The VentureFuel Visionaries

UWM is the #1 overall mortgage and purchase lender in the nation, where Lee Jelenic leads Client Experience, Innovation, Government Affairs, and Investor Relations. From Professional Hockey to Wall Street, from Ford to UWM, Lee has led tangible growth by embracing innovation. Today, we talk about being Productively Uncomfortable, the value of entering the “Uncomfort Zone,” challenging the why, measuring the success of innovation, and why success can be a headwind to new growth. We also discuss UWM’s CEO Mat Ishbia, his story from benchwarmer to billionaire, and how it inspires UWM to seize the moment.

Rudina Seseri is one of the top VCs in the world. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in the next generation of AI and frontier technology startups that are enabling the rise of the intelligent enterprise. She is Startup Boston’s 2022 Investor of the Year, Business Insider’s Most Important VC in Boston and Top VC investing in AI and Machine Learning. We talk about jumping the curve to a new paradigm, the mass consumerization of AI, vertical applications, tourist and hype investing, the role of open source, wrappers vs. native and why empires die slowly.

Eze Vidra is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Remagine Ventures and a former GP at Google Ventures, Alphabet’s venture capital arm. We talk about Gen AI from the hype cycle to incumbents vs upstarts to barriers to corporate adoption to the opportunities for strategic partnerships. Why the best large companies from Health to Finance to Tech aren’t sitting on the sidelines and are being rewarded in this transformational moment.

Why do corporations work with startups? What is a venture studio? How can startups build faster by leveraging the studio model? Can consumer technologies make our lives better? Kristen Gendron is the COO and Principal at Wildwood Ventures, a new pre-seed venture studio and connected seed fund at the intersection of the outdoor and wellness economies. Kristen’s career includes building venture funds at VF Corp, Nike, and the US Agency for International Development; investing in and advising startups across ten sectors and twenty countries; and rolling up her sleeves as a co-CEO and fractional cofounder in early-stage businesses. Build within a box. Idea meets execution. Rigor + Art + Science and what founders would you get into a bar fight, for.

Why the #1 player in their industry, over 100 years old, with a $15 B market cap, partners with startups to see what the world is working on. How they are capitalizing on the 99.9% of innovation taking place outside of their four walls to solve for use cases. We discuss how to scale simplicity, the value of innovation, and the challenges of solving for synchronization and legacy. Marty is on my Mt. Rushmore of Corporate Innovators and is hilarious: "The only person who likes change is a wet baby."

David Radlo is an internationally recognized sustainable leadership, growth, and innovation expert. An accomplished Founding Partner that has led a six-fold EBITDA increase and a 30-fold increase in enterprise value, a 10x Entrepreneur, a 2x best-selling author, a founding partner, and has served on 15 boards. We discuss his billion-dollar success disrupting the egg industry as the founder of “Eggland’s Best,” bringing corporate America back to Cuba after negotiating with Fidel Castro and his “Cartel Leadership Rules.”

The Health Equity Accelerator at Boston Medical Center is an ambitious and aggressive approach to eliminating the race-based health equity gap that exists throughout the healthcare industry in the U.S. Sheila Phicil leads the program and shares with us how innovation is at the heart of serving vulnerable and marginalized populations. We talk about identifying gaps in data, co-designing solutions with patients and partners with lived experience, and why new solutions are needed for our biggest challenges.

10% of America is hungry, and 37% of Food made ends up as waste, equal to 140 billion meals of Food. Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and positively impact the environment. We discuss renovation vs. disruptive innovation, radical collaboration, and turning pineapples into Nikes.

Bob shares how to unleash innovation in a successful, established industry. From close-in innovations to category-changing, game-changing, consumer behavior-changing transformations. Bob shares some of the successes as well as announces the return of the 5th year of the largest dairy innovation competition, The Real California Milk Excelerator, Powered by VentureFuel.

How do you scan for future growth? Is now the time to build? Where is VentureCapital heading (based on their Q1 2023 VC Benchmark report) and what does that mean for founders and corporations partnering with startups? We ask Laura who is the Founder & CEO of The Venture City and is also the General Partner of their Fund with over $145M under management. They have invested in over 100 seed to Series A startups across 14 countries. Her team is made up of founders who have been in the trenches and now not only deploy capital but help their startups build by focusing on data and execution. Laura was the first employee of Facebook in Spain and later led the Growth, Mobile & Partnerships team in Latin America for 9 years. Before Facebook she held management roles at eBay, Siemens and Ogilvy Group as well as being a founder herself.