Marshall W. Van Alstyne is a professor at Boston University and a visiting scholar and research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Van Alstyne is a world expert on information economics and has made fundamental contributions to IT productivity and to theories of network effects. His coauthored work on two-sided networks is taught in business schools worldwide. In addition, he holds patents in information privacy protection and on spam prevention methods. Van Alstyne has been honored with six best paper awards and National Science Foundation IOC, SGER, iCORPS, SBIR and Career Awards. He is an adviser to leading executives, a frequent keynote speaker, a former entrepreneur, and a consultant to startups and to Global 100 companies. He received his BA from Yale and his MS and PhD from MIT.

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a C-level advisor to executives globally on platform business models. He is an Entrepeneur-in-Residence at the INSEAD Business School and a Fellow at the Centre for Global Enterprise. He has been ranked among the top 30 emerging business thinkers globally by Thinkers 50. Sangeet writes the popular blog Platformed (platformed.info), and his work has been featured on leading journals and media, including the Harvard Business Review, MIT Technology Review, Sloan Management Review, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. He is a frequent keynote speaker at leading conferences, including the G20 World Summit 2014 and the World Economic Forum events.