Tech hubs have sprung up all over the world and call it native pride, but let’s face it: there’s something special about New York. Yes, we’ve built a bustling and supportive community, and one that tends to go beyond the pale. One of the many things that sets the NY tech ecosystem apart is the NYC Venture Fellows, a world-class, year-long fellowship program designed to help high-potential entrepreneurs scale their ventures in New York City by giving them access to and mentoring by some of the city’s top investors and business leaders. A joint initiative between the city’s Economic Development Corp. and the 92nd Street Y, past Fellows have included the founders of such New York notables as Warby Parker, Etsy, Rent the Runway, SecondMarket, MakerBot, Codecademy, comiXology, Raspberry Pi, Songza and many more.
This newest group is equally impressive, covering everything from enterprise to ecommerce, from social good to social bicycles, from fashion to finance. They’re alumns of Techstars, YCombinator, ER Accelerator and Springboard. One won a BigApps Award, another a Bronze Medal. The list includes a Kaufman Fellow and a Tisch.
Joey Ortiz, the Director of Fellowships at 92Y, Center for Innovation and Social Impact, shared some thoughts with us on the year-long experience.
“Being selected into the Venture Fellows means joining a network of intelligent, driven, and community oriented founders who know that supporting each other’s growth will make each one of them better leaders, and in turn, help them continue to grow their already successful ventures.”
And now that moment you’ve been waiting for: here are the 33 member of the NYC Venture Fellows Class of 2015.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE 2015 NYC VENTURE FELLOWS
All image credit: NYC Venture Fellows
AlleyWatch staff note: This list is in no particular order nor is it a ranking. In fact, the =RAND() function on excel was used to determine order with the exception of the placement of our Founder and CEO who is included last. Lastly, our founder’s acceptance into the fellowship had no impact on our decision to publish this piece.
Alexander Gillett
Alexander Gillett is the founder and CEO of HowGood – and a serial entrepreneur from back to the days when he started a classic childhood lemonade stand. His first startup was Virage, where he has had the great experience of training under people like Bradley Horowitz. He went on to start a painting company, which he sold to a competitor, and was eventually hired to run half their company. During the earliest startup phase of HowGood, Gillett had a technical support company, a rooftop farm, and a couple other gigs. They were profitable enough to get his real passion – HowGood – off the ground.
HowGood is a site (and an app) that tells you HowGood the groceries that you’re buying really are for you. HowGood rates grocery products for the greater good, covering everything related to sustainability and social responsibility, from carbon emissions to labor relations. So consumers get the goods on their nutritional content and how sustainably they were created. going in. Overseeing the business from administration to strategy, he has taken HowGood from concept to game changer.
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Nathaniel Koloc
Nathaniel Koloc is cofounder and CEO of , a startup that recruits Millenials to work at purpose-driven organizations that are focused on social, environmental, and cultural innovation. Koloc is an expert in hiring, recruiting, and team building – and regularly speaks and writes on these topics, as well as on career strategy, and is committed to supporting ventures, projects, and people who are working to ensure that the future arrives safely for our society and our planet.
He is a 2012 Singularity University Alum, a 2011 Unreasonable Fellow, and a 2010 StartingBloc Fellow. He is also a contributor to Harvard Business Review, 99U, Entrepreneur, Inc., and The Muse.
Koloc co-founded ReWork after his time at the 2011 Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, CO, which was the headquarters for the company until the team relocated to New York during the summer of 2014. When he’s not in hard at work in the company’s Soho office, you can find Koloc adventuring in national parks and other wilderness setting across the country!
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Kegan Schouwenburg
Kegan Schouwenburg is the founder and CEO of SOLS, a NYC startup redesigning the way you move through mass customized 3D printed footwear. ‘Sols,’ as in the soles of your feet. The company is developing an all-in-one process to prescribe, generate and sell corrective orthoses – orthopedic insoles, to the rest of us – at a fraction of the price and lead time currently available.
Kegan is also a leading voice in the 3D printing and mass customization industry. Her passion for bringing nascent technologies to the consumer market is reflected in her years of experience in the industrial design and mass-manufacturing space. Before launching SOLS, she was the director of engineering and operations at Shapeways, where she helmed one the world’s largest 3D printing factories. Prior to Shapeways, Schouwenburg co-founded her first company, Design Glut, which sourced and managed production for more than 30 brands, including national chains Urban Outfitters and Target.
