penn-state
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Happy Valley LaunchBox makes the first mistake cheaper
Free coaching, small grants and a room full of useful skeptics: Penn State’s downtown startup hub helps founders test a business before betting too much on it.
Happy Valley VC: Before the First Check, Find Your People
At Penn State, Happy Valley VC brings students into startup work through founder projects, investor conversations and pitch prizes. Its origin offers a practical lesson: building the room can matter as much as raising the money.
Mario Ciabarra Built a Unicorn by Watching Where the Internet Hurts
Before dashboards, funding rounds, and agentic AI, Mario Ciabarra learned a simpler lesson in a clothing store: frustration is obvious when you can see the customer. His career has been an attempt to give the internet that same pair of eyes.
Nikhil Bharadwaj Put the Cloud on Notice
The Xeal co-founder learned EV charging’s least glamorous lesson in concrete garages: if the network disappears, the product cannot. His answer was to move the essential work closer to the plug.
Gina Smith
Gina Smith’s path from Penn State’s student organizations to Publicis Groupe offers a compact lesson in modern marketing leadership: learn across disciplines, build the network, then make the pieces move together.
Christopher King
Christopher King is the founder and CEO of Eaglebrook, a crypto investment platform that gives registered investment advisors (RIAs) direct access to bitcoin and digital assets through tax-optimized separately managed accounts (SMAs). A Penn State finance graduate who began investing in digital assets in 2014, King started his career in crypto-focused venture capital at Morgan Creek Capital Management before launching Eaglebrook in 2019. The New York and Miami-based company has grown into one of the largest crypto SMA platforms serving wealth managers, backed by investors including Castle Island Ventures, Brewer Lane Ventures, and Franklin Templeton.
Clay Ritchey
Clay Ritchey is the Chief Executive Officer of Verato, a Tysons, Virginia healthcare technology company whose referential identity matching platform helps hospitals, life science firms and government agencies resolve who is who across fragmented records. A Penn State electrical engineer and Harvard MBA, he has spent more than two decades building and scaling healthcare software businesses, including a turn as CEO of Evariant, which merged with Healthgrades in 2020. He took the helm at Verato in 2021 and has become a frequent voice on why patient matching sits at the center of healthcare's digital transformation.
Joshua Richards
Joshua Richards is the Chief Executive Officer of Boundless Learning, a Boston-based online program management and edtech company spun out of Pearson. He rose to the top job in January 2025 after serving as the company's Chief Product and Technology Officer and helping steer its transition into a standalone business. With more than two decades in technology and education, Richards leads a company serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150+ countries and having launched more than 450 online programs, focused on driving learner success through personalization and helping universities and institutions reach new audiences.
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.
Mark Kozlowski
Mark Kozlowski is the founder and CEO of Upped Events, a Philadelphia event-experience platform he built to drag festivals, fairs and community events out of the spreadsheet era. A Penn State and Wharton-trained operator, he started by trying to pour a beer in under ten seconds (BeerMe), then turned that obsession with friction into a full registration, contactless-payment and analytics stack. In May 2025 Upped was acquired by Events.com.
Chase Kim
Chase Kim is a startup founder who spent years deep inside Sendbird, the messaging infrastructure company powering conversations for DoorDash, Reddit, and Hinge, where he led the forward deployment team during Sendbird's critical 2024 pivot into AI agents for customer experience. In 2026, he co-founded Light Anchor (YC P26) with Sangha Park to build fully autonomous e-commerce brands run entirely by AI agents, betting that the future of consumer business is capped by compute, not headcount.
Leslie Wilberforce
Leslie Oley Wilberforce is the CEO of Evidation, a San Mateo-based digital health company that has built a 5-million-person platform where individuals share permissioned health data to power real-world clinical research. A mechanical engineer by training (BS Penn State, MS Stanford), she joined Evidation in 2015 and spent a decade building the company's enterprise technology platform and landmark partnerships with Johnson & Johnson, Apple, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and the American Heart Association before becoming Evidation's first non-founder CEO in March 2025.
Hal Paz
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.