The VentureFuel Visionaries

Recorded at our most recent event, What’s Next Now: Beer, Wine & Spirits, we sit down with Alice Ponti, Senior Director, Front End Innovation, Anheuser-Busch; Seth Yassky, Director of Strategic Alliances and Education, Proximo Spirits; & Ryan Malkin, Malkin LAW P.A. to discuss the areas ripe for innovation and how to overcome industry challenges to driving change.

Natache Volpini is the global head of digital consumer innovation for Heineken, where the team was recently celebrated with a bevy of Cannes Lines for their Metaverse launch of Heineken Silver. She has spent 20 years driving innovation, marketing and digital at multinational companies like Warner Media, Mondelez, Viacom and Ambev. We chat about connecting with new consumers, web3, crypto and the future of beverages. Cheers!

Rachel Weiss is VP of BOLD Ventures, the venture capital fund of L’Oréal, where she invests in new and disruptive business models in BeautyTech. Rachel lives and breathes convergence, embracing all things pop culture, beauty, and technology. Part technologist, part futurist, part investor, part maker and operator she has long been at the forefront of innovation and an early adopter on the value of startup and corporate collaboration. We talk about the value of working with startups from a corporate perspective, how VCs balance strategic and financial imperatives as well as the future of beauty and what role web3 will play in our lives.

Ilana Grossman, Co-Founder & CMO of Pinktada and Steve Shpilsky, Co-Founder & CEO of STAY OPEN and StayDAO discuss how innovation will reshape hospitality and the role technology plays in addressing legacy challenges. This transformation is being fueled by Web3, NFTs, tokenization, blockchain and DAOs which are creating new products, services and business models to meet the needs of the next generation of travelers.

Recorded at our most recent event, What’s Next Now: Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality, we sit down with Kevin Kleist, Emerging Trends Advisor, Southwest Airlines to talk about the trends shaping travel tech, the role of collaboration in their commercialization and the future of flight. As part of the Emerging Trends Team, Kevin explores and brings to life unconventional ideas to encourage change and identify new opportunities for the airline. With more than 16 years of experience with Southwest Airlines, Kevin is collaborating with innovation-driven companies and startups to study, design, develop, and test emerging technologies and complex solutions in real-world environments.

What is corporate upskilling was binge worthy? Circus Street is an on-line school that teaches companies and their employees to do business in our modernizing world. How do you make learning approachable in a world of continues change. Since 2011 Circus Street has upskilled over 600,000 enterprise employees (like Coca-Cola, Lego, Kraft Heinz) in over 150 Countries. purely for enterprise clients like Coca-Cola, Lego and Kraft Heinz. Learn why technology is like water, why upskilling is table stakes and the role of innovation as we improve ourselves.

During this conversation, recorded at our latest event, What's Next Now: Health & Wellness we speak with three Healthcare Startup Founders about the challenges, opportunities and innovations reshaping the future of Health Tech. Hear from: Philip Fung, Founder & CEO of Kit.com, at-home medical exams, delivered; Shailja Dixit, CEO of Curio Digital Therapeutics, tailor-made cognitive behavioral therapy programs for women across the cycle of life; and Vasu Nadella, Co-Founder & CEO at Vital Bio, an ecosystem of devices, software & people designed to help all of us live healthier.

During this conversation, recorded at our latest event, What’s Next Now: Health & Wellness we sit down with Dov Shamir, PhD, Head of Elementa Labs, Mount Sinai Innovation Partners & Tracy Dooley, MD, Partner at Avestria VC to discuss the role of collaboration in the commercialization of health & bio tech innovation. Dov leads the Mount Sinai Health Systems newly established Elementa Labs, an incubator program powered by the health systems commercialization office, Mount Sinai Innovation Partners. The incubator helps strategically position external healthcare and biotechnology startup companies for the next stage in their development. Tracy Dooley is a Partner at Avestria Ventures where she invests in early stage medtech, healthtech, and life science companies with female founders and focused on women’s health. Prior to joining Avestria, Tracy was a digital health & innovation consultant for clients including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Novartis, and early-stage startups. Before that she served as Head of Global Operations at Novartis Diagnostics/Grifols.

Ted Graham is a Principal with GM Ventures (the venture arm of General Motors) and the Head of Open Innovation. He partners with startups, incubators/accelerators, VCs and academia to accomplish GM’s vision of zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. GM Ventures is focused on key technologies that can be implemented in GM’s vehicles, manufacturing facilities and operating businesses. They have made 54 investments with 22 exits and 24 still active startups – those are stats any VC would drool over. He is also the author of The Uber Of Everything and a frequent speaker about disruptive innovation and the power of partnering between large and small companies. We talk about open innovation, the power of collaboration between industry leaders and startups and the path to electrification and autonomy.

Sharon Leite, CEO of The Vitamin Shoppe, talks health & wellness trends, the evolution of retail and the role of innovation in the transformation of the company which is the leading specialty health-and-wellness retailer. The Vitamin Shoppe offers the largest assortment of vitamin, supplement, and sports nutrition products at retail in the U.S.Prior to joining The Vitamin Shoppe, Sharon was the North American President of Godiva Chocolatier, President of Sally Beauty, U.S. and Canada, and EVP of Pier 1. Sharon has been voted one of the Top Women in Retail, serves on the Board of the National Retail Federation, and earlier this year starred in the most recent season of CBS’s hit reality show Undercover Boss.