massachusetts
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Jill Adams Makes Complicated Software Companies Easier to Understand
After three decades in B2B technology, the HeroDevs CMO has reduced her operating philosophy to a clean test: keep what works, remove what does not, and never lose the people inside the system.
Mark Kasdorf Left the App Economy to Build a Heat-Pump Workforce
After bootstrapping a mobile studio to $25 million and selling it to Accenture, the serial founder chose a harder interface: houses, crews and the stubborn shortage of skilled labor.
Kit Gallant Left Big Law for a Vape Factory. Then Came the Ban.
A teacher became a lawyer, a lawyer became a founder, and four friends moved west to build Fernway. The useful part of Kit Gallant's story is how they kept moving when the market, the rules and the timing refused to cooperate.
Katherine Beede
Katherine Godfrey Beede is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of The TJX Companies, the Framingham, Massachusetts off-price retail group behind T.J.Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Homesense, Sierra, Winners and TK Maxx. She stepped into the top marketing seat in February 2024 after roughly a quarter-century inside the company, having previously run marketing for HomeGoods, then T.J.Maxx, then the combined T.J.Maxx and Marshalls division known internally as MarMaxx. Before TJX she spent a decade on the agency side in Boston and Philadelphia, at shops including Hill Holliday, LevLane, Arnold Worldwide and Holland Mark Martin. Her remit now covers marketing for a roughly $60 billion retailer with more than 5,200 stores across nine countries, built on a business model that sells a shopping trip nobody can fully predict - the so-called treasure hunt. She keeps an unusually low public profile for a Fortune 100 CMO.
Saurabh Ullal
Saurabh Ullal is the CEO of 6K, an advanced materials company in North Andover, Massachusetts that uses a microwave-plasma process called UniMelt to make battery cathode powders and metal powders for additive manufacturing. A chemical engineer by training with a PhD from UC Santa Barbara, he joined 6K as COO and stepped into the CEO role in September 2024 alongside an $82M Series E close, tasked with scaling a technology invented at MIT into industrial tonnage.
Russell Beckerman
Russell Beckerman is a biotech entrepreneur and Co-Founder & CEO of Overture Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based company engineering precision antibody medicines targeting obesity and metabolic dysfunction. He previously co-founded 82VS, a venture studio embedded within Alloy Therapeutics that has launched nine drug companies since 2020. His work sits at the intersection of cutting-edge antibody biology, company creation, and the conviction that the next generation of obesity drugs will be antibodies - not peptides.
Jackie Walsh
Jackie Walsh is a Senior Vice President of Media at Microsoft, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Operating within one of the world's largest technology companies - with $281 billion in annual revenue and 228,000 employees - she leads at the intersection of enterprise technology and media. Her role places her inside Microsoft's vast ecosystem spanning cloud infrastructure, AI services, productivity tools, and advertising platforms including Microsoft Advertising, MSN, and Xbox media properties.
Lydia Smyers
Lydia Smyers is Vice President of Customer and Partner Solutions for U.S. Telco, Media, and Gaming at Microsoft, leading a team of more than 400 professionals serving the top 200 enterprises in those sectors. Based in Massachusetts, she has spent over a decade at Microsoft in roles spanning U.S. Education, Americas Northeast, and now the converging industries of telco, media, and gaming. Before Microsoft she held senior executive roles at Oracle, Red Hat, and Ernst & Young, building a career defined by large-scale partnerships, channel strategy, and technology-driven transformation. She was named to CRN's Top 100 Women of the Channel five consecutive years and spoke at MWC Barcelona 2026 on AI and its societal implications.
Scott Morello
Scott Morello is VP of HR Business Insights for Activision Blizzard King at Microsoft, a role he stepped into in October 2023 after building the people analytics function at Activision Blizzard. Before corporate life, he was a marine ecologist - his PhD from UMass Boston studied species interactions in Gulf of Maine intertidal zones. That pivot from counting mussels to measuring workforces defines his unusual edge: he brings the precision of population ecology to questions about how organizations actually behave.
Bob Donahue
Robert 'Bob' Donahue is a veteran technology and fintech executive who led Authorize.Net Holdings as President and CEO from 2004 to 2007, steering the company through its landmark $565 million acquisition by CyberSource Corporation - one of the defining deals in digital payments history. After joining CyberSource's board post-acquisition, he went on to serve as an independent director at NETSCOUT Systems and Sycamore Networks. With a career spanning senior executive roles at Manufacturers Services Ltd., Stratus Computer, and Celestica, Donahue has been a consistent presence at the intersection of technology infrastructure and financial services for over two decades.
Owen Frivold
Owen Frivold is the CEO of Cleartelligence, a modern data and AI consulting firm headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts. A Stanford-educated co-founder of Hero Digital, Frivold brings 14+ years of experience shaping customer experience and digital transformation for brands like Apple, Sephora, Airbnb, and Lucid Motors. After founding Winter Sun LLC as a boutique strategy advisory, he joined Cleartelligence as President in April 2024 - when the company acquired Winter Sun - and was elevated to CEO in April 2025. He is known for turning complex data problems into actionable intelligence and driving enterprise AI readiness across financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and retail.
Eric Paley
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.