Diane Brush has extensive professional experience in design. After graduating college, Brush took a position designing children's wear in Manhattan for nine years. She then moved to San Francisco to work on Esprit's children's wear line for five years. As her career in children's wear moved forward, Brush also became interested in home furnishings. She moved to Wisconsin for two years to design Lands' End's home and children's wear lines. After leaving her position there, she moved to Garnet Hill in New Hampshire and revamped the catalog company into a design house. Brush became co-president of the company and executed a new design focus for the brand.
Brush has since left Garnet Hill and is now the design director at MacKenzie-Childs, a ceramics and home furnishings design firm in Aurora, New York.
Diane Brush is a graduate of Parsons School of Design in New York City.
Margaret Taft is the founder of her consulting company, Design Works, as well as the creator of the product, Calf Cozies.
Taft also discusses her current product, Calf Cozies, and provides examples of the challenges she has faced in the production, distribution, advertisement, marketing and financing of the product.
Joan Reuning owns and operates FIbers and Fantasy, a large and exciting retail gallery near Cayuga Lake in Ithaca, NY. The store features contemporary clothing and a huge variety of American Crafts.
In addition to owning the store, Joan Reuning is a fiber artist who designs many of the stores clothing pieces.
Joan Reuning is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.
Erica Nicole is an accomplished serial entrepreneur, acclaimed entrepreneurship expert, dynamic conference speaker, syndicated columnist, philanthropist and Christian thought leader.
As a renowned serial entrepreneur, Erica leads a diverse business portfolio across digital media, national speaking, global business development, and electronic equipment industries.
Erica Nicole is best known by the entrepreneurial community as the Founder and CEO of YFS Magazine: Young, Fabulous & Self-Employed (yfsmagazine.com) an internationally acclaimed and award-winning small business news site - the definitive digital magazine for startup, small business news and entrepreneurial culture.
Shelly Porges is the National Finance Co-Chair for the Ready for Hillary Super PAC. Prior to this role, Porges was a Franklin Fellow and Senior Advisor leading the Global Women's Business Initiative at the U.S. State Department. She is a recognized marketing and strategy expert having launched products, brands and companies, as well as raised funds for a range of non-profit and political organizations. Before joining the State Department, Ms. Porges had a distinguished private sector career as both a corporate executive (American Express and Bank of America) and entrepreneur. Most recently, she served as chair of the board for Count Me In for Women's Economic Independence, the leading non-profit online accelerator for women-owned businesses. Shelly Porges holds both a BS and MPS degree from Cornell University. She was a founding member of the President's Council of Cornell Women.
Barbara Novick is a member of BlackRock's Global Executive and Global Operating Committees and Chairs the Government Relations Steering Committee.
From the inception of the firm in 1988 to 2008, Ms. Novick headed the Global Client Group and oversaw global business development, marketing and client service across equity, fixed income, liquidity, alternative investment and real estate products for institutional and individual investors and their intermediaries worldwide. In her current role, Ms. Novick heads the firm's efforts globally on Government Relations and Public Policy.
Prior to founding BlackRock in 1988, Ms. Novick was a Vice President in the Mortgage Products Group at The First Boston Corporation. Ms. Novick joined First Boston in 1985 where she became head of the Portfolio Products Team. From 1982 to 1985, Ms. Novick was with Morgan Stanley.
Barbara Novick earned a BA degree, cum laude, in economics from Cornell University in 1981.
Amy Siskind is a national spokesperson, writer and expert on helping women and girls advance and succeed. A highly successful Wall Street executive, she's Co-founder and President of The New Agenda, a national organization working on issues including economic independence and advancement, gender representation and bias, sexual assault and domestic violence.
A pioneer in the distressed debt trading market, she has a lifetime of experience with failure and remarkable success and knows what it takes to win. She became the first female Managing Director at Wasserstein Perella at the age of 31, and later ran trading departments at Morgan Stanley and Imperial Capital, where she was also a partner.
Amy Siskind received a BA in Economics from Cornell University and an MBA in Finance from The NYU Stern School of Business.
Yos Bugallo is a Campus Consultant in EY's Inclusiveness Recruiting team, specializing in the diversity recruiting strategy and development. Yos works with university stakeholders to drive strategic and systemic change regarding diversity and inclusiveness at the student, faculty, and campus level. Her role focuses on increasing the pipeline of top diverse talent into EY and better preparing students for the global workforce. Prior to joining Ernst & Young, Yos was an Associate Director at the NYU Stern School of Business MBA Admissions office, where she handled general admissions as well as diversity, LGBT, military and Latin American recruiting. She started her work in higher education in the Brandeis University Undergraduate Admissions office where she instituted a number of innovative programs and revamped their diversity recruiting function. Yos has also served on the Board of the New York chapter of the Association for Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting (ALPFA) as the Director of Student Programs. She has also been involved with several organizations including Management Leadership for Tomorrow, the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, and the Posse Foundation. Yos holds a Bachelors Degree in Sociology from Brandeis University.
Valisha Graves is an executive director in the institutional securities technology group at Morgan Stanley. She is the product manager for IRIS (Interactive Derivatives Investment Strategies), a Flex data visualization application that allows users to model and analyze equity derivatives strategies. At Morgan Stanley, Valisha has worked with the ModelWare team, responsible for the development and delivery of Web-based applications including intrinsic value (valuation), food chain, profitability analysis, clustering, nearest neighbor and correlation. She was also responsible for improving the efficacy of Workbench, an Excel-based application and managed the Cross Asset Class (CAC)/LBO application. Additionally, Valisha led a team responsible for screening investment ideas, valuation, and due diligence on behalf of the financial sponsors (private equity) and strategic investment groups. In this initiative, the ModelWare framework was used to conduct fundamental, 'bottoms up' investment and capital structure analysis and screen investment ideas across multiple asset classes. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Valisha was a senior analyst with RateFinancials, a private, independent equity research firm that ranks and rates the financial reporting, quality of earnings and corporate governance of S&P 500 companies. Valisha was part of a four-person deal team at Accordia, a $100 MM early stage, quasi private equity e-commerce technology fund. She was a vice president in the finance division of Lehman Brothers, responsible for financial modeling, academic research and data analysis for a global risk equity allocation project. She was a manager in Ernst & Young's financial services consulting practice. She spent 10 years at National Westminster Bank in roles including asset/liability management in the treasury group, where she identified interest rate hedging strategies, recommended proprietary trading strategies using financial futures and options and marketed fixed income, derivative and foreign exchange products. Valisha Graves received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her MBA from Columbia University.