Schouwenburg has been recognized on Business Insider’s ‘30 Most Important Women under 30 in Tech’, ‘20 Hottest Startups Founded by Women’ and ‘The Coolest People in New York City Tech’ lists as well as AlleyWatch‘s ‘28 Hardware Innovators in NYC You Should Know’ list. She is also a mentor at connected devices accelerator, R/GATechStars.
Schouwenburg holds a B.S. in industrial design and manufacturing from the Pratt Institute.
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Justin McLeod
Justin McLeod is founder and CEO of , the social discovery app that helps users meet new people through friends.
Don’t call it a dating app. He hates that.
McLeod hails from Louisville, KY and studied at Colgate University. After a few years in management consulting, he headed off to Harvard Business School and decided to follow his passion for connecting people. He founded Hinge in February 2011 and launched the current mobile app in February 2013.
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Soraya Darabi
is the co-founder of , a shopping platform and lifestyle destination for the next generation of consumers who care about the origins of the items they purchase. Think of the mission-driven brand as “The Whole Foods of Fashion.” What Whole Foods has done for the organic food movement, Zady does for sourced products. The brand is among the first online retailers to seamlessly integrate commerce, rich media content and social media to provide customers with a dynamic shopping experience, allowing them to learn about the conscious consumer movement and purchase beautiful goods that were created with craftsmanship and artisanship – qualities that have been sacrificed in a world of cheap prices and fast production.
Good things still come to those who wait.
Zady has been featured on the cover of The Wall Street Journal’s “Off Duty” section with an article entitled: Feel-Good Fashion: The New Black, and was also named one of The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Retail by Fast Company.
Darabi began her career as Manager of Digital Partnerships and Social Media at The New York Times, where she kept her finger on the pulse of today’s ever-changing digital landscape. Next, she served as Product Lead for drop.io, an online collaboration service (acquired by Facebook) and went on to cofound the application Foodspotting, named by Apple and Wired Magazine as an “App of the Year” (acquired by Open Table).
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Octavian Costache
Octavian Costache is cofounder of , a shopping app that makes it way to easy to find and purchase just about instantly spring for whatever strikes your fancy.
He is also an ex-Googler, author of the Gmail Multiple Inboxes and the Google Finance charts. He also played a key role in building Starring and Social Search on Google Maps.. So, basically, he is an entrepreneur, a developer, and a hacker, and now with Spring, he’s on a mission to build products that help connect the people who provide awesome products with the consumers who love them.
Forbes Romania also named him one of 30 people under 30 to restart the country.
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David Yang
Entrepreneur, hacker, teacher, and starter of companies and trouble, David Yang is CEO, cofounder and lead instructor at , a Y Combinator-backed coding education experience focused on student outcomes. Since its founding in 2013, Fullstack Academy has graduated 100+ students with a virtually 100% placement rate into world-class NYC and SF companies like Zenefits, Priceline, Jibe, Gilt Groupe, Medidata and Percolate.
Prior to Fullstack Academy, Yang built and managed NYC engineering teams for companies, including Gilt Groupe, RecycleBank and BrightWire Media. Yang also has experience in the corporate world, having also worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo! But his passion has always been mentoring and growing great engineers. Yang fell in love with the energy and spirit of teaching software engineering when he and Fullstack Academy’s cofounder Nimit Maru started a lecture series called MBACodeSchool at top business schools like Wharton, Harvard, NYU and Columbia. Fullstack Academy was next – it just had to be done.
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Dan MacCombie
Dan MacCombie is bringing healthy, delicious, and energizing teas and beverages to the world as the cofounder and Co-CEO of , a social enterprise and beverage company that works with indigenous farmers in Ecuador to create the world’s first supply chain for guayusa, a tea-like “superleaf” used by Runa to make hot teas and bottled beverages sold in over 8,000 stores nationwide. MacCombie and cofounder, Tyler Gage, created Runa while they were students at Brown University, after their work and experiences in South America made them aware of the greatest challenge that many of the local communities there faced: farmers had few opportunities to create for sustainable livelihoods for themselves, and often had to choose between supporting their families and protecting their forests. In recognition of his work, MacCombie was named a Forbes “30 under 30.″ and has spoken throughout the country. He can also be found exploring the neighborhoods of NYC on a single-speed bike. Yes, they do exist, but aren’t often seen in this city.
