Bootstrap Maryland Conference

Current Event Speakers

Jay Virdy

Co-founder & CEO, Summize

Jay Virdy was a co-founder and CEO of Summize, a groundbreaking, realtime search engine acquired by Twitter in 2008. His first company, LocalEyes, was a local search engine acquired by AOL in 2000. Today he spends his time recording music in his home studio and does part time consulting on Gov 2.0 projects. A third startup is in the works.

Paul Singh

Founder & CEO, Philtro
Results Junkies, (blog)

Paul Singh is the Founder and CEO of Philtro, a semantic spam filter for Twitter. Prior to Philtro, Paul served as the Director of Information Systems for PBwiki, the world's largest provider of hosted business and educational wikis. As a consultant, he also helped launch Symantec's SaaS initiative. Paul was the Founder and COO of UpSolv, a mobile messaging and data company. Paul is an avid cyclist, and likes it when people call him "Mr. Metrics." Paul earned his BS in Computer Engineering from George Mason University.

John Burke

Partner, True Ventures

John Burke’s passion for building and growing companies began 22 years ago as an engineer for a startup in Oakland, California. Since then he was been the Founder and CEO of BMI Software, a Principal at ABS Ventures, a Director at Deutsche Bank, the managing member of Blacksmith Capital, and now a Partner at True Venture Partners. Some of True Venture's portfolio companies include Automattic, FitBit, Meebo, and GigaOm.

Matt Swartz

Partner, Pillsbury Law

Matt spent several years practicing in Silicon Valley before moving to the Washington D.C. area in 2001. He has represented issuers and investors in scores of venture capital and private equity transactions, including the first venture capital financings of PowerBar (later to sold to Nestle) and Internet Security Systems (later IPO then later still sold to IBM). He has also worked with entrepreneurial companies in exits such as IPOs and acquisitions, including Netscape's first acquisition, the IPO of USWeb, the IPO of Avalon Pharmaceuticals, the IPO of QC Holdings, the IPO of Storm Technology, and the sales of RedZone Interactive to Sony, NovusCG to IBM, and WhiteHouse/Black Market to Chico's.