austin-texas
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Austin Talley Put the Checkout Counter Inside a Text Message
The Everyware founder spent two decades turning awkward business processes into software. His wager now is simple: the most useful payment terminal may be the phone already in your hand.
Enrique Tapia Built Cisco's AI Marketing Team From Zero
He walked into Cisco with a mandate and no team. A few years later, marketing strategy at an 87,000-person company runs on the AI group he built out of nothing.
Joli Kindler Built a Brand Inside the Quietest Corner of Finance
A marketing coordinator who never left, and spent fifteen years turning insurance brokerage into a brand people could actually feel.
Krista Dalton
Krista Dalton is Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at Tecovas, the Austin-based western wear brand built on handmade cowboy boots that has grown into a lifestyle label with more than 50 US stores. She spent nine years at Target, where she moved from allocating plus-size and maternity apparel to becoming the first person the company shifted from stores to Target.com in 2013, then seven years at Overstock.com (now Beyond Inc), ending as Chief Customer and Merchandising Officer with a team of over 1,300 and an $800M-plus P&L. At Tecovas she has pushed the brand into work boots and women's workwear, run TV blackout tests to prove what awareness actually buys, sent her team into customers' closets, and built a custom AI agent to chew through the roughly 16 reports she used to read by hand. Footwear News named her to its Women Who Rock class of 2026, where she argued that authenticity is the new competitive advantage.
Tony Rogers
Tony Rogers is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Dollar General, where he leads brand, media, personalization and the DG Media Network across the retailer's roughly 20,000 stores. A University of Texas graduate who started in accounting before turning to marketing, he built a 25-year career at consumer brands and retailers including Pillsbury, Frito-Lay and Gateway before spending more than 17 years at Walmart, where he rose to Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart U.S. and later Chief Member Officer at Sam's Club. He joined Dollar General in June 2024 after a stint as CMO of Signet Jewelers, bringing a philosophy built around purpose, evolution and keeping the customer at the center of every decision.
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Kion, a cloud governance and management software company based in Columbia, Maryland. He was appointed CEO in October 2025 after more than two decades leading SaaS, observability, and customer experience companies, including roles as CEO of Monetate, COO of Kibo Commerce, and Chief Customer Officer at Zenoss. At Kion he is driving a 'FinOps+' strategy that combines cloud cost management, governance, and policy automation for multicloud and AI-driven workloads. He is based in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Jeff Cardenas
Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik, an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose AI-powered humanoid robot. He spun the company out of the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 and has since raised close to $1 billion, secured a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics, and positioned the company among the small handful of credible US humanoid players. He frames the race to build practical humanoids as the 'space race of our time.'
Jessica Reeves
Jessica Reeves is the CEO and a board member of AxonIQ, the Utrecht-based company behind the Axon Framework and a unified platform for building event-driven, AI-native applications. She came up through HR and operations rather than engineering, spent roughly eight years at Anaconda where she rose to COO and helped scale the company into a $1.5B unicorn with $150M+ in ARR, and now argues that AI's lasting value will sit in its infrastructure layer - specifically in explainability, the ability to trace exactly why an intelligent system did what it did. Based in Austin, Texas, she frames event sourcing as the memory foundation that AI agents need to be auditable and trustworthy in the enterprise.
Joss Leufrancois
Joss Leufrancois is the co-founder and CEO of Visage, an AI-and-human recruitment platform that crowdsources qualified, ready-to-interview candidates for large employers. A French-born entrepreneur who learned recruiting across London, Dubai, and the US, he previously co-founded and ran the recruitment agency Aldelia before selling it, then launched Visage in Dubai in 2015-2016. Today he runs the fully remote company from a ranch near Austin, Texas, blending a global sourcer network with data science to build candidate pipelines in 24-48 hours for clients that have included Tesla, Adecco, GoDaddy, and Virgin.
