Technology may be today´s fastest-growing industry. Entrepreneurs from all walks of life utilize technology to at least some degree in their business and a growing number is marketing technology itself as their product.
Let´s have a closer look at how technology impacts the business world; in the age of the internet and globalization technology provides the means to communicate across the office and the world – be it virtual workspaces or international video conferences.
Tech allows entrepreneurs to better research the market enabling them to gather in-depth knowledge before expanding into a new field. This may prove crucial in avoiding some of the pitfalls a new enterprise has to face.
Do you know of any tech entrepreneurs we should feature here on IdeaMensch?
Even this very page you are reading now is a testament to technology´s impact on modern business – web-based advertising just at the click of a button. Websites can be built by professional web developers or even by any enterprising enthusiast using DIY tools – not to mention social media platforms and their impact on marketing.
Tech entrepreneurs can find a sheer endless number of ways to incorporate technology into their businesses; their ingenuity is the only limit. Several of our featured interviewees have modernized or streamlined existing services by finding a “higher” tech way to provide them.
We want to introduce you to some of the tech entrepreneurs we had the pleasure to interview here at ideamensch.
Table of contents
Tech Entrepreneurs from A-F
Tech Entrepreneurs from F-K
Tech Entrepreneurs from L-R
Tech Entrepreneurs from S-Z
Tech Entrepreneurs from A-F
Aaron Lazor
Aaron Lazor is the CEO and co-founder of Finscend, a consumer-focused credit card transaction dispute consulting enterprise. A Chicago native, Aaron holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois. He previously worked for five years as an Assistant Vice President at Chase Bank and has ten years of experience as a Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operations Officer, and Chief Regulations Officer for various European investment firms.
Akiva Aranoff
Akiva Aranoff is the co-founder of Maestra, an online transcription, captioning, and voiceover platform that allows users to automatically edit their videos in more ways, and enabling content creators to reach viewers all over the world. He co-founded Maestra along with three friends right out of college, and along with his fellow tech entrepreneurs, works full time on enabling content creators to reach a global audience through Maestra.
Alek Matthiessen
Alek Matthiessen grew up in Atlanta Georgia and graduated from Brown University in 2016. He worked at Snapchat, then left to found a startup which he sold in 2019. His new enterprise, Booknotes, is an app capturing the key ideas from best-selling books that anyone can read or listen to in 15 minutes.
Alex Kurkowski
Alex Kurkowski is the founder of a greeting card startup called Tellinga. He was born and raised in Houston, TX. After completing his undergraduate degree from Texas Tech University, he started a career in the alcohol industry. After three years of drinking for a living, he decided to transition his career to the pharmaceutical industry. After eight years of working in this space, he decided to pursue his MBA, where he graduated from Rice University in May of 2019. While attending Rice, the inspired tech entrepreneur launched Tellinga in September 2018.
Andrea Sommer
Andrea is the Founder & Business Lead at UvvaLabs, a female-founded technology company that uses AI to help companies make better decisions that create more diverse and accessible workforces. Previously she was the founder & CEO of Hiver, a female-founded, majority women technology company that helped event marketers measure and improve engagement at their events. Before starting Hiver, she was Director of Strategic Initiatives Europe at Avanade, a joint venture between Accenture & Microsoft. She also consulted for other technology brands including Microsoft in the US, South America, and Europe.
Andrew Plato
Andrew Plato is a 25-year veteran of the information security industry. In 1995 while working at Microsoft supporting one of the first Internet e-commerce sites, Andrew inadvertently hacked the production site using a SQL injection style attack. When the site’s developers dismissed this vulnerability as irrelevant, it perplexed and inspired Andrew to start Anitian. Since 1995, Andrew and the Anitian team have participated in thousands of security projects, built an innovative cloud security and compliance platform and helped advise hundreds of security leaders. His forthright and pragmatic views on cloud security, risk and compliance have made Andrew a highly sought speaker, author and advisor.
Anjali Dighe
Anjali Dighe brings strategic focus, vision, and leadership skills gained from a successful career guiding the creation and implementation of business processes in order to generate sustained positive results. Ms. Dighe is the Owner of Code Ninjas Charlotte comprised of Code Ninjas Concord and Code Ninjas Ballantyne. We provide our students a unique resource to enhance problem-solving, critical thinking, mathematical, and logic skills, while having fun creating and building games and learning how to code. In addition, she is Managing Partner of Relentless Group, a consulting firm focused on strategic growth and leadership development. She currently volunteers her time on the Women in Homeland Security STEM Committee, is a Board of Trustee for Cannon School, Board of Advisor for Cox Mill High School Academy of Information Technology, and is a member of Charlotte InfraGard.
Arun Saigal
Arun Saigal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Thunkable, the platform that enables anyone to build their own apps without coding. Recently named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for Consumer Technology, Arun has held a variety of leading roles and positions at technology companies, including Quizlet, Khan Academy, Aspiring Minds, and Google. At Quizlet, Arun was the lead Android developer and helped grow the platform to over 10 million users. He holds an SB and SM, which he received in 2013, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Outside of the office, Arun conducts orchestras and plays viola and mridangam, and beatboxes in several SF-based music groups.
Ben Premo
Ben is the founder of truefees.com. It is a finance startup that helps consumers start a better bank relationship by focusing on fee transparency. The end goal of TrueFees is to make it easier for consumers to connect with their next financial institution through the use of technology and transparency. Working in the banking industry during the recession of 2008-2009 had a direct impact on Ben’s decision to start TrueFees. He witnessed firsthand the negative effects that financial fees cause for so many consumers on a personal level, and decided to create a solution. His solution not only benefits the consumer, but it also benefits those financial institutions that offer truly affordable accounts and are committed to improving the lives of their customers.
Dave Mackie
Mr. Mackie has over 30 years of experience in Operational and Product Development. He has led diverse teams in highly complex environments, including large multi-million dollar industrial development projects. These products have been integrated at customers like Stanford Hospital and Clinics, Scripps Hospitals, UCSF Medical Center, University of Kentucky Medical Center and MUSC. In 2014 he founded Olea Edge Analytics, an AI/ML Cloud-based Platform for the management of commercial water delivery. He now leads a highly talented group of engineers and industry experts that are changing the way that cities manage and account for their commercial water infrastructure.
Dennis Wohlfarth
Dennis Wohlfarth is the co-founder of Accointing – a tool helping customers to report taxes on revenue from cryptocurrency and other, uncommon sources. A German, 27-year-old, Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Stuttgart that loves German cars, beers, dogs & project management. Dennis is your usual German stereotype except for two things: my love for shrimp avocado tacos and cryptocurrency taxes.
Desmond Lim
Desmond Lim is co-founder and CEO of Workstream, an automated hiring platform for companies hiring hourly workers. He is a graduate of Harvard and MIT Media Lab, former product manager at WeChat, and investor at Dorm Room Fund. He is based in San Francisco and lived in Palo Alto with his wife and two young daughters.
Dmytro Okunyev
Dmytro Okunyev is the founder and owner of Chanty, a team chat app that makes it easy to communicate and collaborate in the cloud. Dmytro started toying with the idea of a chat app back in 2012, when he launched a start-up called iPhone Icon Design. He realized that team communication should be made easier, more flexible and powerful so that it encompasses chat, audio and video.
Dustin Marx
Dustin Marx is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, human capital thought leader, and expert at building and developing high-performing teams. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of IFM Restoration, a technology-driven marketplace serving the Single-Family Rental and Multifamily sectors. With a first-to-market business model and progressive workplace culture, IFM is disrupting the industry and delivering hassle-free experiences to clients, contractors, and residents across the country.
Dvorah Graeser
D’vorah has spent 20 years in the intellectual property industry and is a licensed US Patent Agent. She operates KISSPatent across borders, with offices in Chicago, New York, and Eindhoven. She participated in the Human Genome Project and has extensive knowledge in the fields of healthcare, technology, and business. In her time off she enjoys running ultramarathons.
Tech Entrepreneurs from F-K
Grant Powell
Grant Powell is a one-of-a-kind digital innovator who possesses a unique ability to combine creativity, logic, engineering and business savvy to conceptualize viable approaches to new world demands. There are few who can contend with Grant’s two decades of leadership and expertise in digital brand strategy, digital advertising, user experience and user interface design, mobile application development, startup innovation and blockchain programming. Grant cut his teeth in digital advertising at Google, and left to form the digital agency Pomegranate in 2008, where he fathered the concept of the “network agency” model – a new way of organizing talent and servicing enterprise brands. In 2015, Pomegranate and DBOX partnered up to create DBOX Digital, which is now known as PWLL.
