Mark Yusko is the Founder, CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Morgan Creek Capital Management. Prior to forming Morgan Creek, Mr. Yusko was President, Chief Investment Officer and Founder of UNC Management Company, the Endowment investment office for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 1998 to 2004. Throughout his tenure, he directly oversaw strategic and tactical asset allocation recommendations to the Investment Fund Board, investment manager selection, manager performance evaluation, spending policy management and performance reporting. Total assets under management were $1.5 billion ($1.2 billion in endowment assets and $300 million in working capital). Until 1998, Mr. Yusko was the Senior Investment Director for the University of Notre Dame Investment Office where he joined as the Assistant Investment Officer in October of 1993. He worked with the Chief Investment Officer in all aspects of Endowment Management.
Mr. Yusko received his Bachelor of Science Degree, with Honors, in Biology and Chemistry from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Business Administration in Accounting and Finance from the University of Chicago. Mr. Yusko is an Advisory Board member of a number of private capital partnerships and alternative investment programs and has served as a consultant on alternative investments to a select group of institutions. Mr. Yusko is an Investment Committee member of the MCNC Endowment, President and Chairman of the Investment Committee of The Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Foundation at the University of Notre Dame, and President and Head of the Investment Committee of the Morgan Creek Foundation.
Tim Draper founded Draper Associates, DFJ and the Draper Venture Network, a global network of venture capital funds. The firms’ investments include Baidu, Focus Media, YeePay, KongZhong, Skype, Hotmail, Tesla, SolarCity, Coinbase, Ledger, Robinhood, Athenahealth, Box, TwitchTV, SpaceX, Cruise Automation, Carta, Planet, PTC and many others.
He is a leading spokesperson for Bitcoin, Blockchain, ICOs and cryptocurrencies, having won the Bitcoin US Marshall’s auction in 2014, investing in over 50 crypto companies, and having led investments in Coinbase, Ledger, Tezos, and Bancor, among others.
He created viral marketing, a marketing method for exponentially spreading an electronic service from customer to customer, instrumental to the successes of Hotmail and Skype and other applications, particularly effective for mail and communications applications. Arguably, social media, crowdsourcing and growth hacking are all outgrowths of viral marketing.
He is regularly featured on all major networks as a proponent for entrepreneurship, innovative governance, free markets and Bitcoin, and has received various awards and honors including the World Entrepreneurship Forum’s “Entrepreneur of the World,” and is listed as one of the top 100 most powerful people in finance by Worth Magazine, the top 20 most influential people in Crypto by CryptoWeekly, #1 most networked VC by AlwaysOn, #7 on the Forbes Midas List, and #48 most influential Harvard Alum.
In promoting entrepreneurship, he created Draper University of Heroes, a residential and online school based in San Mateo, Ca to help extraordinary people accomplish their life missions. The school created entrepreneurs that built 350 companies including crypto leaders, QTUM, Spacecash, DataWallet and Credo. He started Innovate Your State, a non-profit dedicated to crowdsource innovation in government, and BizWorld, a non-profit that teaches young children how business and entrepreneurship work.
He served on the California State Board of Education, and led a movement for Local Choice in schools culminating in becoming proponent for a statewide initiative for School Vouchers. He also led a statewide initiative to create competitive governance with Six Californias, followed by an initiative for Three Californias.
Tim Draper received a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University with a major in electrical engineering and a Master of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School. He has two honorary doctorates from The International University and Trinity College of Dublin.
Mr. John Howard Burbank, III serves as the Founder and Chief Investment Officer at Passport Capital, LLC, which he founded in August 2000. He received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and earned his BA in English Literature from Duke University.