affiliate marketing startup in San Diego. Former Lead Developer for Bunchball, the originator of “Gamification” with clients like NBC, P&G; and Victoria’s Secret. 15+ years of programming experience on game mechanics, rewards and loyalty programs, big data, and machine learning.

Casey Bailey
Casey has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Arkansas. He has entrepreneurial experience in the areas of virtual worlds and experimental education and has taught computer science at the University of Arkansas. Mr. Bailey has conducted research at Acxiom Corporation on data redundancy filtering and was a Software Integration Architect at global retailer Dillards, Inc. He was the Chief Technical Officer and Co-Founder of a logistics & management software platform in use by more than a dozen internationally-recognized design firms and currently works as an HL7 Consultant for the upcoming national healthcare exchange network.

Keegan Jones
Keegan  is a product designer with 10 years of experience in both web and mobile. He was on the founding team at Gowalla, a location-based startup, which was acquired by Facebook in 2012. He is passionate about travel, design, photography and meeting new people.

Andrei Vazhnov
Andrei is Member of the Baikal Institute. He’s a strategic advisor for Trimaker, a 3D printing company, and he’s a professor at the Entrepreneurship Department of the Engineering Faculty of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Argentina. He has a degree in Physics from Novosibirsk University, and a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard University. In the United States, he worked as a Research Associate in the Capital Markets Strategies of Goldman Sachs. He was CTO and Vice President of Software Development at eMeta Corporation, where he was in charge of the Engineering, Quality Control and Technical Support. He has also worked as Director of Engineering at Macrovision Corporation.

Enrico Dini
Enrico Dini holds a Civil Engineering degree from Pisa University. Enrico has spent his entire career in the sector of mechanics, automation, and robotics. In Italy, Enrico cooperates with the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, the technological branch at the Scuola Normale, and with the Department of Engineering at the Production “Ulisse Dini”. Enrico Dini works full time developing the D-Shape 3D Printing Building technology, a device that can take sand and transform it into a house.

Jerry Michalski
Jerry is the founder of REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, a private, collaborative inquiry into the next economy. More broadly, he is a pattern finder, lateral thinker, Gladwellian connector, facilitator and explorer of the interactions between technology, society and business. Jerry works with companies such as Best Buy and Havas Media as well as non-profits such as EDF and the Institute for the Future. He also acts as a technology advisor to startups, ranging from Twine and CoTweet (acquired by ExactTarget) to EverNote, TheBrain, Socialtext and Seedwiki.