UTEN Initiation Brainstorms: Speakers - UTEN: the University Technology Enterprise Network

Tara Branstad
Associate Director
Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation (CTTEC), CMU

Tara works primarily with CMU faculty in Robotics, Biomedical Engineering, Computational Biology, Computer Science, Cylab (computer security), and the Tepper School (business). Tara has worked with a variety of licensing models, including traditional commercial, open source, and new company creation. In her capacity as Associate Director of CTTEC, Tara is responsible for overseeing our Enterprise Creation (start-up) activities and managing our Gap Fund Program. She also assists the Director with administrative and finance duties.

Tara came to CMU in October 2005. She began her professional career in technology transfer at the University of Pittsburgh’s Office of Technology Management. She then worked at Innovation Works, a seed stage funding and technology-based economic development organization, and as an independent consultant. Tara is married to a serial entrepreneur and has two young children. She received her BA in Biology from the University of Virginia and her MBA/MHA in marketing and health policy and administration from the University of Pittsburgh.

Barbara Carryer
Adjunct Professor, Entrepreneurship
Embedded Entrepreneur, Project Olympus
Innovation Advisor, Institute for Social Innovation
Carnegie Mellon University

Babs Carryer is adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at the Heinz College and the Don Jones Center for Entrepreneurship in Tepper School of Business. She is the embedded entrepreneur for Project Olympus, which was founded within CMU’s School of Computer Science to stimulate entrepreneurship and the commercialization of new technologies.

Babs teaches new technology commercialization through the University of Pittsburgh’s Offices of Enterprise Development and Technology Management.

Babs is also is President of Carryer Consulting, which provides strategic marketing and business planning services to technology companies and organizations in the software and life sciences sectors.

Babs co-founded LaunchCyte, a development company that creates, seeds, and harvests life sciences innovations from leading research universities across the U.S. In 2009, one LaunchCyte company announced a strategic partnership with Philips, including a five figure investment, to develop a diagnostic device for sepsis; in 2010, another LaunchCyte company announced a $345M deal with Biogen to develop and commercialize a new drug for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Babs is past director of deal flow for BlueTree Allied Angels, a regional angel investment group with $15 million under management.

In the fall of 2008, Babs was the Bishoff entrepreneur-in-residence at Penn State University.

Education
B.A. Mills College, California.
Masters in Public Management (MPM), Heinz College

Gary Hoover
Serial Entrepreneur and Entrepreneurship Teacher, Author, Austin, Texas

Gary Hoover began his entrepreneurial journey at an early age. His question about enterprises was, “What separates the losers from the winners?” He began subscribing to Fortune Magazine at the age of 12, and has acquired most of the issues back to 1930.

As part of his education, he studied economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and two other Nobel Prize winners, served as a securities analyst for Citibank on Wall Street, worked as a buyer for Federated Department Stores, and headed up acquisitions and strategic planning for the May Department Stores Company.

At the age of 30, after he finally took the plunge and created pioneering book superstore BOOKSTOP, which helped change the nature of book shopping in America. This company was sold to Barnes & Noble for $41.5 million cash when it was 7 years old, and became a cornerstone for their industry-dominating superstore chain.

After he and his partners sold BOOKSTOP, Gary returned to his first love of understanding businesses, and began the company that became Hoover’s, the world’s largest Internet-based provider of information about enterprises. Hoovers.com covers over 40,000 companies around the world. In July of 1999, Hoover’s went public and in March of 2003, the company was purchased by Dun & Bradstreet for $117 million. Like BOOKSTOP, Hoover’s has changed the way we do things and today employs over 300 people.

Gary also ventured into the travel business with TravelFest Superstores, which failed when airlines stopped paying commission to travel agencies, and the museum industry, a work in progress. He continues to keep over 100 ideas for new businesses on his list.

In the 2009-10 academic year, Gary served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin. There he focused on inciting and inspiring entrepreneurial thinking among students of all types, graduates and undergraduates, inside and outside of the business school. He reviewed approximately 400 business plans and ideas in this role, as well as teaching a Foundations of Entrepreneurship course.

He also gave five lectures on the history of various industries (movies, airlines, autos, retailing, and computers) which can be viewed at:
http://blogs.mccombs.utexas.edu/mccombs-today/gary-hoover-video-library/

In the fall of 2010, Gary began exploring innovative ways to teach entrepreneurship, how to learn and research various subjects, retailing, and other topics close to his heart, beginning with an all day seminar on retailing in Austin.

Gary lives in Austin, Texas, with his 50,000-book library. He has consulted, spoken to conferences, and worked to encourage entrepreneurial thinking on every continent and in every industry, for profit and not for profit. He has also supported the University of Chicago. In 2009 he launched www.hooversworld.com, a blog which includes reviews of books, ideas, and places from Gary’s iconoclastic angle. His book is available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/25085990/The-Art-of-Enterprise-by-Gary-Hoover-January-2010

Cam Houser
VP of Bizdev at 3 Day Startup
Advisor at Mass Relevance

Cam Houser is the Director of Programming at 3 Day Startup, a student-focused entrepreneurship education initiative with programs in the U.S., Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. He regularly delivers boot camps and workshops on market validation, product development, and marketing emerging technologies to established and nascent markets. In addition, Cam advises and mentors student startup founders on topics such as bootstrapping and the path to seed incubators and angel funding. Before 3 Day Startup, Cam served in business development and marketing roles at Amplifier, the ecommerce and fulfillment provider behind the globally successful Lance Armstrong Foundation “LIVESTRONG” wristband project. Cam received his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010.

3 Day Startup is an entrepreneurship education program designed for university students with an emphasis on learning by doing. The idea of 3 Day Startup is simple: start a technology company over the course of three days. We invite students from numerous backgrounds - MBAs, computer science, design, engineering, neuroscience, law, etc - and provide guidance through the early stages of the startup experience. Over one intense weekend, 3DS participants brainstorm ideas, conduct market validation, devise business models, build prototypes, create branding, and pitch to investors and successful entrepreneurs. The result is an experience that challenges participants to innovate, build and launch real companies.

Dave MaWhinney
Serial entrepreneur and investor
Adjunct Professor, Entrepreneurship
Tepper School of Business and Heinz College, CMU
Director, i6 Agile Innovation System

Mawhinney brings a deep experience in marketing, sales, product development, and operations from co-founding four information technology entrepreneurial ventures. Dave most recently was co-founder, chairman and CEO of mSpoke, a next-generation artificial intelligence software (semantic Web) company which was acquired by LinkedIn in 2010. mSpoke had previously sold its first business line to Morgan Stanley’s MSCI/Barra in late 2006. Prior to mSpoke, Dave was a general partner for the venture capital firm PNC Technology Investors.

From 1998 to 2001, Dave served as co-founder, director and president of Premier Health Exchange, LLC, a company that automated the healthcare buying and selling process to drastically reduce the costs in the supply-chain. The business grew rapidly and was merged with Medibuy.com and Columbia/HCA’s empactHealth.com to form Medibuy. He was also a founding management team member with Hawk Medical Supply Corporation, backed by the private equity firm Welsh Carson, Anderson and Stowe and sold to McKesson in 1998.

Dave’s first start-up, IndustryNet Corporation, was a pioneering internet marketing and commerce company which merged with AT&T Business Network to form Nets, Inc. He began his career with Bayer Corporation’s Agfa-Compugraphic business unit.

Dave holds a B.S. in Physics, Summa Cum Laude, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MBA with Distinction from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

Dave recently became the Director of the i6 Agile Innovation System, a partnership between Innovation Works (a seed stage investor, not-for-profit) and Carnegie Mellon University. The i6 program is working to bring the concepts of agile or “lean startups” and agile product development to teams at the university to help them to commercialize technologies and “spin out” companies. By lean start-ups we mean engaging in early and iterative customer interaction. By agile product development we mean using techniques such as Scrum and Extreme Programming to release product to customers in short cycle times.