
A software engineer, a former Air Force pilot, and a student of language, Jack Welde built Smartling around a familiar frustration: reaching the world is easier than making yourself understood.
He walked away from the record business to study advertising, then came back with a different proposition: artists should keep the work, know the audience and own the upside.
Josh Daneshforooz is the co-founder and CEO of Lango, an Austin-based, AI-enabled language services company that has scaled by acquiring seven businesses across the United States. Raised by an Iranian Muslim father and an American Christian mother, he trained as a theologian at Harvard, served as a Harvard Leadership Fellow, and pivoted from interfaith peacemaking and leadership consulting to building software that knits interpretation, translation and human expertise into a single workflow for over 1,000 customers.