Speakers

Barbara Byrne

Vice Chairman, Lehman Brothers

Barbara Byrne is a Vice Chairman of Lehman Brothers, a leading provider of global financial services. She is the first woman to achieve this Senior Executive position at Lehman Brothers in the 158 year history of the firm. Ms. Byrne, a 28 year veteran of Lehman Brothers Investment Banking Division, is credited for her role in developing longstanding partnerships with major corporate clients on behalf of Lehman Brothers.

Based in New York, she is chairman of the Firm’s Senior Client Council and is responsible for leading Lehman Brothers’ relationships with a diverse group of corporate clients, including GE, IBM, Altria, EMC, HP, US Steel, Microsoft, Cisco and Williams, amongst others. She has held senior management positions in the Energy and Technology Investment Banking Groups. In addition to her roles in these industry groups, Ms. Byrne served as the senior member of Lehman’s Equity Restructuring Group, focusing on the development of strategic equity restructuring techniques to meet client needs. Over the course of her career, Ms. Byrne has led Lehman Brothers’ teams on diverse financing and strategic advisory transactions as wide ranging as representing Digital Equipment in its 1998 merger with Compaq, to advising the Williams Companies on its 2002-2005 liquidity restructuring. In 2007, she lead the teams advising Altria on the $62 billion spin-off of Kraft, as well as the pending spin-off of Phillip Morris International, the $1.1 billion initial public offering of VMWare’s carve out from EMC, and represented GE on the $11.6 billion sale of its plastics business to SABIC.

Ms. Byrne participates in industry conferences as a forum leader on strategic issues as well as trends. She is a frequent speaker on behalf of women in business, finance and leadership. In addition, she has provided commentary on strategic financial restructurings for news organizations such as Fortune, Forbes, Money Line and CNBC.

Ms. Byrne graduated from Mount Holyoke College magna cum laude in 1976 and serves on its board of trustees. She resides in Princeton, New Jersey with her husband, Tom Byrne, and their four children, Meaghan 20, Erin 16, Brendan 15 and Kelly 13.

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Emanuel Pleitez

Equities Division, Goldman Sachs

Emanuel Pleitez is a financial analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. in the Securities Division in San Francisco. Prior to working for the investment bank, he was special assistant to current Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa during his L.A. City Council tenure and his Mayoral candidacy. During the John Kerry-John Edwards Presidential campaign in 2004, Emanuel served as a field organizer in Missouri and Florida. Previously, Emanuel had interned for U.S. Senators Tom Daschle and Hillary Clinton on the Senate Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee. Aside from his political experience, Emanuel has worked with the Quest Scholars Program at Stanford University to develop partnerships nationally with summer programs and school districts serving low-income high school students. He has also served as a mentor for the Center for a New Generation of the Peninsula Boys & Girls Club, an intern for the venture philanthropy organization, Full Circle Fund, and currently serves on the Young Professional Advisory Board for for voter outreach organization, Voto Latino. A former National Hispanic Heritage Youth Award Winner, he continues serving the Hispanic Heritage Foundation as a member of the Foundation's Business Advisory Committee.

Emanuel graduated with a B.A. in Urban Studies from Stanford University where he was a recipient of the Jerry I. Porras Visionary Leadership Award and the Cecilia and Tony Burciaga Community Development Award. He recently helped found the Alumni Foundation of his alma mater, Woodrow Wilson High School in Los Angeles, and serves on its board. Other civic appointments include member of the Board of Directors for the League of Women Voters of San Francisco. Emanuel was born and raised in east Los Angeles.

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Erin Kellerhalls

Asst. Director for MBA Admissions, Stanford University

Erin Kellerhals relocated to California after spending childhood moving between Texas college towns and Seoul, Korea. She works for the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, where she serves as an Assistant Director for MBA Admissions and is responsible for the program’s outreach to women. Erin earned her undergraduate degree in Literature at Scripps College and her master’s degree in German at Stanford University.

Erin is dedicated to the improvement of community through social change and education. She serves on the Board of Directors for C.E.O. Women—Creating Economic Opportunities for Women and was a member of the Development Board of Special Olympics Southern California.

Erin has lived and traveled in Asia and Europe extensively. She has taught, translated and edited for Inlingua Language Institute, ABN AMRO Bank and Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Germany, as well as Robert Mondavi Winery, Stanford University and American Creative Team in California.

She lives in San Francisco.

