Innovators Inside

Who is Shige Ihara? Shigeto is the president and CEO of NEC X launched in 2018 by NEC Corp, formerly Nippon Electric Company. NEC X is a Palo Alto-based business incubator that fast-tracks technologies and business ideas selected from inside and outside NEC. Not only is AlchemistX working with them on their current accelerator batch, but we got Shige on our show! You're going to love Shige!

Who is Kathy Chill? Kathy Chill is a business development powerhouse. She spent 10 years at Citrix where she grew the SAAS business from 30 million to half a billion dollars - making Citrix one of the 10 biggest SAAS companies on Earth. But that was just the first act of a distinguished career. Kathy went on to found the awesomely named, Chill Strategic Partners, where she helps companies around t...

Who is Laura Merling? Laura Marling is the Digital Transformation Officer Automotive for Google. Before joining Google, she was Managing Director and Chief Digital Officer for Slalom, providing business and product strategy to multi-billion dollar companies in technology, transportation, energy, cpg, retail, healthcare, and education. She served as Chief Digital Officer for Collins Aerospace and V...

Who is Jesper Frederiksen? Jesper Fredrickson was president of research and development for Danaher. Since then Jesper has served as Chief Innovation Officer at Banfield Pet Hospital, at Mars company, and then at Mars Veterinary health care. Today he is VP and Digital Executive for Velux, a Danish manufacturing company. Jesper attended INSEAD at the Syed School of Business at the University of Oxf...

Who is Alan Boehme? For‌ ‌about‌ ‌a‌ ‌dozen‌ ‌years‌ ‌corporate‌ ‌Innovation‌ ‌in‌ ‌Silicon‌ ‌Valley‌ ‌has‌ ‌been‌ ‌synonymous‌ ‌with‌ ‌Alan‌ ‌Boehme.‌ ‌From‌ ‌stints‌‌ ‌‌at‌ ‌DHL,‌ ‌General‌ ‌Electric,‌ and  ‌ING‌ , ‌Alan‌ ‌went‌ ‌on‌ ‌to‌ ‌a‌ ‌spectacular‌ ‌career‌ ‌at‌ ‌Coca-Cola‌ ‌rising‌ ‌and‌ ‌rising‌ ‌through‌ ‌that‌ ‌company‌ ‌to‌ ‌become‌ ‌Global‌ ‌CTO,‌ ‌Chief‌ ‌Innovation‌ ‌officer...

Who is Cindy Alvarez? Cindy is the author of Lean Customer Development and the Director of Customer Research for Github where she works to understand what helps developers collaborate to build effective solutions and drive change within their organizations. She came to GitHub and Microsoft from Yammer where she was Director of User Experience. Cindy's passionate about diversity and inclusion; supp...

Who is Sam Ramji? Sam's currently the Chief Strategy Officer for DataStax. In his 25 year Silicon Valley career he's been instrumental in creating two, billion dollar markets. The Enterprise Service Bus during his time at BA systems and API management when he was at Apigee. Notably, Sam laid the foundation for open source at Microsoft back in the aughts. When to do this was next to unthinkable. No...

Who is Christi Zuber? Christi is the founder and managing director of Aspen Labs and holds a Doctorate in Design and Innovation from Coventry University. She's also on the faculty of Northwestern, and has served as Fellowship faculty for Arizona State. This all is the culmination of a distinguished career in Corporate Innovation that included founding and directing The Innovation Consultancy for K...

Who is Corbett Gilliam? Corbett Gilliam is the corporate development manager for the world-renowned Advanced Technology Development Center. The ATDC is a science and business incubator that's part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech.  We're so glad to share Corbett's story with you all!

Who is Louis Stewart? Louis is currently the Head of Strategic Initiatives for NVIDIA's developer ecosystem. NVIDIA of course being the maker of legendary GPU’s and the enabler of our current golden age of video games. Prior to NVIDIA, Lewis was the city of Sacramento's first Chief Innovation Officer, charged with promoting and driving long-term economic growth and job creation through Innovation....

Who is Jeanne Morain? Our friend Jeanne began her career in startups and made her first big splash when BMC Software acquired Marimba. Marimba was the company founded by Kim Polese, the original product manager for the Java programming language. It was a precursor to basically, everything we take for granted today: containers, orchestration, device management, patch management. It ended up being s...

Who is Mike Dolbec? Well, Mike has had a tremendously distinguished career across both institutional and corporate VC, including stints at Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, 3Com, and Orange. From 2012, he is the executive managing director of GE Ventures. He's been on the boards of a bunch of deep tech companies as well! He's currently a science and innovation council member for BHP, one of the world's b...