west-point
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JD Dillon Put a Price Tag on Marketing - Then Gave Solar a Quality Check
The West Point engineer became a marketer by treating competition like terrain, pricing like strategy and customer support like part of the product. At Tigo Energy, his argument is disarmingly practical: solar earns trust one installation at a time.
Bret Boyd Is Building the Missing Switchboard for American Manufacturing
After four Iraq deployments and a career spent watching organizations wrestle with change, the Sustainment co-founder has chosen an unglamorous but consequential target: the friction keeping 250,000 American manufacturers apart.
Grant Demaree Turned a Three-Month Planning Lag Into Onebrief
In Liberia, the virus moved faster than the planning process. The former Army officer built Onebrief around a stubborn question: how much better could military decisions become if the software finally kept up?
Jim Evans Built a Company for the Unflashy Work That Makes Everything Else Work
A West Point engineer moved from airborne operations to Wall Street, military housing and global retail programs. Then he built Sevan around a durable idea: complicated work gets easier when one team owns the handoffs.
Dave Danielsen
Dave Danielsen is the CEO of CairnSurgical, a clinical-stage medical device company in Lebanon, New Hampshire, that spun out of Dartmouth in 2015. He leads development of the Breast Cancer Locator System, a patient-specific, 3D-printed surgical guide paired with visualization software that helps surgeons see a tumor's size, shape, and location before a lumpectomy and remove it with cleaner margins. A West Point graduate with a Tuck School MBA, Danielsen has spent his career running commercial-stage health and diagnostics companies, and is now steering CairnSurgical through its U.S. pivotal trial, FDA submission, and early commercial launch in Europe.
Luis Alvarez
Luis Alvarez is the founder and CEO of Theradaptive, a Frederick, Maryland biotech engineering proteins that latch onto implants and surgical materials to trigger the body to regrow bone, cartilage, and other tissue exactly where it is needed. A retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and MIT-trained biological engineer, he traced the idea back to a combat tour in Iraq, where soldiers under his command lost limbs to delayed amputations. Theradaptive has since won multiple FDA Breakthrough Device Designations, raised more than $43 million, and moved its lead protein, AMP2, into human clinical trials.
Josh Lospinoso
Josh Lospinoso is the co-founder and former CEO of Shift5, an observability and cybersecurity company that protects the onboard operational technology of planes, trains, tanks, and ships. A West Point graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and Oxford-trained statistician, he spent more than a decade as an Army cyber officer building elite hacking tools for the NSA's Tailored Access Operations and the Cyber National Mission Force. Before Shift5 he co-founded RedOwl Analytics (acquired by Raytheon/Forcepoint in 2017). He wrote the C++ course that U.S. Cyber Command uses to train junior developers and turned it into the book C++ Crash Course. In January 2026 he moved from CEO to the board to focus on long-term vision while Shift5, having raised more than $180M, scaled past 130 employees.
Dan Streetman
Dan Streetman is the CEO and Board Member of Tanium, the enterprise cybersecurity and autonomous endpoint management company. A West Point graduate, Harvard MBA, and Bronze Star-decorated Army Ranger, Streetman brings military-grade discipline to enterprise security — leading Tanium's push into AI-powered autonomous IT operations for the world's largest organizations. Before Tanium, he drove double-digit growth as CEO at TIBCO Software and Allvue Systems, and held senior leadership at BMC Software, Salesforce, and C3.ai.
Casey Woo
Casey Woo is the founder and General Partner of FOG Ventures and founder/CEO of Operators Guild, the invite-only community of more than 1,000 strategic finance and operations leaders. A seven-time high-growth CFO/COO whose resume runs through Morgan Stanley, Maverick Capital, Pantheon, Zozi, WeWork and Landing, he now backs founders building the modern operator toolbox alongside a syndicate of the world's top CEOs, COOs and CFOs.
Steve Smith
Steve Smith is the Chief Executive Officer of Zayo Group, one of the world's largest independent fiber network and infrastructure companies. A West Point engineering graduate and former eight-year U.S. Army officer, Smith built his reputation scaling Equinix from a $2 billion company to a $34 billion global data center giant over 11 years as CEO. Appointed to lead Zayo in October 2020 after the company went private under EQT and Digital Colony, he is now steering the company through a massive AI-driven infrastructure buildout - securing over $1 billion in AI-related deals in 2024 alone, with a pipeline exceeding $3 billion. Under his leadership, Zayo operates 240,000+ route miles globally and 34 million fiber miles, serving customers across healthcare, finance, media, and enterprise sectors.
Ross Shuel
Ross Shuel is Network Operations Partner at a16z Crypto, the crypto-focused arm of Andreessen Horowitz. A West Point graduate and former U.S. Army Ranger with seven years of military service including a deployment to Afghanistan, Shuel brought a systems-thinker's discipline to crypto governance. At a16z Crypto, he helps portfolio companies navigate the full arc of decentralized governance - from network launch and governance design to on-chain participation as protocols mature. He co-authored research on application token economics and has appeared on the web3 with a16z podcast discussing DAO governance attacks. His ENS identity, shuel.eth, reflects his deep embeddedness in the on-chain world he helps shape.
Leslie Riley
Leslie Riley is an Analyst at Right Side Capital Management (RSCM), a quantitative pre-VC investment firm in San Francisco that has made 2,000+ early-stage bets since 2012. She brings a rare combination: West Point grad, seven-year Army Aviation officer who flew CH-47D Chinooks over Kosovo and South Korea, then reinvented herself as a facilitator, keynote speaker, and leadership coach for Fortune 500s and federal agencies before landing in venture. She's also a published author, founder of The Penny Project (which has raised $4,800+ for charity), an ultra-marathoner, and creator of the Lead Like a Girl community for women in leadership.