Industry Speakers, Judges, and Mentors
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We're thrilled to present our incredible judges, mentors, and speakers for Lionhack 2023! Handpicked from top industry, VC, and academic partners, they bring a diverse mix of expertise in tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Get ready for them to inspire, guide, and assess your creative ideas throughout this amazing hackathon experience!
a16z Research and Columbia University
Tim Roughgarden
For twenty years, as a researcher and computer science professor at Stanford and Columbia, Tim has led the development of Algorithmic Game Theory, a field that brings together ideas from Computer Science and Economics to solve real-world computing problems. He wrote the definitive textbooks and courses on the field.
Near
Tiffany Gao
Tiffany is a Product Manager at NEAR, focusing on search and discovery and data tooling. She also founded NEAR Data Guild in support in terms of consultation and funding for data access, discoverability, observability and analytical efforts in the NEAR Ecosystem. Tiffany has a masters degree from Columbia Business School focusing on Analytics and earned her bachelor degress from NYU with a double major in Computer Science and Media, Culture and Communication.
Near and Pagoda
Jane Wang
Jane has been active in the blockchain ecosystem since 2013, started with mining PoW coins and moved onto building web3 products. She spearheaded a number of products in the NEAR ecosystems, including validating node experience, wallets, developer console, and had onboarded a number of validators for NEAR. She graduated from Northwestern University with a double major in Mathematical Methods and Economics.
Near
James Waugh
James is currently a Community Manager at Near, works Developer Relations at Banyan Collective, and was the former Head of Community at Aptos. He has previous experience in social media marketing and advertising across various industries within tech. He graduated from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill with a Bachelors of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Near
Cameron Dennis
Cameron is currently working in the ecosystem division at Near Foundation, the founder and CEO of Banyan Collective, a company working to scale Near in the US, and the President and Founder of the Blockchain Acceleration Foundation. He also founded the Blockchain Summit at UC Santa Barbara.
Jump Crypto
Lucas Baker
Lucas Baker is an investor and researcher at Jump Crypto, where he focuses on protocol mechanism design and core blockchain infrastructure. Coming from a tech and finance background, Lucas previously worked in macro and equities at D.E. Shaw as well as on the AlphaGo team at Google DeepMind. He received an undergraduate degree in computer science from Stanford University and an MS/MBA dual degree from Harvard University.
Jump Crypto
Joe Howarth
Joe Howarth contributes to R&D efforts at Jump Crypto. Recently he’s focussed on cross-chain applications powered by the Wormhole Network - particularly solving generic relaying of contract invocations as well as offchain relaying infrastructure. Additionally, he contributes to applied incentive alignment and tokenomics research, an on-chain generic derivatives CLOB, mentoring at ecosystem events and other special projects at Jump. Outside of crypto, Joe has a long-standing love of agent-based historical society simulation, pure functional programming and skiing.
Solana Labs
Noah Gundotra
Noah has been developing smart contract infrastructure on Solana that allows Solana NFTs to be minted without having to pay for on-chain state. He’s currently working on composability and indexing standards for Solana smart contracts. Previously, he worked on the One Delta Equities team at Goldman Sachs.
Offchain Labs
Hunter Brea
Hunger is currently working as a Community Strategist at Offchain Labs, where he's been for the last 2 years. He is also a content creator on Youtube where he makes content about Web3 and crypto. He graduated from Manhattan College with a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering.
Axelar
Stephen Fluin
Stephen is Head of Developer Relations for Axelar. Stephen builds Developer Relations teams that solve real world problems faced by developers and businesses, and advocates for the needs of the community. With 22 years in the Software Development industry, Stephen has served as an executive technologist, consultant, and entrepreneur at Google, Trello, Chainlink Labs, and more.
Hyperlane
Asa Oines
Asa is the Co-Founder of Hyperlane, a platform for crypto developers to build interchain technologies. He previously worked and interned as a software engineer and hardware engineer at Google and Apple. He graduated from Massachusetts Insitute of Technology with a bachelors and masters in Computer Science.
Agoric
Jeet Raut
Jeet is a Partner Programs Manager at Agoric and has co-founded Behold.ai, an AI Diagnostics company. His interests include: blockchain, DeFi, NFTs, education technology, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, computational/design thinking, gamification, behavioral economics, online and mobile learning, and entrepreneurship.
Mina
Emre Tekisalp
Emre is the CEO of O(1) Labs, the company that incubated Mina Protocol, whose mission is to catalyze a new generation of applications powered by zero knowledge cryptography. Before joining O(1) Labs, Emre was a part of the early team at Coinbase, working on launching USDC, Coinbase Custody, Coinbase Wallet, and more. Emre is a 2017 graduate of Columbia Business School.
Dragonfly
Sanat Kapur
Incoming Junior Partner
ZKaptcha
Ketan Jog
Ketan is the co-founder and CEO at ZKatpcha. He was previously co-founder and CTO of BinIt, which raised a $2 million seed round in 2022. Previously, Ketan has worked on AI research at the Zuckerman Institute and MSKCC. He received his B.A in Math and Statistics and his B.S in Computer Science from Columbia University.
