babson-college
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Beth Wood Wants Money to Feel Human
The chief marketing officer of Principal Financial Group built a career on a stubborn idea - that an industry running on spreadsheets and fine print can still make people feel understood.
Eric Levin
Eric Levin is the co-founder and CEO of Scripta Insights, a Needham, Massachusetts healthcare technology company that helps self-insured employers and health plans cut prescription drug costs by flagging clinically equivalent, lower-cost medication alternatives. A serial entrepreneur who has managed products with more than $5 billion in cumulative sales and been part of 32-plus mergers and acquisitions, Levin previously helped grow The Learning Company alongside Kevin O'Leary into a business that sold for $3.6 billion. Since taking the CEO seat at Scripta in 2017, he has positioned the company as an unbiased transparency layer over the opaque pharmacy benefits industry, growing it to 80-plus clients and $42 million in total funding.
Hugo Finkelstein
Hugo Finkelstein is the co-founder and CEO of Rise, a global payroll and compliance company that lets businesses pay contractors and employees across 190+ countries in local currency, stablecoins, or crypto. What started at Babson College as a campus buy-and-sell app turned into a career in crypto community-building and, eventually, a payroll platform that has processed more than $1 billion in payments. Rise raised a $6.3M Series A in November 2024 led by Draper Associates and Polymorphic Capital, and Finkelstein has become one of the clearest voices arguing that the real stablecoin use case is not trading, it is payroll.
Jeffrey Nicholson
Jeffrey Nicholson is the CEO and co-founder of Tracer, a New York-based data intelligence platform that turns fragmented, siloed marketing and business data into unified real-time insight. He built Tracer with CTO Leighton Welch inside VaynerMedia, where he served as the agency's first Chief Media Officer and grew the media department to roughly 250 people worldwide alongside Gary Vaynerchuk. A Babson-trained entrepreneur with more than 15 years across advertising, media, and technology, Nicholson went full-time as Tracer's CEO in January 2020 and has since raised a Series A round. He also founded the education venture NicholNotes and advises Roku, Pinterest, and Nextdoor.
Matthew Bellows
Matthew Bellows is a serial founder turned investor who is now Acting CEO of Averi, an AI-plus-human marketing platform in New York. He built and sold three companies - the mobile-games media bet WGR Media (to CNET), the sales-software pioneer Yesware (to Vendasta), and the digital financial-planning startup BodesWell (to American Express) - and now invests as a General Partner at Grit Capital. A longtime meditation teacher who studied Buddhist and Western psychology at Naropa, he is known for pairing hard-nosed sales discipline with a calm, mindfulness-first leadership style.
Paul Weinstein
Paul Weinstein is the Founder, General Partner, and COO of Azure Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he founded in 2000 with over $750 million under management across 8 funds and more than 200 investments. A former top-ranked Wall Street equity research analyst covering data communications at firms including Credit Suisse First Boston and Deutsche Bank, Paul transitioned from sell-side analyst to VC investor and has backed transformative technology companies including Docker, VMware, Salesforce (via Prediction.io), and Calix. He focuses on early and mid-stage ventures in cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, AI, and communications technology across North America.