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Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising nationally syndicated programs. With a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more, the show showcases individuals who are realizing their dreams and helping to make our world a better place through technology and innovation.
Jeff Ransdell is a venture capitalist building a portfolio of exponential technology companies at Wynwood Arts District-based venture capital firm Rokk3r Fuel ExO, which he co-founded in 2017 following a departure from the world of private wealth management. Jeff approaches venture capital with a signature “founder focused, investor driven” mindset, shaped by two decades as a top executive of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. As a managing director and market executive of the financial powerhouse, he managed more than $130 billion of global private client investment assets, a P&L of $2 billion, and over 2,000 employees across the bank’s Southeast Wealth Management Division. His transition to venture capital was motivated by what he saw as mounting evidence that opportunities to shape the economy and capitalize on innovation were steadily shifting from the public markets to the private markets. In the face of much skepticism, Jeff chose Miami, Florida, as the home base for Rokk3r Fuel, armed with an unparalleled rolodex and emboldened to leverage the city’s untapped resources and advantages. Today, Rokk3r Fuel manages a $200 million fund and has a portfolio of almost a dozen companies, such as Bolt, AdMobilize, and Taxfyle. Jeff is regularly called upon to share his insights on the global economy with outlets such as CNBC, CBS and American City Business Journals. Keep up with Jeff and Rokk3r Fuel via Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. https://www.rokk3rfuel.com https://twitter.com/Rokk3rFuel https://www.instagram.com/rokk3rfuel
Frits Habermann is a Tech Entrepreneur, Landscape Photographer and CEO at PicMonkey. He spent 20 years at Adobe, where he co-founded Adobe InDesign and later ran the Core Technologies group. More recently, Frits served as CTO for PopCap Games and CTO/Head of Product at Lynda.com. He holds degrees in both applied mathematics and computer science from Carnegie Mellon and University of Washington. His passion is combining technology with art and using fancy words like “leveraging synergy” to explain what he’s passionate about. Most at home with a camera in the outback running from grizzly bears or melting his shoes on lava fields, he’s more frequently seen in his hoodie at PicMonkey HQ working with a talented and passionate group of creative designers and tech innovators. PicMonkey, the leading photo editing and creative design tool for both web and mobile, with millions of users a month and over 5 billion photos edited. Our mission is to provide inspiring tools and services to empower the Everyday Creative. www.picmonkey.com www.twitter.com/picmonkey www.fritshabermannphotography.com
Ignacio Rodriguez is a self-made and visually-driven architect with an impressive slate of luxury real estate successes throughout Southern California. His elite slate spans high-end luxury homes that range from 5,000 square-foot contemporary new-builds to 70,000 square-foot estates that are among the largest houses on the market in America. Since launching his own architecture firm, IRA (Ignacio Rodriguez Architects), at the age of 28, Rodriguez has quickly built an impressive repertoire and became a vigorous force in the highly-competitive world of LA luxury residential architecture. Rodriguez places a strong emphasis on collaborating with clients to bring their vision and his designs to fruition by fusing his client-focused approach with a passion for providing functional, yet visually-appealing designs. Leading IRA to constant advancement and innovation, Rodriguez recently launched AVR, a virtual reality studio offering virtual property inspections for clients, developers and financial institutions to facilitate the development process. Being a Southern California-native, his work is informed by his deep appreciation and natural understanding of the demographic, climate and distinct design potential in Los Angeles. Rodriguez attended Woodbury University in Burbank, CA and upon completing several years of professional practice, he launched his own company with the intent to create a firm that leads with a client’s vision. Rodriguez’s architecture aspirations began at a young age, leading him to join an architectural program in high school and intern at an architecture firm at 15 years old. https://irarchitects.us https://avrstudio.us
