You now have a reason to be even more excited about the Extreme Tech Challenge! Joining the XTC Advisory Council are Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab.
DFJ has backed many high-tech ventures which have gone on to critical success, with over 22 of them with exiting at a worth of more than one billion in value. To give you a good idea of just who has come through DFJ, Tim Draper’s firm has lent a helping hand to Skype, Overture.com, Box, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Tumblr, SolarCity, Hotmail and Yammer.
And it doesn’t just stop there. Not only does Tim endorse brilliant business ideas, but he also invests heavily in the education of younger generations. To instill entrepreneurial spirit in today’s youth, Tim has founded Draper University of Heroes, an immersive boarding school for students 18-24 years old in San Mateo, California, to stimulate proactive entrepreneurship.
Joi Ito is of a similar vein to Draper. He has served as both board chair and CEO of Creative Commons, and sits on the boards of Sony Corporation, Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The New York Times Company, and The Mozilla Foundation. In Japan, he was a founder of Digital Garage, and helped establish and later became CEO of the country’s first commercial Internet service provider. He was an early investor in numerous companies, including Flickr, Six Apart, Last.fm, littleBits, Formlabs, Kickstarter, and Twitter.
Draper and Ito will be joining XTC Advisory Council members: Loïc Le Meur, angel investor and serial entrepreneur who founded LeWeb; Othman Laraki, angel investor, founder of Color Genomics, and ex-VP of Product at Twitter; and Robert Scoble, startup liaison officer at Rackspace.
Maybe if Draper had his way with this one you would be winning BitCoins as a prize! Stay tuned for more additions to the XTC Advisory Council!
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