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About Startup House

Startup House was founded with the simple mission of creating the ultimate entrepreneurial internship experience. We set out to create a summer experience that would give entrepreneurial students from across the country the chance to truly live the startup life by immersing themselves in the work, culture, and playful nature of entrepreneurship. We've built an incredible program that combines housing, job placement, and we've stayed true to our founders' core beliefs that working at a startup can be infinitely more rewarding than any other professional opportunity.

The Team

Iolanthe Chronis

Lanthe joins the Startup House team as Executive Director after completing the program last year. She finished her Masters degree at the MIT Media Lab in December, where she worked to understand influence patterns in face to face and phone-based social networks. As an MIT undergraduate, she majored in EECS and Physics. Her experience includes recruitment, event management, sales, and museum exhibit creation. She also excels at iPhone hacking, product development, and user interface design.

Garrett Eastham

Garrett is a founder of Startup House, as well as the Director of Sales and Marketing. Garrett's background is in computer science, digital media, and advertising. He is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for creating new opportunities within existing systems. As a member of the Startup House management team, Garrett leverages his background in marketing, business development, and sales to attract new clients and to increase awareness of Startup House's unique summer opportunities. He is a current Senior at Stanford University majoring in Computer Science and Communications with a focus on Human Computer Interaction and Media Economics, and he will be pursuing further studies in Cognitive Science with a research focus in semantic search systems.

Julian Jennings-White

A founder of Startup House, Julian brings legal and economic experience to the team. As Director of Operations, he works on financial and organizational strategies. While pursuing degrees in Economics and Computer Science at Stanford, he developed interests in entrepreneurship, technology, and efficient human interactions. He brings valuable experience in accounting, patent law, and conference organization. As a web developer, he builds LAMP stack projects and wrestles with IE's treatment of stylesheets. Julian competed for Stanford's fencing team, taught kids the sport, and enjoys poker, skiing, and rocking out to trance music.

Vinayak Ranade

Vinayak recently joined the team as Publicity manager. He's finishing his Masters degree at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he is working on cooperative energy management. Vinayak writes for the MIT Tech, a student-run newspaper, and serves as an Assistant Coordinator for the National Student News Service. Vinayak has experience working as a communications instructor, robot lab tech, economic analyst, software engineer, and air traffic theoreticist. He has also been very active in a variety of student advocacy positions, including working as a liaison between MIT students and the local labor union. He is currently spearheading an effort to run technology backed focus groups for collaborative fundraising. Vinayak DJs a popular MIT radio show called Droppin Knowledge.

Board of Advisors

Tony Eng

Tony is a Senior Lecturer at MIT who has created entrepreneurship courses to inspire students about the startup life and runs a required communication skills course for students majoring in EECS. He co-founded RallyPoint which makes high-tech gloves for the military, and has worked in the areas of networking, cryptography, and computation and biology while pursuing degrees in CS, Biology, and Math at MIT. A creative and non-conforming dilettante, Tony likes to travel, learn foreign language and to sing and dance when he thinks no one is watching.

Syd Kain

Syd Kain has more than a decade of award- winning Sales and Sales Management experience in the recruiting industry. He currently serves as a partner with Kain Management Group, a contingent and retained search firm specializing in executive, sales, and IT management recruiting which he founded in 2002. Syd has always enjoyed the challenge of building high-performance teams, and he knows firsthand that the key to success is finding and recruiting proven talent.

Ed Ring

Ed Ring, Founder and CEO of EcoWorld Inc., has been Editor-in-Chief of EcoWorld since 1995, publishing information and analysis on clean technology and the status of species and ecosystems - economics and ecology. With the motto, "Nature & Technology in Harmony," EcoWorld's editorial voice has consistently espoused free-market and property-rights based environmentalism, a philosophy that is needed now more than ever. With 50% of visitors from outside the United States, EcoWorld has developed a global readership. Through EcoWorld, Ring has launched in partnership with AlwaysOn Media the highly successful "GoingGreen" conferences, which draw greentech entrepreneurs and investors from around the world.

In addition to founding EcoWorld, Ring has over 20 years experience in business and financial management, primarily with start-up and early stage companies. Ring was CFO for Upside Magazine for several years in the 1990's, then their CEO in 2001/02. Ring was CFO for Play Industries in 1999-2000, the first company to develop and deploy technology for desktop digital video production and internet video broadcasting. In 2003, Ring was Director of Strategic Planning for Anuvu, one of the first companies to build a prototype fuel cell vehicle. Ring has an undergraduate degree in Political Science from UC Davis, and an MBA in Finance from the University of Southern California.

Fadi Bishara

Fadi founded techVenture, Inc. in 1996 to meet the growing demand for talented engineers and to remedy the poor channels of supply. techVenture supports venture funded software companies in Silicon Valley and fosters a strategy of Relationship Based Recruiting, a method based on people over paper, quality over quantity and relationship over resumes.

In 2004, Fadi lead a massive scale web sourcing and recruiting automation project with AIRS/The Human Capital Institute. This team consisted of the nation's premier recruitment experts. Fadi worked with government programs to revamp hiring processes for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and a federal project called "Extreme Hiring Make Over."

With the evolution of the blogosphere and early Web 2.0 era, Fadi refocused techVenture by beginning to build technical teams for budding startups and creating the techVenture Co-Founder Network, which brings entrepreneurs together on projects, raises capital and improves the growth of core teams.

Fadi holds a Bachelor's Degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Texas. He is a mentor to the fbFund '09 startups incubator program, the '09 SeedCamp incubator in London and volunteers as the Vice Chair for the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab (VLAB).