Business of Software 2010

Joel Spolsky

Fog Creek Software

Joel Spolsky is a globally-recognized expert on the software development process.

His website Joel on Software is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams. He is the co-creator of Stack Overflow, a programmer Q&A site.

Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed VBA as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written four books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001), Joel on Software (Apress, 2004), More Joel on Software (Apress, 2008), and Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Apress, 2007). He also writes a monthly column for Inc Magazine. Joel holds a BS from Yale in Computer Science. Before college he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.

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Seth Godin

sethgodin.com

Seth Godin writes the most popular marketing blog in the world. He is a renowned speaker and bestselling author of 10 books that have been translated into 20 languages, and have transformed the way people think out marketing, change and work. He is responsible for many words in the marketer's vocabulary including permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cow, the dip and sneezers. His latest book, Tribes, is about leadership and how anyone can become a leader, creating movements that matter.

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Eric Sink

SourceGear

Eric is the author of Eric Sink on the Business of Software. He is the founder of SourceGear, a source control system vendor. He also founded the AbiWord project, and lead the team that built the SpyGlass browser, now known as "Internet Explorer". He's the first to have coined the term "Micro-ISV".

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Paul Kenny

Ocean Learning

Paul Kenny is one of the UK's top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian Newspaper and tens of others. Paul has developed a portfolio of nearly 100 sales, management and personal development courses. He won a national training award for his work with The Guardian.

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Dharmesh Shah

HubSpot

Dharmesh Shah is the founder and CTO of HubSpot, a venture-backed software company offering a hosted software service for inbound marketing. Prior to HubSpot, Dharmesh was the founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions. Pyramid was a three time recipient of the Inc. 500 award and was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005. Dharmesh is also the author of OnStartups.com, a top-ranking startup blog with over 20,000 subscribers and 100,000 members in it's online community. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the UAB and an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT.

Dharmesh is co-author of the recently released book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. The book has been in the Amazon Top 100 business books for 21 consecutive days.

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Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni

Balsamiq

Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni is the founder and CEO of Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Mockups, a fun little wireframing tool for programmers, UX experts and yes, even business types.

Balsamiq has been a bit of a poster child for a new wave of tiny but ambitious bootstrapped tech startups, netting over $1.6M in sales in the first 18 months of operation and gathering rave reviews.

Peldi is a champion of the "radical transparency" trend that's sweeping the Internet, through his posts on the popular Balsamiq Blog. You can read Peldi's story in this blog post, or get to know him more through these interviews and his LinkedIn profile.

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Jason Cohen

Smart Bear Software

Jason is the founder of Smart Bear Software and author of Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. He blogs weekly on startups and marketing from a geek's point of view at http://blog.asmartbear.com.

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The Cranky Product Manager

DysfunctoSoft

The Cranky Product Manager is a fictional product management professional at a fictional enterprise software vendor named DysfunctoSoft.

The Cranky PM has been officially in product management for many years, but before that spent time in the trenches as a developer and professional services slave. All told, she’s been working in tech for lots of years, at companies ranging from itty-bitty startups to IBM-sized behemoths.

The Cranky Product Manager’s personality flaws and character failings include a passion for sodium-encrusted food, snarkiness, cynicism, abject driving skills, bluntness, and an absolute inability to tolerate pompous jackasses.

The Cranky Product Manager might be revealing her true identity at Business of Software 2010. Or she might appear in wig and sunglasses. She hasn't decided yet.

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