Success: A Survival Guide

A twelve year system operations veteran, Adam is a founding partner at HJK Solutions. HJK helps startups build automated, scaleable, and repeatable infrastructures using open-source tools.

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Shayan is CEO of Zoosk, the largest social dating destination, where he is busy revolutionizing online dating by leveraging social media. Prior to Zoosk, Shayan spent five years at Microsoft working on a variety of products. He holds an MS in CS from University of Maryland, and an MBA from University of Washington.

Brian Moon has been working with the LAMP platform since before it was called LAMP. He is a programmer and systems administrator for dealnews.com. He has made a few small contributions to the PHP project and been a casual participant in discussions on the PHP internals list. He is the founder and lead developer of the Phorum project, the first PHP/MySQL message board ever created.

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Don MacAskill is the co-founder, CEO, and Chief Geek at SmugMug. Back in the mists of time, Don built the network that powered eBay, Hotmail, and fatbrain. He lost his mind and spent an exhilarating few years making video games, but found it again with SmugMug. With no outside investment, he bootstrapped SmugMug into a business that’s profitable and growing – but most of all, fun!

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John has worked in systems operations for over ten years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster.com and Flickr.com, where he currently manages the Operations Engineering group.

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Michael T. Halligan is a serial entrepreneur with over 5 years of experience in IT architecture and operations. His primary role is chief technical officer of BitPusher, LLC, a managed application hosting firm based out of San Francisco and Seattle. He is currently starting up a new Web application providing semantic search services to the convention industry. He previously held architectural and management positions at start-ups including Kontiki, Napster, and Register.com.

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Frank Mashraqi is a renowned speaker and scalability advisor to several startups. He comes to Give Real with nearly a decade of scalability, engineering management and monetization experience. Prior to Give Real, Frank was Director of Business Operations and Technical Strategy for Fotolog where he played a pivotal role in helping Fotolog scale to become the 13th largest website on the Internet (Alexa: based on traffic) and the third most actively used social network in the world (ComScore). Frank holds a BBA in Accounting and a BS in Computer Information Systems.

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