DJ Monteilh

I'm a firm believer that your title shouldn't entitle you! Life's too short to be serious all the time so although my official title is "The Keeper of Cool" I also act as "The Stiff Arm of Seriousness" for Seed Sumo, which I am a Co-Founder. 

Seed Sumo is a startup accelerator based out of Bryan/College Station, TX. We invest in 8-10 early stage startup companies a year and put them through an intensive boot camp for 3 months each summer. Although most of the companies we invest in are expected to attend the accelerator we also have a seed fund that invests in larger financing rounds. We look for hungry, well thought out teams that move fast and think big.

Prior to Seed Sumo I lead large teams in the heavy lift and heavy haul business. This gave me a solid foundation in teamwork and attention to detail. My love of fitness lead me to partner in a Crossfit gym in 2012 and soon after to start Seed Sumo with three of my best friends from childhood. I enjoy duck hunting, basketball, golf, wake surfing, and basically anything to do with spending time with friends and family.

We are members of the GAN Network, the largest global accelerator network in the world.

Lisa Cairns

Lisa is a dynamic, open-minded, market strategist and market analyst who is dedicated to helping companies target tough issues and provide innovative and agile solutions to realize their market growth potential. Lisa has deep expertise in research and analysis of diverse populations, complex variables, markets, and industries gained from a long academic career in linguistic anthropology coupled with over a decade in the business trenches with companies spanning pre-launch start-ups to successful exits, and long-standing global enterprises. Her academic roots are the core of her unique ability to help companies with branding and identity solutions that resonate, whether as a new venture or those seeking to pivot. Lisa’s strong ethnographic skills support her clients with a rich framework to identify and understand their market opportunities and add to the data necessary to make informed decisions for immediate and phase-implemented growth strategies.

Leveraging a diverse tool kit of problem-solving, deductive, and communicative skills Lisa collaboratively guides the development of clear, customized market and product strategies, whether for internal teams or external customers. Her key areas of expertise include a keen ability to quickly synthesize a wide range of data to identify key market opportunities through branding & identity, agile product placement, scalable service offerings, expanding revenue streams, understanding market gaps, and collaboratively setting innovative market plans. Lisa also consults with some of the global leaders in market trend analysis to provide qualitative research and insight on rapidly shifting trends across sectors providing analyses and market strategies that help companies realize unique market leadership positions and gain agility by honestly resonating with their customer and client base.

Lisa has a Ph.D. and A.M. in Linguistics from The University of Chicago. She holds a B.A. from Hofstra University, where she was Hofstra's first woman undergraduate to be awarded a Fulbright-Hayes Grant for independent research. Lisa can be reached at lcairns[at]lcairnssolutions.com.

Jesse Martinez

Originally from Houston, Texas, Jesse found his way to San Francisco in March 1997 where he first experienced what it meant to work for a startup. As employee 27, he got to see firsthand the building of a Silicon Valley company (funded by Sequoia Capital) that ultimately grew into a thousand employee+ corporation all in less than a year as it was acquired for $180 million by Frontier Communications.

That experience and access to his new mentors/advisors, led Jesse to cofound along with his brother in 1998 one of the first U.S. online bilingual Latino communities (Picosito.com) which was recognized by a U.S. Congressional Record by the House of Representatives in 1999 for their efforts around technology in Latino Community. They raised $2.3 million in seed capital and had two acquisition offers in less than six months. After the dot com era, Jesse went back to Corporate America; he has over 10 years in the BPM industry & has worked with industry leaders such as Xerox Global Services, IKON, & Kofax as a Business Development Manager.

Jesse is the Cofounder of AVION Ventures which is the 1st pre-accelerator focused on Latina women working on mobile ventures and based in San Francisco. His other personal passion is the Latino Startup Alliance, a non-profit supporting global Latino Tech Entrepreneurs and startup ecosystems where he serves as the Cofounder | Co-chair | CEO. Previously, he was the cofounder/COO of his third startup - Relevance, which took him to Brazil as the country director under the Startup Brasil Program.

Douglas Shumway

Doug grew up in a small town in Wyoming where his family owned and operated an auto parts store. He is the son and grandson of “parts” men who fought the battles of entrepreneurship their whole lives. During the late 90s and early 2000s, rather than focusing on his dream of being either an artist or chef, Doug ended up with four degrees in four years, all of which were business oriented and none of which had anything to do with food or creating art.

