Bob Forness is a Managing Partner of alTreo. He has 23 years of international experience launching, growing, acquiring and restructuring insurance and reinsurance companies. His areas of expertise include underwriting, business development, operations, capital raising, strategy and M&A. His international market expertise spans the US, Lloyd's/London, Bermuda, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean.
Forness has product experience in property catastrophe, marine, construction, transportation, general and professional liability, worker's compensation, financial institutions, life & health, and alternative risk. His work experience includes eight years with Prudential Insurance, four years at Odyssey Re and eight years at the Imagine Group.
Bob Forness has resided in the US, London and Bermuda, and holds a BS from Cornell University and an MBA from Columbia University.
Michael J. Beller is President and CEO of Lightship Partners.
Mr. Beller has led start-up, turnaround, and high growth organizations as a COO, CIO, and consultant. This experience has involved developing business technology and operating strategies combined with "in the trenches" execution and leadership.
Mr. Beller was recently featured in a cover story in Retail Information Systems News magazine for IT's role in business strategy, listed #4 in Apparel Magazine's list of Top 50 Innovators, nominated for ComputerWorld magazine's list of Premier 100 IT Leaders, and won the Smart Enterprise magazine award for Outstanding Achievement in Enterprise IT Management.
Mr. Beller has held various senior executive and consulting positions including CIO and EVP of Strategy Management for a national specialty retailer, Chief Operating Officer for a pharmaceutical packaging and distribution company, and COO and CIO for a venture backed technology re-manufacturing and e-commerce start-up.
Mr. Beller has also held senior positions with consulting firms that included Accenture, Technology Solutions Company, and Diamond Management and Technology Consultants. At Diamond, Mr. Beller was a founding partner and helped lead the company through a successful IPO.
Mr. Beller received a Bachelor of Science degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from the Cornell University College of Engineering.
Donald Gulbrandsen is the founder of Gulbrandsen Technologies and Gulbrandsen Chemicals. Gulbrandsen Technologies manufactures water treatment products, intermediates and electronic etchants. Gulbrandsen Chemicals manufacturers chemical intermediates, fine chemicals and catalysts used in the process industry.
Donald Gulbrandsen is a graduate of Cornell University.
Ed Abel is the founder of ABEL Business Institute.
Abel has invested more than three decades learning how to build a successful, thriving business. At age 24 with a $5,000 loan and the energy and passion of a young entrepreneur, Ed was ready to take on the world. And he did, only to emerge seven years later at the top of a $36 million organization with 585 employees. Inspired by the challenges that led him to success, Ed went on to build other multi-million dollar businesses, yet he missed the passion he experienced "in the trenches" of his formative years.
Determined to find a way to educate and advise others in the construction and sustainability of a vital business, he founded ABEL Business Institute. Over the course of this process, he developed The SkillPreneur Business System, a systematic approach to the construction, maintenance, and growth of a business--an approach that has become the philosophy and methodology of ABEL Business Institute.
Ed Abel is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurial studies at New York University (NYU) as well as the Director of the business division at the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC). At iPEC, Ed directs the business division that is responsible for supporting the graduate coaches in their business development process.
Jacqueline Novogratz is the Founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund. In this role, Jacqueline Novogratz is responsible for the vision behind Acumen Fund's unique approach to using philanthropic capital to invest in scalable businesses that serve the poor with life-changing goods and services.
She has led the Acumen Fund team since its launch in 2001, and under her leadership Acumen Fund has invested $40 million in over 35 companies serving 25 million low-income customers in the developing world (as of April 2009). Prior to Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation. She began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank and she founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda.
Jacqueline currently serves on the Board of the Aspen Institute as well as the advisory councils of Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT's Legatum Center. She is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow, a Synergos Institute Senior Fellow and has received honors including Ernst & Young's 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the 2009 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award and AWNY's 2009 Changing the Game Award.