Hans Angermeier
A lifelong car lover, Hans Angermeier is the founder and Managing Member of CarCareKiosk, a Technology Company focused on producing high-quality and vehicle-specific how-to videos for drivers to fix and maintain their cars. Hans’ expertise in car repair has grown over the past decade through his leadership role in the production of over 60,000 how-to videos. Hans quickly realized producing individual how-to videos for every vehicle on the road today would take a long time. He decided to leverage his expertise and love for cars to create a robust database with over 3.7MM data points and an accompanying algorithm structure to identify what video to show based on the car a user has queried.
Jayson DeMers
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before exiting it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics, and co-host of the podcast The Entrepreneur Cast.
Jeff Roscher
Jeff Roscher is the Founder and CEO of Information Professionals, Inc. (eWorkOrders), providing state-of-the-art Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) software. eWorkOrders offers a cost-effective groundbreaking reliable web-based CMMS software platform to help increase uptime with a seamless integration of maintenance devices, data and systems. Their team of professionals has extensive experience in quickly and efficiently setting up and supporting a diverse range of global customers across all industries.
Joel Klein
Formerly at Julius Klein Group, Joel Klein has been the founder and CEO of Ritani.com since 2009. Having grown up in a family business that has become one of the largest diamond wholesalers in the world, Joel literally grew up amongst diamonds. He watched his friends getting engaged and asking all of these questions about diamonds. Over the past decade, online shopping has become more and more popular. The diamond industry has been known to be antiquated, and diamond buying can become incredibly confusing. Watching people he cared about going through this process was eye-opening, so he started Ritani.com to help folks just like them.
Jonathan Ogurchak
Dr. Jonathan Ogurchakis the CEO & Co-Founder of STACK, a pharmacy information management platform designed to simplify the “outside of the dispense” complexities associated with running successful pharmacies, professional associations, and higher education institutions. His role as Managing Partner of Rhythm Group, a healthcare-focused software development organization, has allowed new and novel products to change the way that medications are being managed across the patient experience. Besides his work in healthcare technology, he’s an educator, a consultant, a husband, and a father to three kids that keep him on the move.
Jude Novak
A seasoned expert in the SaaS and eLearning fields, Jude Novak brings a wealth of knowledge to lead his team at Coassemble. Jude has always been interested in how technology and software could be used to improve the current standards of learning. His first entry into the online learning space was INKids. Jude took what he learned and applied it to a global scale, created the beginnings of what Coassemble is today with CEO, Ryan Macpherson. Together, the two have revolutionized the online training and learning space by creating a dynamic platform that puts the learner first.
Julian Fisher
Julian is a seasoned entrepreneur who started his first (mini) enterprise at the tender age of 8. Fast forward almost half a century, and he is now the founder and CEO of jisp, a lifestyle app that digitizes products and experiences to bring the best of online into physical spaces. Enjoying a varied background in technology, payments, and new media Julian launched the UK’s first internet exhibition in 1994. The expo, which showcased companies providing internet-connecting services, was covered live by BBC Breakfast. Their first question was: “So Julian, what is this thing called the world wide web?” Since then his work has remained inexorably linked to technology, improving sales and payments and tackling compliance issues for a wide group of blue-chip companies.
Kimberly Libertini
A single mother of two boys ages 12 and 14 and a K-12 Director of STEM, grief is no stranger to Kim Libertini. Over the course of 10 years, Kim lost her grandmother, father, mother, marriage and then in 2015, the man she considered her life partner died suddenly after they had been traveling together to Vietnam. Kim has learned that each type of grief is very different and compounded by other life experiences. Recognizing that grief is hard and the griever needs to feel understood and not isolated in their sadness, Kim and Decatur resident, Robynne Boyd, co-founded Goodgrief app to help those in need. Goodgrief App is a network where grieving people around the world can privately connect, chat and support each other in finding a new normal.
Tech Entrepreneurs from L-R
Lauri Kinkar
Together with his cofounders, Lauri has built a global messaging platform Messente which is now used as a part of millions of small business processes every day in Europe, Latin-America, and South-East Asia. Contrary to a typical startup, Lauri and his co-founders bootstrapped the company from day one and have quickly taken it to close to 10mEUR annual revenue without ever raising any outside investments.
Lisa Wang
Lisa is the founder and CEO of Almost Fun, an education tech non-profit dedicated to providing culturally-relevant and accessible educational resources to low-income students and students of color. She was previously a product manager at Google, building education products used by over 40 million teachers and students. Working as a volunteer test prep instructor Lisa started writing her content for her students, based on TV shows, movies, and books that they liked talking about. Students who would just come in and put their heads down on their desks perked up and started engaging in discussions. One day, one of them glanced at her and said, “Hey, this is actually almost fun.”
