In less than a week, we’ll be gathering for the annual Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., to hear a range of speakers talk about the future of tech and media. Those appearing onstage include: Bill and Melinda Gates; Tesla and SpaceX leader Elon Musk; IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg; and many more.
More Code speakers: Meeker, Levin and a panel about recovering from failure
The Code conference is next week.
Recode
Now we are adding a few more names to the list: Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker, TMZ’s Harvey Levin and a panel of three longtime entrepreneurs who will talk about how to bounce back from companies that don’t make it.
VC and Internet seer Mary Meeker
Meeker, of course, is one of the conference’s highlights and an audience favorite with her lightning-fast slide show of the Internet trends for the year ahead, delivering a mass of information in 20 minutes. Meeker, who has deep ties with Wall Street from her many years as a top tech analyst at Morgan Stanley, was recruited to the prominent venture firm in early 2011 to lead a $1 billion digital growth fund, and has since been an active late-stage investor in companies like Spotify, SoundCloud and Waze, which was sold to Google.
Harvey Levin is TMZ's ringmaster.
Harvey Levin is well known as the executive producer and star of TMZ, the celebrity news site and TV show that has been at the center of the boom in entertainment reporting. A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, he began his career as a litigator prior to founding TMZ in 2005. He also created the syndicated series “Celebrity Justice” and worked as an top producer at “The People’s Court.”
Joanna Hoffman was a key Apple exec at its birth, death and rebirth.
Not everyone gets to say that they were played by Kate Winslet in an Oscar-nominated performance, but Joanna Hoffman saw herself portrayed on the big screen in Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” biopic. Hoffman joined Apple as the fifth member of the Macintosh team in 1980, and as product marketing manager, she was responsible for the company’s first business plan, first user-interface guidelines and peripherals plan and more. In 1985, she followed co-founder Jobs to NeXT and later joined a string of pioneering startups in AI, smart TV and intelligent personal assistants and telephones, the last being General Magic, a spinout from Apple.
Chet Kanojia saw his Aereo lose altitude.
Chet Kanojia is now running Starry, a startup designed to make broadband access simple and affordable. It’s a nice sentiment, but so was the aim of his previous company, Aereo, the online television platform that let users record and watch live HD broadcast television on virtually any type of Internet-connected device. That startup got mired in lawsuits from broadcast networks that went to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it had infringed on the rights of copyright holders.
Dalton Caldwell is now at Y Combinator
And longtime digital music entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell, who is currently founder and CEO of Mixed Media Labs and a partner at Y Combinator, was the co-founder and CEO of Imeem. The social streaming music service was built by several engineers from the original Napster team and was notable for being the first online music site to secure licenses from all four U.S. major music labels. It was acquired and shut down by Myspace in 2009.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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