TeachStreet is a new Seattle-based company that strives to help students of any age find great local teachers, classes and schools, and to empower teachers with robust online tools to manage their teaching businesses. What do we want TeachStreet to be? Think a little Craigslist, a dash of Meetup, a sprinkle of eBay, a spritz of Etsy, and over time, three shakes of Wikipedia... yeah, something like that.

Dave Schappell is the Founder & CEO. Dave focuses on developing the product vision, building the team and making TeachStreet an inspirational place to accomplish great things. Oh, and making sure we’ve got money to pay the people who do all the real work. Dave developed his experience creating customer-focused marketplace initiatives at Amazon.com, JibJab and Unitus. He’s experienced in online marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, and praying to the PR gods for TechCrunch coverage.

SocialCompass gives communities and societies the ability to take control of their destiny and navigate their future together. SocialCompass is a crowdsourcing dot-org that allows people to model all related issues, beliefs about those issues, possible actions on those issues, and possible outcomes of those actions. Outcomes can be issues for other beliefs/actions, allowing long decision chains. Then people rate that information so that a map develops which can be used to guide decision-making. A commercial version for organizational decision modeling will be available on dNodes.com.

Jon Poland has been starting businesses for 10 years. A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in marketing, Jon worked his way up the ladder at Dell during the hyper-growth years. He founded Made-To-Order Bikes (dot-com that sold custom-configured bicycles) in 1998, then ZStaff Software (enterprise solutions for the staffing industry) in 2000, then 3rd i Designs (crowdsourcing dot-com for strategic planning) in 2005, and now SocialCompass.org. Jon recently completed his masters degree in entrepreneurship and relocated to Seattle from Asheville, North Carolina.

Twilio hosts a telephony infrastructure web service “in the cloud”, allowing web programmers to integrate real-time phone calls into their applications.

Prior to founding Twilio, Jeff was a Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, the founder and CTO of Nine Star (a category killer bricks-and-mortar retailer of extreme sporting goods), the founding CTO of Stubhub.com and the founder and CEO of Versity.com (a venture-funded online academic resource for college students).

Diffen is a collection of differences and comparisons that users can edit (a.k.a wiki). On Diffen you can compare products, services and service providers, employers, schools, politicians, athletes, cities, jobs, philosophies - anything. What’s the difference between Firefox and Chrome? Prius liftback and Prius Touring? iPhone vs. Blackberry? Common stock vs. Preferred stock? Just diffen it. Diffen. Discern. Decide.

Nick Jasuja has over 5 years of experience (and a day job) in IT consulting and outsourcing services. He has worked in the IT services business in various roles including business analyst, project manager, business development manager and account manager. Nick holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an MBA.