Madhan Kanagavel
Madhan Kanagavel is Founder and CEO of CodeLathe Technologies, a privately-held software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Over the last 15 years, Madhan has worked on diverse systems and technology, including building highly scalable MMORPG game server technology, high-speed real-time video acquisition systems, digital video engagement solutions, and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). He is an open-source enthusiast, and holds a Master’s of Science in Engineering from Boston University.
Manish Godha
Manish Godha is the Founder and CEO of Advaiya, a technology consulting and implementation services company that provides tailored digital transformation solutions with business applications and analytics. Advaiya has earned a distinct reputation building and supporting cutting-edge digital initiatives for progressive enterprises including Microsoft, Google and Adani Group.
Mark Thompson
Mark Thompson is a serial entrepreneur, SaaS enthusiast, and co-founder of PayKickstart – the shopping cart and affiliate management platform that’s reinventing how startups and businesses sell online. In the first 72 hours of its existence, PayKickstart generated over $1M in sales. Besides being a successful tech entrepreneur, Mark is also a husband, father, and an avid traveler.
Mark Weimer
Mark Weimer has spent his career largely in Silicon Valley as an executive in technology and financial services. His passion for entrepreneurship and innovation has been a driving force behind his entire career. Mark is the former Chairman and CEO of 401kServices.com, a business that provided 401K services using the Internet to clients of major financial institutions, including Charles Schwab and other leading investment companies. His career has been heavily involved in using online technology to help both consumers and companies. Throughout his various business ventures, Mark has been involved in fostering the growth of younger entrepreneurs and passing on the knowledge he has learned.
Markus Holzer
Markus Holzer is an energetic CEO whose dedication to transparency and individual fulfillment makes him well-respected by the entire contextflow family. Markus completed Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from the Technical University of Vienna (TU). Alongside studying, he worked as a Software Engineer at x-pin GmbH developing a biometric face detection system and as a Research Associate at the Medical University of Vienna. He became heavily involved in the EU research project Khresmoi during his time at the Computational Imaging Research Lab from 2010-2014 and later decided with his co-founders to commercialize the technology – contextflow was born. He now serves as a mentor to new medtech startups.
Mary Gao
Mary is a Computer Science and Philosophy student at Harvard, and one of the cofounders of Immigrants Like Us, a legal-tech nonprofit that is building a free “turbo-tax” for immigration. After being on the founding team of Upsolve, a legal-tech nonprofit for Chapter 7 bankruptcy which helped discharge more than $200 million of debt for 3,000+ low-income families, she wanted to tackle another enormous broken system – immigration. In 2020, immigration to the US has never been more expensive and more complicated, but she wants to make it safe, transparent, and free.
Matt Buchanan
Matt Buchanan is Co-Founder and VP of Sales at Service Direct, an online advertising and technology company based in Austin, TX. In his role, he helps the company understand how best to meet its clients’ needs and helps his team understand how to position their sales messaging accordingly. Matt’s wife doesn’t think he’s perfect, so you certainly shouldn’t. His experiences are his, and help shape him and his philosophy and his team. But the inspiring tech entrepreneur hopes you find value in learning about those experiences.
Nick Bell
Nick Bell is known as one of Australia’s most prominent entrepreneurs. He’s listed on the AFR Young Rich List for four years, raising in the ranks from humble beginnings to a self-made fortune of $170 million. Born and raised in country Victoria, Nick built his very first agency from his bedroom with start-up capital of only $400 and a phone. In 2017, that agency sold for $39 million. He moved onto the next project instantly, which has now turned into a portfolio of over 10 Agencies worldwide, which combined, turn over more than $130 million annually. His group of businesses offer brand management, online content removal, app development, digital marketing and cyber security. Nick’s other investments range from medicinal cannabis, hospitality, fin-tech and mining.
Nick Mathews
Nick Mathews is CEO of MainVest. MainVest is on a mission to bring investment capital directly to Main Street, so as to keep our local businesses alive and growing during and after this pandemic crisis. His business has helped small brick and mortar companies since 2018, but their mission to save main street is crucial now, more than ever, to us rebuilding post-Covid-19. As the heartbeat of local life, small businesses supply 99% of our jobs, give us culture, community, and the products and services that we value. Through Covid-19, MainVest has offered zero interest rate immediate loans to qualifying small businesses and the platform gives locals direct investment opportunities to support their local businesses; everything from funeral homes to juice bars.
