How To Be A Failure...All The Way To Bank!

Ben is the CEO of the company that runs I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, EngrishFunny.com and a network of other user-created humor sites.

The company has grown from nothing to serving 160 million page-views a month in less time than Sarah Palin has been governor of Alaska.

• Web site

Lane Becker is President & co-founder of Get Satisfaction, a web startup dedicated to fostering new methods of communication and collaboration between companies and their customers. Previously, Lane was co-founder of Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy, research, and design consultancy. While with Adaptive Path, Lane ran the consulting business and, as the creator of the New Ventures program, developed strategic partnerships with early-stage startup companies to provide them with long-term support for their product development, design, and launch strategies.

• Web site

Rashmi Sinha is cofounder and CEO for SlideShare, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. SlideShare is growing rapidly (more than 8 million monthly uniques) letting everyone from teachers to marketers to conference speakers share presentations and connect with others. Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University and did research on search engines and recommender systems at UC Berkeley. She is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Webvisions and Future of Web Apps. She writes a blog at rashmisinha.com about social software and running a startup.

• Web site

Micah is CEO of TakeComics, the seventh startup Micah has been involved in (having recently left Lijit Networks, where he served as VP, Business Development and selling Current Wisdom in the beginning of 2007).

Micah got his start as a university fundraiser, being one of the first to fuze online activities and marketing strategies into alumni fund-raising. In 1996, he sent one of the first email campaigns to help drive alumni fundraising. Over his career, Micah helped universities such as The Catholic University of America and the University of San Diego see their annual giving programs grow by more than 150%.

Focusing on business development, online marketing and advertising, and product strategy, Micah was instrumental in the growth of companies such as MyPersonal (now Synacor – IPO), ServiceMagic (acquired by IAC), Indigio Group (acquired by Bridgeline Software) and other less successful startups, such as Kozmo.com.

Micah has helped author several books on internet and search marketing, and started the #followfriday meme on Twitter, which has become part of the fabric of the social web. A frequent speaker and with appearances on CNN and articles in many of the leading blogs, including Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, you can read about Micah’s philosophy of success through failure at his blog, Learn To Duck.

• Web site

In August of 2007, Charlie founded Path 101, a NYC-based startup company focused on career discovery on the web. The company is the culmination of over 7 years of efforts in the career education space starting and running mentoring programs, internship programs, and recently teaching as an adjunct at Fordham University.

Charlie is also the founder of nextNY, a grassroots a participant-driven organization of almost 1,000 up and coming digital media and technology professionals in NYC—the largest in the area.

Previously, as the Director of Consumer Products for Oddcast, he helped launch the company’s first direct to consumer avatar platform, Voki. He was responsible Voki’s product vision, functional specifications, and initial business and marketing strategy.

His initial entrance into the NYC technology scene came as an analyst for Union Square Ventures. There, Charlie focused on early stage investments in technology enabled service businesses such as del.icio.us, Indeed.com, Feedburner, BugLabs, Etsy, and Oddcast.

Prior to joining Union Square Ventures, he spent four years at the General Motors pension fund’s $6 billion private markets group, where he worked extensively on venture capital partnerships focusing on emerging technology as well as private equity investments in the consumer sector.

• Web site