Mentorship at Startup Weekend
One of the great values of participating in Startup Weekend is that during the event participants get connected to a variety of mentors from a variety of domains to help them solve problems and think through their products and businesses.
The bringing the community together to support new ventures is an important part of the event and connections made will benefit participants long after the weekend is over.
Vanya Boardman
Vanya helps organizations close the engagement gap by turning development into experiences people remember and act on. As Co-Founder of PlayInnové, She designs and facilitate experiential leadership workshops and programs that help teams build trust, unlock innovation, and move ideas into action.
Joel Kaufmann
By day, Joel is a attorney licensed in California and Nevada. By night, Joel is a Legal Quant, turning legal expertise into code. Joel started out as a kid hacking video games with code like Java. Now he uses code to promote ethics, transparency, and access to justice in the legal profession.
Tryston Perry
Tryston, a San Diego native software engineer and AI enthusiast helping people from all industries use AI in their day-to-day work. Organizer of SD DEVx, a community of meetups connecting 1000+ developers, entrepreneurs and builders.
Todd Bashor
Todd Bashor helps early stage founders turn ideas into products customers will actually pay for.
Over the last 25 years, he has built, shipped, and scaled software across startups and companies like ServiceNow, FICO, and Intuit. Today, his focus is helping founders navigate the messy early days of product validation, traction, and go-to-market decisions.
Rick Moy
Rick is an experienced, multi-exit Founder/CEO, CPO, and CMO in B2B SaaS with expertise in cybersecurity, AI, cloud networking. He is passionate about accelerating knowledge for individuals and teams through AI and cognitive science. Active as a community builder, mentor, and investor, committed to advancing human knowledge and transforming how we learn and grow.
Julius Alejandro
Julius is an ecosystem strategist with 10+ years of experience building cross-sector initiatives that expand access to entrepreneurship and workforce pathways. He designs scalable programs and systems that drive equity, inclusion, and long-term impact - turning community vision into strategic infrastructure that delivers results.
Sean Galvin
Sean is an attorney who designs, builds, and deploys AI systems for legal work. As Senior Legal Operations & AI Advisor at LegalEng Consulting Group (LECG), Sean helps legal teams evaluate and adopt AI tools and improve the processes those tools support. Seans background includes employment litigation, complex commercial and regulatory litigation at Goodwin Procter, in-house technology counsel at Cochlear Americas, and co-founding an AI and privacy law firm.
Michael Karres
Michael enables companies to derive value from responsibly leveraging AI. For over 20 years, he has applied Machine Learning and AI to solve high-stakes cybersecurity challenges in environments ranging from classified defense systems at the NSA to enterprise commercial tech.
Our Venue: UCSD Design & Innovation Building
We couldn’t be more excited to host this year’s event at the Design and Innovation Building (DIB) at UC San Diego. This state-of-the-art, 74,000-square-foot facility is the heart of San Diego’s innovation ecosystem, housing a student startup incubator, a massive Makerspace prototyping lab, the renowned Design Lab, and the region’s Entrepreneurship Center. There’s no better place to spend 54 hours turning your idea into a startup.
Lead Organizer
Attorney/Software Developer
Fractional CMO
Founder
Organizer
Senior Consultant Engineer
