harvard-business-school
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Lawrence Schwartz Learned to Build for Space. Now He Has to Sell the Quantum Future.
Before he marketed cloud software, industrial AI and quantum computers, Schwartz trained as an aerospace engineer and worked on satellites. His career is a long experiment in making difficult technology legible - without sanding off what makes it difficult.
Joseph Lee Built an AI Company Around the Messiest Thing in Business: What People Mean
After a $200 million AI exit, Joseph Lee did not chase a louder machine. He built Syncly to hear the quiet signals inside customer complaints, support chats and social video - a second act shaped by a life spent translating between worlds.
Geng Wang Put the Clipboard Out of Work - Then Retired the T-Shirt
His third startup began as Pokémon Go for volunteering, became the back office for hundreds of nonprofits, and reached break-even before he handed over the keys. Now the Civic Champs cofounder is building again.
Alex Zimmerman Is Making Brain Chemistry Legible
An engineer met a spectroscopy scientist in a hospital brainstorm. A decade later, their software is turning unruly signals into something clinicians and researchers can read.
Cesar Carvalho Kept the Problem and Fired the Product
He left Harvard with a gym-pass idea. Fourteen years, several pivots and one abandoned brand later, Cesar Carvalho has built his career around a rarer discipline: loyalty to the problem, not the first answer.
Al Yang Turned the Dreaded Security Questionnaire Into a $250 Million Exit
A former M&A banker found a costly ritual hiding in every enterprise sale. Five years, more than 1,000 customers and one acquisition later, his larger bet is that trust should move at software speed.
Yanghee Paik Changed the Channel
She came to Los Angeles to move Korean culture through Hollywood. A chance conversation gave her a different vehicle - and turned a Disney distributor into the operator behind Rael.
Dana Dunford Built for the 2 A.M. Phone Call
A finance analyst turned a family landlord problem into Hemlane. Her bet is that rental management works best when software handles the routine and local people handle the moments that require judgment.
Caitlin Leksana Found a Startup in the Spreadsheet Nobody Wanted to Open
A mechanical engineer, a failed crypto startup and a hundred nervous cold messages led Caitlin Leksana to an overlooked corner of finance. Now she is building Fazeshift around a deceptively hard question: why is getting paid still managed by hand?
Nina George
She started as a software engineer, detoured through Wall Street, and now runs marketing at one of the most recognized names in consumer wellness. Nina George has spent a career walking companies through their reinventions.
Abdul Al-Asaad
He grew up in a refugee camp and learned finance at Goldman Sachs. Now Abdul Al-Asaad wants to hand ordinary savers the borrowing power that has always belonged to the wealthy.
Elizabeth Layne
Elizabeth Layne is the Chief Marketing Officer of Rebag, the New York-based e-commerce company that buys, sells and trades secondhand luxury handbags and accessories. A Brown and Harvard Business School graduate, she has spent her career building marketing engines for fast-growing consumer brands - launching Birchbox's marketing while still in business school, running brand and retail marketing at Bonobos before its Walmart acquisition, and scaling Appear Here across London, Paris and New York. At Rebag she has helped turn data tools like the Clair Report into marketing that pushes luxury resale toward a mainstream audience.
Sivan Iram
Sivan Iram is the co-founder and CEO of Flow (Flow Specialty), a Mountain View-based next-generation wholesale brokerage that uses GenAI and licensed human experts to automate specialty commercial insurance placement. A former software engineer turned operator with a Harvard MBA, he spent a decade writing code and running go-to-market at Lenovo before starting Flow in 2021 to bring enterprise-grade service to the small and mid-market accounts the industry had long ignored. Flow has raised roughly $20-25M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Joon Silverstein
Joon Silverstein is the Chief Marketing Officer of Coach, the New York leather goods house inside Tapestry Inc., and the founder of Coachtopia, the circular sub-brand she launched in 2023 to build luxury products out of what the industry usually throws away. She trained first as a cultural anthropologist - a BA from Columbia, fieldwork as a Fulbright Fellow - then added an MBA from Harvard Business School and a stint at The Boston Consulting Group before leading change at Louis Vuitton and Victoria's Secret. She joined Coach in 2014 as SVP of Global Customer Experience and worked her way through digital, ecommerce, creative, sustainability and North America marketing before being elevated to CMO in January 2025. Her signature move is treating consumers as collaborators rather than targets: Coach's spring 2026 'Explore Your Story' campaign was co-created with Gen Z communities from the US to China, and the brand posted 25% revenue growth in fiscal Q2 2026 on the back of its strongest new-customer acquisition on record. She gave a TED Talk at TEDNext 2024 arguing that waste is a human invention, not a law of nature.
