Mentors


  • Sally Carson Sally Carson

    Bio: Sally Carson is a User Experience Designer with over 10 years of industry experience. She\'s worked with companies including Yahoo, Edutopia, ShareThis, and Lynda.com. She\'s currently working on an auto-biographical comic book about being a bike messenger in NYC just after 9/11.


  • Zach Steindler Zach Steindler

    Bio: Zach graduated from the University of Michigan in 2007 with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering. In 2005, he began work with Zattoo as a Startup Developer, Europe\'s premier Internet TV provider . Here, Zach\'s passions as a developer allowed him to advance and join Zattoo\'s Core Team in 2007. In 2008, he co-founded coffeehouse coders, a meetup group dedicated to banging out code, swapping code snippets, bouncing around ideas, and talking about the latest and greatest in software. Soon after, Zach co-founded Olark, a service which brings hassle-free live chat to your website to track leads, drive sales, and provide top-tier support. Zach is currently the Chief Olarchitect at Olark. Formally launched in August of 2009, Olark received angel funding (including Y-Combinator), and now has offices Palo Alto, California and Ann Arbor, MI.


  • Dov Rosenberg Dov Rosenberg

    Bio: In 2005, with the opening of a new associate position at Blue Chip Venture Company, Dov crossed over to the investor side of the table. In that role, he performed due diligence on new investment opportunities, monitored the firm’s portfolio companies, conducted market and financial analysis, and generally made sure the partners were kept in line. Now a director at Allos and Blue Chip, Dov also manages Blue Chip\'s Validation Fund, which invests in Ohio-based seed-stage technology companies. He serves on the boards of companies including JackBe and Jacobs Automation


  • Maria LaLonde Maria LaLonde

    Bio: Maria LaLonde is the Recruiting and Development Leader for Bizdom U. Maria oversees the recruiting and interview processes and connects with the community to raise awareness about Bizdom U as an available resource. Maria was born and raised in the city of Detroit and the Detroit metropolitan area. Her background includes a successful career with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, where she managed branch offices and oversaw the recruiting process for 35 branch offices. She has also been a top producing Realtor in residential real estate. Maria has always had an entrepreneurial spirit, and has owned businesses in the fields of recruiting and the automotive industry. Maria is passionate about doing her part to create a vibrant and thriving community in Detroit. She believes that encouraging diverse, growth-oriented businesses is essential to the creation of a brighter future for Detroit.


  • Jeff Bocan Jeff Bocan

    Bio: Jeff Bocan is a Managing Director of Beringea, a venture capital firm based in London and Farmington Hills. He has worked in both the U.S. and U.K. on numerous Beringea\'s funds over the past decade. Jeff co-manages Beringea\'s InvestMichigan Fund -- a $105MM venture fund dedicated to Michigan-based companies. He is a board director of nine Beringea investments including Michigan companies, Sakti3, ReCellular, Mophie, Relume Technologies, Livio Radio and gloStream. Prior to joining Beringea, Jeff was at early-stage technology VC firm Saffron Hill Ventures and worked for then-start-up company, Honest Tea. Jeff is a graduate the University of Notre Dame, the University of Virginia (MBA).


  • Steve Schwartz Steve Schwartz

    Bio: Steve graduated from Kettering University as a Mechanical and Electrical Engineer. He founded his first company as a freshman in college, selling used car parts. In 2007, he co-founded RateMyStudentRental, selling private-label software to colleges and universities to help improve off-campus housing. Then in 2008, he founded LeadNuke, which generates B2B sales leads by monitoring online conversations. He is now managing member at Alfa Jango Software, building custom software and web applications for startups.


  • Jon Baugh Jon Baugh

    Bio: As a serial entrepreneur, Jon Baugh been working extensively with startups for over 15 years. Initially, focused on web design and development, Jon has spent the more recent years in the medical IT space leading an electronic health records company and helping take a patient communications device to market. Over the years he has gained insight into the complex challenges facing companies from conception to market. Additionally, Jon has had the opportunity to work with Menlo Innovations as a High-Tech Anthropologist, bringing an additional approach to helping understand customers, market, and business.


  • Jim Spinello Jim Spinello

    Bio: With over 20 years of marketing and strategic planning experience Jim has become a leading architect and facilitator of innovative strategies for branded products with a focus on efficiency and credibility as the keys to consumer relevance and ROI. At Birdsong 3, Jim focuses on seed stage investments and mentoring with an emphasis on brand building techniques, content creation and social distribution. Working as either an agency partner, investor, mentor or entrepreneur Jim has worked to facilitate the handshake between brands, consumers, founders and financiers with efficiency, technology, mentorship and style. Jim sits on the boards of several Chicago based startups, and has started both agencies and consumer product companies. Over the years Jim has produced more than 500 pieces of digital and televised episodic content and built integrated, multi-media consumer engagements for clients including: NFL, ESPN X Games, Red Bull, Dyson and Chipotle. Additionally, he founded a globally, branded snowboard and accessory company with offices in the US, Europe and Japan. Spinello graduated from Providence College with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Political Science


  • Nate Aschenbach Nate Aschenbach

    Bio: Formally trained in graphic art at the University of Wisconsin, Nate Aschenbach has been working with small teams for over 10 years. His most recent start up endeavor, TwoGear released their first game for iPad and iPhone in the summer of 2011. He has extensive experience modeling and animating for games as well as design for the web. He has recently shifted into a more technical roles at Menlo Innovations, and continues to cultivate TwoGear.


  • Ankur Oberoi Ankur Oberoi

    Bio: Ankur is a Developer Evangelist at TokBox, Inc. where he works to bring exciting and useful resources to the community of OpenTok developers. Prior to TokBox, Ankur attended University of Maryland as an Electrical and Computer Engineering student. His first Startup Weekend was as a participant in NYC where he and his awesome team collaborated to make Animotion and has now been to 7 more Startup Weekend events around the country. Ankur is a full stack developer with areas of expertise in Javascript, PHP, HTML/CSS, Node.js, Objective-C.


  • Jason Raznick Jason Raznick

    Bio: Jason Raznick is the founder of Benzinga and is a passionate entrepreneur. He founded two successful Internet companies prior to his current and largest company, Benzinga. In the first five months, Benzinga grew to over 50k active members. Raznick has worked for Merrill Lynch, Jim Cramer’s TheStreet.com, and Tricap Holdings. Benzinga is a financial media company based out of Metro Detroit and currently serves over 3 million readers in over 125 countries every month. Benzinga provides daily original, accurate, and timely global content to the financial industry. Benzinga also produces real-time tools and applications to give traders and readers an edge that was once only available to the very elite. Raznick is excited to move his business forward nationally by recruiting entrepreneurs and developers in the Metro Detroit area to help launch future products and services.