purdue-university
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Brad Ulrich and the extra trip inside
He used store pickup, then went inside anyway to talk with the team. From Walgreens to Thrive Physical Therapy Partners, Brad Ulrich’s career offers a close look at the distance between running an organization and knowing its people.
Christopher Day’s case for an ugly PowerPoint
Before he led Elevate Ventures, Christopher “Toph” Day raised $1.5 million with a ClipArt pitch deck. His career in Indiana keeps returning to the same question: what makes people willing to back an idea?
Tarrus Richardson and the business of a second chance
A family bar outside Chicago taught Tarrus Richardson what ownership could do. At IMB Partners, he has spent years turning that early lesson into acquisitions, enduring partnerships, and opportunities for other people to own a piece of the future.
Purdue has the patents. Now comes the hard part.
Purdue Innovates connects university inventions with licenses, founders and capital. Its most revealing work happens when a promising idea meets an inconvenient customer.
Jigar Patel Knows the Crop Doesn't Read Spreadsheets
The NorCal Cannabis co-founder has spent more than two decades turning instinct, regulation and agricultural reality into an operating system. His enduring lesson is simple: the model matters, but the living business gets the last word.
Candace Graham Knows the Pitch Is Only the Beginning
After two decades winning business for agencies, Candace Graham crossed to the client side at Bank OZK. Her career is a study in what happens after the clever idea: the restructuring, relationship-building and steady follow-through that make growth real.
Rohit Sirosh Is Building the Software Between a Lead and a Signed Case
After years engineering Azure infrastructure, Rohit Sirosh left Microsoft to build with a friend he has known since sixth grade. Their latest problem is less glamorous than AI mythology and more consequential to a law firm: making sure a promising inquiry does not disappear between the first call and a signed case.
Payton Case Is Building the Delivery Truck for Orbit
After learning to cool computers with liquid nitrogen and build geostationary satellites at scale, the Dispatch co-founder has picked a wonderfully terrestrial problem in space: getting the cargo home.
Liane Hart Is Teaching a Phone to Read the Breeding Barn
A Purdue geneticist, horse breeder and former animal-industry marketer saw an overlooked laboratory tool and asked a farm question. Her answer became Verility - a four-person Indiana company trying to put fertility intelligence in a producer's hand.
Sam Sarullo
Sam Sarullo is the Chief Marketing Officer of Daniel's Jewelers, a family-owned North American jewelry chain based in Culver City, California. A 20-year veteran of e-commerce and digital marketing, he built his reputation scaling online sales and omnichannel strategy for mid-market specialty retailers, including stints as VP of E-Commerce Marketing at ULTA Beauty, VP of Global E-Commerce at PacSun, interim Chief Digital Officer at Mana Products, and Head of E-Commerce and General Manager at Lakeshore Learning. At Daniel's, he steers marketing across traditional and digital channels with a focus on serving Hispanic and multicultural customers.
Wendy Hauteman
Wendy Hauteman is Chief Marketing Officer at VSP Vision, the Rancho Cordova-based not-for-profit vision care company that serves close to 90 million members through a network of 40,000 doctors. She has spent more than two decades in the optical industry, moving from senior marketing roles at Pearle Vision, ILORI and EyeMed to leading global strategic marketing at VSP before her promotion to CMO in August 2019. Under her leadership VSP shifted its message from 'we help people see' to 'empowering human potential through sight,' anchoring the brand's purpose-first playbook.
Jenna Wells
Jenna Wells is the Chief Executive Officer and a board member of Supply Wisdom, a real-time risk intelligence platform based in New York. A former U.S. Marine Corps signals intelligence officer and Purdue University graduate, she spent nearly two decades in intelligence and third-party risk management, including leadership roles at Wellington Management and Iron Mountain, before joining Supply Wisdom. She rose through the company from Head of Customer Experience to Head of Product to Chief Operating Officer, and was named CEO in June 2025 alongside a $14 million Series B funding round led by Jurassic Capital. Notably, she used the Supply Wisdom platform as a customer before joining the team that builds it.
Jared Schwartzentruber
Jared Schwartzentruber is the founder and CEO of Prefix, a New York facility management platform that keeps the ovens, freezers, and HVAC humming for multi-site restaurant and retail chains like Chipotle, Bojangles, and Famous Footwear. A mechanical engineer trained at Purdue and Columbia, he traded bio-inspired robotics and a healthcare startup for the deeply unglamorous world of broken walk-in coolers, wagering that agentic AI plus a real service layer can cut a chain's maintenance costs by more than 15%. In April 2026 Prefix raised a $7.5M seed round to push toward 10,000 locations.
Pranjal Daga
Pranjal Daga is the co-founder and CEO of Accend (YC S23), a San Francisco fintech building human-in-the-loop AI agents for commercial credit underwriting and compliance at banks and fintechs. Before Accend he led AI product on the Risk team at Brex, where his work helped prevent roughly $20M in fraud losses, and earlier helped build Cisco Innovation Labs from a single person to a 35-person team. He dropped out of a PhD in AI/ML at Purdue to chase the build, has done research at Adobe and IBM, and is racing to replace slow, manual back-office compliance work with audit-ready AI.
Ganesh Ramakrishna
Ganesh Ramakrishna is the Founder and CEO of Lyric, a Sunnyvale-based AI-native supply chain decision intelligence platform that raised a $43.5M Series B in August 2025. A serial entrepreneur with deep roots in operations research, he previously co-founded Opex Analytics — building it from zero to 140 employees before its acquisition by LLamasoft — and then played a key role as SVP in LLamasoft's $1.5B sale to Coupa Software. At Lyric, he is rebuilding how global enterprises design and deploy supply chain models, combining composable architecture, AI foundation models, and real-time analytics to serve customers including Coca-Cola, Mondelez International, and Google.