“I’d love to come and tell stories provided there is honest-to-god-Guinness.”
Startup founders, writers, managers, engineers. The Funconf storytellers are behind some of the most exciting web companies in the world.
Michael, aka Rands, blogs at Rands in Repose. He’s the author of Managing Humans. If you want to get a sense of Rands’ inimitable style, browse through his blog, have a read of his Vegas System and be sure to check out the FriendDA.
Joe Stump has been scaling large websites for over ten years. After spending a few years as Digg’s Lead Architect he struck out on his own, with Matt Galligan, to found SimpleGeo. As CTO of SimpleGeo he’s responsible for architecting and scaling a robust GIS infrastructure for developers around the world.
Jonathan has been selling technology in one shape or form from about the age of 11. His consultancy, ELC Tech is proud to sponsor funconf. Jonathan knows the tech industry inside and out, having done the startup thing several times with the likes of RightCart and RightScale. When he’s not tending to his huge family, he can be found swanning around the Playboy Mansion in LA.
Amy is a girl-geek tech dynamo. She’s been writing at Slash7 for years, filling the web application world with friendly tutorials and useful cheat-sheets. Amy knows design just as well as she knows code and she’s a ferocious force when she’s on stage. She’s also behind the awesome Twitter mashup Twistori and the fantastic time-tracking tool Freckle.
Tom Preston-Werner who created Gravatar and sold it to Automattic is one of the founders of Github. The Github story is one of the most inspiring successes of recent times. Tom’s post, “How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go Full-Time on GitHub” is essential reading for anyone bootstrapping their own web startup. Tom walks the walk, talks the talk, tells a good tale and knows how to party. We’re excited to have him on board.
One of the most dominant voices writing about the web for the last few years has been Marshall Kirkpatrick. After a spell with TechCrunch, Marshall has been the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb for the last few years. He’s got insight into how the web works from a technical level as well as a social level, and has some awesome stories to tell of his time getting there.
There aren’t many success stories like Matthew’s on the web today. Matthew built a dating site in 66.5 hours and was acquired within 6 months. After helping set up SEOMoz Matthew now gives back to the web through The Oatmeal, a series of smart, funny web comics.
Web 2.0 might as well have been called Fuchs 1.0. Thomas is the author of Script.aculo.us the pioneering javascript animation framework. A super passionate developer and a wonderful, wonderful person, Thomas is currently doing high end javascript consulting, teaching javascript masterclasses, and lead developer on Freckle.
Werner Vogels is the CTO and vice president of Amazon.com in Seattle, Washington. You know who he is. We hear he loves Northern Irish rock.
Randall is to Engine Yard what the terminator was to Skynet. Equal parts renaissance man and bona fide geek, Randall is the glue that holds the entire tech industry in San Francisco together. Randall will blow you away with his huge personality, razor sharp wit and enormous capacity for talking about the relationship between functional programming and fine scotch.
Chris is a photographer, musician, and burrito connoisseur, but that's probably less relevant to you than his interest in computers in general and Linux in particular. He's spoken at a bunch of stuff like FOWA, Wordcamp, and SXSWi based largely on the fact that he actually knows things like what all that mess in the /proc filesystem is there for. Chris works for (mt) Media Temple, where he splits time between performance R&D, a variety of biz dev projects, and systems architecture for Virb. He's very excited to have a reason to come to Ireland.
Where'd Joe go?
Unfortunately, Joe Hewitt has too many commitments to speak at funconf 2010. Joe, we're sorry you couldn't make it.