Justin Smith
Justin Smith is the CEO of SamCart, an Austin, Texas based e-commerce and checkout platform that has helped more than 75,000 creators and entrepreneurs sell over $3.5 billion in products and services online. He rose through the company from Head of Product to Chief Operating Officer before stepping into the CEO role, and he has become a frequent voice on the future of the creator economy, the shift from awareness to conversion in online selling, and how AI is reshaping how small businesses sell. Before SamCart he worked in marketing and business development at high-growth SaaS companies including Curalate and LivePerson.
Karl Kipke
Karl Kipke is the founder and CEO of HealthGrowth Pharmacy Solutions, an Austin, Texas company that gives independent and community pharmacies a single ecosystem of lending, advisory, group purchasing, and transition services. A former Wall Street banker who spent 11 years at Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns before turning to venture investing, Kipke built HealthGrowth Capital into a direct lender for pharmacies and closed a $16.8 million debt-and-equity financing package in April 2020 to expand its reach to independent pharmacy owners across the United States.
Kelly Thompson
Kelly Thompson is a food industry executive with more than 30 years of experience who led Incredo (formerly DouxMatok), the sugar-reduction technology company behind Incredo Sugar. Trained as a food engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she built her career in research, development and quality at Kraft Foods, WhiteWave Foods and Continental Mills before joining Incredo in 2022 to head North America. She rose to Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Executive Officer, steering the commercialization of a real-cane-sugar ingredient that lets manufacturers cut sugar by up to half while keeping the taste.
Mark Messina
Mark Messina is Managing Director and CEO of ANSCER Robotics Americas, the U.S. arm of a Bengaluru-based hybrid autonomous mobile robot company. With more than 25 years across engineering, manufacturing and operations, he helped build the modern warehouse-robot industry from the inside - joining Amazon during the Kiva Systems acquisition, later working on Amazon Prime Air drones, IoT at Mattel, and leading U.S. expansions for Geek+ and Addverb. He now runs ANSCER's Austin, Texas headquarters, championing a frugal, ROI-first approach to robotics and a Robots-as-a-Service model built to put automation within reach of small operators.
Alexander Candelario
Alexander C. Candelario is the founder, CEO, and chairman of Intiva Health, an Austin-based healthcare company that began by rebuilding medical credentialing and has since grown into a multi-vertical group spanning the Incredable credentialing platform, the Nova Vita wellness centers, and Gummi World nutraceutical manufacturing. A CPA-trained forensic accountant and roughly 15-year Marine Corps veteran who rose from enlisted Force Recon to commissioned officer, he carries an unusual mix: combat-tested discipline, big-firm audit rigor from his Coopers & Lybrand days, and degrees from Texas A&M and Harvard. In 2025 he pushed credentialing onto the blockchain with the TIVA token, listed on MEXC Global, betting that verified professional trust can extend far beyond medicine.
Dirk Buikema
Dirk Buikema is the founder and CEO of Hyperwear, an Austin-based functional fitness company he started in 2011. A former corporate attorney and semiconductor strategist turned inventor, he holds multiple US patents for training gear including the SandBell sandbag, the Hyper Vest adjustable weighted vest, and the SteelBell. Under his lean, research-driven, direct-to-consumer approach, Hyperwear grew 85% from 2022 to 2024 and landed on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies.
James Crean
James Crean is the co-founder and Chief Visionary Officer (also serving as President/CTO) of CREAN Inc, an Austin, Texas aerospace engineering and smart factory firm he started in 2002 with his wife Jennifer. A former satellite systems engineer and program manager at Hughes Space & Communications and Boeing - where he worked on DirecTV, NASA's TDRSS and other communications and weather satellites, and built the Lean Six Sigma group for Boeing Satellites - Crean now leads a team of 600-plus aerospace and defense engineers and champions CREAN's AI-enabled Smart Factory Operating System (SFOS), which aims to make American high-mix manufacturing fast, flexible and competitive enough to bring production home from overseas.
