purdue-university
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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.