After college, a job with a tech startup took him to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he soon found himself interacting with businesses of all types in an attempt to force success upon a venture using technology that was quickly passing its prime. After a few months the venture failed and Doug found himself self-employed and running down a strange path that resulted with him going to law school.

During law school, while working as a business and acquisition strategist for an immensely successful boutique transactional law firm in Las Vegas, Doug had the opportunity to become an entrepreneur once again. One of his closest friends came to Doug and asked him to perform diligence on a real estate investment company that was raising substantial sums of money for loan transactions throughout the United States. The result of the investigation was that Doug, and a few others, started what was soon to become a significant player in the private loan industry, and remains so to this day.

A few years later Doug formed the law firm of Shumway Van to serve the transactional and litigation needs of his various business interests. The law firm has continued rapid growth during the economic recovery due in part to the loyalty of clients that it helped to survive the financial disasters that swept the nation, and in part to exceptional client service that has resulted in substantial business from referrals. Shumway Van presently has offices in San Antonio, Texas, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

In 2012, Doug formed Utile Dulci, Inc., which is an entity dedicated solely to the management of private investment funds that primarily invest in real estate, technology and product related businesses. Related thereto, Doug spends significant time and resources investing in startups and consulting with startups. He also dedicates no less than 500 pro bono hours per year to startups and small to medium businesses in hopes that his knowledge of business, law and finance will help them to achieve their goals and dreams.

To relax Doug plays with his daughter, discusses local, national and international events with his wife, cooks, and serves in various community organizations.

Mike Sarmisakci

With an extensive experience in leading and directing major domestic and international infrastructure as well as real estate development projects, Mukemmel Sarimsakci is responsible for financial and real estate development activities for Alterra International, LLC and Alto West located in Dallas and Istanbul. Over the past 20 years, Mr. Sarimsakci has worked on real estate projects worldwide with a strong track record of completing infrastructure and real estate development projects on time and on budget. Currently, as the Managing Partner of Alterra International, LLC and Alto West, Mr. Sarimsakci is responsible for two projects located in downtown Dallas. The first project is a 65,000 square meters of mixed use development which consists of 230 residences, 275 key Marriott dual brand hotel and retail space in the heart of downtown Dallas. The second project, Alto 211 is an 18 story office tower, known as the “Tech Mecca” of Downtown Dallas is set in the vibrant city center district and brings urban lifestyle and modern business culture to the entrepreneurial community. Alto 211 is the headquarters to such renowned tech companies such as Tech Wildcatters, Health Wildcatters, Traxo, Velocis, Launch DFW and Fort Work coworking space.

Throughout his career, Mr. Sarimsakci has been actively involved in development projects on an international level. Most recently, Mr. Sarimsakci was the guest of the Panamanian government to explore public private joint venture development opportunities in Panama. He will also be traveling to Niger as the guest of the President of Niger to discuss development opportunities in the region. The government of Nigeria and Niger has each granted Alterra International, LLC. 100 hectars for new development projects in their respective countries. These projects have a major role in the re-development of Niger and Nigeria while contributing to the renewal of the region beyond. 

Joe Sanchis

Joe Sanchis is Founder & CEO of Queue, which is helps brands amplify audience marketing campaigns to drive conversions, acquisitions, and engagement for new releases, promotions, and loyalty goals,  Prior to founding Queue,Joe worked in the financial industry as a business development and growth executive at Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan. He’s also an inventor, pretail thought leader, angel investor, and advisor to accelerators and venture funds.

Adam Lieb

Adam Lieb is an entrepreneur from Seattle with 15 years experience building and growing technology companies. He started his first venture, building gaming communities, when he was 11. He eventually sold his growing websites to IGN (Newscorp). At 15 he started generating $10,000 a week in virtual goods sales by building out a marketplace for virtual goods in popular MMORPG games. At 16 he graduated from high school and matriculated to the University of Washington where he continued his entrepreneurial ventures. He started and build Gaming Synergies to a multi-million dollar revenue business operating 25 different properties in the gaming space. Following a childhood dream he decided to continue running his successful business while he enrolled in law school. He spent a four years living by the beach in West LA while he earned his JD/MBA, all while continuing to run Gaming Synergies. 

Shortly after graduation Adam founded Duxter, a company focused on building massive communities of obsessed gamers. He went on to raise millions of dollars, recruit a talented team of passionate developers, and build Duxter out into a major player in the game industry.

