Marc has been obsessing about music since the age of six when he first discovered the Beatles, wedged between Joan Baez and Brahms in his parents scant record collection.
After college he got lucky and landed the prestigious job of "Assistant to the Assistant" to the President of EMI Records group. After successfully mastering the stressful world of lunch ordering and laundry pick-up he got his dream job in the A&R department as a scout. Suspecting that the modern world was passing the music business by, he went back to business school to try to get a more specific handle on the wacky world of big business.

After school he worked at WPP Group, where he was a Marketing Fellow and ultimately led corporate ventures on the West Coast. Soon after arriving in SF he caught the internet bug and helped run one of the earliest user generated video sites (Eveo) and MPEG4 companies (iVast). Both were a bunch of years too early. Just prior to founding TastemakerX, which he had been plotting for the better part of 25 years, Marc was the Chief Innovation Officer, for McCann Erikson and Universal McCann helping big brands create better, cooler digital advertising with emerging platforms.

Marc sits on the Boards and Advisory Boards of numerous adtech and consumer internet start-ups in Silicon Valley as well as being on the BoD of the San Francisco Film Society. Marc has a BA from Hamilton College and an MBA from Columbia Business School, and lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children. Marc blogs about music and film at www.snoozebutton.com and other slightly larger publications.

Best Concert

Jeff Buckley, Fez Bar, 1993

Desert Island Band

Velvet Underground

Favorite All Time Album

Nick Drake 'Bryter Layter'

As a serial entrepreneur, Sandro built his career by following his passions for technology and music. He has always looked for ways to fuze these two loves. His experience includes A&R at EMI, Elektra and Arista Records, co-founding and serving as the technology partner at RedStapler, a boutique interactive agency, and most recently a Co-Founder of Sooloos, a luxury digital music server business acquired by Meridian Audio. He has also delved into the world of analytics and business intelligence with his close friends at Tenthwave Digital. Sandro has a BA from Hamilton College and lives in DUMBO Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Best Concert

Lazy Dog, Nikki Beach Club, South Beach 2002

Desert Island Band

Phish

Favorite All Time Album

Jeff Buckley 'Grace'

While Sean may have started his career at the Naval Research Laboratory working on network protocols, he's spent the last decade working on advanced web-based applications and the last four years specifically in the gaming space. His first real exposure to gaming was managing the backend team for Mafia Wars while at Zynga. Following Zynga and some consulting in the gaming space, Sean joined Kabam, the largest maker of social strategy games on the web. He managed several teams there including the Global Warfare game team which was one of the fastest growing games on Facebook. Sean brings a wealth of experience to the team when it comes to scaling and managing very high demand web properties. When not working, Sean enjoys photography, travelling and dancing late into the night at his favorite clubs.

Best Concert

Victor Calderone at the Roxy, NYC in the late 90's

Desert Island Band

Leonard Cohen

Favorite All Time Album

Guns N' Roses 'Appetite for Destruction'

Leaving the corporate grind and cubicle farms behind, Alex moved out West to pursue his passions for software development and garage-rock. Promptly finding startup refuge and joining fellow music tech geeks at TastemakerX, Alex now leads front-end engineering for the site and hopes to bring a rich & engaging UX to the world’s tastemakers. Not shy of travel, Alex has held several project management and developer roles internationally with GE post graduating from the University of Virginia. During his engineering career he has grown fond of client-side frameworks, Node.js, and big-data analytics. When not building applications for the interweb, he can be found playing guitar, hiking, or eating slices at local pizza shops.

Best Concert

Electric Zoo 2010

Desert Island Band

Soul Coughing

Favorite All Time Album (tie)

Van Halen – 1984
RHCP – Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Sal has been involved in the open source world for several years, contributing in communities like Mozilla, Maemo, Ruby and Prototype. Altought his primary focus is web development, he enjoys fiddling on mobile and desktop platforms. When he is not coding with his DVORAK keyboard, he loves cooking, playing video games, practicing Kendo and watching asian movies.

Best Concert

Sonata Arctica, Teatro Cabaret, GDL

Desert Island Band

OYA

Favorite All Time Album

Vola and the Oriental Machine 'Android: Like a House Mannequin'

Tiffany embarked on a new path after realizing she wouldn't be using her degree in Forensic Psychology until she retired and became the overly nosy neighbor-lady. Luckily, this path lit up not unlike the path in Michael Jackson's Billie Jean video and allowed her to combine her love of all things music and her intense need to understand why people click where they do when interacting with web/mobile products.

Her experience includes six years as Creative Director of the front end team that took True.com from 100,000 to 38 million users, co-founding Songvote.com (a crowdsourced music voting tool) and running her own interactive agency, KinggirlMedia. Tiffany has called Paris home several times, working there recently as the UX Advisor for Le Camping's Season 3 in Summer 2012. When she's not driving the engineering department mad with her endless "what if we…" questions or perfecting pixels, Tiffany is a musician and animal rescue magnet.

Best Concert

Robyn, 2010, Hamburg, GER

Desert Island Band

Anything with Jack White involved

Favorite All Time Album

NIN Pretty Hate Machine and Prince - Purple Rain

Jose has been a startup junkie since he started working for an ISP in high school and has since worked for at least a dozen tech companies from social networking to social games and social apps. As computer science drop-out he studied the digital arts, design, film and finally made his way back to the code side of things. He hails from rural San Luis Obispo and probably knows more than you about fixing tractors. Jose joined TastemakerX for one simple reason - to discover awesome new music! So far it seems to be working ;)

Best Concert

Roger Waters The Wall @ ATT Park

Desert Island Band

Arcade Fire

Favorite All Time Album

Blood Sugar Sex Magic