notre-dame
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Alex Jones Put Prayer in Your Pocket
A lapsed Catholic, a meditation habit and one almost comically obvious question became Hallow. Alex Jones built the first prototype for himself, then learned that millions of other people were looking for the same quiet doorway.
The Engineer Running Zebra's Marketing Playbook
An electrical engineer runs marketing for the company behind every barcode you have ever scanned. His pitch: stop trying to do more with less.
Cole Riccardi
Cole Riccardi is the founder and CEO of Authentic, a New York based insurtech startup that lets software platforms and affinity groups launch their own branded insurance programs. A former investor at Aquiline Capital Partners and a Notre Dame finance graduate, he left the investing side of insurance in 2022 to build what he calls 'captive-in-a-box' - turnkey infrastructure that brings captive insurance, once reserved for large corporations, to gyms, restaurants, salons and other small businesses. Authentic has raised roughly $16 million, including an $11 million Series A led by FirstMark Capital.
Maureen Hillenmeyer
Maureen Hillenmeyer is the founder and CEO of Hexagon Bio, a Menlo Park drug-discovery company that mines the genomes of fungi for hidden small molecules and engineers yeast to brew them into potential medicines. A former competitive swimmer turned computational biologist, she holds a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford and built the company out of a Stanford research program she led, raising more than $270 million to turn DNA sequence data into cancer and infectious-disease therapeutics.
Sam Fahmy
Sam Fahmy is the President and CEO of Ripcord, the Hayward-based robotic digitization company turning paper archives into searchable, structured data. A physics major turned enterprise-software operator, he previously helped take Cvent from $2M to $400M+ in revenue and led commercial strategy at WorkFusion before taking the top job at Ripcord in February 2022.
David George
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'