minneapolis
(22)
Steven Cragle Built a Career by Staying Curious
Across city government, agencies, Medtronic, Merck and UnitedHealth Group, Steven Cragle kept returning to one deceptively simple idea: good communication begins with curiosity about the whole person.
Amber Holm Is Teaching Old Brands New Routes
After Cheerios, Firestone and Rubbermaid, Amber Holm took on a different kind of household name. Her work at Winnebago Industries is a study in how research, retail reality and shared experience can keep legacy brands moving.
The Y Dropped the Map and Kept the Compass
One of North America's largest Ys traded a geographic name for a directional one - and kept doing the unglamorous work of raising kids, teaching swimming, and holding neighborhoods together.
Regis Corporation
The company that quietly cuts millions of heads of hair a year runs almost no salons of its own. Here is how a 100-year-old chain rebuilt itself around franchisees, royalties and the corner-strip haircut.
Minnesota Vikings
Minnesota's NFL franchise has spent six decades turning purple, ritual and recurring heartbreak into a durable consumer business. Its real product is bigger than football: a weekly reason for millions of people to belong.
Aurelius
A research repository built by two UX veterans in a Minneapolis basement, Aurelius helps product teams turn piles of interview notes into searchable, shareable insights - without losing a single finding to a forgotten spreadsheet.
Dave Schneider
Dave Schneider is Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Red Wing Shoe Company, the family-owned, Minnesota-based maker of iconic American work boots founded in 1905. He leads the company's global marketing practice, spanning brand management, digital and traditional communications, ecommerce, retail experience, brand protection, and corporate communications, reporting directly to the CEO. After years in senior roles at leading agencies including Digitas, Tribal DDB, and BBDO, he brought an agency creative sensibility to an operator's job, championing a marketing model that balances long-term brand equity with performance-driven revenue while putting the skilled-trades workers who wear the boots at the center of the brand's story.
Knut Eliassen
Knut Eliassen is a Norwegian-American snowboarder turned marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Nitro Snowboards. Born in Minneapolis to a Norwegian father and a Minnesotan mother, he won a USASA national boardercross title at 15, moved to Norway at 16, and rode professionally for Nitro while completing a business degree at Handelshoyskolen BI. He joined Nitro in 2005 as a rider and rep, became the brand's global team manager, and worked his way up through sports marketing, marketing director, and VP of global marketing roles before being named CMO in 2025. Based in Salt Lake City, he oversees brand, media, social, video, and team departments for Nitro and L1 Outerwear, has produced and appeared in snowboard films including Hyped!, Boom, The Bad Seeds, and the documentary 28 Winters, and hosts Nitro's ten-part Learn To Snowboard tutorial series. His stated goal is simple: get more people onto snowboards.
Tammy Redpath
Tammy Redpath is the Chief Marketing Officer of EVEREVE, the Edina, Minnesota-based women's fashion retailer, a role she stepped into in April 2026. She brings more than three decades of retail and brand leadership, most of it at Target Corp., where she rose from store management to senior vice president of marketing and served as president of Target's India operations. Before EVEREVE she was CEO of Inside Edge Commercial Interior Services, chief engagement officer at Lakeshore Learning Materials, and an independent leadership and brand consultant. At EVEREVE she leads global marketing strategy, brand positioning, and customer engagement across the retailer's stores and digital channels.
River Health
River Health is a Minneapolis digital health company building the first health plan designed specifically for hourly and mixed workforces - the roughly 75 million American workers who earn too much for Medicaid but can't afford traditional insurance. For a flat monthly fee with no copays, deductibles, or hidden charges, members get virtual and in-person primary care, behavioral health, labs, and prescriptions delivered to their door. River sells directly to employers like Taco Bell and Raising Cane's who want to offer real benefits to workers the insurance industry has long ignored.
Anuj Bhardwaj
Anuj Bhardwaj is the co-founder and CEO of SecondWave Systems, a Minneapolis-St. Paul medical device company building the SecondWave MINI, a wearable, noninvasive ultrasound device that aims to calm chronic inflammation by aiming focused sound at the spleen. He took a family-owned industrial ultrasound business founded by his parents in 1977 and redirected its core technology toward medicine, raising a $7M Series A in 2025 on top of more than $15M in government research funding from DARPA, NIH, and ARPA-H. Trained as a mechanical engineer at Penn State with an MS and MBA from MIT, he sits at the crossroads of hardware, bioelectronic medicine, and the emerging field of bio-ultrasonic therapy.
Kobby Amoah
Kobby Amoah is the co-founder and CEO of River Health, a Minneapolis-based subscription health plan built for hourly workers in the United States. Born in Ghana and educated at Wartburg College and MIT's idea-stage accelerator, he previously founded Obaa, a mobile electronic medical records venture for developing countries. River Health pairs virtual primary care, behavioral health, and prescription delivery for a flat monthly fee, and has partnered with national restaurant operators to bring coverage to employees who fall through the gaps of traditional insurance.