Adam has been recognized by The White House as one of the top entrepreneurs under 30. He regularly speaks at startup & game conferences. He is also a contributor to online publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur.com, and Social Media Today.

Elisa Ballard

While a Dallas native, Elisa moved to Denver to pursue her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Denver focusing on management, economics and Italian as an undergrad and focusing on marketing and finance while completing her MBA. During her academic years, Elisa assisted in organizing several large events for the university known as the Voices of Experience with speakers like CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz and worked at a B2B PR firm providing media relation support.

Upon graduating from the University of Denver, she began working in New York City for Starcom MediaVest Group, a Publicis Groupe subsidiary, as a brand and market research strategist. She was relocated to Chicago, the North American headquarters, and continued her work as a Manager supporting the Microsoft and Kraft clients along with several new business and pro bono projects. Since working at Starcom, Elisa has moved into a freelance role offering company’s support in strategic partnerships, brand develop and concept creation. 

By living and working in so many cities throughout the United States, Elisa has developed a strong understanding of local marketing but understands the benefits of internationalization as a dual-citizen with Italy and the US. In the last several months, she has developed an international trade agreement between an Italian client and US supplier identifying sales strategy and transportation logistics. Furthermore, Elisa is also developing a food and beverage concept of her own focusing on Slow Food and Italian fair. 

Elisa is also dedicating her time as a volunteer for large global events such as the Specialty Coffee Association of America convention in Seattle and the World Food Expo in Milan. 

Eric Alfuth

Mr. Alfuth has advised and acted as an interim Chief Financial Officer for start-ups in the areas of bioinformatics, industrial technology, oil and gas, telecommunications, and real estate.  In his day job he has served as the Chief Financial Officer for a public and a private oil and gas company, ran a distressed credit hedge fund, managed a $4 billion investment portfolio for AIG, and was a sell-side equity research analyst. 

He received both an undergraduate degree in Finance and an MBA from Texas A&M University and currently serves on the advisory board for the Texas A&M MBA Program.

Luke Marvel

After graduating from Pepperdine University in 2008, Luke began his career in Corporate Finance and Accounting as a Senior Financial Analyst for Raytheon in Dallas, Texas and was a member of their selective Leadership Development Program. Although the career in finance was exciting and challenging, Luke felt called to leave the safety of a corporate environment and pursue his passion: the real estate industry.

His real estate career began with the purchase of his first two investment properties in College Station, but it did not stop there. He quickly became convinced that he needed to follow his passion and help others successfully navigate one of the largest and most pivotal financial investments they would make.

While he started dealing in residential sales, he was quickly approached by Heath Phillips and The Barracks in the effort of joining The Barracks team to create and implement the on-site Leasing and Property Management business model as a way to directly increase the attractiveness to investors, as well as, the number of townhomes sold each year.  In the first year, sales increased by over 400% and Luke has continued to run the Leasing and Management portion of the business since and also took over the Sales portion of the business in 2013.

At The Barracks, Luke’s influence and experience bring insight to the Sales and Management division of the business. His guidance over and execution of the townhome sales have set records and his marketing of the community continues to create a powerful, organic, grass-roots buzz that has made The Barracks so successful.

Meanwhile, Luke has also been busy building his own personal real estate portfolio to approximately 50 properties, has been active in all aspects of real estate, including flipping, remodeling, new residential construction projects, and more recently into improving commercial projects.

Luke and his wife Brittany live in College Station with 4 dogs and a baby girl on the way. Luke enjoys travel, a good craft beer (or two), hanging out with his wife and being an active member of the entrepreneurial community.  He is also known to keep up the office morale with an occasional face-plant while wakeboarding or while showcasing his dance moves in a bear suit.

Joseph Licata

Joe Licata is the in-house lawyer and finance/strategy catch-all at BuildASign, an ecommerce and tech company focused on custom print products that actually makes most of the products it sells. BuildASign has operations in the US, Canada, and Europe.

As the in-house lawyer Joe mostly tries not to be a bottleneck and to stay out of the way of the product folks. On the finance and strategy side of things Joe works on lots of business decisions both big and small. When and what capital equipment to buy, where and how the company expands, and generally crunching numbers to figure out how we've done, how we're doing, and where we can do better. 

Previously Joe worked in private practice as a litigator in a variety of O&G, insurance, contract, and tort matters. He has advised or partnered in a small number of startup stage businesses in sectors ranging from gas-to-liquids technology and critical access hospitals to feral hog extermination. Before law school Joe worked for an investment bank focused on healthcare. Joe has a BS from Texas A&M and a JD from SMU, where he was a Walsh Scholar. He lives in Austin. 

