business-development
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Dan Schoenbaum Has Spent 30 Years Turning Partnerships Into Growth
From an 80-mile march to a 1,400-integration ecosystem, Dan Schoenbaum has built a career around one durable idea: growth happens when people know the hill, trust the team and move together.
Ronny Haraldsvik Has Spent a Career Selling the Invisible
From Flarion’s mobile-broadband bet to Cohere’s pitch for smarter spectrum, Ronny Haraldsvik has built a career translating radio engineering into decisions that operators, partners and investors can act on.
Jill Flaherty Spent 15 Years Learning How Banking Technology Earns Trust
At COCC, Jill Flaherty turned a business-development apprenticeship into an executive brief spanning product, sales and story. Her argument for community banking is simple enough to remember: technology earns its keep when it protects the relationship.
Crystal Brown Built a Career by Making Hard Problems Move
Before she marketed AI-made presentations, Crystal Brown organized parents, built companies, and learned to keep a hundred things moving at once. Her career is a study in turning complicated systems into coordinated action.
Kevin O'Connor Is Teaching Old Mail New Tricks
After 27 years at Pitney Bowes and Quadient, Kevin O'Connor has a practical brief at BlueCrest: make physical mail work harder by joining dependable machinery with software, data, and a measured dose of robotics.
Mayra López Built a Career Where Cash Meets Code
From affiliate sales to running MBX Mexico, Mayra López has spent two decades learning how relationships become infrastructure - one retailer, provider and payment at a time.
Jay Stamatis Traded the Mega-Deal Table for a Biotech With Two Shots on Goal
After more than eight years shaping AbbVie’s pipeline, the history major turned biotech dealmaker is now running MBrace Therapeutics - where the wager is on novel targets, disciplined development and knowing which risks are worth taking.
Olivier Roux Spent Two Decades Learning What Molecules Refuse to Do
Before Olivier Roux sold manufacturing partnerships, he validated methods, managed reference standards and wrestled with process details. His career is a case study in how technical depth becomes commercial judgment.
Candace Graham Knows the Pitch Is Only the Beginning
After two decades winning business for agencies, Candace Graham crossed to the client side at Bank OZK. Her career is a study in what happens after the clever idea: the restructuring, relationship-building and steady follow-through that make growth real.
Rajiv Pendyala Built a Career in the Work Between the Software and the Sale
For three decades, Rajiv Pendyala has worked the seam where technical projects meet commercial trust. His long tenure at Infotech Spectrum offers a practical study in the quiet machinery of IT services.
Bharath Ram Has Spent 35 Years Making New Technology Make Business Sense
From opening a two-person encryption office in Tokyo to shaping enterprise data strategy in the AI era, Bharath Ram's career is a study in translating hard technology into partnerships, markets and durable value.
Brad Armstrong Has Spent a Career Making Software Companies Shake Hands
From AppExchange to Slack, Rippling and Lovable, Brad Armstrong has built a career around a quiet conviction: software gets more useful when companies learn to work together.
Vsevolod Leonov Has Spent a Career Moving Toward the Machine Room
He learned the internet through portals, games and partnerships. Now the former Google executive is testing the economics and infrastructure of open-source AI with his own hands.
Vanessa Simmons Knows the Secret Ingredient in Every Partnership
At Pythian, she builds cloud alliances. At the cheese board, she teaches people to notice what they nearly missed. Vanessa Simmons has made a career of turning good introductions into lasting ecosystems.
Janelle Weed Makes Complex Expertise Worth Reading
The Bennett Jones chief marketing officer built her career at the quiet intersection of literature, law and business - turning specialist knowledge into work that clients can actually use.
How Peter Wismath Made an Old Law Firm Feel Like a Cup of Coffee
At Cassels, the chief marketing officer has spent the years since 2015 turning brand, office design and client listening into one practical idea: make an institution easier to talk to.
Julie-Ann Cabana and the Human Language of Drug Development
Before she unified a complicated research business under one name, Julie-Ann Cabana learned to sell science across cultures, continents, and conference tables. Her operating lesson is disarmingly simple: make the complex clear, and make the corporate human.
Chuck Tatham’s Two-Decade Bet: Make Waste Visible, Then Make It Actionable
From Lotus and Changepoint to Kubex, the Toronto software executive has built a career around a stubborn enterprise problem: data is only valuable when someone can act on it.
