vanderbilt
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Connor Waslo Is Teaching AI the Fine Art of Leaving You Alone
The Caddy co-founder went from coding through class to cutting a polished feature. His current product thesis is disarmingly simple: a useful assistant knows when to act, when to ask and when to keep quiet.
Gerald Denny Still Sees Patients Between Board Meetings
A practicing nephrologist who runs the medical side of a $1.9 billion device business, and still keeps a standing clinic day.
Everett Cook
Everett Cook is the co-founder and CEO of Rho, a New York-based financial operations platform that combines business banking, corporate cards, payments, and expense management for growing companies. Before founding Rho in 2018 with Alex Wheldon, Cook spent roughly a decade in global macro investing, leading research at multi-billion-dollar funds and working in the orbit of figures like Steve Cohen and Michael Bloomberg. Raised in a New York finance family, he blends the discipline of a trader with an entrepreneurial streak that started at age 14, and has raised more than $200 million to build banking software for real, operating businesses rather than consumers.
Oren Friedman
Oren Friedman is the co-founder and CEO of Rally, a New York-based user research CRM that pulls participant recruiting, scheduling, incentives and consent tracking out of spreadsheets and into one workflow. A Nashville native and Vanderbilt graduate, he built the product with CTO Alec Robins after years selling enterprise research tools at Remesh and AlphaSights. Rally went through Y Combinator's W22 batch, closed an $11M Series A led by Canapi Ventures in June 2025, and counts Adobe, Sonos, MongoDB, GitLab, BILL and Monzo among its customers.
Dan Cook
Dan Cook is the CEO, Co-founder, and Investor at Lyten Inc, a San Jose-based deep-tech company pioneering 3D Graphene supermaterial and next-generation lithium-sulfur batteries. With over three decades spanning General Motors, NeXT Computer (under Steve Jobs), Bay Networks/Nortel, and private equity at Cerberus Capital, Cook pivoted to found Lyten in 2015 around a serendipitous discovery: trying to turn methane into clean hydrogen, the team accidentally created a revolutionary 3D graphene material. Under his leadership, Lyten has raised over $1.2 billion, shipped lithium-sulfur A-samples to automotive and military customers, announced the world's first lithium-sulfur gigafactory in Reno, Nevada, and in 2025-2026 acquired significant Northvolt assets across Europe to become one of the largest battery manufacturers on the continent.
Asit Parikh
Asit Parikh is a physician-scientist turned biotech chief executive who runs MOMA Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company built around the idea of systematically drugging molecular machines - the highly dynamic, shape-shifting proteins that most drug hunters avoid. An MD-PhD trained at Vanderbilt with clinical roots in gastroenterology, he spent two decades at Millennium and Takeda, where he helped steer the inflammatory bowel disease drug vedolizumab (Entyvio) from research to global blockbuster, before taking the CEO seat at MOMA in 2021. He has since raised a $150 million Series B and signed a roughly $2 billion partnership with Roche to push precision cancer medicines toward the clinic.
Graham Gaylor
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
Frank D. Lee
Frank D. Lee is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Pacira BioSciences, a specialty pharmaceutical company pioneering non-opioid pain management solutions. A 30-year industry veteran who immigrated to the United States from South Korea, Lee built his career across Eli Lilly, Janssen, Novartis, and a 13-year tenure at Genentech where he oversaw $11 billion in global product sales. Before joining Pacira in January 2024, he led Forma Therapeutics through a transformative journey from drug-discovery startup to clinical-stage biotech, culminating in a $1.1 billion acquisition by Novo Nordisk in 2022. At Pacira, Lee is executing the '5x30' strategy - five bold objectives to transform the company into an innovative biopharma powerhouse by 2030, including advancing the PCRX-201 gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis, which has already earned FDA Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation.