Marcelo Calbucci

Publisher

Marcelo has been told he’s a professional technologist. He was born in Brazil and moved to Seattle in 1998 to work for Microsoft, where he worked for 7 years. After spending more time in meetings and answering emails than building cool products, Marcelo realized it was time to leave and jump head first into the Startup world. Living of noodle cups and soft drinks for more years than he should have, he launched Sampa, an angel-funded Seattle-based startup that allows people to create a personal, baby and family website on the web. While building Sampa Marcelo noticed a lack of resources about Entrepreneurship and Startups from entrepreneurs themselves. That’s when he founded Seattle 2.0, to be a place where he and guest bloggers could write about what they know that would be valuable to others Startups. Besides publishing the Seattle 2.0, Marcelo also has his personal blog where he writes mostly about building Sampa and is an avid Twitter @calbucci.

Alyssa Royse

Editor-in-Chief

With degrees in playwrighting and anthropology, Alyssa Royse is a born story teller with a short attention span, which naturally led her into the Startup world as the founder and current CEO of Just Cause It. (She really wants someone else to do the CEO part!) As a total novice to the startup world, she has spent the last couple years learning a lot, doing a lot, making tremendous progress and almost as many mistakes. Her blog, Start Her Up, chronicles her experiences as a chick in the Seattle Startup World, and she is a frequent speaker about entrepreneurship and startups. She sees both Start Her Up and Seattle 2.0 as an opportunity to share tales from the trenches with those who are working in the startup industry. Both personally and professionally she is known for speaking her mind, mostly because she wishes someone had "been real" with her when she started - it would have saved a lot of time and money. When she's not working and blogging, Alyssa can usually be found watching bad television, working with her bees, chickens and gardens, playing with her daughter, skiing, planning for Burning Man or trying to figure out what boundary to push next. But at her core, Alyssa really just wants to bring people together, have great conversations and save the world. Despite her sharp tongue and great wig collection, she's really an absolute mush-ball dreamer (but don't tell her we told you that.)

Alyssa's Sites: www.JustCauseIt.com, www.StartHerUp.com, www.Hudroy.com (her totally ignored personal blog.)

Rebecca Lovell

Angel Angle

Rebecca currently serves as the Program Director for the Alliance of Angels and considers it to be the best job in the world. She gets to spend most of her time meeting with inspired entrepreneurs (20/month, over 450 and counting) and coaching them on their business plans and pitches. Directing a nonprofit organization and fulfilling her dream as the economic equivalent of a matchmaker, she sleeps well at night knowing she's doing everything she can to help create a vibrant, high-tech, high-growth economy, and to bring the best deals to her angel investor members. She delivers monthly workshops to entrepreneurs, and has taken that show on the road around the state. In her spare time she has served as a coach in the UW Business Plan Competition, a judge in the International Venture Capital Investment competition, and is currently instructing a course in the UW MBA program on the joys of venture capital. Her passion for entrepreneurship is rivaled only by her love of sushi and her shameless addiction to karaoke. An eternal geek and the good kind of scorpio, she is easily bored, but more easily amused, takes her work seriously but laughs often.

Matt Hulett

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

My name is Matt Hulett and I'm the entrepreneur's entrepreneur. I've always enjoyed the challenge of turning a single idea into a fast-growing and profitable company. I've also found a passion for sharing my learnings and experience with other entrepreneurs and executives through my personal blog, Startup Whisperer. I see writing for Seattle 2.0 as a healthy extension of this passion. Whether I blog about how to deal with one's Board, internal startup management issues or the VC funding process, I'm always energized by people's response, comments and extended questions. My other passion is Batman. I'm believed to be just one of three people in the greater Puget Sound area that owns and willingly wears a full Batman outfit on days other than Halloween (I don't know these people personally; they're probably a little strange). My day job consists of running WidgetBucks, which is the fastest growing ad network on the Internet, serving over a billion impressions each month across the Internet and Long Tail. I've been with Mpire, WidgetBucks' parent company, for over 2 years now (or 14 in "corporate years"), and during that time, Mpire has morphed a few times, as startups tend to do. We feel we've really nailed our recent iteration - WidgetBucks - by creating a distribution platform out of our standalone comparison shopping site, mpire.com. My business chronology looks something like this: president of Expedia's corporate travel division (turned idea into billion dollar worldwide leader in just a couple of years), founding partner of AtomFilms and president of Atom Entertainment (20 million monthly unique visitors, purchased by Viacom for $200M), and founding consumer products leader at RealNetworks, along with a few other product focused positions. On a personal note, I am a proud father of two wonderful children and have the most incredible wife. I have deep Seattle roots being a proud fourth-generation Seattleite.

