Joseph was Chairman & CEO of UBS Financial Services. He is now chairman and CEO of Centurion Holdings, a company that advises private and public companies. Prior to UBS, Joseph was with Merrill Lynch for 16 years, holding various senior management positions including Director of National Sales. Before joining Merrill Lynch, he served in the U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets) where he became one of the Army's youngest officers, achieving the rank of Captain. In 2002, Joseph was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as the Chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Joseph is currently involved in a wide range of educational and philanthropic endeavors, including the Yankee Foundation, the YMCA of Greater NY, the Coast Guard Foundation, and the Inner City Schools of the Archdiocese of the City of New York.
Hal is currently Vice President and Chief Architect of the Developer Business Unit at Juniper Networks. Prior to Juniper, Hal was a Distinguished Engineer and Vice President of Global Systems Engineering at Sun Microsystems and held the titles of CTO for Software, Services, iPlanet and the North American Sales organization over the span of more than 20 years with the company. Hal has co-authored three books, "Professional WordPress: Design and Development", published by Wiley/Wrox (2010), "Blueprints for High Availability", also published by Wiley (2001) and "Managing NFS and NIS," published by O'Reilly and Associates (1991). Hal earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University in 1984 and currently serves on the Princeton University Technology Advisory Board.
Alain Benzaken is SVP of Technology at Buddy Media, and has been involved in technology and startups throughout his career, leading large technology teams in some of the most successful NYC startups. Alain was formerly VP of Technology at TheLadders.com from 2006 to 2011, helping the company achieve significant growth and revenues. Previous to that, Benzaken was an executive at Priceline.com, serving as Vice President, Development, International Systems, where he launched e-commerce travel products in Europe and Asia, and was the architect of Priceline.com's Customer Systems. Alain is also on the board of the NY Tech Meetup, the largest meetup in the world with over 18k members, and a big proponent of the NYC tech startup scene. Alain holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Columbia and a master's degree in physics from Yale.
Derek is an entrepreneur and technical leader with over twelve years of experience in software engineering. He is the founder of Google Apps for Businesses and served as its technical lead for nearly six years. He launched the project from scratch and helped grow the team of one to over one hundred engineers serving over 30 million customers today. The project utilized and developed some of the world's largest scalable systems, along with shaping what is now referred to as "the cloud".
Derek serves as technical investor and adviser to various start-ups in the US. Recently, Derek has gotten involved in the film industry, investing and producing feature films in LA. Educated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Derek majored in Computer Science and in Human and Computer Interactions.
Christina Brodbeck is a Co-Founder and CEO of theicebreak. Prior to theicebreak, Christina most recently worked at YouTube. Joining as an early employee in 2005, she was the company's first UI Designer, and helped to create many of the site's most prominent features. Later, she went on to lead the UI Design for YouTube Mobile, and was responsible for creating an interface that brought YouTube videos to cell phones. Before joining YouTube, Christina worked at MRL Ventures, NASA Ames Research Center, and Keynote Systems. She holds a Master's Degree in Instructional Technologies from San Francisco State University, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