Kelly Olmstead
Kelly Olmstead is the Chief Marketing Officer of Allbirds, the San Francisco sustainable footwear and apparel brand. She brings more than 25 years across sporting goods, footwear and apparel, including nearly two decades at Adidas leading brand, retail and digital marketing for North America, and a stint as CMO of children's clothing brand Hanna Andersson. Since taking the top marketing seat at Allbirds in December 2023, she has anchored the company's turnaround on brand building over pure performance marketing, launching the 'Allbirds by Nature' platform and betting that consistency, storytelling and a beloved product can lift the brand's awareness the way it lifts its Net Promoter Score.
Sam Sarullo
Sam Sarullo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Daniel's Jewelers, a family-owned North American jewelry chain based in Culver City, California. A 20-year veteran of e-commerce and digital marketing, he built his reputation scaling online sales and omnichannel strategy for mid-market specialty retailers, including stints as VP of E-Commerce Marketing at ULTA Beauty, VP of Global E-Commerce at PacSun, interim Chief Digital Officer at Mana Products, and Head of E-Commerce and General Manager at Lakeshore Learning. At Daniel's, he steers marketing across traditional and digital channels with a focus on serving Hispanic and multicultural customers.
Vishwas Prabhakara
Vishwas Prabhakara is the co-founder and CEO of Honey Homes, a membership service that gives homeowners a dedicated, salaried handyperson for recurring maintenance and repairs. A Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Business School graduate, he spent 15-plus years in Silicon Valley product and operations roles - including ESPN, Digg, Yelp Reservations, and a stint as COO of the fintech Digit - before starting Honey Homes in 2021 with his wife Avantika and two other co-founders. The company operates across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and beyond, and has raised more than $21 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, Pear VC and Era Ventures.
Yong Kim
Yong Kim is the co-founder and CEO of Wonolo, an on-demand staffing marketplace that connects businesses with more than one million frontline workers across the United States. Born in Seoul, he moved alone to a New Hampshire boarding school at 15, graduated as valedictorian, and went on to the University of Chicago and Harvard before a career in tech investment banking at Deutsche Bank. A stint at a Coca-Cola innovation accelerator exposed the broken state of hourly staffing and led him to launch Wonolo in 2014. The company has raised roughly $200 million, including a Sequoia-led round, and Kim has become a prominent voice for treating gig and hourly workers with dignity, flexibility, and fair pay.
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.
David Snider
David Snider is the founder and CEO of Harness, a New York wealthtech company that pairs people navigating startup equity, taxes, and estate decisions with a curated network of tax, financial, and legal advisers. Before Harness, he was COO and CFO of Compass, where he helped scale the real estate platform from pre-launch to a $1.8 billion valuation and raised every round from Series A through E. Earlier he invested more than $2 billion in deals at Bain Capital private equity and, as a college senior, wrote Money Makers, a finance primer built from interviews with leaders like Jamie Dimon and David Rubenstein.
David Wells
David Wells is the CEO of Ondo Perps, the equity-perpetuals trading arm of Ondo Finance, where he leads the push to bring leveraged trading of U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodities onchain with tokenized shares usable as collateral. He founded and ran Enclave Markets, the first Fully Encrypted Exchange, incubated within Ava Labs, after earlier roles at Two Sigma and Paxos. A Harvard Business School graduate and long-time markets operator, Wells has spent his career building institutional-grade trading infrastructure and arguing that crypto markets still hold real inefficiencies for those who can build fair, private, and efficient venues.
Kate Condliffe
Kate Condliffe is the co-founder and CEO of Diana Health, a network of women's health practices that partners with hospitals to rebuild their maternity and OB/GYN programs around holistic, team-based care. She launched the company in 2020 out of AlleyCorp's healthcare incubator after two decades scaling high-value care models, including roles as COO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and COO of the birth-center network Baby+Co. Under her leadership, Diana Health has grown to nine locations across Tennessee, Florida, and Texas, cares for more than 80,000 women annually, and has raised roughly $101 million to date, including a $55 million Series C in 2025.
