UCLA Founder's School

Thank you to all of the attendees who showed up for this year's conference! The UCLA FS team would like to further thank the following organizations for their contributions and support towards the event:

UCLA Upsilon Pi Epsilon
UCLA ACM
UCLA Housing
Easton Technology Management Center at UCLA Anderson
Startup UCLA

Stay posted for hear early about next year's conference!

We have released our second wave of acceptances! Due to overwhelming demand, we will keep applications open until tomorrow, Friday May 11th at 12:00pm and release one more wave of acceptances. Don't miss out on this year's speakers! uclafs.com

The final speaker we will be hosting this year is Jessica Willison, Co-founder of Enrou, who will be talking alongside Ann Wang.
Bio: Jessica earned a Communication Studies degree from UCLA and has a background in fashion working at brands like Refinery29, Nordstrom and Reformation. Jessica was named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Social Entrepreneurship in 2016 and was the recipient of UCLA’s Recent Graduate Achievement Award in 2015.

Their talk will run from 11am-12pm.

If you have already been accepted, please don't forget to RSVP before we reach capacity!

Last day to apply! Applications close tonight at midnight. uclafs.com

Wrapping up with our speaker introductions, we would like to introduce Susie Kim, Cofounder of Pluto.
Bio: A multidisciplinary brand/product experience designer and full-stack marketer, Susie is Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Pluto Money, where she leads design, branding and marketing. Pluto is a mobile personal finance app that fuses behavioral science, contextual data and financial technology to help college students manage their money. Pluto was a part of QC FinTech Incubator 2016 cohort, Startup UCLA Accelerator 2015 cohort, won 2nd place at Startup Weekend Bay Area, and was a Global Startup Battle Startup Women Track finalist and Project Entrepreneur 2016 alumni.
Susie’s expertise as a creative strategist, experience designer and full-stack marketer has been seen at several Silicon Beach startups. In 2012, she founded a coffee roastery franchise by combining an artisan roastery with ceramic studio based on trends from the U.S. and adopting it to the Korean market, and generated over $1M in revenue.

Her talk, "Designing a product that everyone needed but no one wanted to build" will run from 2-3pm.

Don't miss out!

Only two days left to apply! Apply here: uclafs.com

Continuing with our guest speaker introductions, Alex Capecelatro is the founder and CEO of Josh.ai, a voice controlled home automation system with a focus on artificial intelligence. Josh.ai utilizes a proprietary natural language understanding (NLU) engine with state of the art home control integrations for a powerful smart home experience. Alex started his career as a research scientist for NASA, the Naval Research Lab, and later Sandia National Laboratory. He then ventured into consumer technology first with electric car manufacturer Fisker Automotive, then through founding two social software products "At The Pool" and "Yeti" with members in more than 120 countries. Alex's focus is at the intersection of elegant design, cutting-edge software, and purposeful hardware to offer transformational experiences. Alex received his engineering degree from UCLA and currently splits his time between LA and Denver.

His talk is titled, "Lessons learned in starting multiple venture backed startups" and will run from 2-3pm.

Our first wave of acceptances have been released! We will be closing applications on Thursday, May 10th and the second wave of acceptances will be out this Friday. Sign-up if you haven't already! uclafs.com

We are thrilled to introduce our opening keynote speaker, Alaina Percival.

Alaina Percival is Chief Executive Officer of Women Who Code, a global nonprofit dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. Under Alaina’s leadership, Women Who Code has grown to serve more than 137,000 women in 20 countries and 70 cities across the globe. This thriving movement offers more than 1,500 free technical and leadership events, per year. In addition to her role at Women Who Code, Percival is an accomplished tech speaker, appearing at WSJ.d Live, CodeMotion Milan, Grace Hopper, Columbia University’s Social Enterprise, MIT’s Venture Capital and Innovation Conference and more. Alaina has been interviewed by Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, and other publications across the globe to share her expertise on best practices for increasing diversity in tech. Prior to Women Who Code, Alaina worked at PUMA's headquarters in Germany, as well as Riviera Partners and Snip.it, acquired by Yahoo. Alaina is also an Angel Investor and CodePath Advisor.

