university-of-washington
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Ahmed “Eddie” Qureshi and the art of the useful meeting
From a University of Washington lab to corporate partnerships and an Arkansas investor network, the Rainfall Health founder has built a career around turning technical ideas into working relationships.
John Gabbert and the business of hearing no
He built PitchBook to explain the private markets, then had to persuade those markets to back him. More than 200 rejections, one cold call and 17 years later, John Gabbert had a different kind of balance sheet.
Kabir Shahani and the trouble with being a stranger
An airline knew his itinerary but still asked him to download an app he already used. A decade after helping build Amperity to close that gap, Kabir Shahani is back at the controls.
Luis Ceze and the computer that doesn't look like one
He helped put a music video into DNA, turned a university compiler project into OctoAI, and joined NVIDIA when it bought the company. Luis Ceze keeps finding computing problems in places that other people file under something else.
David Baker and the art of making what nature never made
For years, the idea sounded improbable: write a molecular shape into existence, then persuade nature to build it. Baker kept at it, and built a community that could try.
Kendra Canton Has Been Building a Seat at the Table Since College
Before the degree and the policy roundtables, there was a Spokane teenager doing homework first and everything else second. A decade later, Kendra Canton's work still follows the same practical rule: earn your place, then use it to bring more people into the room.
George White Put the Construction Notebook on Notice
A mechanical engineer went into the field, listened to inspectors and built a company around a stubborn idea: the record of a public works project should be as modern as the project itself.
The Fund Built to Turn UW Lab Coats Into Cap Tables
Ken Horenstein spent years watching University of Washington research spin out billion-dollar companies for investors somewhere else. Pack Ventures is his answer: a fund that shows up on day zero, before the pitch deck is polished.
Kerry Ok Sells Trust for a Living
She built a career marketing the least glamorous product in tech - the login box - and turned it into a story about who you are online.
Deniz Anders
Deniz Anders is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Nordstrom, the Seattle-based fashion retailer. A homegrown leader who joined the company in the late 1990s and spent more than two decades climbing through its marketing ranks, she now oversees brand programs, digital marketing, creative strategy, and corporate affairs. Anders was named SVP and CMO in 2022 after the retirement of longtime marketer Scott Meden, and was elevated to EVP in 2025, making her one of the senior executives shaping how one of America's best-known retailers speaks to its customers.
Todd Schiller
Todd Schiller is the co-founder and CEO of PixieBrix, a low-code platform that lets teams customize, extend, and automate the web apps they already use through browser mods. A programming-languages PhD who studied software verification under Michael Ernst at the University of Washington, he spent years building knowledge-management and analytics tools for hedge funds and consumer companies before starting PixieBrix in 2020. The New York-based company has raised roughly $26M, including a Series A backed by JetBlue Ventures, and has increasingly focused on AI-assisted customer-experience and support workflows.
Jacob Allen
Jacob Allen is the co-founder and CEO of Reportwell, a software startup that turns the slow, paperwork-heavy work of regulatory compliance reporting into a clean, AI-assisted portal, starting with K-12 schools and the agencies that oversee them. He came to the problem the hard way: as the co-founder and CEO of pilotED Schools, a charter network built around identity and sociology, he drowned in state and city compliance reports and decided to build the tool he wished he had. A Teach For America alum, Echoing Green Fellow, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education honoree, Allen has spent his career on the conviction that students do better when they understand who they are, and that the adults serving them deserve software that does not get in the way.
Ron Faith
Ron Faith is the President and CEO of RBC Signals, a Redmond, Washington company that runs a global ground station network letting satellite operators downlink data on demand instead of building their own dishes. A serial entrepreneur who launched Apple's first standalone internet product in the mid-1990s, ran mobile commerce at Qpass, and led cloud data-protection startup Datacastle to an acquisition by Carbonite, he returned to his aerospace roots in 2019 and took the top job in January 2024. He pairs a Dartmouth engineering-and-philosophy double major with a University of Washington master's spent researching frequency selective surfaces for Boeing.
Shivang Dave
Shivang R. Dave is the co-founder and CEO of PlenOptika, a Cambridge, Massachusetts medical-device company behind QuickSee, a handheld autorefractor that measures eyeglass prescriptions in about 10 seconds using wavefront aberrometry. A bioengineer with a PhD in bioengineering and nanotechnology, Dave co-invented the device during the Madrid-MIT M+Vision fellowship and has grown PlenOptika from a four-fellow research team into an international company whose technology has helped correct vision for over 7 million people across 60+ countries, especially in low-resource settings.
Valerie Daggett
Valerie Daggett is a University of Washington bioengineering professor turned biotech founder who spent three decades running the world's largest collection of protein-folding simulations, stumbled onto a structure nature was not supposed to make, and built a company around it. As founder and CEO of Seattle-based AltPep, she is commercializing the alpha-sheet: a strange protein geometry her lab predicted on a computer before anyone confirmed it in a test tube. Her SOBA-AD blood test, which spots toxic amyloid oligomers years before symptoms, earned FDA Breakthrough Device Designation and put her at the front of the race to catch Alzheimer's early.
Ali Amin-Javaheri
Ali Amin-Javaheri is the co-founder and CEO of Knowde, the B2B digital marketplace and data platform transforming how the $5 trillion global chemicals industry does business online. With 11 years of experience at ChemPoint - where he helped scale the chemical distribution startup to over $400M in revenue - Ali built Knowde from a PowerPoint vision into a platform hosting 8,000+ supplier storefronts and 230,000+ chemical products. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Coatue, and Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher's fund), Knowde has raised $180.8M total, including a $60M Series C in August 2024. Ali's drive is deeply personal: his father Mehdi fled Iran in 1985 and struggled to find work commensurate with his chemical engineering degree, and Ali grew up reading chemistry trade magazines, determined to modernize an industry built on relationships and paper catalogs.
Alexander Ratner
Alexander Ratner is the co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI, the company he spun out of Stanford's AI lab in 2019 after building the Snorkel open-source project during his PhD. A Harvard physics graduate turned Stanford computer scientist, Ratner pioneered the field of data-centric AI and weak supervision - the idea that better data, not just better models, is the key unlock for enterprise AI. Under his leadership, Snorkel AI reached a $1.3 billion valuation in 2025 following a $100 million Series D, with $148M in annual revenue and customers including some of the world's largest enterprises and LLM developers.
Ana Visneski
Ana Visneski is a crisis communications expert, founder of Merewif LLC, former Coast Guard officer, and senior AWS leader who pioneered social media programs in the U.S. military, led disaster response during COVID-19 and major hurricanes, advised Wizards of the Coast through the 2023 OGL crisis, and now runs a boutique firm helping tech and gaming companies navigate chaos. She holds two simultaneous UW master's degrees, published a book called 'F*ck It, Watch This,' teaches crisis communications at the University of Washington, and describes herself as someone who says 'That looks impossible, I want to try it.'