Andrew "A.J." Lang, the global CTO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., has joined entrepreneurs and VCs on the roster of speakers for the first Startup Midwest Conference at Ohio State University, his alma mater.
Some 200 attendees have registered so far, nearing the capacity of 250, a spokeswoman said Friday.
The conference, taking place at several campus venues Oct. 24-25, is an initiative of the new OSU Center for Software Innovation to elevate Central Ohio's stature in the Midwest tech industry.
"Columbus is a hub for innovation," said Shereen Agrawal, the center's executive director. "It's an incredible place to hone and develop skills, and put them into practice."
The Timashev Family Foundation, led by serial entrepreneur and OSU graduate Ratmir Timashev, donated a record $110 million in February to establish the center. The funding covers a future building, faculty, curriculum and Techstars accelerator, which has applications open for its first cohort of startups.
Lang is the kickoff keynote for an Oct. 24 evening networking session with room for up to 500 at the new Vitria on the Square event space in University Square North. He has headed technology development for nearly six years at the New York City banking giant.
Columbus is Chase's second-largest employment center, with some 19,000 Central Ohio workers. The McCoy Center in the Polaris region includes a large financial technology development hub for the company.
Lang graduated from Ohio State in 1984 with a degree in computer information sciences, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO at Workday and a past general partner at Sequoia Capital in Silicon Valley, is also set to speak. Previously he was an executive for 14 years with network infrastructure provider VMware Inc.
Timashev also is speaking. He co-founded Veeam Software Corp., a data backup and recovery firm with $1.5 billion annual revenue that moved its headquarters to Columbus from Switzerland. Before that he co-founded a software company while an OSU grad student that was later acquired.
"How he speaks about his vision is incredible," Agrawal said.
Most of the talks and sessions will take place in OSU's Blackwell Inn and Pfahl Conference Center.
Smaller breakout sessions have speakers including Ayanna Howard, dean of OSU's School of Engineering; Jeff Schumann, co-founder and CEO of Columbus-based Aware; and Bryan Semple, operating partner at private equity firm Francisco Partners and COO at Ambassador Lab.
Lt. Gov. Jon Husted and a panel from Techstars will close out the event at the Ohio Stadium loge level overlooking the football field.