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Vineet Buch

Principal, BlueRun Ventures

Vineet Buch, Partner at BlueRun Ventures (BRV), focuses on Consumer Internet, Mobile Services and Enterprise Software, as well as on BlueRun’s investments in India. Vineet joined BlueRun in 2005 after co-founding Like.com (fka Riya), one of BRV’s portfolio companies. He is a board member or board observer at Like.com, Coupa Software, Zmanda, uGenie and Slide.

Before Like.com, Vineet was a Director in Oracle’s Server Technologies Division. He was also an early employee at Corio, a leading Application Service Provider delivering enterprise applications as a service that IPO’d in June 2000 and was acquired by IBM in 2005.

Before Corio, Vineet was a Practice Manager in Oracle’s Technology Strategy consulting group. Vineet has an MS in Computer Science from Cornell University and a Bachelors in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

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Mark Yoshitake

Lead Technology Program Manager, YouTube and Google

Mark Yoshitake is the Senior Technology Program Manager for Content Partnerships, directing the technology and operations development within the Partner Solutions Organization for YouTube and Google. Mark joined Google in 2003 and has been responsible for incubating and scaling technology and operations for Google's strategic content partnerships for Google Maps/Earth, Google Video, Google Book Search, and Google News. He currently leads the team responsible for incubating YouTube's partner solutions for video syndication, mobile, and content management. Previously, Mark was at Microsoft, where he was a member of the product team responsible for Windows Vista's next generation wireless netwoking platforms and in-home media communications standards. Mark holds a Bachelors of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania in Computer Science and a concentration equivalent in Finance from the Wharton School.

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William F. Abrams

Managing Partner, Bingham McCutchen

William F. Abrams is a Partner and Co-Chair of the Intellectual Property Practice Group at Bingham McCutchen LLP, an international law firm that represents businesses worldwide. Abrams is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on technology and the law, and the law and business of technology, innovation and developing businesses. Abrams is counsel to a wide range of businesses and investors in the tech sector, including start-ups, pre-IPOs, and public companies. Abrams received his BA with Honors from Stanford in 1976.

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Seth Sternberg

CEO and Co-Founder, meebo

Seth is the co-founder and CEO of meebo.com, the live interaction platform of the web. Prior, Seth attended Stanford Business School and launched meebo with Elaine Wherry and Sandy Jen after a summer internship at Warburg Pincus. Seth left Stanford to pursue meebo, which serves over 20 million people monthly. meebo has raised $3.5m from Sequoia Capital and $9m from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Seth previously worked in IBM's Corporate Development group as an M&A Lead and is a graduate of Yale University, where he majored in Political Science. Seth enjoys tennis and rollerblading and is an avid private pilot.

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Alicia Morga

CEO, Consorte Media

Prior to founding Consorte Media, Alicia was an investment professional focused on venture opportunities in the technology sector for The Carlyle Group's U.S. Venture Fund. She also worked at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, where she focused on early-stage software investments. While at Hummer Winblad, Alicia served as VP of Operations for Napster and CEO of venture fund Zero Gravity Internet Group. Alicia has served on the boards of technology companies such as Ingenio, Ventaso, Secure Elements, Archetype-Solutions, Applied Semantics, Menerva Technologies and Discovercast. Alicia has also been a corporate attorney for Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. She started her career as an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs & Co. Alicia holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a B.A. from Stanford University.

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Paul Kim

VP Marketing, Mozilla

Paul is the Vice President of marketing for Mozilla, which makes the award-winning Firefox web browser. Firefox is the second most popular web browser in the world, with about 20% worldwide market share, over 150 million active users and more than 40 unique language versions available. Paul directs marketing activity and strategy for Mozilla worldwide, empowering and leading a team of professional marketers.

Paul joined Mozilla in 2005, and helped launch Firefox 1.5 and Firefox 2. Before Mozilla, he marketed Creative Suite, InDesign and PageMaker for Adobe Systems. He first became involved with web development and Internet marketing in 1996, as an independent web producer for Bank of America, CMP Media, Ziff Davis and Organic. Previously, Paul co-founded and served as chief marketing officer for Insurgency Pictures, a start-up television advertising company based in San Francisco, California. He also held staff positions as a writer and product manager at Spectrum HoloByte, which he left to join the Milarepa Fund as a web producer.

Paul received an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and an AB in English from Stanford. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and daughter.

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