Michael Neril

Director, Webb Investment Network

Michael has been working with technology startups for nearly 15 years as either an advisor, investor, or co-founder. Michael launched Webb Investment Network (WIN) with Maynard Webb in 2010, with nearly 50 technology investments since inception, including seed/early-stage investments in AeroFS, Appurify, Badgeville, Bityota, BoostCTR, Cardspring, HipMunk, LockPath, Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace), MongoHQ, O1Works, PinDrop, Quixey, Rypple (acquired by Salesforce), TapSense, and Vungle.  Prior to WIN, Michael worked at LiveOps, running business development for LiveWork, and also incubating a new product line within the Company. Prior to LiveOps, Michael was the co-founder of Ooreka, a virtual work marketplace (acquired by LiveOps) and SpongeFish, an early entrant in the knowledge sharing space. Michael also spent nearly a decade as an investment banker advising venture-backed startups on M&A and corporate finance with ING Barings Technology Group in San Francisco, and as part of the founding team of Seven Hills Partners, a boutique San Francisco investment bank. Michael earned a BA in International Relations from Tufts University.  Michael enjoys reading, skiing, running and hiking in his spare time.

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart