Our CEO Dave ten Have will be on stage at the Techcrunch40 at 3.45pm US Pacific time (30 minutes from now!). And I’ve noted down the panel of experts who are evaluating Ponoko biographies below. All very accomplished people. We are halfway through the early sessions of the conference now and the early panel included Marc Andreessen, the creator of the first web browser, Marrisa Mayer from Google, Om Malik of GigaOm, Ryan Block from Engadget and Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine. They didn’t grill the companies but they asked tough questions and I was impressed by the ability of the speakers to answer well.

Jason Calcanis asked Om Malik to rate which companies he thought would be acquired or be around in 5 years he was positive about a few but wasn’t so sure on the others. I’ll let you know in detail what they say about Ponoko.

The keynote with David Filo, co-founder of Google, Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, and Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube was very interesting. Some great tips as well some exciting stories. I’m sure the video will end up online somewhere so I’ll try to post a link once we find one.
Panelists Evaluating Ponoko are:

Ron Conway is one of the Internet’s pre-eminent angel investors. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Red Envelope, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “dealmakers” in 2006. He is an active advisor for a number of Internet companies and also very active in community and philanthropic activities, including Vice Chairman of UCSF Medical Foundation in San Francisco. Most recently, Ron has been leading the “Fight for Mike” Homer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD.)

Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. The goal is to help VC’s and start-ups be successful with Microsoft, and together, provide great products for our customers. He writes a daily blog, Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing.

Rajeev Motwani is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he also serves as the director of graduate studies. His research interests include: databases and data mining, web search and information retrieval, robotics, and theoretical computer science. He has written several books including Randomized Algorithms, published by Cambridge University Press. Motwani has received the Godel Prize, the Arthur P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation and an IBM Faculty Award.

Yossi Vardi is one if Israel’s hi-tech veterans, having helped build some 40 hi-tech companies in Internet, software, telecommunications, electro-optics, energy, environment and other areas. Several companies Dr. Vardi co-founded became successful public companies, among them Alon, Advanced Technologies, and Granite Hacarmel. Internet companies backed by Dr. Vardi include Mirabilis Ltd, ICQ (acquired by AOL), Gteko (acquired by Microsoft), Scopus and Answers.com. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, on the board of Amdocs, and the advisory board of 3i. He has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.