Sachin Latawa
Sachin Latawa is the founder and CEO of Tirios, an Austin-based proptech platform that lets everyday people invest in single-family rental homes for as little as $100. Before building Tirios, he ran real estate for Carl Icahn's empire as CFO of Real Estate at Icahn Enterprises, where he managed more than $1.1 billion in assets across homebuilding, distressed assets, resorts, offices and industrial property. He now pairs that institutional pedigree with AI-driven underwriting and blockchain tokenization to crack open a $10 trillion asset class that, by his own count, only about 5% of people can actually reach.
Will Smelko
Will Smelko is the co-founder and CEO of Ora, an Austin-based maker of organic, plant-based supplements built from real food rather than synthetic chemicals. A UC Berkeley political science grad and former healthcare strategy consultant, he traded the pharma world for the supplement aisle after realizing he had no idea where any of it came from. He launched Ora in 2014 with college friend and chef Ron Chang and partner Erica Bryers, pitched it on Shark Tank in 2017, walked away from Kevin O'Leary's offer, and watched sales jump 400% anyway. Today Ora sells nationwide through Vitamin Shoppe, Amazon and its own site, and even fuels professional pickleball players.
Ian Schmertzler
Ian Schmertzler is co-CEO and co-founder of Dispel, an operational-technology cybersecurity company he started in 2015 with his brother Ethan. A Yale-trained industrial engineer and former crew coxswain, Ian helped build Dispel's zero trust platform around Moving Target Defense - a system that keeps shifting network access points so attackers never find a static target. He serves as a principal investigator on three NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence projects and as vice president of the National Defense Industrial Association's NY-CT chapter, working to keep factories, water utilities, and power grids running quietly and safely.
Winston Lin
Winston Lin is a Program Manager in the Office of the CEO at Juniper Square, the San Francisco fintech that builds investment management software for private markets. Based in Austin, Texas, he sits at the operational center of a Series D company with roughly 950 employees, working close to the chief executive on the business operations and systems that keep a fast-scaling SaaS company running. Before fintech he spent his career in education technology, rising to Senior Director of Data Engineering at the charter-school network Achievement First. He holds a BA from Columbia University.
Jon Meachin
Jon Meachin is the CEO of Fleetio, the Birmingham, Alabama-based fleet management software company that crossed a $1.5 billion valuation in 2025 after raising more than $450 million in Series D funding and acquiring maintenance-authorization platform Auto Integrate. A finance-and-operations executive by training, he joined Fleetio as Chief Operating Officer in 2022 and took the top job in May 2023 when founder Tony Summerville moved to executive chairman. Before Fleetio he was COO of A Cloud Guru, VP of Finance at Campaign Monitor, and started his career as an investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley. The Software Report named him one of the Top 50 SaaS CEOs of 2023. Together with Auto Integrate, the company now touches roughly 8 million vehicles and 13+ million repair orders a year across a network of 110,000+ repair shops.
Adriene Mishler
Adriene Mishler is the Austin, Texas-based yoga instructor, actress, and entrepreneur behind Yoga With Adriene, the largest yoga channel on YouTube with over 13.4 million subscribers and 1.7 billion views. Since launching the channel in 2012 with business partner Chris Sharpe, she has democratized yoga through her philosophy of 'Find What Feels Good,' building a global community around accessible, authentic practice. In 2015 she co-founded the FWFG subscription platform, and in 2026 launched Veta, her own yoga gear brand.
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan is an American stand-up comedian, podcast host, and UFC color commentator whose Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) has become the world's most-listened-to podcast. Launched in 2009 and exclusive to Spotify from 2020 under a $200M deal, then renewed in 2024 for an estimated $250M, JRE has crossed 2,400 episodes and 6+ billion YouTube views. A former sitcom actor (NewsRadio), Fear Factor host, and taekwondo champion, Rogan has built a media empire from Austin, Texas, including the Comedy Mothership club, that makes him arguably the most influential solo voice in American culture.
