Speakers
Again, this year, Arctic15 will have some of the most sought after speakers in the startup communities on stage sharing their advice and experience. The requirement of each speaker is the immense experience they bring and share with the community.
More speakers will be added to the list below running up to the conference. During the two days, we will have some 45+ speakers on stage.
If you have a suggestion for a speaker, feel free to nominate one by e-mailing us at info@arctic15.com with an explanation why this speaker would be a good choice for the listeners.
Niklas Adalberth, Founder & Deputy CEO, Klarna
Niklas Adalberth is Deputy CEO of Klarna, a leading European online payments service. He founded Klarna in 2005 together with his fellow students Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Victor Jacobsson. Their idea was to provide a frictionless payment solution that would allow buyers and sellers to interact with each other as safely and simply as possible. In the meantime, Klarna has grown into a multinational with more than 700 dedicated employees. In December 2011, the company received $155M of financing from DST Global and General Atlantic to fuel its rapid growth and expand to new markets. At Arctic15, Niklas will share the success story behind Klarna.
Visit klarna.com for more information and follow Niklas on Twitter: @NiklasAdalberth
Marko Ahtisaari, Executive Vice President of Design, Nokia
Marko Ahtisaari joined Nokia in 2009 and heads the Design team. He is responsible for user experience and industrial design at Nokia.
Prior to joining Nokia, Marko was the CEO and co-founder of Dopplr, the online social atlas for smart travel. In 2006-2008, he was the Head of Brand & Design at Blyk, the free mobile service for young people. Previously, Marko worked at Nokia as Director of Design Strategy and held management positions in corporate strategy and venturing since 2002.
Henrik Berggren, Founder & CEO, Readmill
Henrik Berggren is a 32-year-old entrepreneur from Sweden who recently relocated to Berlin to build Readmill — a social platform for readers. Readmill makes sharing of highlights and reading experiences very simple. This makes it easy for friends and followers to find their next book to read through strong and personal recommendations.
Johan Brenner, General Partner
Johan is an experienced entrepreneur and investor in technology and growth companies. Recently, he spent more than 4 years as a General Partner at Balderton Capital (previously Benchmark Europe) working with investments such as LiveBookings, Habbo Hotel, Rebtel, Zopa and others. Prior to joining Balderton, Johan has been involved in building several successful companies as an entrepreneur, investor and board member, such as Jobline, E*Trade Nordic, DIBS and Tradera. Johan has also held various executive positions with the Kinnevik Group and MTG, and spent 10 years with the ABB Group in various executive positions.
Lars Buch, Partner & Managing Director of Startupbootcamp Copenhagen
Lars Buch, Partner and Managing Director of Startupbootcamp Copenhagen. +20years with Hardware Development and 13years with Mobiles at Nokia building new technology, products and high-performing teams, latest as Head of Symbian Smartphones Copenhagen. Build the “Nokia Bridge Program Incubator” in Copenhagen and then globally during 2011-2012 and helped more than 60 new spinoff startups to life. Left Nokia this summer and joined Startupbootcamp.org, The European startup accelerator, re-launching the program in Copenhagen focusing 100% on “Mobility” and game-changing ideas to make life go mobile.
Horace Dediu, Founder, Asymco.com
Horace Dediu is the founder and author of Asymco. His work has been cited 400,000 times and is followed by over 30,000 professionals.
He writes about the mobile industry and the changes taking place there. Asymco has been cited numerous times by The Economist and other respected publications. He is also one of the most accurate "non-professional" (by industry standards) analysts on Apple and it's quarterly financial performance.
You can read more from http://asymco.com and @asymco on Twitter.
Floris Dekker, Co-founder & CPO, Gidsy
Floris is a co-founder and the Chief Product Officer at Gidsy. Originally from the Netherlands, Floris has a background in design and is passionate about empowering micro-economies and cultural diversity. He also runs the popular design blog Little Big Details.
Gidsy is place where anyone in the world can explore, offer and book things to do. Examples include a pilot offering 60-minute sightseeing flights over Berlin, a retired police officer who shows people around the Red Light District in Amsterdam, and an amateur cook in New York that organizes in home cooking classes.
Gidsy has raised financing highly respected investors such as Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon), Ashton Kutcher, Sunstone Capital, Index Ventures and Matt Stinchcomb (Head of Marketing at Etsy).
Henrik Dillman, CEO & Founder, Mancx
Evangelist for the distributed economy and peer-to-peer business models. Firmly believe that we haven't seen anything yet! Business background from Booz&Co. Investment Manager at JCE Group. Start-up CEO in ventures including SMB billing solutions and offshore surveying. Transformed online accounting for small business in the Northern Europe 2005-2010.
