Venture Café
Timothy Rowe – Tim Rowe is the Founder and Chairman of the Venture Cafe Foundation. He is President of the Kendall Square Association and the Founder and CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center (www.cictr.com). In addition, Tim is a Venture Partner and member of the investment committee of New Atlantic Ventures. Tim holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a BA from Amherst College.
Chris Myles – Chris is the Executive Director of the Venture Cafe Foundation. He is a passionate product guy, entrepreneur and adventurer with 16 years experience juggling multiple hats in startup and advanced development group environments as both a senior manager and hands on contributor. Chris holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Umass but switched to the software side when the tools he needed weren’t available. He returned from a five+ year 30,000 mile sailing trip and followed his passion for entrepreneurship straight to CIC and Venture Cafe, where you’ll find him helping entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses navigate and optimize their Next Steps.
Renee Lin – Renee is a volunteer organizer at Venture Cafe where she enjoys working with her peers and event organizers to make it a place that is valuable to the innovation community. Renee also implements IT solutions in the healthcare delivery space and is currently an IT Project Manager Consultant. Renee was recently the Acting Community Manager at Venture Cafe.
Brian Wang -
Alex Schultz – Alex grew up just west of Boston. He graduated from Vanderbilt University where he studied History and played football for the Commodores. Alex currently works as the business director for his backpack and luggage start up brand. He has been bartending at the VC for about 2 months now.
Andrew Singleton-
Amy Tindell – Amy holds degrees from Dartmouth College (B.A., Cognitive Science), The University of Michigan (Ph.D., Neuroscience), Boston College Law School (J.D.), and Drinkmaster Bartending School (Master Bartender). Prior to joining Venture Cafe, she practiced intellectual property law, including patent prosecution and litigation work across a range of technologies. Amy worked with the MassChallenge Competition and Accelerator Program during its first year in addition to Venture Cafe to support entrepreneurs in developing their businesses. Currently, Amy is an associate at Tapestry Networks, where she collaborates with networks of leaders to improve healthcare outcomes in Europe.
Aslam Karachiwala
Carrie Stalder – Carrie was the Founding Manager of Venture Café. She is an engineer who holds an SM in Engineering and Management at MIT and a BS Eng. from Caltech. She is passionate about making meaningful connections across networks. She has worked in astronomical instrument development, construction management, and the defense industry, as well as for Caltech’s prestigious faculty club, The Athenaeum. Carrie tweets about the Cambridge, Somerville and Boston restaurant, entrepreneurship and tech scenes at @CambridgeCarrie.
Courtney Scott-Howard - Courtney is a senior marketing professional with over 10 years of experience with all aspects of marketing communications, including marketing strategy, brand management, public relations, social media engagement, and web marketing. She provides marketing and brand strategy consulting to small startups and established businesses, and recently founded her own wine club startup, sipwith.me.
Dan Koff
Dharmishta Rood - Dharmishta studies the internet, and is interested in the intersection of technology, culture and human interactions. In addition to being a researcher at Harvard Business School, she co-directed t=0, a festival for entrepreneurs, which happened at MIT fall 2011. Dharmishta holds an Ed.M. from Harvard University and a B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA. She is currently learning to do handstands.
Farnaz Bakhtari- Farnaz is the founder of TrainingPal an early stage startup in the online fitness industry. She’s worked as a software engineer in wireless and mobile industries before starting the business. She holds a Masters degree in computer systems engineering from Northeastern University and an MBA from Babson. She believes in value of a rich network in speeding ones career and personal growth and volunteering at Venture Café helps her witness the result of great networking at its best.
Frank Ottati- Frank has been in technology for more than 10 years. He is the founder of an early stage start-up, Cowadunga.com, and finds the dynamics of Venture Cafe invaluable and a lot of fun. Frank holds a BS in Business Administration from the University of New Hampshire and lives in the south shore with his wife and 2 kids. Find him on Twitter @frankottati.
Giuseppe Frustaci – Giuseppe started his first business at the age of 13 and hasn’t looked back since. A passionate marketer, he focuses on bootstrap-friendly strategies that engage enthusiastic customers and drive sales. When not working for www.FreeLogoServices.com, he can be found antiquing, imbibing a finely crafted cocktail, foraging with fellow foodies, or searching for a shrubbery. Giuseppe has degrees in Psychology and Business from Boston University. Find him on Twitter @Fritalci.
