event-tech
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Maksim Kondratjuks
Maksim Kondratjuks is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Tagvenue, an online marketplace for booking event venues that he started in London in 2015 with Artur Stepaniak. The idea grew out of his own frustration finding conference and wedding spaces while working in equity capital markets at the London Stock Exchange. What began as a UK venue search engine now spans six countries with more than 20,000 verified venues and around 700,000 monthly event organizers.
Artur Stepaniak
Artur Stepaniak is the co-founder and CEO of Tagvenue, a London-based online marketplace for booking event venues. He and university friend Maksim Kondratjuks started the company in March 2015 after struggling to find spaces for events, and grew it - largely by word of mouth - into one of the world's leading venue-hire platforms, now covering six countries and used by more than a million event planners each month. Before startups, Stepaniak spent his early career as a derivatives and proprietary trader.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
Nick Freeman
Nick Freeman is the co-founder, co-CEO and CTO of Marco Experiences, a San Francisco and New York company that helps companies plan and book team offsites, retreats and group experiences. Before Marco he was one of the founding backend engineers on Instagram Stories, where he helped scale the product from launch to 500 million daily users, and he shipped Cortana for Xbox One at Microsoft. A UC Berkeley computer science and economics graduate, he left Brex in 2020 to build Marco with Suman Siva on the bet that, done thoughtfully, technology can build community. Marco now serves 800+ companies including Meta, Bain and Netflix.
James Hirschfeld
James Hirschfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Paperless Post, the New York company that turned the dread of sending an invitation into an act of design. He started it from a Harvard dorm in 2008 with his older sister Alexa, after his own 21st birthday party left him stuck between expensive paper and lifeless email. More than 175 million people have since sent or received a Paperless Post, across roughly 20 million events. He runs it as a design company that happens to live in a browser.