Alistair Croll has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. He’s worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time. In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant, and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies. Alistair is the author of three books on web performance, analytics, and IT operations, and is currently working on Lean Analytics , a book on using data to build a better business faster that's due out in March from O'Reilly Media. He lives in… Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at Solve For Interesting . Alistair chairs O'Reilly's Strata Conference .
Ben Yoskovitz is a serial entrepreneur with 15+ years experience in web businesses. He started his first company in 1996 while completing university. In 2007 he co-founded Standout Jobs, a B2B software company in the recruitment space. The company raised $1.8M from venture and angel investors. In 2010 after exiting Standout Jobs, Ben co-founded Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator that provided funding and up to 1-year of hands-on mentorship to 5 startups. Year One Labs followed a Lean Startup program, making it the first accelerator to formalize such a structure. Three of five companies graduated from Year One Labs and went on to raise follow on financing. A great deal of Ben’s… experience and thought leadership around Lean Startup and analytics emerged during this time. Ben has been blogging since 2006. The “Instigator Blog” ( http://instigatorblog.com ) is recognized as one of the top blogs on startups and entrepreneurship. Ben is also an active mentor to numerous startups and other accelerator programs, including FounderFuel (a TechStars-like program in Montreal.) He regularly speaks at startup conferences and events, including the Michigan Lean Startup Conference, Internet Marketing Conference, etc.