Author: dojo.live

John Estafanous is the founder and CEO of RallyBright, a team development platform that helps business leaders improve team performance and strengthen team dynamics.

As a repeat founder with extensive digital transformation, marketing, and operations experience, John leverages his executive leadership and technology background to build solutions that drive business impact and are easy to use. Prior to founding RallyBright, John served as the Global Managing Director of the Digital practice at a leading Omnicom agency where he led global digital strategy, operations, product, and growth initiatives and grew the team from 100-400+ members and annual revenues from $27M to $100M+. Before that, John was CTO & President of Technology Services for WhittmanHart Interactive, a top 10 US digital agency which acquired his SaaS marketing software company and agency.

He believes that resilient, high-performing teams can change the world.

Rajiv Mehta is the Founder and CEO of nonprofit Atlas of Care. For the past 15+ years, he has applied innovations in anthropology, design and technology to understanding how we (people) care for ourselves, our families and our communities, and how those efforts could be more joyful and effective. In collaboration with many others, this has led to the development of tools and methods for self-exploration (”personal science”), and the design of collaborative experiences for strengthening social bonds, as well as novel research on day-to-day human care. Atlas has worked with communities across a wide range of ages (teens to nonagenarians), professions (waiters to executives), and ethnicities.

Earlier in his career, Rajiv led product innovation and new business efforts for Apple, Adobe, Motorola and numerous technology startups. Before that he was a research scientist at NASA. He studied aerospace engineering at Princeton and Stanford, and business at Columbia. Rajiv is an advisor to several research and entrepreneurial efforts focused on care, has been an advisor and leader in the Quantified Self community, and served for a decade on the board of the Family Caregiving Alliance.

As CEO and Founder of EasyKnock, Jarred Kessler is a vision-driven entrepreneur with over fifteen years of experience in the financial services industry. He has a proven track record with industry leaders such as Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Goldman Sachs. Throughout his career, Kessler witnessed the effects of technological change on the industry and evolved his own business models to align effectively with emerging trends.

Kessler is redefining the real estate and financial space for American homeowners, delivering new and necessary opportunities with EasyKnock’s residential sale-leaseback programs. Kessler’s innovative approach has allowed homeowners across the country to access the money they need to reach their financial goals without uprooting their lives or being rejected by traditional lenders. Kessler earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance and Financial Management Services from Tulane University.

Brian Price leads Kion and the strategy to achieve the company’s mission to make people’s lives easier in the cloud. Before co-founding the company, Brian built software and led software teams at several industry leaders, including Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Jacobs Engineering to name a few.

This software helped these companies transform their internal processes and deliver advanced analytics capabilities to customers. One of these applications launched the first self-service internal cloud platform provisioning service, using AWS and VMware vSphere, for Booz Allen Hamilton. These leadership experiences paved the way for Brian in his current role at Kion to help organizations of all sizes realize success using the cloud.

Vi Friebertshauser went from ESL to becoming valedictorian. She made her first dollar in first grade by trading in soda cans he found. She then made his second dollar by convincing the principal to let her trade the school’s soda cans for cash. Vi got a full ride to the University of Texas at Austin and went on to spend most of her twenties living a 4-hour work week as a digital nomad until she got tired of beaches. Without the technical know-how, she assembled a team, brought in expert advisors, and launched a tech startup.

Vi stumbled upon no-code when she needed to build faster. She fell in love with no-code when she discovered its capabilities! Currently Vi is working on a stealth startup and loves learning about new technologies.

Vikram Chalana is an engineer turned serial entrepreneur. He is currently building Pictory to enable anyone to turn their message into engaging videos quickly & easily. He previously created and scaled Winshuttle, an enterprise software in the data management space, to over 300 global employees.

Vikram holds engineering degrees from Indian Institute of Technology and from University of Washington.

Tom Livne is the CEO & Founder of Verbit, the world’s leading AI-based transcription and captioning platform. Tom formerly served as a board member and investor in Convexum, which was acquired by NSO for $60M. He is an active investor in promising tech companies, including IronSource, Outbrain, Roundforest, Datadog (IPO stage), Snowflake (IPO stage), Jfrog (IPO stage) and Ncino (IPO stage).

Tom holds a LL.B. & B.A. (Cum Laude) from IDC Herzliya and an MBA from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Tom served in the Israel Defence Forces as a warrior and paramedic for the special forces unit of the paratroopers.

Karan Talati is the CEO and co-founder of First Resonance. Their Factory OS, ION, is used by over 30 companies building products in aerospace, automotive, robotics and more. Prior to starting First Resonance, Karan built machine automation and data systems at SpaceX, where he got to see the shift in manufacturing patterns and the enabling technology first hand.

After spending a few years building data and ML pipelines at a startup in LA, Karan started First Resonance with his co-founder and COO, Neal Sarraf. First Resonance is now 25+ people and recently closed its Series A round of funding. This year, they are expanding their customer base and accelerating product development to help more manufacturers meet increasingly dynamic and competitive demands across air travel, space exploration, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Cenk Sidar is the founder and CEO of Enquire AI, an insights software company that leverages artificial intelligence in a tool for businesses to find global subject-matter expertise in real time, from both internal and external resources. Sidar has written for, been interviewed by, and worked with the world’s leading newspapers and media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, CCTV and Al Jazeera. Sidar has also addressed audiences around the world, including at UK House of Commons, Cornell, Tufts, Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and CFR.

Sidar holds an MA degree in international economics and international relations from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, a postgraduate degree in European studies from SAIS’s Bologna Center in Italy, and a BA degree in business administration and international relations from the Istanbul Bilgi University.