Top-tier entrepreneurs, innovators and investors

Over the last year we've worked hard to provide you with amazing speeches!
 Have a look at the IL! 2016 speakers lineup:

Klaus Hommels

Founder & CEO of Lakestar

Klaus is one of the leading European investors and has been involved in numerous successful internet investments including Skype, Facebook, Xing, Spotify and Airbnb. Klaus invests in promising start-ups that have the potential to become major players in the internet space. He was named first among European investors on Forbes Midas list in 2013.

Ryan Bubinski

Founder of Codecademy

Ryan has been working on Codecademy since 2011, back when he was a student at Columbia. Codecademy is a free education website, teaching coding interactively to millions of users worldwide. Ryan started building web applications at age 13 and hasn't stopped since, except for an occasional break to practice cooking or enjoy a drink or two with team members and friends.

Boris Wertz

Founder of version one ventures & Board Member at Andreessen Horowitz

Boris Wertz is one of the top early-stage tech investors in North-America and the founding partner of version one ventures. Boris is also a board partner with Andreessen Horowitz. Before becoming an investor, Boris was the Chief Operating Officer of AbeBooks.com, the world’s largest marketplace for new, used and rare and out-of print books which got sold to Amazon in 2008. Boris joined the company in 2002 after JustBooks, the German company he co-founded in 1999, was acquired by AbeBooks.

Elli Sharef

Co-Founder , HireArt

Elli Sharef, co-founder of the resume-killing jobs marketplace HireArt will share her story this October in Vallendar with us! The Yale-alumni decided to make her childhood ambition come true and founded HireArt with her best friends from university. "The best place to find startup jobs" is Y Combinator-backed and used by tons of business customers including Airbnb, Cisco, eBay, Gap and Facebook.

Shehzad Daredia

Co-Founder, Bob.fm

Being one of the most successful internet investors and founders, Oliver, together with his brothers, is associated with a number of big names: alando.de, Jamba!, Zalando and many more. He is co-founder of...

Dominik Richter

Founder & CEO of HelloFresh

Dominik has been CEO since starting HelloFresh in 2011. He has responsibility for keeping a general oversight of the business and strategy. Prior to HelloFresh, Dominik worked with Goldman Sachs in London. Dominik graduated from WHU with a degree in International Business in 2009, and from the London School of Economics in 2010 with a Masters in Finance.

Pia Poppenreiter

CEO & Co-Founder of Ohlala.com

Pia Poppenreiter is CEO and Co-Founder of Ohlala. With her background in finance and business ethics, she feels well-equipped to have a take on the paid dating industry. Ohlala is Pia’s rebellion come to life. She makes it her business to reconsider the world daily, and invites others to do the same.

Han Jin

Founder & CEO Lucid VR

Han is a serial entrepreneur in the Bay Area of the United States who graduated from UC Berkeley. His passion for startups lead him from his first web-based startup directly out of Berkeley to his first IoT hardware startup on Kickstarter to his first non-profit startup in Y Combinator 2014, and finally to his current endeavor in the Virtual Reality space - Lucid VR. He advised several startups, spoke at multiple conferences and judged Stanford's startup competitions.

Oliver Samwer

Founder & CEO of Rocket Internet

Oliver Samwer is founder and CEO of Rocket Internet and has launched more than 75 companies that operate in more than 110 countries. Inspired by the dot-com boom in the U.S. in the late ‘90s, the Samwer brothers created the German auction site Alando which they sold to eBay after only a few months of operation. That success story was followed by numerous game changing start-ups including Jamba!, Zalando, HelloFresh, Home24 and many more.

Saygin Yalcin

Founder & CEO of SellAnyCar.com

Saygin is the Founder & CEO of the Middle East’s (ME) first & largest car buying service, SellAnyCar.com, Founder of the first & largest online private shopping club in the ME, Sukar.com and Partner at Jabbar Internet & Souq.com Group, the largest E-commerce company in the Arab world, with 2500+ employees. He is also Board Member & Academic Lecturer of Entrepreneurship at the Canadian University of Dubai and has been selected as an UBS Industry Leader, a network of Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals.

Shehzad Daredia

Cp-Founder, Bob.fm

The Wharton graduate is the Co-founder of bop.fm, a music technology company that creates a home for every song on the internet. Building up a modest team that is collectively motivated to revolutionize the way we discover and share music, his startup is backed by renowned Y-Combinator, SV Angel and LeWeb Founder Loic Le Meur. Shehzad Daredia is a Mentor at The Peter Thiel Foundation and was an early employee at KAYAK and Rho Ventures.

Shehzad Daredia

Founder & CEO -  bop.fm

Shehzad Daredia is the Co-founder of bop.fm, a music technology company that creates a home for every song on the internet. The company aggregates several popular music services such as Soundcloud, Spotify, YouTube and Beats Music into one interface. Building up a modest team that is collectively motivated to revolutionize the way we discover and share music, his startup is backed by renowned Y Combinator, SV Angel and LeWeb Founder Loic Le Meur. The Wharton graduate is also mentor at The Peter Thiel Foundation and was an early employee at KAYAK and Rho Ventures.

Mahesh Ramasubramanian

Founder & CEO of LoomAi

Mahesh has more than 15 years of experience leading visual effects and technology teams in crafting some of the top films of all time, including the Shrek and Madagascar franchises at DreamWorks Animation. Now at LoomAi, he wants to create 3D avatars of every consumer to bring visual identity back into virtual conversations in chat and VR. He holds a Masters in Computer Graphics from Cornell and an MBA from UCLA-Anderson.

Kevin Petrovic

Founder of FlightCar

Kevin is the co-founder of FlightCar, a peer to peer car sharing company built for airport travelers. An entrepreneur since age 13, Kevin dropped out of Princeton University to launch FlightCar, which is now disrupting the car rental market throughout the US. Prior to FlightCar, Kevin ran a successful import/export business that generated over half a million dollars in annual revenue and cofounded a clean water NGO which built over 50 wells in remote villages in India. Kevin was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015.
AS FEATURED IN

A few of our former speakers

These speakers already shared their story with us!

Kevin Hale

Y Combinator

Robert Gentz & the whole Management Board

Zalando

Martin Ott

Facebook

Nazanin Daneshvar

Takhfifan.com

Andy Goldstein

German Accelerator

Maximilian Tayenthal

Number26

Rene Reinsberg

GoDaddy

Frédéric Mazzella

BlaBlaCar

Stefan Glaenzer

Passion Capital

Dr. Christian Illek

Microsoft

Abhijit De

Global Business Incubation SAP

Rene Obermann

Deutsche Telekom

Omid Scheybani

Google

Josh Miller

Facebook

Ryan Leslie

Next Selection

Morten Lund

Skype

Adora Cheung

Homejoy

Colette Ballou

Ballou PR

Jörg Rheinboldt

Axel Springer Plug & Play

Andreas Wiele

Axel Springer

Sahil Lavingia

Gumroad

Christian Gaiser

KaufDa

Jens Begemann

Wooga

Christophe Maire

AtlanticLabs

Christian Vollmann

E-Darling

Yali Saar

Tailor Brands

Alexander Ljung

Soundcloud

Efe Cakarel

Mubi

Gregor Hochmuth

Instagram
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