scottsdale
(10)
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.
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.
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.