scottsdale
(24)
Hamid Shojaee and the business of getting distracted
His first startup taught him to focus. At Axosoft, he gave distraction a deadline - and helped turn side projects into Pure Chat and GitKraken. Now the Arizona founder is finding new uses for the same old curiosity.
Craig Cerny and the price of an empty market
Before leading TerraNova, Craig Cerny ran community banks and argued over how to value securities when buyers disappeared. His career follows capital through the corporate office, the bank balance sheet and the deal table.
StormWind Studios bets on the teacher, not just the video
A Scottsdale training company put studio production behind live IT classes. Now its AI tools tackle the same old problem: getting useful knowledge out of a screen and into somebody’s working day.
The James Agency Lost 62% in an Hour. Then It Kept Everyone.
A Scottsdale marketing firm built its reputation on hospitality, then watched that market vanish in a morning. Its response - open books, zero layoffs, and a ruthless 10% cost hunt - explains how the agency works today.
HVH Media & Marketing Put the Feed at the Center
HVH began with a simple wager: social media should not sit at the edge of a marketing plan. It should connect the story, the reputation, the advertising and the sale.
The Agency That Sold Its Own Best Argument
For more than a quarter-century, Santy told brands to embrace useful change. Then the Scottsdale agency made the advice personal - and engineered an exit that turned a small firm's limits into a larger firm's bench.
The Decade Andrea Aker Spent Learning to Let Go
Aker Ink began as one writer's bid for independence. Its more revealing story is how she stopped treating independence as the business model.
The Agency That Put a Dashboard Where the Pitch Deck Used to Be
FabCom’s real product is not an ad. It is a tightly wired system in which research, creative, code, media and measurement are forced to share the same room.
Tracy Tannenbaum Is Taking the Surprise Fees Out of the American Dream
The Meritage Homes CMO built her career by walking into unfamiliar industries, studying what frustrates customers, and clearing the clutter. Her latest brief is simple to say and difficult to deliver: make buying a new home feel less like decoding a fee schedule.
Joshua Simon Bet on the Strip Mall. Then He Made It a Community Strategy
He started SimonCRE in a bruised market with no outside equity. Sixteen years later, Joshua Simon is still making the unfashionable case that physical retail is civic infrastructure with a cash register.
Jared Vishney Found a Business in the Waiting
For a decade, attorneys kept asking Jared Vishney the same question. His eventual answer turned a slow administrative chore into a focused software business - and revealed the value of listening to the request that will not go away.
Blerim Zeqiri Is Turning Apartment Data Into a Public Utility
After eleven years inside multifamily operations, Blerim Zeqiri built the software he wished had existed. Now his larger bet is that rental markets work better when professionals and renters can see the same truth.
Milan Patel Bet His Third Startup on a Glass Chip - and a 120-Year-Old Problem
Before PathogenDx, Milan Patel built cars, ran an electronics company, learned finance at Intel and watched his first startup fail. His third venture turns tiny patterns on glass into same-shift answers for laboratories - a career assembled from engineering, money and the nerve to ship.
Aaron Brodt Built the Firm. Then He Built the Operating System.
A former college basketball player and oil trader spent years building a wealth firm - then discovered that the machinery behind advice was the harder business to fix.
The $6 Billion RIA Built to Make Complicated Money Feel Boring
Ashton Thomas sells a scarce luxury: one coordinated view of a wealthy family’s messy financial life. Its post-2023 expansion shows how a regional adviser can add offices, specialists and assets without sanding away the local teams clients hired in the first place.
SimonCRE Is Betting $500 Million That Retail's Ugly Spreadsheet Can Still Be Beaten
New shopping centers are expensive, slow and unfashionable. SimonCRE's answer is a short ownership clock, municipal dealmaking and the stubborn belief that a good Target can still rearrange a town.
The Software That Weaponizes a HIPAA Loophole Against the Records Department
Every personal injury case stalls in the same place: waiting on a records clerk who has no reason to hurry. Arctrieval turned a line of HIPAA regulation into a stopwatch that providers can't ignore.
The Company That Sells You Peace of Mind, One Thermostat at a Time
Honeywell spun it off in 2018 as an afterthought. Six years and three acquisitions later, Resideo is a $6.76 billion home-safety business splitting itself in two - and betting the boring stuff on your wall is worth more apart than together.
Trainual
An all-in-one employee training platform that connects knowledge, systems, roles, and processes to deliver instant answers, job-ready training, and confident execution for every employee.
Pure Chat
The easiest & fastest way to add live chat to your website. FREE for the first 30 days!
Nextiva
A phone company that decided phone calls were only the beginning. How Nextiva turned a VoIP line for small businesses into an AI platform that runs a billion customer conversations a year.
Axio Education
Axio Education is an AI-native learning platform, spun out of Arizona State University's Luminosity Lab in 2023, that helps colleges and universities design, deliver, and improve courses. It combines LMS, CRM, and SIS capabilities with agentic AI to compress course development from months to minutes, deliver personalized learning pathways, and give faculty real-time insight into how students are doing - while keeping instructors in creative control.
Todd Zipper
Todd Zipper is a longtime education-and-technology operator now running Axio Education, a Scottsdale-based agentic AI learning platform that turns static coursework into adaptive, personalized pathways. Before Axio he spent more than two decades building and scaling online-education businesses: he led The Learning House to its 2018 sale to Wiley, then ran Wiley's global education and talent operations as an executive vice president overseeing more than $300 million in annual revenue. He hosts the higher-ed podcast An Educated Guest and holds a CFA charter alongside degrees from Penn and Columbia.
Justine Davis
Justine Davis is the VP of Developer Marketing, Community, and Developer Relations at ServiceNow, where she oversees a developer community of more than one million members and shapes the narrative of ServiceNow as a global developer platform. With roots in digital marketing and a career arc that ran through Hotwire, Atlassian (over nine years), and Postman, she has built a reputation for translating complex technical products into language that resonates with developers and enterprise buyers alike. Based in Scottsdale, Arizona, she is known for her candid takes on developer marketing, her emphasis on showing rather than telling, and her belief that DevRel and Developer Marketing are two sides of the same coin.