Greg Millington – Greg is Lab Manager for the Somerville-based startup Neuromorphometrics and Co-founder of the in-house crowdsourcing website MercMob.com. His academic background is in Philosophy (B.A., Syracuse University) and Cognitive Science (M.A., University of Sussex). A former attendee of Venture Café, Greg now helps with general set up and operations.
Kannan Thiru
Matthew Glidden - Matthew’s worked and volunteered in Kendall Square for 11 years. He loves trivia, games, and interviewing entrepreneurs about their work.
Pardees Safizadeh
Pardis Saffari - Pardis is a Project Planner in the Economic Development Division for the City of Cambridge and a part-time MBA student at Babson. She worked previously for the City of Lowell and the Downtown Crossing district of Boston. Her previous academic background is in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (MA, Tufts University) and Politics/Complex Organizations (BA, Mount Holyoke College). Pardis’ interests lay in supporting and cultivating the small business and start up community, the local arts and restaurant scenes and all things Kendall Square. Follow her on twitter @saffarip.
Peter Nash- Peter might be called a ‘situation expert’, ‘catalyst for change’ or ‘VP of glue’ for his ability to meet the challenges of both emerging companies and entrepreneurial divisions of larger corporations. He is skilled at identifying solutions, removing road blocks, building transformative strategies, and linking key business and technical drivers. Functioning as an ‘internal entrepreneur’, Peter serves executive teams by bridging the gaps which often form between the business and technical functions as they transition towards scalable growth.
Robin Coxe – Robin is the Founder of Close-Haul Communications, Inc. (www.close-haul.com), which helps people neglected by conventional cellular carriers. The Close-Haul GAPfiller access point allows any GSM mobile phone, not just smartphones, to connect to the global telecommunications infrastructure using VoIP. Robin is also an electronics design consultant, specializing in digital signal processing applications with FPGAs. She has a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics from the University of Chicago and is a graduate of Harvard University.
Rudi Seitz -Rudi builds software for early-stage startups; he’s also photographer, musician, and writer. Rudi founded QuadrivialQuandary.com, a daily writing and vocabulary challenge, to share his love of uncommon words. Rudi’s 45-piece photography show Imago is currently on display on the fourth floor of CIC. Rudi plays classical guitar and can sometimes be spotted at Venture Cafe carrying a Himalayan singing bowl. For Venture Cafe, Rudi conducts interviews with startup founders (http://www.venturecafe.net/author/rseitz/) and helps organize special events like the Creativity Clinic and mini-Unconference. Rudi holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Yale, and did graduate work at MIT before entering the startup world.
Shahin Ali-Shahin has over 12 years of progressive strategic management & marketing experience in the areas of business strategy, customer upgrade & relationship marketing, personalized product recommendations, analytics/segmentation, account management and customer lifecycle management. He has worked with major entertainment, broadcasting & mobile technology companies such as: DIRECTV, Fox Mobile, HBO, Starz, Showtime, Helio/Virgin Mobile, AT&T U-verse, MTV Networks and others. Shahin has a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT as well as a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Sidi Gomes -
Sidney Tam- Sidney is a recent graduate from Northeastern University. Currently he’s a technology consultant at Donna Franca Tours. He worked previously at Bain Capital, State Street, and WayFair.com. His academic background is in Marketing and Management Information System (B.S. Northeastern University). Follow Sidney on twitter @sydneytam.
Tina Zeng – Tina is the co-founder of ranksocial.net, a general purpose, user-friendly sharing and ranking application. Its uses range from allowing a company to get feedback on a collection of logo designs, to a group of girls suggesting the perfect prom dress for a friend. Tina tweets about her journey as an entrepreneur at @ranksocial. Tina is also the marketing analyst for extensionEngine, an IT company based in the CIC. She holds a B.S. in biology and neuroscience from Williams College.
Yifei Zhang - Yifei manages client accounts at Tapforge, a mobile app company based in Fort Point, Boston. Ask him about: why everyone should code, how to manage a development project, taming unruly CSS, what 2020 looks like. He designed and themed the Venture Cafe website.
A big thanks to all the Deepthink participants and the entrepreneurial community who support us with all they do! We wouldn’t be where we are now without them.
