Renee DiResta is a Principal at O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), where she invests in seed-stage technology startups (both hardware and software), researches emerging technology trends, and supports portfolio companies. She is also a member of the O'Reilly Radar team. Prior to OATV, Renee spent seven years as an equity derivatives trader at Jane Street Capital, a quantitative proprietary trading firm in New York City. For fun, she plays with data sets, helps run The Maker Map open-source project, and is a Maker and crafter. Renee holds a B.S. in both Computer Science and Political Science from the Honors College of SUNY Stony Brook. She blogs about her interests and data projects at http://noupsi.de and can be found on Twitter at @noupside. Nick Pinkston is the founder of Plethora, a rapid manufacturing service with tools that help you improve, verify, and cost your part inside your CAD software in real time and then let you make prototypes and small runs using a flexible manufacturing system. Previously, Nick started CloudFab, the world's first manufacturing-as-a-service API, and also HackPittsburgh, a collective workshop for the makers of Pittsburgh, PA. Nick's mission is to make developing hardware as easy software through better, more accessible tools. He also organizes the SF Hardware Startup Meetup and is heavily involved in building the hardware startup movement more broadly.