Aman Ghei, Accel Partners
Aman joined Accel in 2010 and focuses on investments in software, Internet and digital media companies. Prior to joining Accel, Aman worked at Credit Suisse Securities in San Francisco and London, advising clients in the Technology space. He has worked on transactions including the sale of Ogone to Summit Partners, bond offerings for Nokia and Interxion, and IPOs for NXP and 3PAR.
Kristjan Hiiemaa, Founder & CEO, Erply
Kristjan Hiiemaa is the founder and CEO of Erply. Erply has been named as one of the hottest startups coming from Europe. In September 2009, the company won the Seedcamp week and from there on, its growth has been extremely impressive.
Erply is a point-of-sale and invetory software for small and medium sized businesses. You can find more on Erply at their website.
Taavet Hinrikus, Co-Founder, TransferWise
Taavet Hinrikus is the co-founder of the crowd-sourced online money transfer service TransferWise. TransferWise, based out of London, has saved its users more than half million euros in bank fees since being launched in 2011.
Previously Taavet was the first employee of Skype and spent 7 years building various parts of the company and its products (mobile, hardware, platform & strategy). Additionally he is an angel investor and advisor (OMGPOP, Tweetdeck, betaworks, blip.tv, Mendeley, etc).
Jussi Hurmola, Co-Founder & CEO at Jolla
Jussi Hurmola has an extensive career from Nokia. He is one of the founders and also the CEO of Jolla Mobile. Jolla Mobile is preparing to launch its MeeGo-based device and a new app ecosystem.
Sverker Ingre, Nordic Business Area Manager, iZettle
Sverker Ingre is Business Area Manager Nordic at iZettle, meaning that Sverker is ultimately responsible for the company's business development and operations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland.
Prior coming to iZettle, Sverker worked for MTG for seven years, where he was responsible for geographical expansion/roll out for new online services.
Aldas Kirvaitis, Co-Founder & CEO, Cherry Media
Aldas Kirvaitis is a co-founder and CEO of Cherry Media, the dominant online group buying sites operator in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and one of the largest e-commerce companies in the Baltics. Its flagship properties include beta.lt, grupinis.lt, cherry.ee, cherry.lv and citylife.lv. Aldas also serves as vice-chairman at Slevomat Group, the local e-commerce leader in the entire CEE region.
Before co-founding Cherry Media in 2010 and joining Slevomat Group in 2011, Aldas Kirvaitis belonged to the top management team at Forticom Group, a DST and Tiger Global-backed operator and developer of leading online social networking sites in the Baltics, Russian Federation and Poland, which later got merged into Mail.ru Group. Aldas is also an active investor in a number of successful startups.
Phil Libin, CEO, Evernote
Phil Libin, CEO, EvernotePhil Libin is the CEO of Evernote, the service that's helping millions of people worldwide remember everything of value in their daily lives. He is an entrepreneur and executive who has led two Internet companies from the very beginning to proven commercial success, and helped three others through rapid growth. Prior to joining Evernote, Phil founded and served as president of CoreStreet, currently one of the top companies providing smart credential and identity management technologies to governments and large corporations throughout the world. CoreStreet was aquired by ActivIdentity (ACTI) in 2009. Previously, Phil was founder and CEO of Engine 5, a leading Boston-based Internet software development company acquired by Vignette Corporation (VIGN) in 2000, where he went on to serve as principal architect and chief technologist for applications.
Inka Mero, Co-Founder & Chairwoman of KoppiCatch Startup Accelerator
KoppiCatch is a Helsinki based startup investor, accelerator and innovator company specialized in media, commerce and analytics domains across the consumer internet and mobile technologies, solutions and services space. Today, Koppi operates as a leading player in the Scandinavian seed stage startup –scene and one of the Vigo- accelerators, with 10 companies in portfolio.
Inka's passion is in building new businesses and in currently she holds board seats and management roles in Finnish Industry Investments Ltd (FII/TESI), Cabforce.com, Meetin.gs, GWS Staffpoint, DesignStory and IndoorAtlas Oy. Her earlier experience covers leading startups, international grow businesses and VC investing in companies like Apaja, Nokia, Digia, and Sonera in Helsinki and TelAviv.
Vitaly Rubstein, Founder and Partner, Rubylight
Vitaly is an experienced and successful tech entrepreneur, who in 2010 founded a unique technology and investment fund, Rubylight. The fund's business approach is based on three keywords: Experience, Technology, Investments. Rubylight offers its professional tech team, proprietary technology and financial funding to help fast growing consumer internet startups to scale and expand globally.