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Doreen Bloch
is the CEO and cofounder of , the the beauty-meets-data company for the $382B beauty and personal care industries, which has been named by InStyle Magazine as “Best of the Web” and L’Oreal’s NEXT Generation Women in Digital Award.
Poshly collects hyper-personal data direct-from-consumers to empower brands with real-time consumer intelligence and precision marketing campaigns. Clients include L’Oréal, Unilever, Time Inc., Teen VOGUE and more. Since 2014, Poshly has raised more than $2M in capital from investors including Frontier Equities VC, Corigin Ventures, WI Harper Group. 645 Ventures and others.
Despite the fact that she grew up in the Silicon Valley, yes, Poshly is New York City based. Bloch’s work has been featured by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and more.
The former Second Market analyst also authored the book, “The Coolest Startups in America.”
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Josh Bruno
Josh Bruno is the cofounder and CEO of CareGuardian, a provider of in-home senior care and technology. CareGuardian’s mission is to ensure safety, peace of mind, and a brighter future for families by connecting them with incredible, carefully vetted caregivers, and giving stakeholders insight into what’s happening in the home and with the people closest to them.
Bruno hails from the investment world, and was previously a venture investor with Bain Capital Ventures in Boston and New York. Prior to that, Bruno put his degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas to work, as a developer and product manager at Yahoo, Inc.
And he’s proud to be a Longhorn.
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Andrew Cove
Andrew Cove is a founder of Cover, a payments platform for restaurants and the hospitality industry that allows users to sit down, enjoy their meal, then go, without ever needing their wallets.
Cove was an early team member at AngelList, where he leveraged his experiences in venture capital to help numerous start-ups raise capital. He holds both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon.
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Jocelyn Leavitt
Jocelyn Leavitt is the CEO and cofounder of Hopscotch, a colorful drag-and-drop tool that not only teaches kids how to code – they’re building their own fun projects. Think of it as the legos for software – part tool, part toy, 100% mobile and completely engaging. It’s also the first-ever programming language designed for a mobile device, enabling kids aged 8-infinity to create their own apps and games.
A former educator and business owner, Leavitt combines her love of building companies with her passion for empowering students through experiential learning. Before Hopscotch, Leavitt founded a real estate company and taught history to 7th through 11th graders in Hawaii and New York City. She attended Dartmouth as an undergraduate and earned her MBA at Columbia Business School.
Her work at Hopscotch has been featured by Apple, recognized in FastCompany, Forbes, and Business Insider, and received awards from the Children’s Technology Review, the Parent’s Choice Foundation, and NYC BigApps. The company has earned the praise of kids and teachers alike in over 100 countries.
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Alicia Yoon
Alicia Yoon is CEO and cofounder of peachandlily, a beauty e-commerce site that is changing the way consumers access, discover, and shop for the best beauty products out of Asia.
Yoon grew up pursuing a platform diving career in Korea, then returned to NYC for her BA in Philosophy and East Asian Studies from Columbia University. After a career in finance and consulting, she launched Enabling Hands, a nonprofit that serves the homeless population through hyper-targeting aid, and Alicia Yoon Showroom, a NYC-based platform debuting Asian fashion designers. Yoon launched Peach and Lily in 2012 to bring Korean and Japanese beauty brands to North America through the company’s website and top national retailers like Sephora, Target and SpaceNK. She is a long-time volunteer of international development projects in Thailand, Uganda, China and rural Korea, and never shrinks from using her training as an aesthetician to provide unsolicited skincare advice to friends.
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David Klein
David Klein is the cofounder and CEO of CommonBond, a venture backed financial services company that has raised over $100M to lower the cost of student loans in the US. CommonBond not only provides more affordable loans to students in higher education, by sourcing capital from a community of investors who in turn receive a competitive financial return: for every degree fully funded through the company’s platform, CommonBond funds the education of a student abroad who is in need, funding him or her for a full year. Klein is responsible for ensuring capital growth, creating a best-in-class borrower experience, and building a world-class team at the compan.
