cornell-university
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Michelle Peterson
Michelle Peterson is the Chief Marketing Officer of Kendra Scott, the Austin-based fashion and fine jewelry brand. A chemical engineer turned marketer, she spent 18 years at General Mills before leading marketing at Life Time, Holiday Inn Express, and the juice brand Pressed. At Kendra Scott she unified the brand and performance teams into a single 'brand builder' organization, driving record direct-to-consumer traffic, customer growth and loyalty around a 'connection before transaction' philosophy. She was named a 2023 Adweek Marketing Vanguard.
Philip Auerbach
Philip Auerbach is the Chief Marketing Officer of Custom Ink, the Fairfax, Virginia custom apparel and promotional products company, a role he took up in May 2025. A Cornell-trained marketer with roughly 25 years of executive experience, he spent nearly 15 years at McKinsey & Company, where he became a partner in the Sales & Marketing practice and co-founded the firm's Loyalty service, before running commercial and digital operations at Caesars Entertainment, Lindblad Expeditions, Dunkin' Brands, ClearChoice, and Bumble. At Bumble he led global marketing and partnerships and helped scale the business profitably by more than 50%, contributing to over $900 million in annual revenue. At Custom Ink he owns brand strategy, performance marketing, and customer acquisition.
Aaron Heiser
Aaron Heiser is the first-ever Chief Executive Officer of Malbon Golf, the Santa Monica streetwear-meets-golf brand founded by Stephen and Erica Malbon. Appointed in October 2024, he runs day-to-day operations while the founders steer creative as co-Chief Creative Officers. Heiser arrived after roughly 18 years at Nike, where he ran retail across Western Europe and Greater China before serving as Global VP of Apparel, Accessories and Licensing. A Cornell graduate and former varsity wrestler, he has built a career relocating across Amsterdam, Shanghai and Oregon, and now leads Malbon as it pushes toward roughly $100 million in revenue and deeper international expansion.
Jay Jandrain
Jay Jandrain is the president and CEO of Butterball, the largest turkey producer in the United States. A Cornell-trained food scientist who joined Butterball in 2002 running product R&D, he climbed through sales, strategy and operations to take the top job in 2018. In 2025 he was elected chairman of the National Turkey Federation, and each November he becomes the country's most quoted voice on the price and preparation of the Thanksgiving bird.
Martin Peryea
Martin Peryea is an aerospace engineer with more than 40 years in vertical flight who founded Jaunt Air Mobility in 2019 to build a quieter, more efficient electric VTOL air taxi. After 33 years at Bell Helicopter, where he became a Technical Fellow and chief engineer on the fly-by-wire Bell 525 Relentless, he bet his career on a contrarian idea: a single rotor that slows down in cruise while a wing does the lifting. That Slowed Rotor Compound design became the Jaunt Journey. He now leads the Electric Air Mobility division of The AIRO Group as Senior Vice President and General Manager.
Will Kramer
Will Kramer is the CEO and co-founder of Laila Technologies, a Buffalo, New York startup building HireGPT, an AI recruitment platform that pairs a marketplace of expert tech recruiters with AI agents to screen, evaluate, and match candidates. A Cornell graduate with more than two decades of software development experience, including leadership roles at startups and Fortune 500 firms such as Paychex, he says HireGPT processes over 50,000 technical applications a month and has helped companies cut hiring costs and timelines by more than half. He also mentors founders at the University at Buffalo and runs plain-English AI workshops for small business owners.
Shanel Fields
Shanel Fields is the founder and CEO of MD Ally, a public safety telehealth company that plugs virtual care directly into the 911 system so non-emergency callers get routed to the right help instead of an ambulance. A Cornell graduate and Wharton MBA, she spent her first year doing ride-alongs with dispatchers and first responders before building the platform solo. The daughter of a volunteer EMT, she has raised more than $23M, taken MD Ally through Techstars, joined the Techstars board of directors, and been featured by The New York Times and Good Morning America.
Brian Hartnack
Brian Hartnack is the co-founder and CEO of Archer Education, a higher-education growth firm that helps colleges and universities recruit, enroll and retain online and adult learners. A Cornell history major who cut his teeth in the late-90s dot-com scene at eToys, Gifts.com and Rent.com (sold to eBay for $415M in 2005), he launched the company that became Archer in 2006. Two decades on, the firm has worked with 200+ institutions, managed 1,000+ online programs, and connected millions of students to degrees - with Hartnack arguing that the winners in education marketing pair data infrastructure with authentic storytelling.
Elan Greenberg
Elan Greenberg is the CEO of Augury, the Industrial AI company that listens to factory machines and predicts their failures before they happen. A former US Marine Corps captain who went from Morgan Stanley M&A to launching DoorDash's non-restaurant business to running operations at Flock Safety, he took the top job at the roughly $1 billion-valued Augury in October 2025 after a year as its COO. His through-line is operations at scale: taking proven technology and putting it in front of every customer who needs it.
