Thomas Madsen-Mygdal is an IT entrepreneur of the highest calibre. He is a serial entrepreneur who not only has brilliant ideas, but pursues them and gets them to succeed. His passion lies in doing activism, designing, founding and investing to bootstrap change. Thomas has been co-founder and investor in numerous companies such as Chairman of 23, Podio, Kinetik and Socialsquare. He is also well-known for being the founder and host of the annual European gathering for practical digital visionaries, the reboot festival.

Paul Jozefak is running Liquid Labs GmbH in Hamburg – a place, where “a bunch of investors and entrepreneurs” will be building companies in a “skunkworks like” environment. Previously he was a managing partner at Neuhaus Partners for six years and head of SAP Ventures Europe from 2001 onwards. Paul Jozefak is a highly skilled company builder with solid investor experience, known as one of the best European VCs, as even TechCrunch says, and a “huge geek when it comes to new technologies”.

Simone Ashoff leads the “Good School”, which is the largest school for digital communication and the place for managers, entrepreneurs and advertisers to learn how to deal with the digitalization. Prior to that she worked at several publishers, TV and movie productions and advertising agencies, for instance Jung von Matt, BMW and MTV.

Andy Lenz co-founded hardwrk GmbH, yeebase media and the associated t3n magazine, which focuses on social media, e-business and open source. He intiated ConventionCamp and BarCamp Hannover and is a full-blooded social media enthusiast, who already attended betapitch Berlin two years ago as a jury member.

Christian Nagel has more than 18 years of experience as an investor respecitvely entrepreneur and supported, for example, the development of Tipp24 AG, Interhyp AG or BridgeCo AG. As a managing partner and co-founder of Earlybird, one of the most successful venture capital firms in Europe, he is currently involved in Crowdpark.de, Lumics GmbH, madvertise GmbH and smava GmbH. Previously he worked at two industry holding companies as a managing partner and at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant.

Jeremy Tai Abbett is an designer, entrepreneur and maker exploring the intersection of art and technology through the playful prototyping of mediated interactions for clients such as Google, the Guggenheim and mobile start-up Stuffle. In his former life, Jeremy founded Fork Unstable Media in 1996 (with three projects that were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art – San Francisco and a game that enraged the British Monarchy to his credit), was a founding post-graduate student at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and was an award winning creative director at several advertising agencies.

Jakob Berndt, born and raised in Hamburg, worked as a strategic planer for the well known advertising agency Jung von Matt, where he supervised clients like Mercedes-Benz, ARTE, and BMW. In 2009 he and Paul Bethke founded LemonAid Beverages. Since then, he has been selling fair-traded LemonAid and ChariTea, two renowned and extremely delicious drinks.