Baratunde is the co-founder of Cultivated Wit. He's also a comedian, author and former director of digital for The Onion. His responsibilities included producing the “War For The White House” 2008 election coverage, helping the company adapt its storytelling to new digital platforms such as smartphones and social media, and expanding The Onion’s public voice as well as relationships with the technology community. Baratunde is a best-selling New York Times author of How To Be Black. He regularly engages in “digital performance art” including being @The_Swine_Flu, running a real world campaign for his Foursquare mayorship and “live hate-tweeting” all Twilight movies. He’s been a standup comedian for more than 10 years and is a highly sought-after public speaker addressing topics related to the media, politics, technology and marketing. Also black people. He was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company magazine and has worked with the White House Office of Public Engagement as a digital advisor.

Gary Vaynerchuk is first and foremost a storytelling entrepreneur. He is also a New York Times bestselling author and his digital consulting agency, VaynerMedia, works with Fortune 500 companies to develop digital and social media strategy and content. Business Week selected him one of the top twenty people every entrepreneur should follow and CNN voted him one of the top twenty-five tech investors on Twitter. He lives in New York City where he avidly roots for the New York Jets.

Forrest serves as the Director of the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) Festival, where he guides the overall vision for the event as well as directs panel programming. He also spends much of his time with the all-consuming task of community management. Forrest graduated from Austin High School in 1980, and then majored in English at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Before joining the SXSW team, he founded a small alternative publication called The Austin Challenger.

Molly Wright Steenson is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she focuses on digital media studies.

This is her 17th SXSW Interactive and her 16th year on the Advisory Board. Yikes.

Her research focuses on the nexus of architecture, urbanism, infrastructure, design, technology and communication from the 19th to the 21st centuries. She researches architectures of information, pneumatic tube systems, postal services, and mobile phone and social media use.

She has also taught interaction design for a decade and was a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, where she led the Connected Communities research group.

Molly began working with the Web in 1995 at a wide variety of companies including Reuters, Johnson & Johnson and Razorfish. As a design researcher, she examines the effect of personal technology on its users, with recent projects in India and China for Microsoft Research and Intel Research.

Molly has a PhD in architecture from Princeton University. She holds a M.A. in architecture from Princeton, a Master’s in Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture and a B.A. in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.