Craig Donato
Craig Donato is the Chief Business Officer at Roblox. He currently oversees Business Development and Developer Relations.
Prior to Roblox, Donato led Business Development and Monetization at Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods. He also was the CEO and co-founder of Oodle, a local community marketplace that was acquired by QVC in 2012.
Donato holds an MBA from Stanford Business School and BS in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech.
Dan Murray
As President of Skybound Interactive, Dan Murray oversees the company’s robust gaming business. He works closely with the industry’s leading publishers, developers and investors to extend Skybound’s IP into mobile and console games.
Skybound’s game slate includes Telltale’s The Walking Dead series, Scopely’s The Walking Dead: Road to Survival, Night School’s Oxenfree, Free Range Games’ Labyrinth, Disruptor Beam’s The Walking Dead: March to War, and Other Ocean’s Giant Cop: Justice Above All. In addition, Skybound Interactive has a handful of video game projects in the pipeline including Overkill’s The Walking Dead.
Prior to joining Skybound, Dan ran worldwide business development for Foundation 9 Entertainment, the largest independent videogame developer in the world creating franchise-based video games on every major platform. During this tenure he helped close over 60 major video game deals including Killer Instinct and Strider.
Dan graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Finance.
Bernard Kim
Bernard Kim serves as Zynga’s President of Publishing. He is a mobile gaming and interactive entertainment veteran with more than 15 years of experience.
To-date, more than one billion people around the world have played Zynga’s games, including the world’s largest social poker game, Zynga Poker; the world’s most popular mobile word game, Words With Friends; and the #1 Top Grossing Mobile Racing Game, CSR Racing 2. As Zynga’s President of Publishing, Bernard is responsible for overseeing how the company brings these games and services to players through our network, consumer insights, product management, marketing, user acquisition, ad monetization, communications, business development and strategic partnerships.
Prior to joining Zynga, Bernard spent nearly 10 years at Electronic Arts Inc., most recently as the company’s Senior Vice President of Mobile Publishing. In that role, he oversaw EA’s mobile distribution, strategy, product management, analytics, network engagement, marketing, revenue demand planning, business development, third-party publishing, mergers and acquisitions and Sandbox. During his tenure at EA, Bernard also led EA’s games division in Asia and helped bring EA franchises including SimCity, Star Wars, The Sims, The Simpsons, Real Racing and EA SPORTS to billions of players.
Prior to joining EA, Bernard served as Director of Sales and Channel Strategy at The Walt Disney Company, where he led sales and retail for Disney Mobile.
Bernard holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in both Economics and Communications from Boston College.
Stephanie Chan
Stephanie Chan is a reporter for GamesBeat and writes its weekly IndieBeat column, which highlights in-progress games by independent developers and students from around the world. She was previously head of editorial for Poncho, a media/tech company based out of the betaworks office in New York.
Yvette Martinez-Rea
Yvette Martinez-Rea is Chief Executive Officer at ESL North America, where she leads the strategy and operations of the region. ESL, a part of the international digital entertainment group MTG, is the world’s largest independent esports company. Previously, Martinez-Rea served as Chief Operating Officer (COO) at ESL North America, where she oversaw business operations for the region.
Prior to ESL, Martinez-Rea served as Chief Operating Officer at Violet Grey, a venture-backed luxury beauty content and commerce company based in Los Angeles, where she oversaw the company’s growth, as well as business initiatives and the development of the company’s fulfillment, e-commerce systems and retail operations.
Before joining Violet Grey, Martinez-Rea was a Vice President of Change Management for Yahoo!’s Global Products organization, responsible for leading the cross-functional change efforts to improve engineering quality and overall organizational effectiveness for a 6,000-person global division. Previous roles at Yahoo! include Senior Director of Strategy and Business Management, Global Products, and Senior Director of Strategy and Business Operations and Chief of Staff to EVP Yahoo! North America. She also acted as the executive sponsor for the Southern California chapter of Women in Technology.
Formerly, Martinez-Rea was the Vice President of Operations at United Online Inc., a publicly traded internet services provider, responsible for business and sales operations for multiple brands including NetZero, Juno, Classmates, Photosite, and UOL Web services.
Martinez-Rea also serves on the board of Young & Healthy, a non-profit dedicated to providing health care to underserved children. She holds dual undergraduate degrees in English Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California.
Ann Hand
As CEO and Chairman of Super League Gaming, Ann drives the vision of the leading platform for amateur esports. Super League Gaming’s 16-city North American league along with compelling online experiences and membership programs is a unifying lifestyle destination for local, competitive gaming.
Prior to Super League Gaming, Ann served as CEO of Project Frog, a venture-backed firm whose mission is to democratize environmentally conscious buildings. From 1998 through 2008, Ann served in a variety of senior executive positions with BP plc. Ann has garnered industry recognition, including “100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs” by Goldman Sachs, “Top 10 Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs” by Fortune, “100 Most Creative People” by Fast Company, and “40 under 40” by Advertising Age.