Khari Austin-Rawls
Khari Austin-Rawls is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Goldcast, a Boston-based B2B video and events software company backed by roughly $40M in venture funding. He built his early career in streaming media at Disney, where he rose to Senior Manager on ESPN+ acquisition and engagement, then earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2025 before moving into a startup leadership seat. A University of Pennsylvania graduate who studied East Asian Languages and International Relations, he is known for candid reflections on being the only Black person in the room and for a personal creed about not squandering time.
Melissa Bridgeford
Melissa Bridgeford is CEO and cofounder of Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent she runs with Marc Lore that emerged from stealth in February 2026 after nearly five years of private development. Wizard aims to replace endless e-commerce scrolling with a chat interface that searches the web, ranks products with zero paid placements, and checks out on your behalf. Before Wizard, Bridgeford founded Stylust in Austin, a text-based conversational shopping company that was folded into Wizard as its technical and human foundation. Earlier she spent almost a decade in finance at Guggenheim Partners and at Cain Hoy Enterprises.
Michael Monovoukas
Michael Monovoukas is the CEO and co-founder of AcuityMD, a Boston-based commercial intelligence platform for the medical device industry. Founded in 2019, AcuityMD gives medtech sales teams a shared view of physicians, procedures, and referral networks. In April 2026 the company raised an $80M Series C led by StepStone Group, pushing its valuation near $1B and total funding past $160M.
Ori Eldarov
Ori Eldarov is the co-founder and CEO of OffDeal, a New York based AI-native investment bank that runs sell-side M&A processes for owners of small businesses with $10-100M in revenue. A former RBC Capital Markets banker with over $20B in advised deals and a Harvard MBA, Eldarov started OffDeal out of Y Combinator in 2024 with ex-Meta engineer Alston Lin, and in mid-2025 raised a $12M Series A led by Radical Ventures.
Scott Requadt
Scott Requadt is the founding CEO of Prolium Bioscience, a New York-based biotech that emerged from stealth in March 2026 with a $50M Series A from RTW and a Phase 1/2-ready CD20xCD3 bispecific T-cell engager, PRO-203, in-licensed from KeyMed Biosciences and InnoCare Pharma for severe autoimmune disease. A lawyer-turned-investor-turned-operator, Requadt spent a decade at Clarus Ventures (later Blackstone Life Sciences) as Managing Director, ran Talaris Therapeutics as CEO from 2018 through its 2023 wind-down, and now sits on the board of ESSA Pharmaceuticals. He trained at McGill, Toronto Law, and Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar), started his career as an M&A attorney at Davis Polk, and has spent the intervening twenty years turning that unusual pedigree into biotech deals.
Tony Kingsley
Tony Kingsley is a biopharmaceutical executive who runs Stablix, Inc., a New York biotech betting that you can treat disease by protecting proteins instead of destroying them. He took the CEO seat in February 2022 after a career of running one drug company after another - Scholar Rock, TARIS Bio, The Medicines Company - and heading global commercial at Biogen, with a McKinsey partnership and a stint in medical devices before that. In July 2025 he joined the board of Indivior. He holds a Dartmouth degree and a Harvard MBA.
Cameron McCord
Cameron McCord is the co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a defense-tech software company modernizing how the world tests and validates mission-critical hardware. A former US Navy nuclear submarine officer who logged 484 days underwater, he studied physics and nuclear engineering at MIT and earned an MBA at Harvard before building product at Anduril and investing at Lux Capital. Founded in 2022, Nominal reached a $1 billion valuation after raising $155 million in ten months, counting four of the five largest US defense contractors among its customers.
Katie Spies
Katie Spies is the founder and CEO of Maev, the direct-to-consumer brand that made human-grade raw food for dogs a subscription. An MIT-trained engineer who quit tech to spend nearly a year as a full-time dog walker, she built Maev after her rescue dog's health turned around on a raw diet. Since launching in 2020 she has shipped millions of meals, raised roughly $19 million in venture funding, and grown the company by wheat-pasting posters across New York before scaling to paid channels.