David Eson is the founder and owner of Isidore Foods. He has been assisting farming families with distribution and market development since 1997. He has worked for the extension service and various non-governmental organizations and now operates his own business, Isidore Foods LLC.
Isidore Foods began in 2006 as an internet business to provide marketing and selling local farm products. In its first year, Isidore Foods provided community supported agriculture marketing services to three farms and local food delivery services for 200 customers. Each farm produced fruits and vegetables. The principal focus was a pilot project with the University of Pittsburgh. The pilot served 150 customers.
In 2008, Isidore Foods partnered with a local distributor to handle the purchasing, packaging and delivery of orders and established buying relationships with 40 farms and businesses. These farms and businesses produce fruits, vegetables, meat, bread, milk, cheese, butter and various pantry items. Isidore currently serves 500 customers.
Paul Esposito is Senior Vice President of RAILEX, LLC Esposito began as a food carrier as a center of the plate buyer for Kraft Foodservice in Clifton Park, NY, and became very interested in goods movement consolidation while in his position of Procurement Category Manager, combining loads of seafood and processed goods from New England reducing the transportation costs. In 1998, Esposito began working with Union Pacific Railroad as Sr. Business Manager for the northeast, working in the Refrigerated Products Division. In 2002, he began working for Andy Pollack, owner of Ads Management, LLC as the Director of Logistics. Ads Management is the largest and citrus re-packer east of the Mississippi, with locations that span the eastern seaboard. Andy Pollack saw the success in conversion of the truck freight to rail car and gave Esposito his next assignment to control refrigerated lanes of distribution to reduce transit times and product shrink. From this request, Pollack laid out to Esposito his plan of unit train distribution and a new company under the Ads potato umbrella: Railex.
John Ewen is Senior Vice President in Corporate Finance and Investment Banking at Ardour Capital Investments, LLC.
Prior to joining Ardour, Ewen was portfolio manager at Bank von Ernst AG Liechtenstein where he focused on renewables and sustainability. Before that role, he served as Project Manager for New Business-Mining Sensing Systems at Hilti AG which led to filing of a number of German and international patents. Ewen has also worked as a Geophysicist at CGAS Exploration, Inc.
John Ewen holds a BS in Environmental Systems Technology from Cornell University and a MS in Geophysics from Ohio State University.
Lara Ewing has 25 years experience in helping individuals and organizations improve business performance. She has coached over 100 CEOs and senior executives in more than 20 Fortune 500 companies on six continents. Clients have credited her with saving their organizations, key client relationships, partnerships and sanity. They rely on her expertise to assist them in rapidly understanding and maximizing their impact on organizational results by focusing their attention and efforts on the key people, systems and external factors necessary to shift to break through barriers. Lara is co-author of The Art of Connecting, published by the American Management Association (AMACOM).
Daniel Fabian is a member of Ospraie Advisors, L.P. His work involves conducting all aspects of the investment process including in-depth industry and company-specific due diligence, sourcing and screening prospective transactions, constructing comprehensive financial and operating models, managing advisors and consultants, structuring investments and authoring and presenting internal investment committee documents.
Prior to working at Ospraie Advisors, Fabian worked at Credit Suisse (CSFB Strategic Partners) as an Associate.
Daniel Fabian received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University.
Field Failing is the Founder of Fields Good Chicken. Field Failing has an undergraduate degree and MBA from Cornell University.
Bruce Failing has been an entrepreneur, private equity and venture investor and turnaround specialist with successes in the areas of technology, media and consumer packaged goods. Over his 35-year career, Bruce has acted as CEO, founder, investor and board member of numerous growth companies, resulting in an IRR of 60%. Prior to co-founding Alerion in 2004, Bruce led investments in Productivity Solutions, Actmedia, Lamaze Publishing, Newborn Channel, Tone Brothers Spice Company and ERS International.Bruce sits on the Board of Directors of ScentAir, EnviroScent, True Citrus, InStadium, HydroMassage and Convergence Marketing.
Bruce received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Tufts University.
Jim Farrell is the founder and President of f'Real! Foods.
After graduating college in 1979, Farrell founded a company which designed and manufactured insulation systems for commercial greenhouses based on his Master of Engineering design project to reduce greenhouse energy usage by 80+%, receiving a patent for the design of the system in partnership with the Cornell University Technology Transfer Office. This business was successful for a period of time, but ultimately closed when the price of oil dropped to less than half of its late 1970s highs.
Farrell next attended Harvard Business School and received his MBA in 1985. Upon graduation from Harvard, Jim moved to San Francisco to join McKinsey & Company as a senior management consultant specializing in Corporate Strategy with an emphasis on Change Management, which focuses on moving beyond corporate strategy to accomplish successful implementation of the strategy. He later joined Dreyer's-Edy's Grand Ice Cream as General Manager of their FoodService business unit as Dreyer's-Edy's worked to successfully complete their national roll out from their West Coast roots.
While at Dreyer's-Edy's, Jim conceived of the product concept upon which his current company, f'REAL! Foods, is based. Jim founded f'REAL! Foods to pursue a new approach to making frozen blended beverages such as milkshakes, fruit smoothies and frozen cappuccinos. The concept utilizes a f'REAL! patented blender, which blends up frozen drinks right in their serving cups. The serving cups are shipped to retail locations with all of the ingredients for their drinks pre-frozen into the cups.
Jim Farrell graduated from Cornell University with Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in Agricultural Engineering. He received his MBA from Harvard.
Adam Farrell founded Silicon Solar when he was 15. It had a single product, a raw solar cell for use in educational kits, and was based in his bedroom. Today there are about 260 products, a busy Web site, sales are growing at about 10 percent annually, and the company is putting a large addition on a building it moved into last year.
Farrell owns 60 percent of the corporation. His older brother, Matt Farrell, a 24-year-old Cornell graduate, serves as vice president and owns the rest.
Adam Farrell expects to graduate in December 2006 with a degree in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University.
Francis Farwell, founder of WinterSilks Inc., a Middleton, Wis., mail-order apparel company, planned to sell his business from the start. Based on that decision, he built the business accordingly. Instead of plowing all his earnings into growth, he made sure the company maintained a sizable free cash flow, making it more attractive to potential buyers. In 1990, Farwell sold out, pocketing several million dollars.
Matt Faso is currently a Marketing Advisor at Haley Marketing Group, where he works with clients on their marketing programs. Prior to Haley Marketing, Matt worked for Ingram Micro (a Fortune 75 company) and for the Hearst Corporation, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world.
Matt Faso has been involved exclusively in marketing since writing an award winning business plan in the Entrepreneurship@Cornell program his junior year at Cornell University. He graduated Cornell in 2000.
Drew Faust became dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study on January 1, 2001. She also holds an appointment as the Lincoln Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
Before coming to Radcliffe, Faust was Annenberg Professor of History and director of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. Faust is a historian of the Civil War and the American South.
She is the author of five books, including "Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War", for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997.
Faust is a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and she serves on the educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. She has served as president of the Southern Historical Association, vice president of the American Historical Association, and executive board member of the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Historians. Faust has also served on numerous editorial boards and selection committees, including the Pulitzer Prize history jury in 1986, 1990, and 2004.
Drew Faust received her bachelor's degree in 1968 from Bryn Mawr and received her master's degree (1971) and doctoral degree (1975) in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.