Meet The Authors
Brant Cooper
Brant Cooper helps startups get started.
As a Lean Startup thought leader, he travels the world speaking to entrepreneurs at conferences, hackathons and workshops. Recent speaking events include the Kuala Lumpur Venture Capital Symposium, Lean Startup conferences in Vancouver and Michigan, the Forward Technology Conference in Wisconsin, the Lean Startup Challenge in Boston, and Lean Startup Machines in London, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Brant also consults for and advises startups on Lean Startups and Customer Development, with clients in Silicon Valley, New York, San Diego, France, Australia and Singapore. Clients include Qualcomm, MOGL, HubKick, MotherKnows, i.TV, Lean Startup Machine, Discovr and many others.
Brant Cooper is passionate about growing the San Diego tech community.He runs the San Diego Tech Founders monthly meetup that consistently draws between 100 and 200 startup people. Speakers have included Eric Ries, Steve Blank, KISSmetrics CEO Hiten Shah, CatchFree CEO Sean Ellis and Venture Capitalist Mark Suster. He is the curator for the San Diego edition of the Startup Digest. Brant mentored at CONNECT for four years and holds open office hours at a weekly coffee meetup that draws 10-20 people a week.
Prior to becoming involved in the Lean Startup community, Brant was involved with startups in a more traditional way. He has over 20 years experience in IT and a long track record of bringing high tech products to market. As a leader in Professional Services, Product Management and Marketing, he has directed strategy, design, marketing and implementation of numerous products for a variety of startups including Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, Incode and InfoBright.
Brant Cooper has published articles for Venture Beat and Business Insider, blogs at Market By Numbers and tweets @brantcooper.
Patrick Vlaskovits
Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur, mentor and author. He is CEO and cofounder of Superpowered, a Cross Platform Pro Audio SDK for Android, iOS and Wearables, and co-wrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
His writing on debunking the origin of Henry Ford’s “faster horses” has been featured on Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal blog and The Browser.
Patrick has spoken at tech conferences nationally, including SXSW Interactive (Austin, Texas), Michigan Lean Startup Conference, Lean Startup Machine San Francisco/Chicago/New York as well as internationally, The Turing Festival (Edinburgh, Scotland), Leancamp (multiple), SVC2LX (Lisbon, Portugal). He tweets at @pv and blogs vlaskovits.com. Patrick enjoys advising (Drumbi, Chromatik) and mentoring and serves as a mentor for the 500 Startups and for The Lean Startup Machine.
He organizes the Los Angeles Lean Startup Meetup which boasts almost 2,000 members. Previous speakers include Hiten Shah, Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Jason Calacanis, Janice Fraser, Dave Binetti and Dan Martell. In past years, he also organized Twiistup, a well-attended tech/startup conference that celebrates the entrepreneurial and investment talent of the Los Angeles startup ecosystem.
Patrick holds a Master’s in Economics (emphases in finance and econometrics) from University of California, Santa Barbara. When he has spare time, he can be found with his family usually on the beach or in the ocean either fishing, surfing or stand-up paddle surfing.
