Sam Bauch
Web Applications Developer, VaynerApps

Since graduating from Amherst College in 2010, Sam has worked at a few different NYC startups in varying capacities with a healthy dose of entrepreneurship in-between and on the side. Sam began his career as a “business guy,” doing sales, marketing, operations and other non-technical stuff. Driven by the desire to build, create, and solve problems, Sam taught himself some programming, and won the NYC Big Apps 3.0 City Talent Award for his first app Uhpartments, a tool to help NYC apartment hunters avoid buildings with maintenance problems. Sam is now developing web applications full-time at VaynerMedia as the lead developer on the VaynerApps team.

Words of Wisdom:  Create tools to solve problems from your daily life, and most often you’ll find that you’ve solved problems for many people beyond yourself.

Rebecca Cameron
Vice President of New Product Development,  NASDAQ OMX

Rebecca Cameron is a Vice President of New Product Development for NASDAQ OMX, in the Corporate Strategy group.  In her current role, she is responsible for leading an effort that is focused on influencing the company culture with emphasis on supporting innovation and product development that targets alpha revenue growth and profitability.  Prior to joining Corporate Strategy, Rebecca was Managing Director in the Transaction Services U.S. division.  Her responsibilities included product development for our key trading platforms.   Her most notable accomplishment was leading the launch of NASDAQ OMX PSX.  She joined NASDAQ OMX as a Licensing Analyst upon graduation in 2002. Rebecca is Virginia Tech alum, having majored in Business Management.  She has since earned her MBA from the University of Maryland, University College.

Words of Wisdom:  Ask questions – the more information you seek in any of your endeavors, the better prepared you will be for success.

Avinash Dabir
CEO & Co-Founder, Scene Near Me Inc.

Avinash Dabir is a digital experimenter from NYC specializing in Biz Dev and Product. He is CEO and co-founder of SceneNearMe.com a mobile service that helps you discover what film and TV shows were shot near you. He enjoys orchestrating digital stunts (www.USOpenBallHawk.com), building technology influenced furniture and is a StartupBus alum. Prior to that he held postions at NBCUniversal, the NBA and mQube (acquired by VeriSign). He graduated from Boston University with a BSBA in marketing and finance.

Words of Wisdom:  Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things.

Charles Douglas-Osborn
Program Manager, Google

Originally from the UK, Charles studied Computer Science at University of York, then went to London where he started at a small Startup called Tango Zebra. Tango Zebra was later bought out by DoubleClick who in turn were bought by Google. Charles has worked in a variety of roles from Support & Developer to Designer and now a Program Manager where his role is to analyze the business and work out how to scale the business to be able to handle the increase in Online spend. He looks forward to starting his own startup one day as well.

Words of Wisdom:   Keep trying (Richard Branson almost went bankrupt 3 times), do something you believe in because when it gets tough it’ll give you the drive to keep going and finally meet as many people as possible – you never know who will be the contact that makes your company.

Guy Fruda
Director, Northeast Regional Technology, Deloitte

Joining Deloitte Consulting as a Manager in May 2000, Guy’s career at Deloitte started by leading multiple large scale technology integrations for some of the top consulting clients in the Tri-State. After 9/11, he was asked to focus his attention internally and lead Deloitte Consulting’s Tri-State IT organization on the strategic/tactical vision for support. During that time, Guy has held multiple roles in the organization; leading our IT efforts in India back in February of 2004, responsibility over our IT Program for Deloitte University from 2007 – 2011, to his current role as the Regional Technology Director for the Northeast and member of the Northeast Regional Executive Committee.  He is still active in many national programs for both WIN/Diversity and Business Continuity Planning. Guy holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from St. John’s University and Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Boston University.

Words of Wisdom:   ‘Perseverance is the Engine of success’, what usually makes someone successful is not necessarily how ‘smart’ they are, but how willing they are to stick with a problem or issue until it is resolved.

Amber Hampton
Strategist, User Insights Analyst for Google Docs & Drive, Google

Amber graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a B.A. in Public Policy and Interdisciplinary Honors in Education. Upon graduation she worked as a Financial Analyst at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco for over 2 years where she collaborated with several teams of advisors to manage the assets of ultra high-networth investors.  In November of 2011 she moved to New York City to join Google as a User Insights Analyst for Google Docs and Drive in Consumer Operations.

