20MinuteLeaders

Larisa leads Merck KGaA's Healthcare R&D Center in Israel. She also serves on the Merck Global Healthcare Drug Discovery Technology Leadership Team and is a member of the "Women in Leadership" program. At Merck Larisa has managed global projects and teams across geographies and cultures. Larisa has extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry, having worked for large corporations, small-to-medium businesses, and startups, and she is well-versed in process development, analytics, manufacturing, and technology transfer in the frame of pharmaceutical regulation. She is also involved in key startup business decisions such as the company's growth strategy, product portfolio, due diligence, technology review, and potential strategic relationships with other companies or investors.

Steven R. Gerbsman is a nationally recognized Crisis/Turnaround CEO/Restructuring Professional and Private Investment Banker who has been involved in maximizing enterprise value, stakeholder and shareholder value in a broad variety of industries.  He has worked with a wide spectrum of senior and junior lenders, bondholder groups, venture capital and private equity sources, private investors and institutional groups. He has acted in the capacity of Crisis/Turnaround CEO, Chief Restructuring Officer, Crisis Consultant, Private Investment Banker, Examiner for the Office of the United States Trustee, a member of the Board of Directors of various companies and Advisor to stakeholder groups.

Bryan Clayton is CEO and cofounder of GreenPal an online marketplace that connects homeowners with Local lawn care professionals. GreenPal has been called the “Uber for lawn care” by Entrepreneur magazine and has over 200,000 active users completing thousands of transactions per day. Before starting GreenPal Bryan Clayton founded Peachtree Inc. one of the largest landscaping companies in the state of Tennessee growing it to over $10 million a year in annual revenue before it was acquired by Lusa holdings in 2013

John Nieuwenburg has been a business coach since 2004. He has helped over 320 small business owners increase profit, remove the stress and chaos from their businesses and get their lives back. Before becoming a business coach, John was president of BC Liquor Stores which currently does over 3 billion dollars in sales annually with a headcount of 4,000 people. In 2019, MacKay CEO Forums awarded John with Canada's CEO Trusted Advisor Award in the Small Business category.

Dr. Helen Gu, Ph.D. has made it her life’s work to create unsupervised machine learning to detect anomalies in data in valuable ways. Based on more than 15 years of Helen’s academic research and findings, Helen created InsightFinder, a tool that can help predict and prevent IT incidents based on algorithms that can determine an anomaly score and predict the future impact on a company’s infrastructure. The platform also diagnoses the root cause of each system issue and provides automated self-healing capabilities to minimize the impact of service outages. In addition to being the founder/CEO of InsightFinder, Helen is also a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina, and worked at IBM T. J. Watson research center, where she worked on the IBM stream processing system called System S. It later became IBM's InfoSphere Stream product.

A passionate and empathetic leader, Madhav Nair is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at ZoomInfo, a leading go-to-market intelligence platform designed to drive a brand’s sales, marketing, and recruiting initiatives seamlessly and profitably. In his role, Madhav is responsible for leading engineering for all applications and data services, development, quality, and delivery of ZoomInfo’s software products.

Dr. Yishai Mishor is MTE's founder. Prior to MTE, Yishai was founder and CEO of Ein Hamishpat, a legal-tech start-up. His 20-year career spans law, business, academia and politics, including serving as Chief of Staff to the President of Israel. Yishai holds a PhD in Law from the University of Oxford and was a professor at Oxford.

Ariel Geifman is a co-founder and CRO of Dealtaele, the Revenue Science company. Ariel was the CEO of Dealtale from founding until the acquisition by Vianai at the beginning of 2022. Ariel is an avid eneprenour and an expert in tech go to market.

Ryan Larson is the founder and CEO of Scottsdale-based FirstLine Financial, LLC. His job as a firefighter gave him a sense of purpose and a lifelong desire to make the world safer. In his new business book, Ladder to Leader: My Journey from Failure to Fire to Financial Freedom (Calling Card Books, May 2022), Ryan describes his journey from a troubled youth to a successful founder and CEO, and the life and business lessons he learned along the way. Ryan's mom pushed him to join the Fire Department Explorer Program, where the entrance exam changed his mentality and gave him confidence.

Chen was the Co-Founder and CEO of two companies, and led them to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and sold them to Fortissimo PE, and Teldor Group, for tens of millions of dollars. Chen managed NCR Retalix Partners in the Asia Pacific (APAC) as well as Verint Software in Australia (Victoria) and New Zealand, leading it successfully to 70% market share. In the last 3 years, Chen took an active role in the Proptech industry, as a board member in accelerators, invested in 4 startups, and built a reputation as a leading Proptech investor. He is also serving as a board member and consultant in several startups as well.