By way of background, Klein worked in consumer finance at American Express after having started his career at McKinsey & Company. Klein graduated from Brandeis University with a BA in Politics, Economics, and International Business, and also attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Andras Forgacs
An entrepreneur and venture investor in technology and life sciences, Andras Forgacs is the co-founder and CEO of Modern Meadow, a company that’s developing fundamentally new ways to grow meat and leather with better properties, that eliminates the need for animal slaughter and requires much lower inputs of land, water, energy and chemicals.
Previously, Forgacs co-founded Organovo (NYSE: ONVO), which uses 3D bioprinting to create human tissues for pharmaceutical research and medical applications. Organovo has been recognized as one of TIME magazine’s inventions of the year in 2010 and by MIT Technology Review on its TR50 list of most innovative companies for 2012.
He is also co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of the international non-profit Resolution Project, is a Kauffman Fellow and was a Term Member with the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds an MBA from Wharton and a Bachelor of Arts with honors from Harvard.
He was a speaker at TEDGlobal 2013, Google’s Solve for X 2013, Singularity University and The Economist Ideas Conference and when it comes to investing, his focus is on companies with the potential to have global positive impact.
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Daniela Perdomo
Daniela Perdomo is the cofounder and CEO of goTenna, a hardware startup that has developed a device that pairs with your smartphone and lets you communicate with others, even when you don’t have service. It allows you to send text messages, actually.goTenna works anywhere, regardless of access to cell reception or wifi, and allows you to communicate not just when you’re off-grid, but when you want to be, because it’s end-to-end encrypted.
Perdomo grew up in Sao Paulo, and lives in Brooklyn.
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Drew Austin
Drew Austin is the cofounder of Augmate, a venture backed enterprise platform that provides the building blocks to create customizable and scalable smart eyewear business applications for deskless workers. Let’s just say that they make smart glasses even smarter by removing friction from work and powering wearable devices with purpose. Working with industrial customers and partners, like UPS and Siemens, Augmate is delivering new insights into the operational performance of the deskless workforce.
Austin is a serial entrepreneur and extremely active in the startup community. He is a Mentor at the Startfast Accelerator program in Syracuse, NY, a Managing Director of FounderDating in NYC, an advisor for SXSW Startup Village and an angel investor in and advisor to Augary, which makes safety applications for drivers of connected cars.
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Dan Lambert
Dan Lambert is CEO and cofounder of Board Vitals, the leading test preparation platform for the Medical Specialty Boards. The startup is there to ensure that medical training is always up to date. Board Vitals aggregates the very best, most up-to-date content from publishers, universities, research institutions, and doctors into question banks for the various medical specialties. These banks are currently used by over 20,000 MDs and 30 institutions in the US and Canada, and clients include Harvard, Yale, and the VA Hospital Network. Board Vitals is a Blueprint Health alumni company.
Before Board Vitals, Lambert attended Harvard Business School, and cofounded Pushpins (acquired by Ebates).
Lambert holds over 15 patents related to healthcare and data analytics.
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Lane Gerson
Lane Gerson started his career at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and eventually took his formal business and accounting skill set to work with entrepreneurial-minded companies. Lane has helped run, organize and grow multiple New York-based companies and is now working on his own venture – Jack Erwin, a direct-to-consumer men’s shoe company tailored to the way men think about and shop for footwear, from the ground up, and with an eye on quality and affordability. Well.
While driven to keep their retail pricing down, Jack Erwin are unwaveringly committed to using only quality materials and to the labor intensive, age-old craft of fine shoe making, giving a new meaning to the term ‘well-heeled.’
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Jonathon Ende
New Jersey-born Jonathon Ende has always been a bit of an over achiever, participating in every club and sport he could while growing up, then venturing off to Emory University in Atlanta, where he double majored in Philosophy and Business (at Goizueta Business School, where he was VP of the Business School and President of the Undergraduate Business School Leadership Conference, which earned him the prestigious Burt and Betty Schear Book Award for person most likely to make a positive impact on his or her Universe. He’s working on it. He’s founder and CEO of SeamlessDocs, where he’s helping governments go paperless and making the world a more seamless place. But as Jonathon says, it isn’t really work if you love what you do.
He’s also a cofounder of AlleyNYC.
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Jules Miller
Jules Miller is cofounder of Hire an Esquire, the first and only technology company to offer enterprise legal staffing. The company helps law firms and in-house legal departments to find, manage and pay a team of contract-based attorneys and paralegals on demand. Prior to this, she spent seven years as an ‘intrapraneur’ and consultant in the green industry, helping companies like Salesforce.com and Tiffany & Co. to start up and grow environmental sustainability and corporate responsibility programs.
