founding-ceo
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Alan Levitz and the Art of Getting 24 Owners to Agree
Alera Group began with 24 independent firms and a shared wager on working together. Its founding CEO, Alan Levitz, spent eight years turning that wager into a national business before handing over the chief executive’s chair.
Ken Mills and the Work Between the Wires
He helped build a billion-dollar business inside Dell, then became EPIC iO’s founding CEO. Ken Mills’s career turns on a less glamorous skill: getting people, machines and businesses to work together.
Bart Shuldman and the art of changing the play
For 27 years, Bart C. Shuldman led TransAct from transaction printers into restaurant technology. His next chapter turns on a question he has been asking for decades: when should a leader change the plan?
Paul Marushka and the price of a promise
A corporate pledge is easy to announce and harder to count. Sphera’s founding CEO has built a career around the distance between the two.
Brian McNamara and the art of starting again
He took a two-level demotion to learn marketing. Years later, as Haleon’s founding CEO, Brian McNamara faced another kind of restart: giving an established business a life of its own.
Justin Intal and the checkout that changed the question
A grocery savings app led Justin Intal to a more stubborn problem: people could find the food, but their benefits could not follow them online. Forage’s founding CEO built his next chapter around getting the payment through.
Jerry Sanders and the art of staying in the fight
A salesman with an engineering degree, Jerry Sanders gave AMD its voice and spent 33 years making room for a rival to Intel. His story begins with a financing deadline, a late check, and five minutes to spare.
Kim Reid and the art of getting the parcel there
He bought a small online retailer, gave it a new name and spent a decade working on what happened after checkout. Kim Reid’s Takealot story runs through warehouses, old rivals and the expensive business of keeping a promise.
Paul R. Garcia gave his company a name it had to grow into
Global Payments was mostly American when Paul R. Garcia took it independent. He spent the next twelve years turning an ambitious name into an international business, one bank partnership at a time.
David Donabedian and the art of handing over the keys
He has helped start companies, raise their first capital, and recruit the people who take them forward. At Newleos, David Donabedian’s move from founding CEO to advisor fits a career built around the beginning.
Luigi Costa and the art of starting again
Luigi Costa spent decades building international businesses before co-founding Noema Pharma. His career held an Oslo listing, a public reckoning, a return to the founder’s chair - and a passion for motorcycles that followed him beyond the boardroom.
Mark Stadler took the other road
His brothers joined the family trucking business. Mark Stadler went to college, then spent a career building teams and businesses. At AccessHope, the founding CEO’s next assignment was growth.
Brian Faux and the price of a simple question
Before co-founding Morty, Brian Faux worked inside the mortgage machinery and helped shape housing policy after the financial crisis. His career keeps returning to a deceptively ordinary question: why should buying a home be so difficult to understand?
Cyrus Massoumi and the art of starting again
Before Zocdoc, there were size 13 shoes and a startup that folded. Cyrus Massoumi has spent the years since revising his ideas about people, ambition, and what makes a company worth building.
Jeff Elton
Jeff Elton, Ph.D., is the founding CEO and now Vice Chairman of ConcertAI, a Cambridge-based company building generative and predictive AI on the world's largest multi-modal oncology dataset. He grew the company from a 2017 startup into a roughly $1.9 billion business with about 1,300 employees, acquiring TeraRecon's imaging technology and ASCO's CancerLinQ network along the way. A former Accenture managing director, Novartis research COO, and McKinsey partner, he co-authored the widely cited book Healthcare Disrupted and chairs the MassBio board.
Rachel Humphrey
Rachel W. Humphrey, MD, is the founding CEO of Normunity, a Boston and New Haven biotech building a new class of cancer drugs called immune normalizers, drugs designed to free the immune system to attack tumors it normally ignores. Before Normunity she helped bring three blockbuster cancer therapies to patients: Yervoy at Bristol Myers Squibb, Imfinzi at AstraZeneca, and Nexavar at Bayer. She partnered with Yale immunology pioneer Lieping Chen to translate his discoveries at the cancer-immune interface into medicines, raising $65M to launch in 2022 and a $75M Series B in January 2025 to push lead program NRM-823 into the clinic.