Betaworks is a company of builders; creating and investing in products that combine together to form a strong network. And that network is helping Betaworks become a media company for this century. Their operating portfolio includes digg, Instapaper, Dots, Giphy, Tapestry, Rushmore, bitly, Chartbeat and Socialflow. Investments include Tumblr, TweetDeck, OMGPOP, Kickstarter, Path, and many others.

Xsellco provides a cloud-hosted distribution solution for etailers allowing them seamlessly place products into several Amazon and Ebay marketplaces across Europe through a single UI. It then focuses on collecting all costs associated with the sale, and prices the product so that it meets margin expectation and attracts new buyers.

The Gifts Project is a social gifting platform that makes gift giving more easy and fun because it helps consumers to interact with their friends while shopping. With Group Gifting, friends can share their special occasions with their social graph by actively participating in a Group Gift on their favorite retailer’s website.

Paul Murphy is SVP, Betaworks in New York. Betaworks builds and invests in industry-changing businesses that include Digg, bitly, Tumblr, Kickstarter, and Summize. Paul is a co-founder or operating partner for betaworks companies Dots, Giphy, Rushmore.fm, Blend.io, Poncho, Telecast and Bloglovin. Prior to betaworks, he was COO of Aviary and was previously chief of staff for Microsoft's Office division. He studied computer engineering at Virginia Tech and received an MBA at IE Business School.

Namek is a Founder and Managing Partner at Silicon Badia, a group of venture capital funds based in Jordan and New York City and a member of the Accelerator Technology Holdings family of global funds. Namek’s broad experience ranges from technology development, product management, business development, enterprise sales and global venture investing across a variety of industries.

Ray was the Founder and CEO of Ireland's greatest dotcom success story, Hostelworld.com which was sold in November 2009 returning $500MM on just €150k total investment.

Ray continues to build web-based brands, launching Xsellco this year.

Since relocation from Sydney to the MENA region, Dana focused on running her boutique consulting business out of Dubai and growing the tech businesses she’s invested in. More recently, Dana also became heavily involved in advising on and executing programs targeting the empowerment of Arab youth in entrepreneurship, this includes the Arab Mobile App Challenge that was recently launched by Silatech in Tunisia on the 25th of September 2013. With a need for nearly 100 million jobs by 2020 in the MENA region, there’s a big gaping hole that needs to be addressed to create jobs for young people.

Dana has a Bachelor’s in marketing, a Master degree in strategy, and had begun working on her PhD thesis titled ‘Developing a framework for Personal Brands’.

Erez Dickman helped establish eBay’s Innovation Center in Tel Aviv, where he serves as the Head of Engineering. Previously, Erez co-founded The Gifts Project in November 2009 and served as CTO since its inception and until its eBay acquisition in September 2011. Erez holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Management from Tel Aviv University. He served as an officer in Israel’s elite military programming and intelligence unit in various command positions where he trained and led Israel’s finest and brightest engineers.

Rafa is CEO and founder at Bolt, an early stage mentoring and investment program for startups that want to go global from day one. They are supported by a team of 70+ highly experienced global entrepreneurs and investors looking to support and accelerate their startups from prototype in order to successfully scale globally. Having helped over 15 years technology startups to scale, enter new markets or getting acquired, Rafa has experienced first hand the difficulties many companies face to reach the next step of growth as they are missing capacity and resources to think and act globally. He has a vast experience closing multimillion-dollar contracts in Europe and Latin America with startups.

Neda Al-Dihany is a Co-founder of Brilliant Lab, which is a startup accelerator service. He has enjoyed a successful career in business development through his work on major projects in the educational and oil sectors in both Kuwait and Qatar.

After earning his MBA from IE Business School, Neda started Brilliant Lab in 2012 with the goal of enhancing the spirit of entrepreneurship among the youth by matching the best startups with the potential investments community in Kuwait and throughout the Arabian Gulf.

To date, Brilliant Lab has helped incubate more than 40 startups in various fields. It has also developed two acceleration programs, including one in Spain that is associated with IE Business School and one which will be taking place in San Francisco in December of 2013 which is associated with Mind the Bridge, one of the top startup schools in Silicon Valley.