Wisdom of Crowds: Harnessing Community Knowledge and Data

Event Description:

Marc Hedlund co-founded Wesabe to help people better understand their spending and to foster a community dedicated to helping each other get the most from their money. Marc will talk about how to form and grow an active community of members, and will demonstrate how the power of aggregated data can help individuals make better financial decisions.

Moderator:

Marc Hedlund is CEO of Wesabe; when he caught his bank making sneaky changes to its account terms in order to squeeze more fees from him, he had enough. When searching for a better bank, Hedlund was surprised at the number of people who were also dissatisfied. He began to think about how powerful it would be if a community could pool its collective knowledge about businesses so they all could benefit from the best values and experiences. Marc co-founded Wesabe to help people better understand their spending and to foster a community dedicated to helping each other get the most from our money.

Hedlund was recently an entrepreneur-in-residence at O’Reilly Media and prior to that was VP of engineering at Sana Security, an enterprise software startup developing an “immune system” for protecting servers from worms and hackers. Marc co-founded and was CEO of Popular Power, a distributed computing startup. He also founded and led Lucas Online, the internet subsidiary of Lucasfilm, Ltd; was director of engineering at Organic Online; and was CTO at Webstorm, where he wrote one of the Internet’s first shopping cart applications in 1994. Marc is a graduate of Reed College.