Tom Ding, CEO/CoFounder String Labs, a venture-backed studio & incubator for decentralized blockchain & open protocols. Serial entrepreneur, founder of Blockchain University and previously a senior manager at eBay who comes from Shanghai. Tom caught the blockchain wave in 2013 and hasn’t looked back. Back in the day, he graduated in Computer Science at age 14 and from business school at 20.
Mason Borda CTO /CoFounder Gen Life, a digital insurance startup based in Hong Kong and Palo Alto, focused on bringing blockchain and AI to the insurance industry. He is a blockchain technology professional with a record of building and scaling innovative technologies. Mason speaks to and advises Fortune 500 enterprises on many aspects of blockchain solutions, including architecture, security, and scalability.
Mike Belshe CEO Bitgo & is a veteran technologist and inventor of the multi-signature protocols used at BitGo. Prior to BitGo, Mike worked at Google on the founding team of Google Chrome and was the inventor of SPDY (which has now become HTTP/2.0). Prior to that he co-founded Lookout Software, an email search company acquired by Microsoft. He holds a C.S. degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He is the inventor of over 10 technology patents.
Melody Li, CFA, former Principal InnoSpring Seed Fund. Melody was responsible for investment activities in the field of Machine Learning in early stage startups. Prior to InnoSpring, Melody was with BlackRock’s Alternative Investments group, advising clients’ asset allocation using risk and performance analytics.
Lilly Huang, Senior Director Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), focuses on both inbound and outbound cross-border business between Asia and the US. She has helped many companies looking to expand their presence in the global market. Some of her current clients include ZTE and Alibaba, among others. Prior to this position, Lilly was the Director of SVB’s Global Gateway Division, which serves as a single point of contact to assist domestic and international clients with their global business expansion initiatives. Lilly spent four years in Shanghai, China, spearheading SVB’s business development efforts in technology and venture capital industries under the Entrepreneurial Services Group. Before joining SVB, Lilly worked in Shanghai as the director of the China Desk for the City of San Francisco. In this role Lilly successfully helped more than a dozen Chinese companies set up U.S. subsidiaries in San Francisco.
Cathryn Chen CEO/CoFounder MarketX. MarketX is an online investment management platform helping connect a generation of mass affluent investors with alternative financial products and independent wealth managers. We offer a spectrum of investment products from single house lending projects, car & consumer luxury goods loans, to pre-IPO company shares in high growth technology companies. They are the first online platform to facilitate direct investments in alternative financial markets between the U.S. and Asia. Previously, Cathryn worked at Deutsche Bank, Rothschild in London, and JP Morgan in Hong Kong, where she contributed to dozens of IPOs and private placements including Alibaba and Xiaomi. Prior to the Twitter and Alibaba IPOs, she witnessed first-hand the pent up demand for pre-IPO shares which led her to found MarketX. She also worked at EverString, an ad-tech startup backed by Lightspeed and Sequoia, bringing predictive analytics to sales & marketing at Fortune500 enterprises. In college, she co-founded MoneyThink LA, a White House-recognized, 501(c)3 non-profit that provides financial education to urban high school students. Cathryn graduated from UCLA and the London School of Economics.
MODERATOR: David Spark Tech journalist/Founder Spark Media Solutions, a content marketing firm for the B2B technology industry. Spark has reported on the tech scene for more than 20 years in more than 40 media outlets. and he now reports predominantly at trade shows for companies such as HP, IBM, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Dice, Citrix, and Juniper Networks. Read Spark’s musing on his Spark Minute blog or listen to him and his co-host weekly on the Tear Down Show podcast.