Prior to Rubylight, Vitaly was co-founder and CEO of Forticom Group. Forticom was the largest network of social networks in CEE with more than 100m active monthly users in total. The group owned and operated ODNOKLASSNIKI.RU, NASZA-KLASA.PL, ONE.LT and ONE.LV. In November 2010 Forticom was acquired by MAIL.RU GROUP (DST).
Vitaly has graduated with his MBA degree from Darden Business School, University of Virginia.
Ole Ruch, Managing Director Northern Europe, Airbnb,
Ole is the Managing Director for Airbnb in Northern Europe. Previous to that, he developed international markets for Groupon, expanding their business in East-Asia and in Russia as part of the executive management team. Ole has from his early days as a student been founding and growing start-ups, and thoroughly enjoys the excitement of building great companies.
Ole holds a Master in Management from Imperial College Business School in London. Prior to that he studied entrepreneurship at Boston University and law at the University of Oslo. After living on the road for most of his adult life, Ole has become a travel addict, always looking to explore new places, unlocking their secrets and experiencing the local flavours.
Elise Sass, Startup Wise Guys
Elise takes care of Estonian first accelerator program Startup Wise Guys, pushes teams, invites mentors and organizes activities. Elise joined the startup scene in 2007 as a community manager in a social network her brother had founded. By now she has been part of several other startups. Elise helped to launch Garage48 hackathons in Estonia and organized several ones in Africa.
Mikkel Svane, Founder & CEO, Zendesk
Mikkel Svane founded Zendesk in 2007 with the goal of making customer service not suck anymore. Today, the company is the epicenter of a customer service revolution, with more than 15,000 organizations worldwide, from Groupon to Hulu to Tumblr, using Zendesk to build tight relationships with their customers.
Corrado Tomassoni, Manager, EMEA Developer Network
Corrado leads the PayPal Developer Network team, coordinating the Developers and Technology Startups activities across Europe, Middle East and Africa.
He is “Seedcamp”, “StartupWeekend”, "StartupBootcamp", “Le Camping” and “Launch48” mentor across EMEA and has been speaker in several events like Droidcon Berlin (GER), WebIT Expo (CEE), AppsMania (ISR), Mobility 2012 (ISR), StartupDay (SWE), Mobile Monday (FRA), Minibar (UK),…
Before joining PayPal, he worked in the “Developer and Platform Evangelism” group at Microsoft where, as NextWeb Lead, he led the Web Technologies stack adoption evangelism activities with top customers and partners in Italy. Previously he has been Technology Consultant for Accenture and, more recently, he drove a Technology startup focused on Digital Brand Management for global celebrities, incubated by a Startup Accelerator and funded by a VC.
He currently holds a Master in “Business and Corporate Strategy” from SDA Bocconi - School of Management, a BEng in “Computer Engineering” from Polytechnic of Milan and a BMus from a National Conservatory of Music.
Nicolai Wadstrom, Founder & CEO, BootstrapLabs
Nicolai Wadstrom, born 1973, is a serial entrepreneur resident in Silicon Valley, and the founder of BootstrapLabs. He founded his first startup company in 1995, and have been starting and running a number of startup companies since then, ranging from software, gaming, Internet, media and professional services. Angel investor and adviser to Internet, Software, Mobile and Digital Media startups in Europe and Silicon Valley, including BootstrapLabs portfolio companies such as Prezi, Zerply, Audiodraft, Mancx and Witsbits. His focus is on product and technology development with Internet, Mobile, Software/Cloud and Media in particular. He also have experience from technology and management consulting for some of the major brands in the world.
Tove Westlund, Co-Founder & CEO, ShapeUp Club
Tove Westlund is the CEO of ShapeUp Club, northern Europe's fastest growing weight- and health service. Tove founded ShapeUp Club back in 2008 together with Martin Wählby when they were both studying.
The company that is self-funded is growing fast and has now more than 2 million downloads of the app and is increasing with more than 5000 new customers daily.
Antti Ylimutka, Co-CEO/Captain, Startup Sauna
Antti is nowadays the Captain of Startup Sauna. He started his entrepreneurial career by joining Europe's biggest student-run entrepreneurship community, Aalto Entrepreneurship Society. He was given 6 months to learn enough to be able to run Summer of Startups, a 10 week program for first time student and researcher -founders. It was a big success and he joined Startup Sauna as the Wingman to help scale operations and involve more people into the program. Apart from startup madness, Antti has worked previously in B2C, B2B -sales. Playing guitar, listening to music and cracking awful jokes are his passion.