Mariano Battan

Mariano Battan co‐founded Mural, a collaborative intelligence company. He is a serial entrepreneur with an exit to Disney on his resume, an EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 Finalist, and an inventor by trade. He is passionate about connecting the next generation of knowledge workers to the development of their collaboration design skills, so they can ideate and solve hard problems together.

Previously, he co‐founded Three Melons, a video game studio that designed and published online games for clients like LEGO, Disney, Mattel, and Warner Bros. Three Melons created more than 50 games as well as the soccer‐based Facebook game Bola!, which had more than 20 million players globally in 2010. The company was acquired in 2010 by Playdom, then Disney, where Mariano served as creative director following the acquisition. He then co‐founded Idea.me, a leading crowdfunding site for the Latin American region.

Mariano is an active angel investor and startup advisor at Endeavor.org, a global non‐profit leading the high‐impact entrepreneurship movement. As an Endeavor entrepreneur, he mentors other founders at various stages of their scaleup journey. He is a graduate of the Endeavor Leadership Program by the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Jim Kalbach

Jim Kalbach is the chief evangelist at Mural and has been with the company since 2015. He is a noted author, speaker, and instructor in experience design, strategy, and visual methods, as well as remote facilitation. Jim's personal mission is to make imagination work possible in global organizations, anywhere, anytime. Early on, Jim was instrumental in growing several of Mural's largest customers, including IBM, SAP, Intuit, and more.

In 2018, Jim coauthored Mural's guide to remote meetings, Facilitating Remote Workshops. He is also the author of Designing Web Navigation (2016, O'reilly); Mapping Experiences (2016, O'reilly; 2nd Ed, 2020), focusing on the role of visualizations in strategy and innovation; and The Jobs To Be Done Playbook (2020, Rosenfeld Media), offering techniques organizations can follow to turn market insight into action. More recently, Jim co‐founded the JTBD Toolkit, an online learning platform on the topic of jobs to be done (www.jtbdtoolkit.com).