Lindsay Everitt Makes a Law Firm’s Quiet Work Legible
From a television control room to the executive table at Goodmans, Lindsay Everitt has built a career around a deceptively hard task: helping expertise travel through relationships.
Dave Lewis Changed Industries Without Changing His Playbook
A software sales career led Dave Lewis to co-own a decades-old tower engineering firm. His job now is to connect technical rigor with the relationships and operating discipline that let infrastructure businesses grow.
Jeffrey Amling and the Discipline of Saying No
For four decades, Jeffrey Amling has worked where judgment matters more than motion. His career links Wall Street's media deal boom, FTI Consulting's selective acquisition strategy, and a patient second life breeding racehorses built for the long run.
Chris Scherman Is Learning to Read the Energy Map Before It Is Drawn
A lawyer moved from contracts to corporate strategy. At Pembina, Chris Scherman now works where long-lived infrastructure, customer demand and the next version of the energy map meet.
Angie Leccese Is Selling the Story Behind the Square Footage
The Chief Marketing Officer at Newmark spent a career learning that in commercial real estate, the deal closes on the story - not the spreadsheet.
Laura Wilbanks
Laura Wilbanks has spent a career translating corporate ambition into work a marketing team can actually do. Her method joins customer focus, measurable goals and an insistence that people bring their own voice to the room.
Tim Rumer
Tim Rumer is a sporting goods executive who serves as Senior Vice President of Business Development at Mizuno USA in Peachtree Corners, Georgia. A left-handed pitcher drafted by the New York Yankees out of Duke University in 1990, he spent eight professional seasons in the minors and reached Triple-A before trading the mound for the boardroom. At Mizuno he climbed from business unit manager to product and lifecycle leadership - including a stint running ball glove development - and now steers partnerships and growth across the company's team sports and golf divisions.
Tara Nickerson
Tara Nickerson, PhD, is President, CEO and Director of Therini Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurological and retinal diseases. A biopharma executive with more than 20 years of experience, she was a founding-team member and Chief Business Officer at both Maze Therapeutics and Prothena Corporation before taking the top job at Therini in 2024. She combines a research background from McGill University with an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School and a long track record of company-building, financing and dealmaking in the life sciences.
Chris McNulty
Chris McNulty is the interim CEO of Ring Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech developing genetic medicines that use commensal anelloviruses as delivery vectors. An MIT-trained engineer with a Harvard MBA, he joined Ring in May 2023 as Chief Financial Officer and Head of Corporate Strategy and stepped up to lead the company in December 2024. Over more than 15 years in pharma and biotech finance, he has closed financing transactions worth more than $300 million across companies including VBI Vaccines, InVivo Therapeutics, Repligen, and Genzyme.
Eric Gornstein
Eric Gornstein is the Chief Executive Officer of Pearl Diagnostics, a Johns Hopkins spinout in Baltimore that makes MycoMEIA, the first FDA-cleared urine test for invasive aspergillosis. A biopharma commercialization veteran with more than 25 years leading product launches, partnering and deal-making across therapeutic areas, he joined Pearl in late 2025 to take the company from FDA clearance to the market and into Europe. Earlier he helped launch Radius Health's first product, Tymlos, and worked in business development and cell therapy partnerships at companies including bit.bio and Talaris Therapeutics.
Philipp Thurner
Philipp Thurner is the Austrian-born founder and CEO of Nexl, an AI-powered growth and CRM platform for law firms. He built the company in Sydney in 2018 after seeing spreadsheets of global lawyers being updated by hand at Gilbert + Tobin, pivoted through a 'LinkedIn for lawyers' phase, and now runs the business from Brooklyn as it serves more than 150 firms worldwide, including AmLaw 100 members. In October 2025 Nexl closed a $23M Series B (reported as A$35M) led by Tidemark, bringing total funding to roughly $45M.
Terrence Connolly
Terrence (Terry) Connolly is a chemist-turned-dealmaker who runs K36 Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech chasing a single target: NSD2/MMSET, an epigenetic switch that drives hard-to-treat cancers. A Ph.D. organic chemist who started at the lab bench making molecules at Roche, Wyeth and Celgene, he crossed over into business development at Celgene, closed more than two dozen deals, then ran the business side at Skyhawk and Dragonfly. In 2021 he took the top job at K36, and now steers its lead compounds KTX-1001 (for t(4;14) multiple myeloma) and KTX-2001 (for treatment-resistant prostate cancer) through early clinical trials, backed by a $70 million Series B led by Nextech Invest with Bristol Myers Squibb participating.