Jon Brumley was raised in Austin, Texas and graduated from the University of Texas in 1961. He received an MBA degree from the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Brumley began his energy career with Southland Royalty Company as a risk analyst in 1967 and became its President in 1974. Over the course of his career, Brumley has listed eight companies on the New York Stock Exchange and was a founder in all but two. He currently serves as president and CEO of Bounty Minerals which was formed to buy non-producing minerals in the Utica Shale and Marcellus Shale.

In 2012, Brumley endowed the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs at the McCombs School of Business. JBTVL is a campus-wide initiative to accelerate startups in taking their innovations to market and to transform graduate students into entrepreneurs and business leaders.  To date, 40% of the 178 companies working with JBTVL have raised more than $491 million from investors.  

Brumley also devotes time to philanthropic ventures. Together with his wife Becky, the couple founded the Red Oak Foundation in 1991. The foundation initially provided four year scholarships to students planning to become public school teachers in Texas. In 1997, that mission expanded to spread the benefits of books to disadvantaged children, laying a foundation for reading readiness and involving parents. Brumley serves as a member of the M.D. Anderson Board of Advisors, the McCombs Advisory Board, the Littlefield Society, and the Chancellors Council. 

Bill Gurley has spent over 15 years as a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston focusing on personal computer hardware and software. His research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. In both 1995 and 1996, Bill was a member of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team.

Prior to his investment career, Bill was a design engineer at Compaq Computer, where he worked on products such as the 486/50 and Compaq’s first multi-processor server. For the past fifteen years, Bill has authored the Above the Crowd blog which focuses on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses.

Over his venture career, he has worked with such companies as GrubHub (IPO: GRUB), Nextdoor, OpenTable (IPO: OPEN, Acquired by Priceline), Stitch Fix (IPO: SFIX), Uber, and Zillow.com (IPO: Z).

Other Affiliations: Advisory board of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.

Education: MBA from the University of Texas, 1993; and a BS in computer science from the University of Florida, 1989. Chartered Financial Analyst.

 A former Management Consultant with Booz & Co, Katie got involved in start-ups when she joined the Executive Team at www.seek.com.au as head of Marketing & Product.

She invested 6 years building the SEEK brand and leading the product effort at this award winning website through IPO.

Katie then founded www.kidspot.com.au, the largest and most successful online website for mothers in Australia and New Zealand, selling to News Corp in 2011.

Katie has a BBA in Accounting and earned her CPA shortly after studying at the University of Texas at Austin. Katie later returned to the same university to earn her MBA with a concentration in marketing.

She joined ShippingEasy as the CEO in 2012, moving the headquarters to her hometown of Austin and kicking off the aggressive growth efforts following its founding in Sydney, Australia.