Words of Wisdom:  If you have a great idea that you think will make a difference in someone’s life -  do some research, find people who support you (a few might not) and make it happen!

Eugene Joseph
Director of Operations (formerly), Categorical

Eugene was formerly Director of Operations at Categorical, a publishing platform for easily building curated sites with community features. Prior to this, he was a Venture Capital Summer Associate at NYC Seed, where he helped with doing due diligence on early stage investments and with their Accelerator Program, NYC SeedStart Media – which was partnered with leading venture capital firms and media companies. He has also worked at firms such as PwC Consulting, UBS Investment Bank, The Receivables Exchange, and BCMS Corporate. Additionally, he has worked on many different entrepreneurship related endeavors when he was a student at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and is an ardent believer in building a ‘lean startup’, doing tons of customer development, and iterating quickly to get to an ideal product-market fit.

Words of Wisdom:   To paraphrase Steve Jobs, always keep searching for what it is that you are truly passionate about and love to do, keep searching and never settle.

Michael MacDonald
Chief of Technology, Global Corporate Solutions & Web, NASDAQ OMX

Michael MacDonald is Chief of Technology of NASDAQ OMX’s Global Corporate Solutions (GCS) & Web teams.  Michael oversees technology strategy, development, and operations for all NASDAQ OMX customer and corporate web businesses and is responsible for managing a team of 80 web and mobile developers worldwide.  Michael has over 17 years of internet development and leadership experience, having managed a variety of web development organizations at NASDAQ OMX and Citigroup.  He is also a co-founder of Wunderground.com, the internet’s first weather service, which provides real time weather data, forecasts, and graphics to over 25M global users per month, and which was recently sold to The Weather Channel and Comcast.

Joel Natividad
CEO & Co-Founder, Ontodia Inc.

Joel Natividad is a two-time winner at NYC BigApps.  First, as part of the NYCDataWeb team, winning the Large Organization Award in NYC BigApps 2.0.  And second, as co-founder of Ontodia with their Grand-Prize winning NYC Facets submission for NYC BigApps 3.0.  Joel is a long-time Semantic Technology practitioner.  He used to head TCG’s Knowledge Engineering practice, where he worked with several Fortune 500 firms to implement semantics in the enterprise.  After winning at NYC BigApps 2.0, he wanted to pursue the original NYC DataWeb vision – to create a web of Linked Open Data in NYC.  However, his day job didn’t allow him to chase his dream.  So two weeks after NYC BigApps 3.0 was announced, Joel put in his papers and started Ontodia with his best friend, Sami.  Now that their gamble has paid off, Joel and Sami are aggressively pursuing their dream to make NYC the “first Web 3.0 City”.  Joel immigrated to the US from the Philippines in 1991 and has been living in the Metropolitan NYC area since then.

Words of Wisdom:  Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.  Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.  Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.  And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.  They somehow already know what you truly want to become.  Everything else is secondary.

Tracy Pesin
Senior iOS Engineer, bitly

Tracy Pesin has been developing mobile applications since the dark days before the iPhone. Currently the sole iOS developer at NYC startup bitly, she formerly was Director of Mobile Engineering at Major League Baseball Advanced Media, where she helped develop the first versions of MLB.com‘s At Bat applications. Prior to that she worked at the early mobile company Vindigo, fondly remembered by early adopters as the first app to let you find the nearest slice of pizza while standing on the corner. She holds a BA in English from Brown University and an MS in Computer Science from NYU.

Words of Wisdom:  The most satisfying projects are those that make other people’s lives easier or better, even if it’s just in small ways.

Veronica Picciafuoco
Director of Content, Partnerships & Community, Docracy

Veronica Picciafuoco is more than Docracy’s legal arm: she oversees content, marketing, business development and community. Born and raised in Italy, she became an experienced attorney, closing multi-million acquisition deals across Europe for international clients. She holds a LLM degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she specialized in startup and Internet law. A true music lover, she has 10 years of experience as a music critic. In her spare time, she hunts for old vinyl records and new restaurants, tries new sports and attempts hardware hacks.

Words of Wisdom:  When you work on something completely new, you will make mistakes. There’s no book to look up the solution: learn from experience and fix problems as fast as you can!