university-of-texas
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Jill Wiltfong
She left the anchor desk two decades ago. She still runs Korn Ferry's marketing like a newsroom - find the story, prove the value, hit the deadline.
Stephen Koza
Stephen Koza is the CEO of EverOps, a San Francisco DevOps and IT operations partner that embeds engineering teams inside high-growth companies. A Texas-raised electrical engineer who traded the lab bench for the sales floor, he spent 17 years building go-to-market functions in Silicon Valley, most notably growing Cisco Meraki's global service provider business from zero to $400M and leading industrial sales at Samsara. As Managing Partner at Blue Ono Capital he led the investment in EverOps in 2022, then stepped in to run it, pairing an inner-nerd love of technology with a people-first, no-jerks approach to building teams.
Tony Rogers
Tony Rogers is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Dollar General, where he leads brand, media, personalization and the DG Media Network across the retailer's roughly 20,000 stores. A University of Texas graduate who started in accounting before turning to marketing, he built a 25-year career at consumer brands and retailers including Pillsbury, Frito-Lay and Gateway before spending more than 17 years at Walmart, where he rose to Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart U.S. and later Chief Member Officer at Sam's Club. He joined Dollar General in June 2024 after a stint as CMO of Signet Jewelers, bringing a philosophy built around purpose, evolution and keeping the customer at the center of every decision.
John Joyoprayitno
John Joyoprayitno is the President, CEO, and co-founder of Alafair Biosciences, an Austin-based medical device company building bioresorbable hydrogel implants that protect soft tissue during surgery. A native Austinite who studied anthropology before switching to entrepreneurship, he has built and run ventures ranging from a triathlon bike shop to the custom-car outfit Austin Speed Shop, and now leads a commercial-stage medtech firm best known for its VersaWrap product line. Under his leadership Alafair posted 722% year-over-year growth, and he was named Austin Business Journal's 2024 Best CEO and made Inc.'s 2025 Business Leader of the Year list.
Khaled Bitar
Khaled Bitar is the co-founder and CEO of Avtal, an Austin-based fintech building a white-labeled, AI-powered digital collections platform for third-party debt collection agencies. In March 2026 the company announced $24 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by S3 Ventures. Before Avtal, Bitar co-founded and ran LeftLane Software, a subprime auto lending platform, led Supply Operations at ServiceChannel (acquired by Fortive for $1.2B), and spent four years as a consultant at Bain & Company. He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
Mark Floreani
Mark Floreani is the CEO and co-founder of FloSports, the Austin-based streaming company he started in 2006 with his brother Martin and Madhu Venkatesan on roughly $10,000-$20,000 and a van. A former All-American runner at the University of Texas, he filmed the company's breakout moment - Ryan Hall's U.S. half-marathon record - from the back of a noisy pickup truck. FloSports now streams around 50,000 events a year across more than 25 sports that mainstream broadcasters overlook, built on the bet that passion, not audience size, defines a great sport. Floreani took over as CEO in 2018 and has pushed the company deeper into college sports, hockey, motorsports and, more recently, AI-powered production and dubbing.
Nathan Sportsman
Nathan Sportsman is the founder and CEO of Praetorian, an Austin-based offensive cybersecurity firm he started in 2010 and bootstrapped for a decade before taking a Series A led by McKinsey in 2020. Beyond running the company, he hosts and produces 'Where Warlocks Stay Up Late,' a long-form interview series documenting the hackers who built the field. He is a contributing author to 'Hacking Exposed,' a U.S. patent holder, and a former adjunct professor at UT Austin.
Jeffrey Chou
Jeffrey Chou is the CEO and co-founder of Sonatus, the Sunnyvale-based company building AI-powered software-defined vehicle platforms for the automotive industry. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a track record of exits to Cisco and Brocade, Chou co-founded Sonatus in 2018 with Yu Fang, applying datacenter-era thinking to automobiles. Under his leadership, Sonatus has raised over $110 million, won the 2022 PACE Innovation Partnership Award with Hyundai, and deployed its platform across more than 6 million production vehicles globally from Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia.