Behind Company Lines

Mike Molinet is the co-founder of Branch, the mobile linking and measurement platform powering 100,000 of the world's top apps, including Spotify, Uber, Robinhood, Strava, Adobe, and more. Last valued at $4 Billion, Mike helped grow the business from an idea in early 2014 to over $100M in annual recurring revenue as COO and President. Success came only after failing with six previous startups between his 2007 graduation and 2014. Mike is also co-founder of a Seed-stage company, Thena (thena.ai), that helping modernize business communication over messaging platforms. 

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Chat Joglekar is an experienced executive and the CEO and co-founder of Baton, a data-enabled marketplace that empowers small business acquisitions. Baton's innovative platform allows owners to unlock liquidity in their most valuable asset, while also providing serious buyers access to a vast but fragmented asset class. Baton's goal is to become the go-to platform for SMB acquisitions, much like Zillow is for real estate.

Prior to founding Baton, Chat served as an executive at Zillow for over five years. During his tenure, he launched and grew the company's New Construction marketplace, generating over $100 million in revenue. He has also played instrumental roles in scaling iconic companies such as Spotify and Google from their earliest stages and has held leadership positions at various early-stage startups.

With the support of investors such as Bloomberg Beta, Giant Ventures, and others, Baton is excited about the potential to create the next great asset class while also supporting small businesses, which are the backbone of our economy. Baton is committed to continuing its mission to enable small business acquisitions and provide a platform for growth and success for all its users. Chat currently resides in New York City with his wife and three children. 

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Nicolas Mendiharat is a repeat founder and CEO with 25 years of experience building tech-enabled startups. He specializes in early-stage consumer markets and marketplaces.

After launching the online travel venture Skihorizon.com, which achieved $100m in revenues and 300k customers, he decided to focus on one of his passions: wine. He has been since revolutionizing the industry with 2 ventures—Palate Club & WineChain.

WineChain is a wine NFT marketplace where the world's most coveted wineries use blockchain technology to sell their wines directly to wine lovers worldwide.

Palate Club is focused on the premium segment, creating a much better consumer experience that uses AI and data science to match wines to your personal taste via blind tasting.

As a French-German citizen, Nicolas launched his career in Europe. Since 2015, he now splits his time with the United States, where his ventures are based. Nicolas likes radical new ideas, fast movement, innovative mindsets, and above all, gathering the best talents to build a new project.

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Tushar Makhija has over 10 years of experience spanning revenue & growth leadership, product, and customer success. He was the founding Sales leader at two SaaS companies, Helpshift and Airbase, and helped them grow ARR to eight figures, respectively. In 2021, he co-founded TeamOhana with a vision to empower growing companies to unify around their most important and expensive asset: people. TeamOhana brings collaboration, visibility, and control of headcount to all key stakeholders in a single integrated platform, ensuring that you build a team in the best way possible: as a team. 

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Troy Bannister is the Founder of Particle Health, shaping the new standard for healthcare data exchange with a user-friendly API platform. After spending 15 years in healthcare in multiple capacities — as an EMT, medical student, clinical researcher, and early-stage investor — Troy found a disturbing gap in patient rights & paper processes the digital solutions could fill. Troy is incredibly optimistic about the future, particularly as it relates to legislation and emerging data standards. 

Past experience: Mount Sinai Health System, StartUp Health, IEEE, and a graduate of Georgetown University.

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Vasily Nikonov is the Founder of Velvet.Capital - a DeFi Asset Management protocol that helps people & institutions create diversified financial products on-chain: tokenized funds, yield farming strategies, and other structure products.

Prior to Velvet.Capital he was a venture builder incubating Blockchain & Crypto startups at LongHash Ventures (e.g., Xanpool and Astar raised ~$50m+)

Vasily was also a Project Leader at BCG and launched digital products for clients (incl. a WealthTech start-up, a SaaS for financial advisors, and other fintech)

He holds an MBA from INSEAD and BSc & MSc in Applied Mathematics from MIPT.

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Don Burton has an extensive career at the cutting edge of education innovation and technology, launching, scaling, and exiting companies as well as being a thought leader on the topic of the Future of Education.

He is a strategic advisor, Don worked with McKinsey & Co. consulting on strategies to launch interactive media business units and how to create open innovation within large corporations such as Apple, IBM, Sony, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Cox Cable, Viacom, and Disney, and with Goldman Sachs advising on exits and acquisitions.

As an intrapreneur, he has built education startups within large companies such as the Walt Disney Company and Kaplan.

Don, as an entrepreneur, has built multiple EdTech startups on his own as a founder, with a major exit to Kaplan/Washington Post.

Don was an angel investor before running EdTech Startup Accelerator programs with Techstars and for his own company, graduating three cohorts who have raised more than $100 million in financing and have an estimated market cap of more than $1 billion. He is currently co-founder and managing partner of LearnStart, a seed-stage venture capital fund focused exclusively on learning, education, and talent with a portfolio of more than 30 startups and excellent fund performance. 

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Brandon Schulz has been building in the e-commerce space for over a decade, first as a founder, then creating new concepts for Starbucks, Softbank Robotics, John Deere, and others.  In 2017 Brandon co-founded Violet, an e-commerce infrastructure company that powers universal native checkout for emerging e-commerce channels. Brandon's passion for making messy and complex challenges clean and transformative has helped fuel Violet’s success. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Klarna and has grown quickly over the past year.  Brandon resides in Seattle, Washington with his fiance, Brenna, and their puppy, Huckleberry.  When not hard at work building the future of e-commerce, you can find Brandon training for a triathlon or at a concert.

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Archie Ravishankar is the Founder and CEO of Cogni. Prior to Cogni, Archie was an Investment Director at Manor Estate Family Office, a Board Member at GP Pacific Engineering and Construction PNG, and a Director of Partnerships and Strategy at Hudooku Solutions. Archie is currently a Forbes Finance Council Member, an Investor of ni2o, a Board Member of Howard Brain Sciences Foundation, and a Board Member of C4ADS (Centre for Advanced Defense Studies)

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Jon Ferrara is a serial entrepreneur and noted speaker about social, sales, and marketing. He has re-imagined CRM by building Nimble - The Simple CRM for Microsoft 365 & Google Workspace. Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs). He has been recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Social CEOs, Top 10 Social Salespeople In The World, and Top 100 Marketing Influencers.

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