Meet the Angel Capital Summit 2018 Speakers

Keynote Speakers 2018
Divya Narendra is the founder and CEO of SumZero, Inc., which was founded with the intent of changing the way professional investors shared information. The site is a reciprocity-based platform, meaning that members are required to share certain pieces of information in order to draw from the intellectual product of thousands of fellow SumZero members. In addition to accessing highly-differentiated investment research, the platform further enables members to build a track record, expand their networks in highly-relevant places, and identify further professional opportunities within the industry.

Before founding SumZero, Divya was an Associate at Sowood Capital Management, a $3.5B multi-strat hedge fund located in Boston, MA. At Sowood, Divya analyzed investment opportunities across the capital structure. Prior to this, he was an analyst in the M&A Group at Credit Suisse in NYC. Divya graduated from Harvard College in 2004 with a degree in Applied Mathematics and earned a JD/MBA from Northwestern University. While in college, he also co-founded HarvardConnection (later renamed ConnectU) with Harvard University classmates Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss. In 2010, the actor Max Minghella portrayed Divya’s character in Aaron Sorkin’s movie ‘The Social Network’, chronicling his contributions in the creation of Facebook. Divya also serves as a director on the board of Gemini Trust Company LLC, a digital asset exchange founded by the Winklevoss Brothers.
Andre Durand Andre Durand: In the past 20 years, Andre has founded and grown a number of successful software companies.

Andre founded Durand Communications in 1993. The company pioneered the first online photograph database and Windows NT client/server bulletin board. In 1998, the company was sold to Webb Interactive.

Jabber was founded by Andre in 2000 where he commercialized the Jabber instant messaging open source platform, creating the Jabber Software Foundation in the process. Today Jabber is used around the world by hundreds of thousands of businesses. Jabber was sold to Cisco in 2008.

In 2002 Andre founded Ping Identity with a vision of securing the Internet through identity. Among his many contributions to the identity and security industry, he founded and chairs the identity industry conference, Cloud Identity Summit, now in its 7th year.

Andre holds a BA in Biology and Economics from the University of California at Santa Barbara and lives in Denver, Colorado with his wife Kim and two daughters, Parker and Samantha.

ACS Panel: The Blockchain Wave
Description: We are in a time of extraordinary innovation and change. This provides great opportunities for angel investors and for entrepreneurs to catch the next wave and take it into the future. We’ve seen blockchain based currencies growing at greater than 1000% in the last year and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) are happening every day without regulation (for now). It’s clear that the future of money will be driven by blockchain currencies, but it’s unclear who the winners and losers will be. In the 1990’s we knew the internet was going to be big, but after the dot-com bubble burst, many lost out, despite the ongoing importance of the internet for pretty much everything we do today. During this panel we will be diving into what Blockchain technology is, the industries that it is currently disrupting, how angels and entrepreneurs can take advantage, and finally what it might look like in the future.
David Gold (Moderator) is a Managing Director at Access Venture Partners. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering with Special Honors from the University of Colorado and was a National Science Foundation Fellow while earning Masters Degrees in both Aerospace Engineering and Technology Policy from M.I.T.

After working as an engineer with NASA, David spent a short time working on Capitol Hill and served in the Executive Office of the President of the United States where he was responsible for budget and policy oversight of the U.S. Land Remote Sensing and Weather Satellite programs as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Subsequently he worked for several years as a manager growing a network of manufacturing consulting centers that assisted smaller manufacturers implement improved quality and efficiency. As part of his role, David launched an initiative focused on green manufacturing through waste reduction.

Prior to joining Access Venture Partners, David was founder and CEO of ProSavvy, an eProcurement and online marketplace company which grew to profitability and a merger. After ProSavvy, David spent a number of years working with early stage companies as an advisor, board member and part time executive before joining the Access team.
Erik Voorhees, CEO of leading digital asset exchange ShapeShift.io, is among the top-recognized serial Bitcoin advocates and entrepreneurs, understanding Bitcoin as one of the most important inventions ever created by humanity. Erik’s former project, the groundbreaking gaming phenomenon SatoshiDICE, was, at its peak, responsible for more than half of all Bitcoin transactions on Earth and popularized the concept of “provable fairness.”

Having been a featured guest on Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC, BBC Radio, The Peter Schiff Show, and numerous Bitcoin and industry conferences, Erik humbly suggests that there is no such thing as a “free market” when the institution of money itself is centrally planned and controlled.
John Paller, the founder and steward of Opolis, is an experienced entrepreneur in the talent acquisition & employment space who has built several companies as a Managing Partner and CEO. After almost 20 years of building multiple successful enterprises, he is now focused on developing a decentralized employment protocol to democratize data, connection and employment. This will bring about smart placements and aligned outcomes whereas a dystopia of transactional incentives, short-lived outcomes is the current norm. John recently founded and led the ETHDenver Hackathon which is the largest Ethereum based hackathon (1500 people) in the world to date.
Sasha Shtern is a serial entrepreneur with ventures in manufacturing, aerospace, and blockchain. He is very active in blockchain angel investing as well as ICO investing.

Sasha is former president of the board of directors of Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) of Colorado. While serving EO, he traveled across the country speaking to small business owners seeking strategies to grow their businesses

In 2016 Sasha kicked off the Distributed Giving Project that piloted a program giving 20 homeless men in Denver small increments of bitcoin on a regular basis for them to spend at a market. Sasha was born in Tashkent Uzbekistan and has been a proud Denverite since 1992.