Dave Bell

Dave Bell is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gummicube. In this role, Dave is responsible for overseeing the business strategy for the company, driving growth and market development. Dave is a pioneer of the mobile entertainment industry with more than 15 years of experience publishing, marketing and distributing mobile applications and games across carrier, direct to consumer and app store channels.

Prior to co-founding Gummicube, Dave was a member of Playphone’s founding team and served as SVP, Business Development & Strategy. Playphone was one of the first direct-to-consumer channels for mobile entertainment, growing to $100M in annual revenue during his tenure. Prior to Playphone, Dave was the founder of Chasma Publishing. Chasma was one of the first publishers of mobile games in the world and was responsible for releasing some of the first downloadable apps on carrier networks. Chasma merged with Kayak Interactive and was sold to Oberon Media in 2005.

Dave serves on the Board of Directors of Kimera Systems, enjoys advising early state startups and frequently participates in speaking engagements at industry events. At age nineteen, Dave was recognized by Inc. Magazine, Fortune Magazine and CNNMoney for his early role in the mobile start-up community.

Chris Wilke

Chris has a passion for anyone willing to brave it on their own.

A computer engineering graduate from Texas A&M University, Chris was employee #2 at a small startup that grew to 30 people before being acquired by a NASDAQ company.

From 1995 to 2013, Chris played many roles in the business.  Starting as a programmer, he became the Director of Development, VP of Development and served as CTO for over three years.  During that time, he represented the software countless times all over of the United States, Europe and Japan.

Chris now serves as VP of Product Management for an upstream oil and gas software firm.

Although he is a technologist at heart, he has come to appreciate that Organizational Readiness combined with a rock-solid go-to-market plan can make the difference.

Jaime Raijman

Known as the founder of the Pet Rock 2.0, Jaime recently raised nearly $500,000 on Kickstarter for his Tungsten Cube project.  As President / Co-Founder of Forge Solid & Co-Founder of Esington, Jaime is passionate about creating unique UX designs and strategic marketing support with focus on crowdfunding expertise.  

Additionally, Jaime loves mentoring creative, out of the box thinkers and entrepreneurs to help them grow and gain funding through his consulting agency, Prime Start.  Jaime also has expertise in introducing creative ways to approach a product to find a perfect market fit.  He has helped small startups and big businesses find their niche and skyrocket their growth.

Jaime has a unique ability to drive engagement and gain attention through marketing, design and a customer-centric approach.  Prior to launching his own businesses, Jaime worked in the data-rich field of bioinformatics as the lead visual designer/UX/UI designer and lead marketing director, making complex data accessible to the customer.

Before jumping into business market strategy, Jaime worked and studied in architectural design and illustration.  He has been published in health journal articles for genetic studies, McGraw-Hill Business book illustrations, and Yahoo!.com as the founder of the Pet Rock 2.0.  Jaime’s experience with tradeshow and exhibit design helped him develop the ability to capture an audience and find a company’s uniqueness, resulting in some of the largest international trade show successes.

When not designing, marketing, or mentoring, Jaime enjoys creating YouTube video tutorials for various software, computer building / design, playing guitar and online gaming.  Jaime lives in Houston, Texas and works in The Woodlands, Texas.

Blaz Kos

Blaz Kos has spent past ten years of his career developing start-up, entrepreneurship and venture capital ecosystem in Slovenia and Central and Eastern Europe. He establish university incubator at the biggest university in Slovenia, established first and biggest angel network in Slovenia, helped to establish business angel network in Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia, raised 6.000.000 mio € seed VC fund and helped to film Slovenian Dragons' Den. He has also established first co-working space on 7 locations and was in management board of the biggest technology park in Slovenia (66.000 m2).

Blaz Kos is currently acting as COO of Initiative Start:up Slovenia, which runs two public national start-up accelerators Start:up Geek House and Go:Global Slovenia and is organizing one of the biggest two day CEE conference for entrepreneurs PODIM. He is also director of consulting firm VentureLab (his private consulting company), adviser at Business Angels of Slovenia Club and professional web content author of the www.AgileLeanLife.com blog.

He had also co-organized and lectured at more than 600 events, mentored over 200 start-ups, written over 1,000 pages on entrepreneurship, and worked on 30+ investments. Blaz Kos is also Ready for Equity Accredited trainer for business angels and entrepreneurs.

