You are going to have 2, count them 2 chances to engage and work with our talented mentors in the Business Solutions Challenge before Semi-Final Submissions are due. Make sure to register today for Challenge Day – you won’t want to miss adding all of these folks to your network!
March 6th Challenge Day Mentors:
Kathy Boelter – President at Arrow Solutions Group
Kathy leads Arrow Solutions Group, a Technology Staffing and I.T. Executive Recruiting company serving Colorado and surrounding states for over 12 years. She brings 20+ years’ experience in understanding and advising corporate leaders on their team development and internal technology strategy.
Kathy is an expert in staff augmentation, recruiting, and salary & initiative management. She advocates for technologists to understand and negotiate for their worth, educates clients on industry technology trends, and is a trusted adviser to CIOs and technology executives as they grow professionally.
Leo Archer – Senior DBA at Builders FirstSource/Probuild
Your next-door data guy, Leo, is experienced with public data and machine learning. Leo has had teams entered the Go Code Colorado final competition twice and would love to work with your team this year! Leo is a Sr Database admin and mid-level data scientist with eight years of experience and proficiency with SQL Server, Google Cloud, Python, and Tableau. He is a Public data enthusiast and has worked for city and state-level government organizations plus the United Nations. Leo is dedicated to international relationships and social good in his spare time and loves all things entrepreneurial.
Tracy Wesley – Director of Software Development at Proximity
Tracy is the Director of Software Development at Proximity and has worked exclusively in the startup and entrepreneurial community. She has participated in Go Code Colorado three times and was a finalist once. She moved to the beautiful Western Slope in 2015 and enjoyed working with and getting to know the local tech community members.
Jordan Stone – Director of Cloud Platforms at Panasonic Smart Mobility, Cirrus by Panasonic
Having worked everywhere from a four-person startup to a Fortune 100 company, Jordan has extensive experience delivering quality applications to both consumers and the enterprise. While his career started predominantly in mobile app development, since 2014, he has focused on emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things, cognitive computing and conversational user interfaces, VR/AR/MR. His focus is putting these kinds of technologies in the hands of users in a way that both improves their productivity and enhances their lives.
Venky Swaminathan – Chief Technology Officer & Chief Strategist at Trilogy Networks
Venky is an entrepreneur, problem solver, mentor,loves big ideas and strategizing, value creator, husband, and father. He is a serial entrepreneur that is currently focused on solutions for some challenging problems with edge computing. Stay tuned! Venky’s core skills are problem-solving, building lean startups from ideation to product, building value for customers and investors, and go-to-market strategies and partnerships.
Venky has twenty-plus years of experience in high-tech, internet, wireless/mobile, cloud, connected devices, and startups from start to exit. He has worked in large companies and startups in varying roles but always gravitates to solving problems with technology, building scalable models, and delivering exceptional results.
Tim Campbell – System Analyst at City of Fort Collins
Tim has many interests that have led him in many different directions: from consumer products testing to photovoltaic creation, from electric propulsion characterization to hydraulic system design, from studying reuse of hybrid-electric vehicle batteries to simulation and analysis of non-electric hybrids (and that’s just in chronological order!). The one constant in all this is data. Proper data use is the key to furthering all of these fields and more, which is where Tim comes in. Tim’s passion is all things data – collection techniques, transfer, sanitization, processing, storage, and analysis. What sets him apart from others in this field is his understanding of the data themselves and the means to gather the best information from the available data.
Jeff Ditillo – Agile Software Product Management
Jeff is a successful Agilist, Product Owner, and Lean Startup enthusiast with deep experience in the software industry. Known for being a relentless learner, team builder, and effective communicator, he collaborates and focuses on delivering value. Passionate about inspiring his teams and providing the tools needed to deliver the right products with high quality that customers need collaboratively and creatively, bringing out the best in everyone on the team.
Jeff’s specialties are Agile product management, product ownership, lean startup, technical analysis, enterprise application development, business processes, Agile coaching, Scaled Agile, and facilitation.
John Dardick – Principal Owner, Spring Creek
John is an accomplished business management and transformation executive. He has extensive experience and knowledge in startups and large enterprises – innovative strategy development and functional management of supplier portfolios, vendor business development, inventory planning, procurement, sourcing, business operations, and logistics for products and services in technology OEM, wholesale distributor, and reseller channels.
For the Mentorship Event on Wednesday, March 31, from 6 pm to 8 pm, you will also meet with these accomplished people as well as the folks above:
Kellen Sorauf – Assistant Professor and Data & Information Director at Regis University
Kellen Sorauf is an assistant professor of Data Science in the Anderson College of Business and Computing at Regis University. Dr. Sorauf first began practicing data science while completing his graduate work in analytical chemistry at the University of Denver, where he used machine learning and chemometrics to model chemical systems. Dr. Sorauf’s research interests are now primarily focused on assessment and learning assurance within the Anderson College of Business and Computing.
Elisa Hebert – Vice President of Engineering Operations at Fairwinds
Elise is a results-oriented, data-driven operations executive with 20+ years of experience driving operational effectiveness, workforce optimization, business process re-engineering, efficiency, and continuous improvement. Elise possesses the ability to create clarity and operationalize quickly, driving consensus and positive outcomes.
Brad Bickerton – Executive VP of Carbon Chemistry Ltd
Brad believes entrepreneurs have the power to change the world. He loves helping them do that. This is his obsessive hobby, profession, and honor.
Brad works every day (and night) at manifesting a better success/fail rate. This began for him with spinning out his internal consulting work into inventing a Primary Advisor system inside Delta Awesome. It has grown beyond that. Brad’s Primary Advisors regularly help early to late-stage startups find success and avoid failures at astonishing levels. Brad has the distinct honor to work with exceptional founders and Get-Stuff-Done folks all day, every day, and he loves it.
Lang Mei – Co-Founder of Informu
With a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a determination to improve the world around him, Lang moved from China to the U.S. in 2013. By the age of 20, he had founded three profitable startups.
Lang has a passion for building new and novel solutions to solve real problems and values diversity above all else when finding the right team to do so. Diversity alone has been the spark that has made many of Lang’s business ventures possible.
Lang’s newest and most forward-thinking venture, informu, has successfully raised venture funding from Top 10 Seed V.C. firms. The company has shipped loss prevention devices to over 69 countries. To date, informu has been reported on by over 40 national and international media outlets in 6 different languages, including BBC, Mashable, HuffPost, Business West, Denver News 7, and CCTV, to name a few.
Above all else, Lang is a young, insightful, and passionate entrepreneur with a vested interest in bettering the world around him by all means possible.
If you are interested in joining us as a mentor for the Business Opportunity Challenge coming up in the fall of 2021 contact us at info@gocode.colorado.gov.
