columbia-mba
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Jay Lee Wants Marketing and Revenue to Speak the Same Language
The Five9 growth chief trained as an engineer, learned marketing inside payments giants, and now runs a job that most companies keep in two separate offices.
Jonathan Birnbaum
Jonathan Birnbaum is the founder and CEO of OpenYield, a New York-based fixed income marketplace that brings an equity-like, fully automated trading experience to bonds. A former US credit trading COO at Morgan Stanley and fixed income execution lead at Bridgewater Associates, he later helped build consumer investing platforms as general manager of SoFi Invest and founding COO of Domain Money. He founded OpenYield in 2023 to make bonds cheap and easy to trade for retail investors, backed by a 2026 Series A of more than $6 million from investors including LeveL Markets, Draper Associates, Canapi Ventures and Clocktower Ventures.
Matt Kennedy
Matt Kennedy is co-founder and CEO of Mantra Health, a New York-based digital mental health company that partners with over 150 college and university campuses to deliver telepsychiatry, teletherapy and campus-wide wellness programs to more than 1.3 million students. He moved from COO to CEO in 2023, and leads a team of roughly 130 employees and 100+ in-house clinicians.
Nick Abramovich
Nick Abramovich is the CEO of Workers Benefit Fund, a New York-based benefits platform that builds the plumbing between gig workers, freelancers, independent contractors and the government, union and private benefits they are eligible for but almost never enroll in. He has been running the company since 2019, when WBF acquired BeneStream, the Medicaid-for-the-workplace outfit he ran as President. Under him, WBF added Upward Finance in December 2024, extending the platform from healthcare enrollment into tax and earnings tools for gig workers. Before benefits, he was CEO of Synaptic Digital and CMO of Ditech Holding Corporation, with earlier stops at MetLife, MoveOnIn.com, and BizSlate. Columbia MBA, Tulane BS.
Robert Jacks
Robert Jacks is President & CEO of Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, a Boston-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing targeted therapies for disorders driven by intracellular cortisol excess. In September 2025 he closed a $95 million Series B co-led by RA Capital and Forbion to advance clofutriben, an HSD-1 inhibitor, through a Phase 2b trial in type 2 diabetes patients with elevated cortisol. A civil engineer turned biotech operator, Jacks has spent 25 years in the industry, co-founded Symbiomix Therapeutics (sold after Solosec NDA approval), previously led Indalo Therapeutics, and has raised more than $300 million across his companies.
Sohel Roopani
Sohel Roopani is the co-founder and CEO of Exponent, a New York fintech building a financial operating system for America's multi-unit franchise operators. A former Visa and Stripe executive with an MBA from Columbia Business School, he raised more than $40 million in combined equity and credit to underwrite the operators behind Burger King, Dunkin', Buffalo Wild Wings and roughly 10,000 other franchised storefronts, replacing spreadsheets and month-end closes with charge cards, term loans and AI-powered bookkeeping.
Todd Zipper
Todd Zipper is a longtime education-and-technology operator now running Axio Education, a Scottsdale-based agentic AI learning platform that turns static coursework into adaptive, personalized pathways. Before Axio he spent more than two decades building and scaling online-education businesses: he led The Learning House to its 2018 sale to Wiley, then ran Wiley's global education and talent operations as an executive vice president overseeing more than $300 million in annual revenue. He hosts the higher-ed podcast An Educated Guest and holds a CFA charter alongside degrees from Penn and Columbia.
Yael Alkalay
Yael Alkalay is the founder and CEO of Red Flower, a New York-based natural beauty and lifestyle company she launched in 1999. A former creative director at Shiseido in Japan and a Columbia MBA, she built Red Flower around botanical formulations, aromatherapy and self-care rituals, selling to Barneys in her first year and growing the brand into a SoHo flagship and a fixture in spas and hotels. She is an early and persistent voice for non-toxic, biodegradable, vegan and cruelty-free beauty.
Fernando Bleichmar
Fernando Bleichmar is the CEO of Risepoint, the online program management company formerly known as Academic Partnerships, which helps regional universities build and grow online degree programs for working adults. He joined in 2022 after running the U.S. higher education business at Cengage, serving on the leadership team at Elsevier Health Sciences, and spending his first decade in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group. The son of educators who founded a school in Mexico City, he frames the company's work around closing the access and affordability gap in American higher education.
Steve Gilman
Steve Gilman is the co-founder and CEO of OneRange, a New York-based AI-powered upskilling platform that lets employees discover, get approval for, and buy the learning resources they need, with companies paying only when people actually learn. Before software, Gilman was drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of Yale and then served as a Defense Intelligence Agency intelligence officer working counterproliferation missions out of US embassies in Cairo and Abu Dhabi. He frames OneRange as importing the world-class skill-development methods of pro sports and the military into the corporate world, and the company now works with 25-plus enterprises including Google, Wasserman, and Caylent.
Julie Hansen
Julie Hansen is Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO of Babbel, the language-learning company. She joined in 2017 and turned the US into Babbel's largest market, crossing one million US subscriptions in the first half of 2022. Before Babbel she was the fifth employee at Business Insider, where as President and COO she helped grow it into the most-visited business news site online. Her earlier career spans CBS Interactive, Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Penguin Books. She keeps German vocabulary notebooks, rows on the water at dawn, and was named to the 2025 ASU+GSV Power of Women honor list.
Nihad Rahman
Nihad Rahman is the CEO of ezCater, the Boston-founded online marketplace that turns office lunch into logistics across 100,000+ restaurants. He joined in 2022 as CFO after two decades in finance at JPMorgan Chase and General Electric, stepped in as interim chief in January 2025, and was handed the permanent job that May - succeeding 16-year co-founder Stefania Mallett. He runs a roughly 850-person company from Bronxville, New York, commuting to the downtown Boston headquarters rather than the other way around.
Steve Peltzman
Steve Peltzman is the CEO of FeedbackNow, the company behind the smiley-face feedback buttons in airport bathrooms and security lines. A former U.S. Air Force officer who worked on the B-2 Stealth Bomber, a decade-long CIO of New York's Museum of Modern Art, and Forrester's first Chief Business Technology Officer, he spun FeedbackNow out of Forrester in September 2024 with a $9M Series A. He is turning a network of physical sensors and one-tap buttons into a real-time, AI-driven operating system for hospitals, convenience stores, airports and stadiums across 40 countries.
Steve Alperin
Steve Alperin is the founder and CEO of SurvivorNet, the New York based media platform that turns dense cancer treatment research into clear, watchable guidance for patients and families. A former head writer and senior producer for Peter Jennings at ABC's World News Tonight and a two-time Writers Guild of America Award winner, Alperin built SurvivorNet in 2018 after his family's struggle to find reliable answers during his father's cancer. He pairs newsroom storytelling craft with the clinical rigor of leading physicians, reaching millions of survivors every month.
Jack Raines
Jack Raines is a writer, investor, and author who turned a $150,000 trading loss into a media career and a Penguin Random House book deal. He writes Young Money, a newsletter with 61,000+ subscribers covering behavioral finance, career philosophy, and what your twenties are actually for. He's now an investment associate at Slow Ventures, where he works on their $63M Creator Fund. Known for viral LinkedIn satire that got him reported to Columbia Business School as the 'Bacon Bandit of Hell's Kitchen,' he combines intellectual rigor with a refusal to take himself too seriously.