Whether you’re an online entrepreneur or brick and mortar business owner, and whether you’re hustling, growing or slaying it in your business right now, you know you want a more profitable business. (Slight) Correction – you know that you want to super-charge your profit. With ease and with simplicity. That’s more like it. And I know that every business could make more profit – including yours. More profit = more fun, right? And everyone should want more fun in their life. More profit = more impact. And you want your business to make a bigger impact, yes? So what gives? You’re not shying away from doing the work, but it may have felt like there’s an imbalance between the level of profit made and the effort that you put in – it just feels too hard to make that profit. Moreover, you know that if you want to grow your business you can’t just keep on working harder and harder {Only 24 hours in a day, remember}. Fortunately, there is another way. There is a solution for you. https://jasonawithers.com https://twitter.com/jasonawithers https://www.facebook.com/JasonAWithers
Light Sail VR is a bleeding edge immersive cinema production company and studio determined to push the boundaries of creative storytelling in Virtual Reality. Founded by managing partners Matthew Celia and Robert Watts in 2015, Light Sail VR specializes in live-action Virtual Reality content with great characters and compelling narratives. We craft 360, 180 and interactive VR content for agencies, brands, studios and consumers. We are creators. We are innovators. We are Light Sail VR. http://www.lightsailvr.com https://twitter.com/lightsailvr https://www.youtube.com/lightsailvr
I’m an infrastructure geek who likes working on the hardware, software and people sides to make endeavors successful. My experience lies within untangling underlying communication issues, both from the people and software side that would otherwise inhibit growth, and in applying learnings from large-scale enterprise to startup. Throughout my 20 year career, I have spanned gaming, travel, healthcare, nonprofits, hospitality, productivity, government, retail, entertainment and security verticals. In my current life, I’m a CTO and coach for technology leaders at early-stage startups as well as an angel investor and tech advisor. I've also served on various boards with the aim of fostering entrepreneurship, and I write, speak and produce workshops around the world to that end. http://roceteer.com https://antarcticonf.com https://twitter.com/heathriel
In 2017 husband and wife team Kathryn Fantauzzia and Dr. David Rabin and together we set out to accelerate the development and translation of novel neuroscience discoveries to address public health needs and improve outcomes. Recently the World Health Organization officially recognized burnout as a medical syndrome. This designation is a milestone calling out for the world to combat the collective global crisis of work-related stress. When left unchecked, chronic daily stress overwhelms the body and mind, burning us out by making it hard to sleep, focus at work, and feel engaged. This leaves us exhausted, depleted, increasingly “checked out” and feeling ineffective, no matter how hard or long we work. Most worrisome, burnout can lead to serious negative health consequences. The economic consequences of burnout for business are palpable, with studies showing the following figures: ● Two-third of the full-time American workforce suffers from burnout ● On average, workers lose 11.3 days in lost productivity due to chronic stress in the workplace. ● US businesses suffer $63.2B in lost productivity annually due to chronic stress at work. And the most concerning stat: there are 120,000 stress-attributed deaths a year caused by stress-related illnesses. We’ve all heard of steps to manage our stress like meditating, exercising regularly, and prioritizing our sleep. However, these activities can be tremendously difficult to pursue when you’re already overwhelmed and stressed out and there is a scientific reason for it - Our bodies are not designed for persistent stress. When faced with constant emails, phone calls, text messages, distraction and interruption, our fear center in our brain becomes overactive, making it significantly harder to sleep, meditate, and focus. And that’s where Apollo comes in. Apollo is the only technology to improve sleep and cognitive performance by delivering vibration through a wearable. Apollo works within minutes by signaling safety to the brain and is the only technology that has been clinically validated to improve Heart Rate Variability (HRV), the most reliable predictive measure of how well your body adapts to and recovers from stress. In the age of wearables, many devices including the Apple Watch track your HRV, but do nothing to improve it. By signaling safety to the body, Apollo naturally improves HRV, and restores homeostasis, helping users fall asleep faster, focus, and practice mindfulness more easily. Apollo users can track improvements in their sleep and biometrics within the mobile app. Apollo has been evaluated in multiple University-led trials, has been tested by over 1,000 beta testers, and has over 500 case studies with long term users, all with consistent results. Over 95 percent of users report enhanced productivity, focus and sleep when using Apollo. https://shop.apolloneuro.com https://vimeo.com/377890612/9b4f6547d8