Gregg Lehrman
Gregg Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Output, the Los Angeles music software company whose plugins and instruments turn up in records by Billie Eilish, Beyonce, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar and scores like Stranger Things and Game of Thrones. A Cornell-trained composer who cut his teeth assisting Hans Zimmer and became Universal Publishing's youngest executive producer at 26, Lehrman built Output in 2013 because the creative tools he wanted as a working musician did not yet exist. He bootstrapped the company for seven years before raising a $45M Series A from Summit Partners in 2020, and built Arcade, one of the first cloud-based music plugins.
Jim Bartoo
Jim Bartoo is the CEO and a board member of Visual Action Software, a Texas-based enterprise visualization company built on patented Flaremap treemap technology that helps organizations spot threats, monitor performance, and reduce risk. A Cornell-trained engineer with an MBA from the same school, he spent more than 25 years across Oracle, Business Objects, and EDS before leading The Hive Group and engineering its 2015 merger that formed today's Visual Action.
Miranda Tan
Miranda Tan is a serial founder who keeps reinventing herself one industry at a time. A Cornell grad and New York Bar attorney, she traded litigation for launch parties, building tech PR shop ExcitePR in 1999, then the cloud PR platform MyPRGenie, then Robin8, a Shanghai-born, blockchain-powered influencer-marketing engine that turned ordinary social posts into measurable currency across China. She has co-founded Paybby, a digital bank for underserved communities, served as a spokesperson for celebrity NFT platform TOKAU, and now runs Onellama, a community-driven, AI-assisted alternative to traditional auto insurance. Fluent in Mandarin and English, she translates between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and China for a living.
Saurav Kumar
Saurav Kumar is the founder and CEO of Euler Motors, a New Delhi commercial-EV maker building electric three- and four-wheelers for India's last-mile logistics. A computer-vision engineer trained at Delhi College of Engineering and Cornell, he worked on driverless-car research at INRIA in France, co-founded Cube26 (acquired by Paytm), then started Euler in 2018 on a contrarian thesis: beat diesel on performance, not just price. His flagship HiLoad EV is pitched as India's most powerful electric three-wheeler, and the company has raised hundreds of millions across rounds led by investors including Hero MotoCorp and British International Investment.
Tammie Siew
Tammie Siew is a General Partner and Co-Founder at Pebblebed, a San Francisco-based deep tech venture capital firm focused on foundational infrastructure—AI simulation engines, robot operating systems, developer platforms, and formal verification systems. A Cornell-educated economist and literature scholar who spent years investing at Sequoia Capital Singapore before co-founding a healthcare startup, she brings a rare operator-investor lens to backing the infrastructure layer of next-generation technology. Pebblebed's Fund II closed at $125M in 2024, with roughly 35 investments backing companies like Augment Code, OpenMind, Zeromatter, Lemurian Labs, and Logical Intelligence.
Ahmed Reza
Ahmed Reza is the Founder and CEO of Yobi, an AI workforce platform that deploys synthetic agents to handle calls, texts, and social DMs for small businesses 24/7. A Milken Scholar at Cornell University who wrote image-processing software for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Reza went from child actor in Bangladesh to homeless student to serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. His previous ventures include Call Sumo (call tracking analytics) and Dental Web Now (AI dental marketing, acquired by NPI). Yobi raised a $2.37M seed round in 2023, reached $2.4M ARR by late 2025, and in 2026 partnered with Microsoft to develop a private foundation model for predictive behavioral intelligence.
Brian Yoo
Brian Yoo is Chief Business Officer at FriendliAI, an AI inference platform that helps enterprises deploy and scale large language models faster and cheaper. Before joining FriendliAI in April 2026, he spent nearly a decade as COO at Moloco, where he scaled the AI-driven advertising company from 10 employees to 600+ and grew revenue over 500x to $250M+, helping it reach a ~$4 billion valuation. A Cornell-trained operations research engineer turned business operator, Yoo brings deep expertise in scaling AI-native companies through go-to-market strategy, financial operations, and global team building.
Bill Trenchard
Bill Trenchard is a Partner at First Round Capital, a top-tier seed-stage venture capital firm. A serial entrepreneur turned VC, he sold his first company (Jump Networks) to Microsoft at 23, scaled LiveOps to $100M in sales, and made early-stage bets on category-defining companies including Uber, Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Flexport, Notion, Verkada, and Superhuman. Known for creating First Round's Pitch Assist program, he's a fundraising savant who teaches founders his process-driven approach to raising capital. He was named to Forbes Midas List in 2017 (#41) and 2020 (#17), and BusinessWeek's Best Young Technology Entrepreneurs in 2006.