Noah Miller
Noah Miller, Black Dog LED’s CEO, has been engaged in the legal cannabis industry since its inception and is a cannabis cultivation technologist. Noah joined Black Dog LED as employee #1 and has over 25 years of management experience ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. With a BS in Hospitality Management, an MBA and 3 startups behind him as well as 8 years’ consulting with C-level clients, Noah brings a business background to the exciting and rapidly-growing cannabis industry.
Priscilla Varnagy
Priszcilla “Pris” Varnagy is the founder and CEO of Be-novative, a Design Thinking Process Management Platform and SU Labs company backed by Pioneers.io as a shareholder and Microsoft and Spencer Stewart as strategic partners supporting 100+ Fortune1000 companies digitally on creating a culture of innovation and collective creativity.
Rivelino Montenegro
Dr. Rivelino Montenegro is a serial entrepreneur and expert in medical devices, materials science, biomimetics and nanotechnology. Dr. Montenegro has many patents and dozens of papers in international scientific journals. He helped to raise millions of euro in venture capital and public grants for startups. He is co-founder and CEO of Monarch Bioimplants, a Swiss Medtech company, focused on the development of technologies for peripheral nerve repair. Such technologies are extremely important since our peripheral nerve system is vital for it connects our brain to the rest of the body.
Ronald Czachara
Ronald Czachara is co-founder of Derdack GmbH, a German software company specialized in corporate alerting solutions. As a child growing up in Eastern Germany before the wall came down, he never thought to be able to travel the world or to become an entrepreneur. Both became reality. He traveled to over 50 countries, realized many IT and telecommunication projects and learned about people, business and different cultures on the way. Within Derdack Ronald filled various positions starting from programming and product management at the very beginning, to sales, leading the technical consulting team, as well as business development. His passion for science, technology and personal development as well as his love of learning in various fields help Ronald to stay on top in a fast-moving tech business.
Ryan Dempsey
Ryan Dempsey is the CEO and founder of The Compliance Workbook, a Software as a Service (SaaS) company which provides industry-leading software that is changing the future of compliance and asset management. He worked in the electrical industry for many years, the majority of this time in the Social Housing sector, where he managed all electrical and cyclical services for a Local Authority in the UK. Here Ryan saw first hand the lack of innovation within both the electrical industry and the Social Housing sector and that there was a requirement for a more proactive approach to lifecycle insights. He decided to challenge the status quo and disrupt current ways of working introducing innovative technology that would allow more efficient, proactive and rigorous methods of managing assets that can be applied to multiple sectors and industries.
Tech Entrepreneurs from S-Z
Shahid Hanif
Shahid Hanif is the Co-Founder and CTO of Shufti Pro, AI-based identity verification and fraud prevention solution. Previously, he also co-founded Zensed, a machine-learning-based fraud, and chargebacks prediction system. He completed his MSc in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Edinburgh. Providing cutting-edge fraud prevention solutions to online businesses and banks is his passion.
Sina Khanifar
Sina is the co-founder and CEO of Waveform.com, the leading online seller of cell phone signal boosters and distributed antenna systems (DAS). Sina is also a co-founder at OpenSignal, and a Technology Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He started a company in college helping people unlock their phones online, so by the time he graduated he had built up some seed capital to fund his next thing. His father turned him onto signal boosters – Sina followed his advice and became a tech entrepreneur. H recruited a couple of his closest college friends and they started working on launching a site to sell them online.
Tammy Camp
Tammy is one of the Founders and the Chief Executive Officer of Stronghold which creates virtual payment networks that enable instant settlement and interoperability between legacy and new payment networks. She started out working remotely in demand generation for a number of companies while traveling the world kiteboarding. She spent a number of years traveling to many different countries and managed to achieve a world record for the most back loops in one minute. When she arrived back to San Francisco in 2010, Tammy attended Singularity University’s GSP11 in Exponential Technologies at NASA Ames where she first learned about Bitcoin from legendary cryptographer Ralph Merkle. The prospective tech entrepreneur became very interested in financial technology, and using the technology of blockchain in conjunction with traditional networks like those used by banks – this set her on the path that would end in the founding of Stronghold.