Ann earned a BA in Economics from DePauw University and a MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management along with executive education at Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford Universities. She has spent a significant part of her career in China and the UK, but is a proud Midwesterner at heart.
Rick Phillips
Rick Phillips is the President, Publishing and Licensing at FoxNext Games. In this role, Rick oversees all marketing and publishing activities for the company’s self-published and licensed games, and is also responsible for licensing the studio’s film and television properties for mobile and console/PC games. FoxNext Games, a division of FoxNext, is led by game industry veterans with a successful track record of creating critically acclaimed titles. FoxNext is expanding the storytelling universes of Twentieth Century Fox Film and Fox Networks Group most cherished franchises through interactive and immersive next-generation storytelling.
Prior to his current post, Rick served as Executive Vice President of Fox Digital Entertainment; in this role he was responsible for both Fox’s mobile gaming activities and for licensing Fox’s film and television libraries to mobile video services. Under his leadership, Rick led the company’s expansion into first-party game development and publishing and prior to that also markedly expanded the company’s licensing business substantially development slate. During his tenure, Fox has released The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff, Futurama: Game of Drones, Angry Birds: Rio, Ice Age Village and a broad range of other games. Mr. Phillips joined Fox in 2012.
Rick has served as a senior executive at leading media and technology companies including Microsoft Corporation, Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., and MGM Worldwide Television. Early in his career, Mr. Phillips held executive roles at Liberty Global and Liberty Media Corporation. Prior, he served as a creative executive at The Walt Disney Company, and started his career as an analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Rick holds a Masters of Business Administration degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors Degree of Arts degree from Harvard College. He also serves on the Board of Directors and is a member of the Compensation Committee of Audible Magic Corporation.
He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Elissa, and his three children.
Lydia Bottegoni
As senior vice president of story and franchise development at Blizzard Entertainment, Lydia Bottegoni is tasked with overseeing the creative strategy and execution of cross-media development around Blizzard’s award-winning game franchises.
In this role, Bottegoni’s mission is to extend the Blizzard universe across a variety of media formats and platforms. She is responsible for establishing and developing a business strategy for Blizzard’s universes, driving the company’s game worlds into new arenas to engage fans old and new and to entertain an expanding global audience.
Previously Bottegoni was head of production for Sony Pictures Imageworks, responsible for overseeing all projects in production and managing the production team, while also leading the artist management team across multiple studio locations. She was co-producer on Sony Pictures Animation’s Hotel Transylvania and served as the digital producer for The Smurfs. She was also co-producer on Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs as well as Surf’s Up, an Academy Award nominee for Best Animated Feature and winner of two Annie Awards.
Bottegoni was the senior visual effects producer on the Academy Award-winner for Best Visual Effects, Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man. She also oversaw the production of visual effects on such films as Michael, Ghost and the Darkness, Contact, and Starship Troopers. As a visual effects producer, her credits included the Academy Award nominated Stuart Little, Sphere, and The Postman.
Bottegoni is a member for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Producers Guild of America and holds a degree in Economics from California State University, Northridge.
Richard Marks
Richard Marks heads the PlayStation Magic Lab within Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Research & Development group. Magic Lab was founded by Marks to push the boundaries of play by exploring how technology can be used to create new entertainment experiences.
Marks joined PlayStation in 1999 to investigate the use of live video input for gaming and to develop new interactive user experiences. He helped create the EyeToy and PlayStation Eye cameras, as well as the PlayStation Move controller. Most recently, Marks and his team have been involved with PlayStation VR, experiments with eye tracking technology and other innovations.
He received a Bachelor of Science in avionics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in the field of underwater robotics from Stanford University.
Jon Radoff
Jon Radoff is CEO and Founder of Disruptor Beam, a company focused on turning the world’s greatest entertainment brands into hugely successful games loved by highly connected customers. Radoff founded Disruptor Beam in 2011 and oversees company strategy and operations.
Disruptor Beam creates highly authentic and story-driven games based around worlds that have spawned communities of millions of passionate, dedicated fans. The company released its first game, Game of Thrones Ascent, in 2013, and Star Trek Timelines in January 2016. The Walking Dead: March to War is currently under development and scheduled to release this year.
Previously, Radoff launched GamerDNA, a social media company that built products driven by real-time gamer behavior. GamerDNA merged with Live Gamer in 2011. Prior to GamerDNA, Radoff founded Eprise, the creator of a content management system that was a forerunner of modern blog and wiki technology. At Eprise, Radoff raised venture capital, established product strategy and recruited a management team that succeeded in taking Eprise into Fortune 500 customers, culminating in a public offering on NASDAQ in 2000. Earlier on in his career, Radoff started NovaLink, an online game publisher that created Legends of Future Past, which became one of the first independent, commercial game products on the Internet.