Jose Suarez is the CEO & partner of TEDMED, LLC, CEO & co-founder of yappr.com, CEO & founder of Suarez & Associates, LLC, and a partner at Walker Digital, LLC.

TEDMED is a conference focused at the frontier of medical innovation and brings together highly accomplished thinkers, innovators, and achievers in the fields of technology and medicine to explore entirely new ways of thinking about medical problems.

Yappr.com is a free educational website where learning is self-directed, social and fun. The service is based on the premise that people learn better when they are intrinsically motivated to do the work and enjoy the content. Millions of users worldwide first used yappr to learn, study, and teach English and now use it on practically any subject.

Suarez & Associates, LLC advises and makes investments in businesses that solve large problems, leverage existing networks (such as the Internet) and can scale rapidly. Examples include MediaBids.com, a marketplace for efficiently buying and selling print media advertising, and Universal Bio Mining, LLC, a company using synthetic biology technology to improve throughput and reduce pollution in the mining business.

Mr. Suarez served for many years as President & COO of Walker Digital, a privately-held, innovation laboratory based in Stamford, Connecticut, founded by prolific inventor Jay Walker. For Walker Digital Mr. Suarez first restructured $350 million of the company's capital during the burst of the Internet bubble and then managed the creation of a portfolio of more than 1,000 issued and pending U.S. and international patents across a broad range of industries. During his tenure, he brought many of these innovations to market through licenses and strategic partnerships generating more than $260 million in royalties and investments from industry leaders. Now as partner of the firm, Mr. Suarez advises the company’s management on deals and opportunities in an investment banking capacity. Walker Digital is best known as the creator of priceline.com, the Internet-based “name-your-own-price” company.

Prior to Walker Digital, Mr. Suarez was the start-up COO and General Manager of Priceline WebHouse Club, a titanic $400-million venture to extend the priceline.com model into groceries and gasoline.

Mr. Suarez has started, operated and sold numerous businesses, including an electronic payment processing company and manufacturing plants employing thousands of people throughout Central America. A former real estate developer, Mr. Suarez started his professional career at GE, where he created computer simulation models of manufacturing processes and entire factories.

Mr. Suarez was born in El Salvador and emigrated to the United States during his country's civil war to attend college. He graduated valedictorian with a 4.00 grade-point-average from Virginia Tech holding a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Suarez enjoys adventure travel and has participated in expeditions to both the Arctic and the Antarctic. He is forty-eight and an avid ultra-runner. In 2007 he completed the Western States 100 Mile Endurance Run across the Sierra Nevada in 27 hours. He repeated the feat again in 2010, this time finishing in 23 hours to earn the race’s coveted Silver Buckle. Jose and his wife Trish have one son and live in Fairfield County, Connecticut.