Has successfully grown dozens of early stage companies across a wide variety of products and markets, As founding partner, I currently lead market development strategy for the GrowthX portfolio of companies. GrowthX provides seed-stage venture capital and market development expertise to a select group of startups seeking product-market fit and predictable revenue. Our focus is on helping the entrepreneur make money - not raise money - and we've got it down to a science. Products and markets are unique, but the path to product-market fit and sustainable growth is not. GrowthX Academy trains individuals and their companies in the skills needed in the innovation economy. Programming areas include Market Acceleration, Entrepreneurial Selling, Growth Marketing and UX Design. https://growthx.com https://gxacademy.com https://twitter.com/growthxvc
Fairfax Intel is a Charlotte based managed analytics provider with clients throughout the US ranging from early stage companies to SMBs to Fortune 500 firms. We empower organizations to use the right data at the right time. We draw on deep expertise to develop the data-driven decision making infrastructure and programs to guide clients toward opportunities to capitalize on business growth. We are experts in finding public and private open market and deep web data, curated to help our clients see the bigger picture beyond their four walls. We provide steady guidance and planning for organizations managing periods of transition, expansion and marketplace shift. Our core expertise is to architect a custom suite of analysis tools leveraging multi-source data along with strategic frameworks for organizations ranging from start-ups to Fortune 50 industry leaders. Using best-in-class analytics technology, we meet the diverse needs of businesses regardless of size and market.Solutions are reasonably priced and designed particularly for SMBs. https://fairfaxintel.com https://twitter.com/fairfaxintel https://www.linkedin.com/company/fairfaxintel
Andrew is a Founding Partner of GrowthX. He has been in the technology sector since 1998, based in New York City, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Palo Alto. Andrew began his career in technology as a lawyer for the early Internet pioneers in Search (Alta Vista and Yahoo), AdTech (DoubleClick), SaaS (Salesforce) and others while practicing law. He left private practice at Skadden Arps to join DoubleClick leading up to the Google acquisition. Andrew then joined Thomson Financial where he co-founded their financial news business leading to the acquisition of Reuters. At Thomson Reuters, Andrew served as Publisher of Reuters News, where he worked on innovation and design-thinking with nearly 3,000 journalists based in 200 countries worldwide. He then became Co-Founder and Managing Director of the company’s legal media business in Asia Pacific and the Middle East. After 6 years in Asia, Andrew returned to the U.S. and returned to helping early-stage companies. In Silicon Valley, Andrew was early at Guidespark, an employee communication SaaS platform, and BrightTalk, a content marketing SaaS platform and professional community. He then co-founded GoodMoney to democratize high-performance, values-based investing. During that “wonderful learning opportunity,” Andrew met his current partners and co-founded GrowthX. Andrew is a Kauffman Fellow, Trustee at the Nashville Children’s Theatre, Founding Organizer of Nashville Entrepreneur Week, Regional Board Member of Venture for America, and a proud Mentor at Alchemist Accelerator in Palo Alto, Matter in San Francisco, WeWork in Nashville, and, nationally, at Galvanize. Andrew received his undergraduate degree from the University of Cincinnati and his law degree from Georgetown University. GrowthX provides seed-stage venture capital and market development expertise to a select group of startups seeking product-market fit and predictable revenue. Our focus is on helping the entrepreneur make money - not raise money - and we've got it down to a science. Products and markets are unique, but the path to product-market fit and sustainable growth is not. GrowthX Academy trains individuals and their companies in the skills needed in the innovation economy. Programming areas include Market Acceleration, Entrepreneurial Selling, Growth Marketing and UX Design. https://growthx.com https://gxacademy.com https://twitter.com/growthxvc
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