Martin Hack President, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Skytree. Mr. Hack has 20 years of experience, creating game changing technology products, services and strategies. His experience includes the management of product lines with revenues totaling $1.8B/year. He has launched ground-breaking products, driven world wide strategies and helped set de-facto industry standards. As an expert on Trusted Computing, Virtualization and High Performance environments he became a sought-after advisor to many Fortune 500 companies and government organizations including the FBI, CIA and DIA. In his past roles he was involved in all aspects of the product life cycle including engineering, product management, marketing, business development and sales. He also developed and introduced products and services into virtually every commercial and government, channel and market segment.

Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures spoke @FailCon in October. Cathy Brooks moderated the session. Many thanks to Cathy for responding to my raised eyebrows & distress from the audience, to allow me to refute what Vinod was saying !

Vinod Khosla is an entrepreneur, investor, failure expert and technology fan. He is the founder of Khosla Ventures, focused on impactful clean technology and information technology investments. Mr. Khosla has a few decades of first hand failure experience across several sectors as a founder, incubator, investor, and advisor: from his first soy milk startup in the 70’s to several high profile venture investments throughout the 90’s and 2000’s. Mr. Khosla was also a co-founder of Daisy systems and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. One of Mr. Khosla’s greatest passions is being a mentor to entrepreneurs, assisting entrepreneurs and helping them build technology based businesses. He is also passionate about Social Entrepreneurship. Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from IIT, New Delhi, a Master’s in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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FinTech Silicon Valley

FinTech Silicon Valley podcasts are focused on educating and highlighting FinTech in Silicon Valley to the global community both through video and audio. These podcasts are short and fun, one on one interviews by FinTech Silicon Valley journalists with experts and investors on how they are contributing to the community and what their perspective is on the future of FinTech.

Sankaet Pathak, Founder & CEO Synapse completed a Master’s in electrical engineering at the University of Memphis, where he previously majored in computer engineering, physics and mathematics. A scientist at heart, much of Pathak’s academic work was focused on physics and research related to the solar corona. As a student at the University of Memphis and a recent immigrant to the USA, Sankaet Pathak needed to open a bank account. He was surprised to learn that wasn’t an easy task. Sankaet knew he had to develop a better option not only for himself but for the over 20% of adults in the USA with poor or limited credit history. Sankaet founded Synapse with an eye toward offering a viable alternative to legacy banking systems, while providing operational simplicity, efficiency & ease of integration to perform virtually any banking interaction. Sankaet is launching an AI startup soon called Foundation. Foundation is developing the future of general purpose robotics with the goal to address the labor shortage. Foundation’s mission is to create advanced robots that can operate in complex environments, reducing human risk in conflict zones and enhancing efficiency in labor-intensive industries.