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Sarajane Sparks Verghese and the Art of Getting Someone Else Interested
A former journalist with an MBA, Sarajane Sparks Verghese built SPARKS Consulting Group around the journey from a brand’s private ambition to somebody else’s attention.
Thatcher Spring
Thatcher Spring is the founder and CEO of GearLaunch, a print-on-demand and end-to-end ecommerce platform he launched in 2013 to give independent online sellers the same backend muscle - manufacturing, fulfillment, payments, and customer service - that big marketplaces take for granted. A Georgetown English major who started a nationally distributed wholesale apparel company right out of college, he detoured through J.P. Morgan, the Mars graduate leadership program, and an MBA at UNC Kenan-Flagler before going back to what he knew best: merchandise and supply chains. GearLaunch raised a $4.8M Series A in 2017 and grew to a few hundred employees, letting creators build custom-product businesses without ever touching inventory.
Robert Mallernee
Robert Mallernee is the founder and CEO of Eton Solutions, the Research Triangle Park company behind AtlasFive, an integrated, cloud-native, AI-driven platform that runs the back office for more than 1,000 of the world's wealthiest families. A CFA with three-plus decades in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, he built the software inside a real multi-family office (Eton Advisors) before spinning it out to sell to the rest of the industry. His pitch is blunt: spreadsheets are 'separate-sheets,' and the modern family office needs one system, not a hundred. In 2025 Eton closed a $58M Series C to push AtlasFive and EtonAI deeper into private equity, funds and global private banks.