Jacqueline Novogratz has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Economics/International Relations from the University of Virginia. She is the author of the bestselling memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, published in early 2009.
Throughout her career, Pelin Wood Thorogood has been in the forefront of emerging technologies and trends. During her more than 15 years as a high technology marketing executive, Pelin has led the go-to-market strategy for WebSideStory's on-demand online marketing suite (acquired by Omniture), extended Peregrine Systems' enterprise software business (acquired by HP) into the web-based employee self service (ESS) category, and in the mid 90s, launched one the very first mobile B2B applications designed for the Windows CE platform. Her success with venture backed start-ups, rewarding creativity and speed, as well as public companies that thrive on process and fiscal discipline underscore the diversity of her skills and the strength of her approach. Currently Pelin sits on boards and advises new media and cloud computing companies focused on solving sales and marketing problems - Online Marketing and Media Company Online Marketing Connect; Sales Intelligence CompanyInsideView; Inbound Marketing Company Eightfold Logic, Content Delivery Network Limelight Networks; Web Analytics Consulting Company Technology Leaders; - and serves a virtual Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. Pelin was also instrumental in defining theSales 2.0 Movement. She is a regular speaker and author on Social Selling, Establishing a Culture of Measurement, and Sales and Marketing Alignment and is recognized for her passion for the subjects by technology analysts and pundits alike. Most recently, Pelin was the Senior Vice President of Marketing for WebSideStory, a leading provider of real-time, multi-channel analytics solutions. Pelin holds a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research, Master of Engineering and MBA degrees, all from Cornell University. Her comments are from the November 2010 Strategic Marketing Conference sponsored by the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.
Kathleen O'Connor is an Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University's Johnson School. She is an organizational psychologist who studies negotiation, teamwork, and decision making. Much of her recent research focuses on how negotiations link together over time. One stream of work shows that past negotiation experiences direct negotiators' choice of tactics and their performance in successive negotiations. A second stream investigates how negotiators' reputations affect them and their potential for success at the bargaining table. As part of this research, she has explored how negotiators' confidence in their skills changes as a function of their negotiation successes or failures, and how it affects their tactical decision making and the quality of their deals.
O'Connor's recent projects investigate the development of individual social capital. She applies theories of individual cognition and interpersonal behavior to study the conditions under which people recognize and exploit opportunities for building social capital. She is a member of a team of networks experts from Cornell University whose work is sponsored by the Institute for the Social Sciences.
Her research has been published in such journals as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
O'Connor joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1997. She has been a member of the faculty at Rice University, and has been a visiting faculty member at Northwestern University, and at the London Business School.
Kathleen O'Connor earned a BS from Cornell University and an AM and PhD in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Warren Packard is a Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. He currently serves on the Boards of Anagran, CastTV, EoPlex, Media Lario, Microfabrica, Primet Precision Materials, and SeaMicro. Warren also leads the firm's investments in BinOptics, CallGate, Imago Scientific Instruments, ooma, YeePay, and Zon Networks.
Prior to joining the firm, Warren co-founded Angara Database Systems, a main memory relational database company, which was acquired by Personify. Prior to co-founding Angara, he was an Associate at Institutional Venture Partners, investing in early-stage technology companies. Before IVP, Warren was a Senior Principal Engineer in the Advanced Product Development Group at Baxter International.
Warren Packard is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University and holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering: Smart Product Design. He received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar.
Colleen Wainwright is a writer-speaker-illuminator who started calling herself "the communicatrix" when she hit three hyphens. She consults one-on-one with solopreneurs about their online marketing presence and creates content for an alarmingly large number of online outlets.
Wainwright spent 10 years as an award-winning TV copywriter at Young & Rubicam crafting ads for brands like Wheaties, Gatorade and Jell-O, and another 10 acting in them as a performer. Wainwright now spends her time teaching other creative souls how to talk about what they do in a way that wins them attention, work and satisfaction.
Colleen Wainwright is a graduate of Cornell University.