Theron McCollough
Theron McCollough is an accomplished tech entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in addressing the behaviors that promote company value, help startups reach strategic goals, and increase venture success. Having sold his first company in 2010, Theron’s knowledge and proficiency in business development, content creation, product management, sales, and marketing is unparalleled. He focuses on business development and sales for technology and SaaS companies selling to the enterprise. Most recently he was a Managing Director with Silicon Valley Bank where he managed 61% of their global early-stage ecosystem. In 2019, Theron founded fiifi, a system of record for all startup investments that allows angel, VC and early-stage investor to dynamically view their startup portfolio on a near real-time basis.
Tim Campbell
A (tech) entrepreneur at heart, Tim Campbell brings over 20 years of experience, strategic expertise and brand stewardship as Founder and CEO of GiftCast. Campbell understands traditional and digital channels and knows how to apply them effectively to create bold brand ideas that achieve and surpass goals. He has worked with large consumer brands, such as Dairy Queen, as well as in pharmaceutical advertising, where he contributed his strategic insight to help build and drive multi-billion-dollar brands such as Enbrel, Crestor, Nexium, Symbicort and Cialis. Prior to founding GiftCast, Campbell tapped into his entrepreneurial skills and created Chef Pak in 2009, a high-quality culinary case, that quickly became a household name among chefs.
Trevor Lohrbeer
Trevor Lohrbeer is a serial tech entrepreneur working on his fourth startup, Day Optimizer. Day Optimizer is a desktop & mobile web app that helps you mindfully plan your day by walking you through a 3-step process to convert your daily to-do list into a daily schedule, so you can accomplish more. Prior to Day Optimizer, he co-founded Lab Escape, an enterprise data visualization software company that he sold in 2015. Lab Escape’s customers included Walmart, Dell, Schlumberger and the U.S. Army. Before Lab Escape, he co-founded True Peers, a social network for professionals that folded after they failed to raise additional financing after the dotcom bust and Slambook.com, a home page add-on service he sold in 1999.
Vadym Zotov
Vadym Zotov is a co-founder and CEO at Devox Software, an IT outsourcing company in Ukraine. Vadym graduated from Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and started his career as a .NET developer. In just four years he got a leading position and shifted to a managerial role in one of the biggest outsourcing companies in Ukraine. At the same time, Vadym started a few businesses in retail, restaurant and furniture industries. He’s got interest in (tech) entrepreneurship and entered an MBA program at Lviv Business School of UCU in 2016. While studying there, he completely defined his business area and set up Devox Software in 2017. The company provides web & mobile development services as well as UI/UX design, quality assurance, and DevOps.
Vernon Weitzman
Vern Weitzman is a serial tech entrepreneur and an avid consumer of new ideas, principles, and innovations in technology. Vern started his career as a software engineer for Control Data in 1981. After a series of joint ventures and consolidation, Vern started his first company; SessionWare, which developed apps for some of the first local area networks connecting desktops and servers in the enterprise. Through the 1990s, SessionWare morphed into a consultancy helping companies deploy Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange, and, eventually the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. In 2001, Vern founded itrezzo, where he started building server and handheld apps specifically for the Microsoft Exchange platform. Today, the 1,000+ customers include HBO, FIFA, and the U.S. Department of Justice which bought a site license for one million dollars. In 2015, Vern saw some customers migrating from on-premise messaging to Microsoft Office 365 and decided to start building cloud-specific applications. Cira Apps with its flagship product, CiraSync, launched in April of 2016 and now has over 100,000 users at 7,000 unique companies on its SaaS platform, built specifically for Office 365.
Yvonne Lo
Yvonne Lo was born and raised in Hong Kong (HK), then traveled to the United States to attend and graduate from Michigan State University with a BA in Business, Hospitality. Her career began in the hospitality industry working for a luxury hotel chain before starting her own catering venture in 2004. While being a stay-at-home mom, she acquired a master degree in International Hospitality Business from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University where she received an invitation to pursue a PhD. Instead of the academic world, she chose the trending editorial world of producing food-related articles and cooking videos. In 2015, Yvonne teamed up with Petur Hannes Olafsson, founder of ONANOFF, to launch the BuddyPhones line, a series of audio solutions designed exclusively for kids to engage safely with technology.
We hope you enjoyed this post about Tech Entrepreneurs!
If you know of any awesome tech entrepreneurs we should feature, let’s start by having them featured on IdeaMensch. You can learn more about our interviews with entrepreneurs, makers and doers here.
Also, here are some more compilation posts of very noteworthy entrepreneurs.
Young Entrepreneurs To Watch
Female Entrepreneurs To Watch
Cannabis Entrepreneurs To Watch
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.