irvine
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The Art School That Teaches the Application
In Irvine, one small academy has turned the art portfolio from a mysterious bundle of work into a coached, critiqued and highly specific admissions instrument.
The Smart Agency Put All Its Chips on the Buildings Nobody Knows How to Explain
For three decades, an Irvine communications firm has practiced a peculiar form of fluency: translating capital stacks, construction sites and fund managers into stories people can act on.
Ascend Agency Put a Price Tag on the Part of PR Everyone Else Calls Hope
The Irvine firm grew by replacing open-ended pitching with guaranteed media placements. Its newest act is quieter and more interesting: becoming the white-label PR and SEO counter behind other agencies.
The PR Firm That Bet Its Own Retainer on the Right Answer
Beyond Fifteen built a communications agency around an unfashionable promise: show clients the work every week, measure the result, and recommend the smaller retainer when the evidence demands it.
The Company That Lived Between the Idea and the Deadline
Graphic Industries built its business in the awkward, essential space between a campaign concept and everything the public actually sees. Its product was not merely ink or pixels - it was fewer handoffs when the clock was loud.
Trinet Internet Solutions and the business of the next click
A prayer request, a donation, a sermon search: Trinet builds the small digital steps that bring people closer to an organization. Its work across ministries and businesses reveals why the useful website often beats the merely handsome one.
At South Lake Middle School, care gets a place on the timetable
Two 42-minute periods reveal how this Irvine public school makes room for academic help, emotional support and new interests. The shark mascot has surprisingly gentle house rules.
Dream Agency and the case of the missing logo
A restaurant with misplaced artwork. A gym with an awkward website. A region full of pizza. Dream Agency builds its business around the practical work of getting good businesses noticed.
AMG Media knows the value of a room worth talking about
The Irvine agency combines public relations, travel publishing and special events. Its most interesting work puts a brand close enough to taste, try or talk about.
Cornerstone Communications puts the newsroom inside the PR firm
The Irvine agency sells access to experienced communicators. Its most revealing creation, Behind the Badge, shows what happens when a public relations firm also becomes a publisher.
Super Color Digital knows the hard part comes after “Print”
A fabric wall is easy to admire. The color matching, metalwork, packing, and installation behind it explain what Super Color Digital actually sells.
Venture Strategic knows who needs convincing
From campaign rooms to hospital boardrooms, this Irvine communications firm sells a practical skill: understanding who has a stake in the story, and giving them a reason to listen.
Dharne & Associates puts a price on “What should we fix first?”
The Irvine technology firm sells a $1,995 answer, then offers three ways to act on it. Its real subject is the gap between buying digital tools and getting useful work out of them.
LightHouse Graphics sells the work behind a working website
From a home-care redesign to a vacation brand’s booking ambitions, the Irvine agency connects design, development and marketing. Its most revealing work starts with the problems a prettier homepage cannot solve.
INOVIT’s Business Is Making the Complicated Watchable
A medical implant, an off-grid charger, a gadget for carrying bags: INOVIT turns products that need explaining into short animated films. The revealing work happens before anything moves.
Starch Creative builds brands you can walk into
A Shopify bag becomes a shop. A pop-up earns an extended stay. Inside the creative studio that connects brand strategy with the people who build the fixtures.
Andrew Abraham Built Orgain by Listening to the Shelf
Before Orgain reached more than 100,000 stores, its founder answered the phones, improvised an org chart with family names and watched an early batch turn stubbornly solid. His useful talent was never pretending the first plan was sacred.
Michael Speranza
Michael Speranza is the CEO of Kantata, the professional services automation software company formed in 2022 from the merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications. A Rensselaer-trained electrical engineer who began his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before pivoting to Deloitte Consulting and then a two-decade run inside private equity backed software companies, Speranza has specialized in scaling mid-market B2B software firms from roughly $100 million toward $1 billion in revenue.
Outreach Grid
Outreach Grid is an Irvine, California software company building a unified platform that helps cities, counties, service agencies, outreach workers, and law enforcement collaborate to understand and end homelessness. Founded in 2016 by Tiffany Pang-Cadengo and John Cadengo under parent company Appledore, its coordinated-entry system spans street outreach, case management, shelter and bed matching, housing navigation, and Point-in-Time counts - turning fragmented field notes into shared, actionable data used by more than 23 municipalities across the United States.
Ray Liu
Ray Liu is the CEO and co-founder of Vena Vitals, an Irvine, California medtech startup building a soft, skin-like sticker that tracks blood pressure continuously, beat by beat, without cuffs or invasive arterial lines. A National Science Foundation fellow turned operator, Liu spent two decades inside GE Healthcare, Siemens, and Vizient, and racked up two health-tech exits before reuniting with a former Berkeley labmate, UC Irvine professor Michelle Khine, and PhD scientist Josh Kim to turn a material-science breakthrough into a clinical product. Backed by Y Combinator, MedTech Innovator, and EvoNexus, Vena Vitals has tested its sensor on 600-plus patients in operating rooms and is targeting FDA clearance in 2026.
Jessica Toh
Jessica Toh is the co-founder and CEO of Huckleberry Labs, the AI-powered children's sleep and parenting app she built with her husband Seng Toh after their own son woke every two to three hours for 20 months. A UC Berkeley triple major in electrical engineering, computer science, and math & statistics with a Cambridge MBA, she turned a personal sleep crisis into data science, then into a company that now reaches more than 5 million families across 150+ countries - including roughly 15% of U.S. babies. Her mission is to make expert-grade parenting guidance affordable for everyone, not just families who can pay a sleep consultant thousands a year.
Todd Watts
Todd Watts is the co-founder and CEO of PatientFi, an Irvine, California fintech that lets patients pay for elective and out-of-pocket healthcare in monthly installments at the point of care. Since starting the company in 2017, he has built a platform that has helped roughly 320,000 patients qualify for more than $3 billion in care across aesthetics, fertility, dentistry, ophthalmology and audiology, reaching a $140 million annual revenue run rate and 130 employees. A former J.P. Morgan investment banker with a Yale MBA, Watts was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Pacific Southwest winner.
Darrin Chen
Darrin Chen is the VP of Global Partners (NPN) GTM & Operations at NVIDIA, where he leads go-to-market strategy and operations for the NVIDIA Partner Network - the company's global partner ecosystem spanning solution providers, systems integrators, and channel partners. With 30+ years in technology from storage to networking to AI infrastructure, Chen joined NVIDIA through the 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies, where he had spent over a decade building worldwide channel programs. In mid-2023, NVIDIA expanded his mandate as it split its global channel chief role in two, tapping Chen to oversee its entire NPN program as the company transformed into a full-stack AI computing company.
Saleel Awsare
Saleel Awsare is President and CEO of Lantronix, the Irvine, California-based provider of compute, connect and management solutions for the intelligent edge. He took the top job in November 2023 after a quarter-century run that included senior leadership posts at Synaptics, Conexant Systems and Nuvoton Technology Corporation America. Under his watch, Lantronix has been repositioning from a networking-hardware vendor into a full-stack edge-AI and 'Physical AI' systems player, with drone, smart-city and industrial IoT deployments leading the pivot.
Adam Wegel
Adam Wegel is the Chief Executive Officer of Ease.io, the Irvine-based manufacturing audit and plant-floor platform used by Dana, Tenneco, Eaton and other manufacturers in 50+ countries. Appointed in October 2025, he succeeded Eric Stoop after more than a decade of Stoop's leadership. Wegel previously ran AI Application Development product at Salesforce, where his teams shipped the Agentforce Chat Client, and earlier worked as a manufacturing engineer at Delphi Automotive.