western-new-york
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Tricia Barrett Took the Long Way Home - Then Changed the Agency That Hired Her
A Buffalo return brought her to Crowley Webb in 2003. One improbable acquisition, a hand-lettered office reminder to “Serve,” and two decades later, she is leading the independent agency into its next forty years.
Jack Sardinia
Jack Sardinia is the co-founder and CEO of FavorDrop, a Buffalo-based platform for sending time-bound digital gifts and promotions. He launched it in 2021 with his father, longtime Buffalo restaurateur Tim Sardinia, around a simple idea: buy a friend a drink at their favorite bar even when you cannot be there. What began as a consumer app for sending restaurant gift cards grew into a B2B customer-engagement tool used by car dealerships, marketing agencies, and home-services companies, with more than a million FavorDrops sent and a patent on the 'bounce back' that returns unredeemed gifts to the sender.
Will Kramer
Will Kramer is the CEO and co-founder of Laila Technologies, a Buffalo, New York startup building HireGPT, an AI recruitment platform that pairs a marketplace of expert tech recruiters with AI agents to screen, evaluate, and match candidates. A Cornell graduate with more than two decades of software development experience, including leadership roles at startups and Fortune 500 firms such as Paychex, he says HireGPT processes over 50,000 technical applications a month and has helped companies cut hiring costs and timelines by more than half. He also mentors founders at the University at Buffalo and runs plain-English AI workshops for small business owners.