Justin Siegel

Justin Siegel is an entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder and CEO of two successful mobile entertainment companies. The first company, JSmart Technologies, was a pioneer in mobile games. It was acquired by the SK Group in 2004. The second company, JNJ Mobile, backed by General Catalyst Partners and Softbank Capital, built one of the first mobile social networks. Today it is one of Android’s top grossing social applications, and a leading mobile platform for HTML5 games.

Justin is the founder and Managing Partner of ATX Angel, LLC, which invests in early stage companies. He is also a Techstars mentor and advisor to Boston Seed Capital.

Asim Zubair

Entrepreneurial global executive with 20+ years of Venture Development, Product Management, and Marketing Strategy experience geared towards maximizing shareholder value creation. Expertise span across start-up ventures, product management, sales and partnering strategy, and optimizing P&L. Expertise leveraged to build, manage, and grow new business ventures, develop products, market and sell product and solution portfolios, manage relationships, sell and deliver consulting engagements, and build and manage motivated global entrepreneurial teams in time-to-market environments.

Itai Tsiddon

Facetune, the #6 most downloaded paid iOS app of 2014, is a powerful yet simple to use portrait editing app, enabling non-professional users to quickly retouch their portraits to magazine-level perfection. Facetune consistently performs as one of the best-selling paid apps in the world, with millions of paid downloads. Facetune for iOS has been ranked as the #1 Paid App in over 100 countries, and Facetune for Android took one week from launch in July 2014 to become the #1 ranked P&V App in 113 countries. Facetune has been featured by Apple, Google and Microsoft numerous times, including in Apple's Best of 2013, and Apple & Google's Best of 2014. The app continuously receives superb reviews from users and media, including Bloomberg TV, BBC, NYTimes, W.S.J. and Huffington Post. Examples can be seen on Youtube. 

Facetune was 100% bootstrapped by Lightricks,an Israeli company founded by five entrepreneurs with experience in both industry and academia (including 4 CS PhDs with experience in Google, Adobe, and Microsoft research) to bring state of the art image processing technology to mobile and enable the creator in everyone. Lightricks has also been featured as the Facebook case study for mobile user acquisition, as well as at Facebook's F8 conference. Lightricks scaled to 24 employees in two years, solely on profits and with external investment to date. It is currently developing additional cutting edge mobile products which have sparked interest from several of the world's largest corporations.

A few weeks ago we launched Enlight for iOS, the most comprehensive image processing suite for mobile. It has since reached the #1 paid rank in 90 countries including the US, and was featured by Apple as the marquee Editors Choice, globally, for the entire first two weeks.

Some media coverage below: 
Recode, Techcrunch,TheNextWeb, Venturebeat, Mashable, Macworld

David Hess

David K. Hess (Dave) brings 20 years of executive management, software development, computer security, computer administration, networking and entrepreneurial experience and expertise to the founding of Data Bakery – delivering turn-key custom software services and solutions. Over the past 15 years, Dave has founded two startups and been one of the first five employees in two others. With his experience as a CTO, Dave has worked on large scale service delivery, telecommunication and software product development and understands what it takes to start and operate a company. At Data Bakery, Dave is applying his product development and startup experience to helping clients develop their own solutions and also participates in the startup community through mentoring/advising.

Areas of expertise:
o Technology evaluation, selection and development
o System architecture
o Product and customer development
o Intellectual property

PAUL O'BRIEN

In 2010, O’Brien relocated to Austin from Silicon Valley where he had launched a series of startups in local search, crowdsourcing, web-based accounting, payments, and social intelligence.  In Texas, Paul advises startups in funding, marketing, business development, project management, and product management, and spends most of his time as the CMO of the Venture Capital firm MicroVentures.

Notably O'Brien is a seasoned marketer having directed Advertising Solutions for Yahoo! and later running online marketing for HP’s eCommerce business. From there he led the early growth of startups such as Outright.com (Acquired by GoDaddy) and Zvents (Acquired by eBay’s Stubhub). That work, a reflection of Paul’s impact in e-commerce, marketing, entrepreneurship, and search, in both B2B and B2C markets, overshadows Paul's technical expertise having consulted with various web properties, designing and developing web sites, online communities, e-commerce stores, and web services. Paul was featured in the book, Online Marketing Heroes, and continues to blog at seobrien.com.