Maturing Your Vision

You've got a pretty epic product you’re looking to bring to the next level. You’ve found the money and hired your team. So, now what? With the numerous challenges involved in scaling, growing a brand, defining company culture and maintaining the vision of the product, many startups end up stuck when trying to grow a product into a company.

Join Huge CEO Aaron Shapiro (http://www.hugeinc.com/about/leadership/Aaron-Shapiro?id=fcee88a2-540b-4cc9-a266-5335ae711638) as he shares his experience building and cultivating startups from concept to company. Followed by a panel moderated by Huge's VP of UX Sherine Kazim (http://www.linkedin.com/in/sherinekazim), with Acompli's Javier Soltero (https://twitter.com/jsoltero), Fuel451's CEO Mary Lou Song (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mlsong), Wildfire's Erin Turner (http://www.linkedin.com/in/erineturner), and Arianna Orland (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ariannaorland) who will discuss how to avoid the pitfalls and roadblocks that can prevent even great products from reaching the next level.

Drink tickets available at front door.

About the Speakers:

Aaron Shapiro, CEO, Huge

Aaron Shapiro is CEO of Huge, where he helps companies reimagine how they interact with their customers and manage their businesses in the digital economy. Since 2005, Aaron has grown the firm from a small startup into a full-service interactive agency operating out of the United States, Europe and Latin America.

Sherine Kazim, VP of UX, Huge

Sherine plays a key role in the leadership of the User Experience group at Huge. She excels at defining and developing new opportunities with product companies and start-ups, creating strategic brand experiences for web, retail environments and product interfaces.

With more than 15 years industry experience, she comes to Huge from a senior UX role at AKQA and also draws on a decade of UX consulting for startups and emerging technology companies, as well as positions at EA, Friendster and Walmart.

Mary Lou Song, CEO, Fuel451

Mary Lou joined eBay in 1996 as the company’s third employee because she loved shopping and the Internet. In the company’s early days, she led the product management and community teams, helping grow the user base from 15,000 members to more than 20 million globally by 2002.

Currently, she is CEO of Fuel451, where she is on a mission to help anyone turn a video into an instant advertising campaign for their business, so they can do what they love.

Erin Turner, Product, Wildfire/Google

Erin Turner is an entrepreneur and product leader in commerce, social marketing, & games. Currently she manages a product team within Google after the 2012 acquisition of Wildfire (leading social marketing platform) where she was Director of Product. Erin is also co-founder & Chief Curator of the bi-annual Growth Hackers Conference. Previously she founded and led two startups (Crave and Gigabeat) and spent 8 years in the game industry at Electronic Arts (EA), Kixeye, and Trion Worlds. Follow on her on Twitter @erineturner.

Javier Soltero, CEO & Co-Founder, Acompli

Prior to starting Acompli, Javier was at VMware where he was CTO of SaaS & Application Services. He was responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for application level cloud services, bringing more than 15 years of experience in designing and developing infrastructure management technologies.

Throughout his career, Javier has been actively involved in various open source communities as both user and contributor to projects like JBoss and Apache Tomcat. He is also an active advisor to a number of open source and SaaS startups.

Arianna Orland, Creative Lead, Strategist, and Designer

Arianna is a design leader with over 15 years experience and a passion for blending creative vision with business objectives to create beautiful, functional, engaging and connected experiences.

Presently, Arianna is consulting for several well known Silicon Valley companies with a focus on building brands and bringing them to life. For the last 3 years Arianna was Senior Director of Global Brand and Publishing at Zynga where she drove consumer, trade, and partnership marketing efforts seen by millions. Arianna also spent several years in New York City where she she led the web design practice for Hillman Curtis and worked with well-known artistic and cultural institutions such as David Byrne and SVA (School of Visual Arts).