She started her professional life as a consultant in the Venture Capital Group at Ernst & Young, and also founded and led Carbonado Group, an environmental consulting firm. Miller received her BA from UCLA and her MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also the first East Coast member of the UCLA Venture Capital Fund and a perpetual student of life.
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Rob Fishman
Rob Fishman is the cofounder of Niche, the leading network of relevant and influential social media creators who are prominent on rising platforms such as Vine, Instagram and Tumblr. With both software and services, Niche help creators engage, thrive – and monetize.
Fishman formerly led social media efforts at The Huffington Post, and later at AOL. In 2011, his first company, Kingfish Labs, was acquired by BuzzFeed, for which he is now a contributing editor.
He holds degrees from Cornell and Columbia University, where he attended the Graduate School of Journalism.
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Ben Hindman
Is there anything Ben Hindman doesn’t know about events?, As CEO of Splash, he has helped to throw more than 250,000 events…this year alone, mind you. Splash is the country’s fastest growing event marketing platform, powering events for the top brands in the world. It’s also a frequent go-to platform for tech events.
By way of background, Hindman was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events, from concerts to hotel takeovers to mystery fly-aways. He was recruited to Thrillist after co-founding the Summit Series, an event for the world’s leading entrepreneurs. Prior to that, Hindman started – and sold – DC By Foot, our nation’s capital’s only free walking tour company.
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Jukay Hsu
Ah, Queens, borough of dreams… It is according to Jukay Hsu, founder of C4Q, which fosters the Queens Tech ecosystem to increase economic opportunity and to transform the world’s most diverse community into a leading hub of innovation and entrepreneurship.C4Q believes that technology is a powerful vehicle for increasing economic mobility and empowers adults in low-income and diverse communities to gain skills and jobs in tech.
After graduating from Harvard College, Hsu served as a U.S. Army officer, where he commanded a rifle platoon in Iraq and earned the Bronze Star Medal. Hsu led economic development initiatives and founded the first private provincial radio station with Iraqi reporters. After military service, he returned home and was honored to serve as the youngest member of Mayor de Blasio’s Transition Team and “Jobs for New Yorkers” Task Force. He serves as a Director of the Stuyvesant High School Alumni Association and a Trustee of the Queens Public Library, chairing its technology committee.
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Ryan Rzepecki
Ryan Rzepecki may be one of the coolest entrepreneurs on wheels. Beside the fact that he was on Business Insiders 2013 list of the 100 Coolest People in Tech and UBM’s Future Cities list of Top 100 City Innovators Worldwide, the of Social Bicycles founder and CEO is also a former Central Park horse drawn carriage driver..
Rzepecki has a BS in Marketing from Penn State University and a Masters in Urban Planning from Hunter College, and worked for the NYC Department of Transportation as a bike planner before founding Social Bicycles (SoBi) in 2010.
SoBi is a bike sharing service not unlike Citi Bike, except that the technology is on the bikes themselves, including a GPS-enabled lock, racks, kiosks, and software. This company also led to Social Cyclist, an app that allows New Yorkers to share and record bike routes. It was one of this past year’s NYC BigApps finalists.
His passion is to advance multi-modal transportation systems by providing the ultimate first/last mile solution.
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Mark Arnoldy
Mark Arnoldy is the CEO of Possible, a nonprofit healthcare company the delivers high-quality, low-cost healthcare for the world’s poor. As CEO, it’s Arnoldy’s job to leads overall strategy, focus on building a remarkable team, and make sure we never lose sight that everything is impossible until it isn’t. Prior to Possible, Arnoldy worked closely with a Nepali social entrepreneur for three years to create an innovative way to treat malnourished children, and he helped create two U.S. businesses that fund nutrition programs in Nepal. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Colorado at Boulder, completed Harvard’s Global Health Effectiveness Program, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Nepal. Arnoldy is an Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar, 2014 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, Cordes Fellow, and Bluhm/Helfand Social Innovation Fellow and was named one of Forbes Magazine’s top 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs in 2014.
He also calls both New York and Nepal home.