Spots are almost full so apply soon!

Final notice to apply for Founder's School at uclafs.com before 4pm today! We will only have two waves of acceptances and the first one is coming out tonight at midnight.

Another one of our featured speakers attending Founder's School is Sanketh Katta.
Bio: Sanketh Katta is the CTO and co-founder of Smartcar. Smartcar is a Mountain View based startup building the connected car API for developers. Their platform allows you to do things such as unlock the doors or retrieve the odometer of a car using simple HTTP requests. Sanketh graduated from UC Berkeley and previously worked as a Data Scientist at LinkedIn.

He will be giving a talk called, "Engineer to Entrepreneur" and it will run from 1-2pm.

Sign-up while spots last!

Sign up for UCLA Founder's School at uclafs.com! We will be rolling out our first batch of acceptances this Friday, May 4th.

Our next featured speaker is Ann Wang, CEO and Cofounder of Enrou.
Bio: Ann grew up with a thirst for creative social innovation. Knowing that there had to be a way for people who believed in a better world like herself to make a lasting impact in their daily lives, Ann combined her passion for social activism and great storytelling with the business skills she learned growing up as the daughter of an entrepreneur to found Enrou.

Ann studied International Development at UCLA and has worked with activism organizations like the UN, Invisible Children and Charity Water. She won the first ever $400K Forbes Pitch Competition and named Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2016. Ann also serves as the youngest member of the UCLA Alumni Board, and was listed as LA’s top CEOs to watch in 2015.

Her fireside chat will run from 11am-12pm.

Spots are filling up fast so reserve a spot ASAP!

Sign up for UCLA Founder's School at uclafs.com!

Introducing one of our two keynote speakers, Omar Hamoui is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he focuses on partnering with early stage companies.
Bio: Prior to Sequoia, Omar spent 16 years as an entrepreneur, founding several companies in mobile software and services. While working towards his MBA at the Wharton School, he began to think more seriously about the untapped potential of mobile advertising, and created AdMob to address this growing opportunity. Omar served as AdMob's founder and CEO from January 2006 through the company's acquisition by Google in May 2010. He currently represents Sequoia on the boards of Kiwi, Kahuna, AppAnnie, Streamlabs, PicsArt, and Clutter. Omar holds a BS in Computer Science from UCLA.

Omar's fireside chat is titled, "From Entrepreneur to VC" and will run from 3:00-4:00pm.

Spots are limited so apply ASAP!

Founder's School is back this year on Saturday, May 12th! Registration is now open at uclafs.com.

Our next featured guest speaker is Grant Hosford.
Bio: Grant is the CEO and Co-founder of codeSpark, a venture backed EdTech company turning programming into play for young kids. In 3 year over 20 million kids have used codeSpark Academy, the company award wining app. Grant is an experienced entrepreneur who has been building successful digital businesses in Seattle and Los Angeles since 1999. Grant has deep expertise in new product launches, has lived on 4 continents and comes from a family of educators. Grant has a MA from The Fletcher School (Tufts University) and a BA from Claremont McKenna College. He lives near Pasadena with his author wife, 3 kid coders and a goofy pug.

He will be giving a talk titled, "codeSpark: building a global edtech company in LA".

Spots are limited so apply ASAP!

Founder's School is back this year on Saturday, May 12th! Registration is now open at uclafs.com.

Our first featured guest speaker is Harsh Vathsangam.
Bio: Harsh Vathsangam is the CEO of Moving Analytics. He is driven by a passion for taking technological solutions and applying them to benefit people’s lives. Prior to Moving Analytics, Harsh received his PhD from the University of Southern California working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and mobile health. He is the author of several peer-reviewed publications in machine learning and chronic disease management. He was a USC Annenberg Fellow and winner of USC PhD Achievement Award in recognition of outstanding academic research. He is also one of the inventors of iGest, an alternative communication device for children with cerebral palsy and winner of the NASCOMM award for social innovation. He holds an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

His talk will be titled, "Starting a Digital Health Startup: Lessons from the Battlefield."

Spots are limited so sign-up ASAP!