Gadi Eliashiv
Gadi Eliashiv is the CEO and Co-Founder of Singular, a marketing intelligence platform that unifies marketing analytics to help brands understand ROI across every channel. A veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200 intelligence unit and former Head of Research at Onavo (acquired by Facebook in 2013), Eliashiv co-founded Singular in 2014 with the belief that simplified and unified marketing data is the key to unlocking growth. Under his leadership, Singular has raised over $55M in funding, grown to 370 employees, tracks more than $10 billion in digital marketing spend annually, and serves clients including Lyft, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Twitter. He was named one of the 22 most important executives shaping marketing technology by Business Insider in 2019.
Zack Bloom
Zack Bloom is a co-founder of Heirloom Carbon Technologies, the company behind America's first commercial direct air capture facility in Tracy, California. A software engineer turned climate entrepreneur, Bloom previously co-founded Eager - a cloud app marketplace acquired by Cloudflare in 2016 - and served as Director of Product at Cloudflare overseeing Workers, Storage, and Tunnel. In 2020, he pivoted from internet infrastructure to atmospheric infrastructure, co-founding Heirloom alongside Shashank Samala and Noah McQueen. The company has since raised over $354M in total funding, opened its first facility, and secured contracts with Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, Meta, and JPMorgan.
Yinon Weiss
Yinon Weiss is a serial entrepreneur, decorated military veteran, and the Founder and CEO of Stress-Free Auto Care - a tech-enabled auto repair chain with 30+ locations across California and Texas. Before Stress-Free, he co-founded RallyPoint (the 'LinkedIn for the military') and CarDash (a transparent auto repair marketplace that went through Y Combinator S17 and was acquired). A UC Berkeley bioengineering grad with a Harvard MBA, Weiss served 10 years on active duty as a Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Platoon Commander and Army Special Forces officer, earning the Bronze Star before transitioning to Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Jake Saper
Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm that backed Zoom, Salesforce, and Veeva before the rest of the world caught on. Over a decade at Emergence, he has become one of the loudest and most credible voices on AI-native services — companies that combine human expertise with AI to displace the $200B consulting industry. His 2024 essay 'The Death of Deloitte' earned him a cease-and-desist from Deloitte and a loyal readership of founders rebuilding professional services from scratch. A Yale and Stanford-trained operator-turned-investor, he grew up in Austin watching serial-entrepreneur parents build companies, started his own career selling rocks door-to-door from a Radio Flyer wagon, and today holds board seats at category-defining enterprise companies while maintaining a side career as a self-described 'mediocre guitar player.'
Tips Out
Tips Out (known online as TipsOutBaby) is a gaming entrepreneur and Creator Scout at Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Games division, operating at the intersection of creator culture and venture capital. Best known as co-founder and COO/CEO of One True King (OTK) - the Austin-based creator collective he helped launch in October 2020 alongside Asmongold, Mizkif, Esfand, and Rich Campbell - he has quietly built one of gaming's most ambitious creator-led business empires. Beyond OTK, he co-founded Starforge Systems (a PC hardware company), Mythic Talent (a talent management agency), and Mad Mushroom (a creator-led game publishing label). In October 2023, a16z tapped him as a Games Creator Scout, formalizing his role as a bridge between gaming culture and the startup investment world.
Bill Gurley
Bill Gurley is one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists - a 6'9" Texan who played college basketball, led the analyst team on Amazon's IPO, and then bet Benchmark's money on a then-tiny black-car startup called Uber. As a General Partner at Benchmark from 1999, he built a track record that includes Uber, GrubHub, OpenTable, Zillow, Stitch Fix, and Nextdoor. He writes the 'Above the Crowd' blog, has appeared consistently on the Forbes Midas List, and in 2026 published 'Runnin' Down a Dream,' a career guide ten years in the making. After stepping back from active investing, he relocated to Austin, Texas - where his wife Amy always wanted to end up.
Joe Lonsdale
Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC — a firm managing over $6 billion in assets. A chess prodigy turned PayPal intern turned Peter Thiel protege, Lonsdale built his empire around the belief that the most important companies are the ones governments and defense establishments can't function without. Based in Austin, Texas, he hosts the American Optimist podcast, co-founded the University of Austin, and runs the Cicero Institute — all while backing defense tech titans like Anduril at a $30.5 billion valuation.