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Rachel Kaplowitz
Rachel Kaplowitz is the CEO and cofounder of Honey, an enterprise social network helping thousands of employees share ideas, grow their professional networks, and contribute to their company in a meaningful way. Honey is the easiest way to keep coworkers in the know about what matters and to share company news, latest industry trends and innovative ideas.
Kaplowitz is a graduate of Columbia University and earned her MBA at NYU Stern School of Business. She is also a committee member of Coalition for Queens, a member of the Work-Bench community, and a brand new mom!
She’s also a Techstars alum, having worked at Condition One, a video technology startup out of the 2012 NYC Techstars class.
The Ohio (and digital) native lives in Astoria and considers herself a total non-hipster.
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Alan Tisch
Alan Tisch is Founder and CEO of Spring, a shopping app that makes it just waaay to easy to find and purchase just about instantly spring for whatever strikes your fancy. Products include men’s and women’s fashions, skin care, beauty and of course there’s a geek factor. He did a stint at City Hall, where he launched such initiatives as NYC Big Apps and the 311 iPhone app, and more recently, he worked at Fab. Tisch has an MBA from NYU Stern in Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation, and a BBA from Michigan Ross School of Business. He also has a sneaker addiction.
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Mona Patel
Mona Patel combines positivity, timeless wisdom, sharp design thinking and a little bit of magic glitter to help you see around corners and realize a kind of success you didn’t necessarily expect. She’s also on a mission to eradicate bad design, which is why she founded Motivate Design, an agency designed to give clients what they want, while making human end users happy.
She holds a M.S. in Marketing Communications from Boston University and a B.S. in Engineering Psychology from Tufts University.
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Nicole Hamilton
Nicole Hamilton is the founder and CEO of Tactile Finance, a technology company that makes complex financial decisions clear and easy for consumers, and uncovers new business opportunities by leveraging data and clarity. Tactile Finance’s first products revolve around home financing opportunities, and are used by mortgage professionals from many different banks and their customers, providing clarity for both sellers and buyers.
In fact, she started Tactile Finance after she found it unacceptable that home owners and home buyers don’t have access to more sophisticated insight into the financing options when it comes to what is often their biggest asset – their home.
Hamilton’s career has spanned several different technology sectors. She was the managing director of a large-scale enterprise software data analytics company, and worked in telecommunication software technology and the medical device industry, launching high-impact, innovative products. In short, she has spent her career developing and managing game-changing technology for large and competitive industries.
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Bea Arthur
Bea Arthur is an established psychotherapist and entrepreneur devoted to transforming traditional therapy into a more affordable and approachable experience. Enter In Your Corner, which provides instant, expert support when you need it. The Columbia University alum has worked with a variety of demographics, including recovering addicts, couples in crisis, and survivors of domestic violence. Her passion led her to start two wellness-based businesses and a thriving private practice, all before the age of 30.
Arthur is also the first black female CEO from the US to be accepted into the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program, and was also named part of the New Guard of women in tech by Marie Claire magazine.
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Dan Teran
Dan Teran is the cofounder of Managed by Q, the operating system for the office of the future. He cofounded the company with the idea of making it easy to run an office. Q provides the products, services and technologies necessary to run a physical office space. Q also provides great careers and health benefits to its hundreds of Operators in NYC.
Teran is also a partner at prehype, a New York based venture development firm, where he works with Fortune 500 companies and startups to develop new digital businesses. In fact, he was responsible for creating Newsmart (News Corporation), an award winning English language learning app, and BarkBuddy (Bark & Co), a Tinder for dog adoption, that was featured as “Best New App” in the App Store. He was also #1 employee at Artsicle.
Teran holds a degree in international politics and economics from the Johns Hopkins University.
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Reza Chowdhury
Reza Chowdhury is the CEO and Founder of AlleyWatch, a leading media property focused on the advancement of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in NYC and beyond.
He is also the Founder of New York Startup Lab, a software development firm with a specific focus on early stage companies.
Chowdhury is an entrepreneur from way back, having been involved in several entrepreneurial ventures in the course of his career, which began on Wall Street, where he worked as a securities trader.
Recognized as a thought leader, Chowdhury was recently named as one of the 100 most influential people in NYC Tech by TechWeek and routinely invited to speak on the topic of startup ecosystem in New York City.
He holds an MBA in Finance and Entrepreneurship from Georgetown University and completed his bachelors in Economics at the University at Albany.
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