Lorenz Esguerra
Lorenz Esguerra is the chief executive of Folklore, a Minneapolis-area design and technology agency he has grown roughly 40% in under a year. A Filipino American agency veteran with a 30-year career spanning Procter & Gamble, Bain & Co., Weber Shandwick and Edelman, he is known for turning offices into growth engines and for championing diversity in the advertising profession as treasurer of the nonprofit The BrandLab.
Scott Klein
Scott Klein is the CEO of HelpWear, a Toronto-based medtech company building HeartWatch, a medical-grade ambulatory ECG monitor with a dry-electrode design worn on the bicep for extended, comfortable heart-rhythm monitoring. A biomedical engineer with a Notre Dame MBA and roughly 25 years in cardiology medical technology, Klein spent 14 years at Medtronic, then led global marketing and strategy for heart-failure therapies at Abbott and product strategy at Starkey Hearing before taking the helm of HelpWear. He is known in the industry for building and scaling cardiac-monitoring businesses into markets measured in the billions.
Alison Richards
Alison Richards is the CEO of Surest, a UnitedHealthcare company (formerly Bind) that builds a health plan with no deductibles and upfront prices people can see before they book care. A UnitedHealthcare veteran since 2012, she has turned the company's most contrarian benefits idea - let members shop for care the way they shop for everything else - into its fastest-growing employer plan.
Thomas Arnold
Thomas (Tom) Arnold is the Chief Executive Officer of ViCentra, the Dutch maker of Kaleido, billed as one of the smallest, lightest and most precise insulin patch pumps in its class. Appointed in February 2025 after nearly 25 years across Medtronic, PROCEPT BioRobotics, Boston Scientific and Sorin Group, he is steering ViCentra's smartphone-controlled automated insulin delivery system into European markets and toward a US entry, backed by financing that has grown from $85M to $98M.
A.R. Weiler
A.R. Weiler is the CEO of C3 HealthcareRx, the Raleigh-based value-based care company formed when Wellbox Health and C3 merged in January 2026. A Harvard-trained computer scientist who began in Silicon Valley software, he has spent more than fifteen years building and scaling healthcare companies - running Healthsense, Livio Health Group, SonarMD and Wellbox, and holding senior posts at Oracle, OptumInsight, Virgin Pulse and Change Healthcare. He specializes in turning fragmented care vendors into coordinated, multi-specialty operations.
Kristin Werk
Kristin Werk is the CEO of BookNook, a San Francisco-based edtech company delivering synchronous, research-backed K-8 tutoring in reading and math to students across the United States. A self-described introvert with 20+ years of operational leadership—spanning 17 years at Thomson Reuters, followed by executive roles at Questar Assessment and NWEA—Werk joined BookNook in 2023 as COO, expanded the platform to include math tutoring, and stepped up as CEO in December 2024. She holds a BS in Journalism from St. Cloud State University, an MBA from Capella University, and a stack of certifications including PMP, Six Sigma Green Belt, and Prosci Change Practitioner.
Marty Sarim
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Praful Saklani
Praful Saklani is the Founder and CEO of Pramata, an enterprise contract AI company he built from a bootstrapped startup in Minnesota into a 300-person global platform trusted by Fortune 500 companies. Inspired by watching attorneys manually search through contracts during a 2001 acquisition, he spent nearly two decades turning that frustration into a radically simple contract lifecycle management platform now powered by generative AI. Along the way he's been named to Comparably's Best CEOs for Diversity lists, grown Pramata to $49.7M in annual revenue, and attracted backing from Volition Capital.
Janet Dryer
Janet Dryer is a seasoned software industry executive with over 30 years of experience building and scaling technology companies. She served as CEO of Perforce Software from January 2016 through mid-2018, relocating headquarters from San Francisco to Minneapolis and growing the company from roughly 220 to 450 employees while doubling revenue to $150M. Previously, as CEO of HelpSystems for 16 years, she grew it from $20M to $110M in annual revenue. She now serves as Chair of the Board at Perforce, which provides version control, DevOps, and software development lifecycle tools to over half of the Fortune 500.
Kim Kelderman
Kim Kelderman is the President and CEO of Bio-Techne Corporation, a global life science tools and diagnostics company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With over 30 years of healthcare and life sciences experience, Kelderman rose through the ranks at Bio-Techne after joining in 2018 to lead the Diagnostics and Genomics segment, where he doubled the spatial biology business and commercialized the ExoDx Prostate test. A native of the Netherlands educated at Hogeschool Heerlen and Columbia Business School, he previously held executive roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Becton Dickinson. He became CEO on February 1, 2024, succeeding Chuck Kummeth.