vanderbilt-university
(5)
Suman Siva and the business of showing up
Before he built Marco Experiences, Suman Siva had to learn how to join the conversation. His route from a North Carolina school courtyard to corporate group travel keeps returning to the same question: what gets people together?
Blake Hall and the problem hidden inside a military discount
A veteran’s paperwork gave the ID.me co-founder a question worth pursuing: how much should you have to reveal to prove who you are? Sixteen years and several business models later, that question reaches far beyond the checkout counter.
Josh Ginsberg and the trouble with being talked about
A campaign veteran helped turn the war room into Zignal Labs. His journey from presidential politics to Meta follows a stubborn question: what should you do when the world starts talking?
Ross Hendrickson and the art of handing over the keys
He helped build Bloomerang around the donors who come back. After a decade, Ross Hendrickson made room for a new CEO - and carried his interest in nonprofit technology into a different job.
Dillon Rolnick
Dillon Rolnick is the chief executive of Nous Research, an applied AI lab building open-source, human-centric language models and the decentralized Psyche training network. A Vanderbilt graduate who came up through quantitative FX trading at Effex Capital and founded the litigation-claims firm Crysknife Capital, he moved from finance into AI research leadership, helping steer Nous through a Paradigm-led $50M Series A and, by 2026, a reported $75M round near a $1.5B valuation. His focus is proving that world-class models can be trained openly and over the internet rather than behind the walls of a few large labs.