Category: Podcasts

A serial entrepreneur, Alejandro Rivas Micoud has been founding or co-founding companies since he launched his first business, a grocery delivery business, in Spain at the age of 14.

A San Francisco native and Nuclear Operations Engineer with an MBA from INSEAD, Alejandro has lived, worked and launched companies in Japan, Europe and the U.S. Some of his startups have had phenomenal exits, some have been learning experiences, but all of them had a strong international/global component to them.

Alejandro has had the experience of managing the preparation of an IPO, has launched and completed an MBO as well as a major restructuring, and has successfully managed company acquisitions, mergers, divestitures and joint ventures.

With experience in the utility, telecom, and the B2B SaaS industries, Alejandro has learnt the crucial importance of a great user experience for the success of any company, whether a startup or a fortune 100 firm. His current venture, Userlytics, founded in 2009, is one of the global leaders in remote user experience optimization.

In his free time Alejandro likes creative writing, amateur film directing & producing, skiing, sailing, travel and fine dining.

Troy Harvey is the CEO of PassiveLogic. He has a proven track record of 20 years of vision and leadership: building and delivering game-changing products by blending cutting-edge technology with emerging market opportunities. Troy holds unique cross-over expertise in the fields of product development, building science, and control systems engineering.

Prior to forming PassiveLogic, Mr. Harvey founded Heliocentric, a leading building science and controls engineering firm that innovated a new approach to building design using simulation technology. In his capacity as CEO he oversaw the development of next-generation controller technology to address the unmet needs of high-performance building energy systems and led his team on several award-winning building designs.

Liz Burstein is CEO and Co-Founder of Neura Health. She founded Neura Health based on her personal journey with chronic pain, which exposed her to the key challenges of specialist access and care quality that patients face when navigating chronic neurological conditions. Previously Liz led product development teams at digital health companies Maven Clinic and Zocdoc.

Liz started her career in product management at LinkedIn, where she shipped many core products across both the consumer and enterprise side of the business. Liz also spent time as a venture capital investor focused on enterprise AI, healthcare, and consumer technology. She holds dual degrees in Computer Science and Philosophy from Stanford University.

Giora Engel is the co-founder and CEO of Neosec, an API Security Platform. Giora is also the chair of the fraud prevention task force at Financial Data Exchange. In 2011, Giora founded LightCyber, which used network and endpoint behavioral analytics to help lay the groundwork for what would later become XDR. Palo Alto Networks acquired LightCyber in 2017. Giora served as VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks after LightCyber was acquired. Before venturing into the private sector, Giora served for nearly a decade as an officer in Unit 8200, the elite technological unit in the Israel Defense Forces, where he pioneered the development of cyber technologies.

Giora is a recognized innovator in cybersecurity, cyber warfare and behavioral analytics, and holds several patents. His broad range of technology experience spans network analysis, cybersecurity, algorithmic coding and mission-critical systems. His research in the fields of computer vision and physics has been published in Nature, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and the International Journal of Computer Vision. He has also contributed to Dark Reading and other publications. He holds a B.Sc. in Physics with honors from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ruari Baker, CEO & Co-Founder of Allegrow, has been working on the science behind inbox placement (where emails land after they’ve been delivered) since 2018. After automating more than 18 million emails through multiple SaaS applications, Ruari has developed unique expertise on the emerging issue of inbox placement effecting business and customers.

Allegrow today is used by hundreds of market leading businesses in sales and technology like SaaStr, Black Kite Software, Path Robotics and Vise. Previously Ruari was an early employee for London’s fastest growing start-up, while they scaled from 8,000 to 40,000 recurring customers.

Jim Donnelly is a career entrepreneur who co-founded Restore Hyper Wellness in Austin, Texas in 2015. After founding and exiting his first company in grad school, Jim spent time in the US military as an Army officer before marketing stints at brands that included Kraft Foods, AT&T, Coca-Cola and Citibank. In 2001, Jim leveraged his love for travel to build one of the most popular online travel communities in the world, IgoUgo.com, which earned a Webby Award for “Best Travel Site in the U.S.” After IgoUgo was sold to Sabre Holdings/Travelocity, Jim founded Pursuit Group, an incubator that launched high-end experiential retail businesses and one-of-a-kind boutique real estate projects.

Adam Gordon is an experienced Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) / Chief Technology Officer (CTO) with over 35 years of experience working in the information technology and services industry. As a consultant, author, and educator, he is a strong information technology professional skilled in IT Service Management, IT Strategy, Virtualization, Cloud, Security, and Infrastructure across multiple vendor platforms. Adam holds pretty much every IT certification worth holding, including many from Microsoft and (ISC)2.

He runs CISSP and Azure training, having trained thousands of IT pros over the course of his career.

Belsasar (Bel) Lepe is co-founder and CEO of Cerby. He was previously the Head of Product at Impira, where he led the company’s product life cycle, helping drive a 4x increase in revenue. Prior to his role at Impira, Bel was co-founder and CTO at Ooyala where he led a global product, design, and engineering team of 300+ Ooyalans spanning five countries and seven offices. Ooyala achieved two successful exits totaling over $440M.

Bel began his career as an engineer at Google working on Enterprise Collaboration products and studied Computer Science at Stanford University. He is an active advisor and investor in start ups, with a specific focus in Latin America.

Rob Palumbo helps consumer scale-ups optimize paid media mix and grow revenue as CEO of OutPoint. Prior to OutPoint, he previously built and led the growth & marketing functions for a few high-growth consumer fintech companies, Borrowell.com (credit & lending), PolicyMe.com (life insurance), and, most recently, Properly.ca (real estate).

Rob has a track record in supporting the growth of companies from 0-to-100k+ users and millions in revenue, taking startups from Seed to Series B+ stage.

Daniel Raskin, Co-founder, CMO and CPO of Mperativ, has more than 15 years of experience building brands and driving product leadership. Prior to Mperativ, Daniel served as CMO of Kinetica, held executive product strategy and marketing roles at ForgeRock, and served as Chief Identity Strategist at Sun Microsystems.

Daniel also held leadership positions at McGraw-Hill, NComputing, Barnes & Noble and Agari. He has a master’s degree in international management from Thunderbird School of Global Management and a master’s degree in publishing from Pace University.

Jon Sockell is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Limbix, a company providing digital therapeutics for adolescent mental health. Limbix’s flagship product is SparkRx, an evidence-based adjunct treatment intervention for adolescents aged 13-22 with symptoms of depression.

Jon has spent over a decade working on business teams at venture backed startups in Silicon Valley. Prior to Limbix, he was the first business hire and head of marketing at KeepTruckin, and before that he worked in product marketing and client services at Medallia. Jon has a BA in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis and an MBA from Vanderbilt University. His hobbies include golf, travel, NBA, and scrabble.

Richard Bronson is the founder and CEO of 70 Million Jobs–the first national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records. Richard had an extremely successful career on Wall Street, but along the way broke some securities laws. He paid the price by losing everything, including his freedom, through a 2-year prison sentence.

When he left prison, he was destitute and homeless, but had found his calling in life: help his brothers and sisters returning to society so that they could lead safe, productive lives.

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.