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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.
The Marketer Who Reads Insurance Like a Customer
For 20 years he has been rebuilding how insurance companies talk to the people who buy from them. Now he runs the brand for one of the country's largest small-business carriers.
Geoff Schneider
Geoff Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of GoSaga, a Norwalk, Connecticut holding company that acquires and scales franchised brands across wellness, beauty, and fitness. He founded the personalized-stretching studio brand LYMBR and runs the early-stage investment platform Cava Capital, drawing on more than 25 years operating and investing in consumer brands. Under his 'efficient franchisor' thesis, GoSaga has assembled a portfolio including LYMBR, VIO Med Spa, FitLab, and Squeeze Massage that shares services and vendor scale across roughly a dozen states.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
Vasiliki Demas
Vasiliki 'Vicky' Demas, PhD, is the CEO and founder of identifeye HEALTH, an AI-enabled retinal imaging company that brings specialized eye screening to primary care settings. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Berkeley and a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, she cut her teeth as a founding member of Google Life Sciences (which became Verily) and helped build foundational technology for GRAIL's Galleri multi-cancer early detection test. At identifeye HEALTH — which she joined in 2021 and rebranded from Tesseract Health — she leads a 38-person team developing a portable, FDA-registered AI retinal camera that lets minimally trained staff detect diabetic retinopathy and systemic disease markers in the same visit patients already make to their primary care doctor.
Shangda Xu
Shangda Xu is an Investing Partner on the Growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. Focused on enterprise technology companies - from AI infrastructure to enterprise SaaS - he brings a dual lens: the analytical rigor of a Harvard summa cum laude economist-mathematician and the operator pattern-recognition of someone who has worked across private equity (Warburg Pincus), investment banking (PJT Partners), and corporate strategy (Disney, Warner Bros.). At a16z, he co-authors influential research on enterprise AI adoption, including how Fortune 500 CIOs are actually deploying generative AI - making him one of the more data-grounded voices in an arena full of hype.