Danielle Morrill

Events Editor

Danielle works for Pelago, a local startup building Whrrl, and recently transitioned into the role of community program manager. As a "learned extrovert" she is fascinated by the nuanced dynamics of social interactions, both face-to-face and with the assistance of technology, and is proud to be working on a product that brings people together in the real world. Beyond work, which happily consumes most of her life, Danielle loves to play piano and sings in a band called S.L.E.D. (sucking less every day) although they've yet to play any shows. When she isn't writing furiously against a deadline or editing her latest multimedia creation, she can be found playing house (she's not much of a domestic) in Kirkland with her dog Rafe and her husband Kevin.

Creating an event that encourages comfortable socializing and relationship building doesn't happen by chance. The best events are planned with much consideration for the details in mind, to facilitate a specific kind of experience. Whether you're looking to meet potential customers, partners, investors, employees, cofounders, mentors or friends there are events in the local startup community that are right for you -- and she'll help you discover them.

Danielle's Sites: www.daniellemorrill.com, @DanielleMorrill (Twitter), www.whrrl.com, www.pelago.com

Kevin Leneway

Products

Kevin Leneway is a geek with a passion for anything around startups and the Web 2.0 movement. He works on the Developer and Platform Evangelism team at Microsoft and loves writing simple, useful little pieces of software. In his spare time, he maintains his "A Startup A Day" blog, which is an outlet for any random ideas he has around new startup companies. In addition to blogging, Kevin enjoys snowboarding, playing the tuba, and watching Lost with his beautiful wife and two overweight kittens. Feel free to email Kevin at any time for any reason at kleneway@hotmail.com.

Kevin's Sites: www.AStartupADay.com, www.InnovateOn.com

Kelly Smith

Product Designs & Experience

Kelly has over 15 years experience dabbling with the web and digital media and is the founder of Curious Office - a software incubator and early stage investment firm based here in Seattle. Curious Office has invested in several companies (to include Shelfari, SEOmoz, CoolSpotters) and has developed two companies internally. As Co-founder and CEO of Imagekind, Kelly developed the fastest growing online venue to buy, sell or create original artwork. Imagekind was sold to the Cafe Press in July 2008. The most recent company (code-named "Pressplane") closed $1.7 million in Series A financing in September 2008 from Second Avenue Partners and other notable Seattle tech entrepreneurs. While at Imagekind Kelly authored one US Patent in the area of content presentation and associated print-on-demand supply chain complications. Kelly also founded RocketVox, an early marketer and distributor of online digital video. RocketVox merged with thePlatform in 2000 and is today the leading developer of content management and publishing systems for rich media content (e.g. streaming audio & video). thePlatform was purchased by Comcast in July 2006. Mr. Smith has held various other roles to include Vice President Product Marketing for Myrio Corporation which developed the most widely deployed IPTV middleware in North America. In April 2005, Myrio was acquired by Siemens AG. In January 1995, Kelly joined RealNetworks - the pioneers of the Internet “digital media” industry where he managed business development for Europe, Middle East and Africa from Real’s London offices. Kelly developed his Internet addiction in the early 90's where he held various sales and marketing positions with Seattle-based SPRY, - the world’s first commercial implementation of the Mosaic web browser. You can find Mr. Smith obsessing over creative things over on his personal blog at www.kellysmith.com or probably babbling about something similar on his work blog at www.curiousoffice.com.