Serial entrepreneur Byron Bennett began his entrepreneurial journey in high school, never expecting that one day he would lead a venture called Zergratran to build in Columbia an alternative to the Panama Canal. He shares the challenges he is facing which include raising funds for a venture of significant scale. His stories of earlier ventures illuminate the unique path of an entrepreneur while offering insight helpful to aspiring and fellow entrepreneurs.
Vitaly Golomb is a seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor who most notably co-founded HP’s corporate venture arm. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sofielabs, the next-gen CRM that uses AI to automate the sales process. Hear how AI was applied to the costly weak link of sales and how their startup strategically emerged from stealth to take on Hubspot and Salesforce which dominate the CRM market.
Trevor Laudate heads the award-winning startup Ecodrive, a B2B climate tech platform connecting companies to measurable sustainability projects such as tree planting and harvesting plastic from the ocean. Customers find these environmental and social activities appealing which companies see as strengthening loyalty and yielding other desired customer outcomes.Trevor shares how they developed their model, formed their leadership team, and gained the attention of investors, winning a $300K inve...
CEO Stacey Yudin has experienced the full arc of digital technology, leading NEP Services' Union and Non-profit clients from legacy processes and structure to specialized digital technology platforms. Stacey shares how NEP learned about their customers' pain points and established collaborative working relationships---that is ongoing with new technology such as AI. Stacey also delves into the excitement of building an innovative company as part of Industrial 4.0 and her commitment to fosterin...
Patricia Lizarraga is the Founder and Managing Partner of Hypatia Capital Management. Leveraging her 30+ years of experience on Wall Street, she and her co-founder launched in 2023 an ETF comprised solely of female-led publicly traded companies, WCEO. Hear how she navigated the launch of this unique financial model that highlights the performance of women executives and increases their prominence within the institutional investor community.
Daniel Daoura, founder and CTO of Pebblebee, is a serial entrepreneur and visionary leader in the trackables industry. Daniel began his career at Boeing, where he spent over 10 years in lead engineering roles developing global software and hardware systems for military asset-tracking communication systems. Leveraging this experience, Daniel ventured into the finder space, creating Pebblebee to help people track what matters most to them. To date, Daniel has more than 30 patents in the trackab...
First-time entrepreneurs often have great business ideas that provoke their passion to start a business. Our guests, Stacy Pena and Brian Engleman, are Fund Managers for the San Diego Angel Conference and they will share their experience as to how angel investors view founding entrepreneurs and the business ideas they pitch for funding. Don't miss this chance to gain insight into how to best position your startup to gain the support of investors.
Join author Mark Atkeson on his 30-plus year journey of living and working in China, an eyewitness to China's great transformation into a superpower. As both an entrepreneur and investor, Mark shares his firsthand experiences in a country that lifted 800 million people out of poverty over that period, spurred in large part by innovating Chinese entrepreneurs. In his book "Risky Business in Rising China" Mark offers why the U.S. will remain competitive with China, identifying both the co...
Not many college students can claim that their startup won $100,000 at a pitch competition held at the San Diego Angel Conference and then also gained seed funding. Student athlete Dominyck Bullard, now student entrepreneur, accomplished both soon after launching his digital media startup Athletiverse. His company manages the digital assets of colleges, universities, and collectives, supporting student-athletes and athletic departments. Dominyck shares how he navigated from the initial ...
Hear Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder of SEQSTER, a healthcare technology startup. Ardy shares his journey to solve a giant pain point in the healthcare industry, achieving funding and his one-on-one meeting with Bill Gates to discuss his disruptive model. SEQSTER is on the frontline of healthcare innovation, breaking down health data silos, using an enterprise operating system which aggregates disparate health data from a range of sources to provide a single, 360-degree view of a p...
Sri Solur, CEO of Kenmore Brands at Transformco, takes listeners through his journey of transforming the Kenmore brand in today’s digital world, leaving behind its one-hundred-year history as a top Sears appliance brand. Hear how through his leadership he changed the company’s "retail-captive" culture to embrace innovation, while also applying his 25+ years of experience as a Chief Product Officer at top product-based high-tech companies such as Hewlett Packard and Berkshire Grey.
Finding investor funding for a startup is an enormous challenge, William Santana Li, an intrapreneur at Ford Motor and its youngest senior executive at the age of 28 provides frank insight about startup funding—having raised over $120 million for his robots venture Knightscope. He shares the unconventional and visionary mindset that enabled him to move his startup forward despite great obstacles.
Funding a life science or medtech startup is uniquely challenging due to the extended time required for product development, and if applicable, product approval. Patrik Schmidle, Founder and CEO of CARI Health shares how he navigated funding for his medtech startup that brought in millions of dollars in funding from a range of funding sources.
Susan Newman, SVP of Conferences at the National Retail Federation, and Rob Grimes, Founder and CEO of the International Food & Beverage Technology Association discuss the latest innovations impacting the retail industry and how they will be showcased at the upcoming Retail Big Show in January. They share the excitement of the Food Service Innovation Zone, a dedicated area for 50 exhibitors, that will provide attendees with immersive experiences of the coolest technologies now being...
Serial entrepreneur Steve Visconti is co-founder and CEO of Xiid, a cyber security startup providing a proprietary architecture to protect enterprise networks and assets. Steve discusses cyber security in terms of both large companies and startups, sharing insight about cyber threats dominating our news. He also gives his view as to how a tech startup can be scaled, the role of funding, and the mindset that it takes to make it all happen.
Product brands surround our everyday lives, but few truly understand what is required to create a brand that is preeminent and enduring. Udaiyan Jatar (UJ) held prominent positions in both P&G and Coca Cola. In the latter he was one of the youngest Global Vice-Presidents where he led the strategy, innovation, and marketing for Global R&D. Now UJ is the co-founder and president of Tecton, a multi-functional health beverage that provides nature’s optimal fuel — exogenous ketones — to pr...
Dr. Peter Bonuitti is a renowned orthopedic surgeon who pioneered Minimally Invasive Surgery and has over 500 patents and applications. In a discussion of his two most recently launched products, the world’s smartest mobile UV light sanitizer and a medical device to counter severe headaches, Dr. Bonutti shares insight about the challenges and the rewards of medical device innovation.
Carol Craig began her career as a Naval Flight Officer flying P3 Orion Aircraft, serving as a trailblazer for women in the military. Today she is the CEO of Sidus Space, a public company listed on the NASDAQ Exchange. Hear her story of her first aerospace startup, Craig Technologies, that benefited from SBA programs for women, veterans and minorities that led to her great success as an aerospace entrepreneur.
From his time-consuming experience of preparing options data, fintech entrepreneur David Hait saw an unmet need for it to be better organized, cleaned, and made easier to use by portfolio managers, investors, and academic researchers worldwide. In 1999 he founded New York-based OptionMetrics when options trading was less common than it is today, with a record 10.38B U.S. option contracts cleared in 2022. David shares his startup challenges and how he grew his firm to 60+ employees that led to...
Tom Frazier is the co-founder and CEO of Redivider, which follows his 25-year corporate career in technology to become a visionary entrepreneur driving transformational initiatives in future tech, B2B, and public sectors. Tom's latest venture is building greener data centers in Opportunity Zones across the U.S. He shares how he pulled together the resources for his startup, the elements necessary for all entrepreneurs to succeed, and how entrepreneurs need to be thinking about AI for th...