marketplace-founder
(5)
Alvaro Silberstein Is Turning Accessibility Into Travel Infrastructure
A Patagonia expedition revealed a market hiding in plain sight. Alvaro Silberstein built Wheel the World to turn scattered accessibility details into reliable travel infrastructure.
Bora Hamamcioglu
Bora Hamamcioglu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mascotte Health, a Miami-based, tech-enabled support company that gives veterinary practices virtual triage, client communications, front-desk help, after-hours care and scribing so vets can focus on medicine instead of phones. A Turkish-American entrepreneur, he previously built and ran CarHopper, a luxury and exotic car-rental marketplace acquired by Turo in 2020, and worked as a Principal at Dubai's BECO Capital. Mascotte emerged from stealth in 2023 with an oversubscribed $1.2M pre-seed round led by Nuwa Capital, with angels from Uber, Turo and Airbnb.
Peggy Chang
Peggy Chang is the co-founder and CEO of ActivityHero, the online marketplace where parents discover, compare and book summer camps, after-school classes and workshops for their kids. An MIT-trained engineer with a Stanford MBA, she spent more than 15 years building consumer software at Intuit's QuickBooks, Charles Schwab, Excite@Home, the Los Angeles Times new-media division and Walt Disney Imagineering before turning a personal frustration - it took her three months to enroll her daughter in gymnastics - into a company. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Palo Alto, ActivityHero now connects more than 4 million families with over 10,000 activity providers, and Chang frames its mission as both helping kids find their passions faster and helping parents (often mothers) stay in the workforce.
Stephanie Lawrence
Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Dallas Hogensen
Dallas Hogensen is the co-founder and CEO of Felux, a Cleveland-based digital marketplace and operating platform for the steel and metals industry. A ranch-raised Oregonian and former college football player turned serial startup operator, he scaled Lyft Business toward $1 billion in revenue and co-founded two companies (Liveli and Signal HQ) before relocating his family to Ohio to digitize a $2 trillion industry famous for handshakes and fax machines. Under the irreverent banner #makingsteelsexy, he has grown Felux's platform volume from roughly $10M to hundreds of millions in transactions, raised more than $24M in venture capital, and set out to put Cleveland back on the map as a hub for industrial technology.