Bill Kilday’s new book Never Lost Again released on May 29, 2018. It chronicles the early beginnings of the digital mapping and gaming industry which gave birth to Google Maps, Google Earth, Pokemon Go, and more. His book tells the story of Google Earth, including his involvement with UT grad John Hanke who co-founded the firm Keyhole and later led Google’s GEO division. Bill has been a participant and witness to the amazing growth of the industry and the evolution of Google in Austin, of which we was one of the instigators. His company is currently working on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Bill received his MBA degree in 1994 from Texas McCombs. Learn more about Bill’s Book at Harper Collins.
Author: Zoya Nooruddin (page 7 of 7)
The Austin Business Journal (ABJ) profiled Texas McCombs MBA alumna Alissa Bayer, CEO, owner, and founder of Milk and Honey Day Spa and Salon. ABJ says Alissa, “has her sights on turning Milk + Honey into one of the largest spa brands in Texas — and next, the country.”
Mason Rathe, MBA ’18, joined LiveOak Venture Partners as a senior associate where he will focus on executing new investments and supporting the firm’s growing portfolio. LiveOak Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Austin, Texas.
Mason Rathe interned at LiveOak from the beginning of 2018 while completing his MBA at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Prior to business school, Mason was in the Technology and Life Sciences division of Comerica Bank, where he underwrote over $350M in capital commitments to early stage companies. Prior to Comerica, Mason led business development for US Capital Partners. During his MBA, Mason began a weekly newsletter that chronicled key developments in Austin’s startup environment and grew virally to thousands of subscribers.
“Mason has already shown terrific value add as an intern at the firm and demonstrated strong leadership in nurturing the local startup environment with his newsletter. These team expansions underscore our intense focus on the Texas venture opportunity and the support of local entrepreneurs with resources to scale their business and reach their full potential,” added Venu Shamapant, founding partner at LiveOak Venture Partners. Read more
The San Antonio Business Journal (SABJ) featured MBA alumnus Bryan Grundhoefer, President of WellMed Medical Management, as a Health Care Hero.
Momentum Glass named John Shaddix, MBA ’12, as its Chief Financial Officer where he will manage business operations, financial planning and analysis, corporate development, and support performance improvement efforts across the company. Prior to joining Momentum, Shaddix was a Principal with the Houston office of The Boston Consulting Group. He graduated with honors from The University of Texas at Austin with a BA in Economics and an MBA from the McCombs School of Business.
Omar Maalouf, CEO of Momentum Glass, remarked, “We mean it when we say ‘Momentum only hires the best’ – and John is no exception. In short order, he’s proven to be an indispensable member of the team.” Read more
WP Engine promoted Tina Dobie, BBA ’92 and MBA ’99, to the newly created position of Chief Customer Officer (CCO). Dobie joined WP Engine in 2013 and since that time has built a world-class customer experience organization focused on supporting WP Engine’s 80,000+ customers in over 135 countries while optimizing internal operations for scalability, growth, and productivity. Under her leadership, the WP Engine customer experience organization has won five Stevie® Awards, the world’s premier business awards. Reflective of this excellence, the WP Engine customer experience team maintains a world-class Net Promoter Score of 82.
As CCO, Dobie leads a team of 200 people located around the world. In her expanded charter, Dobie will lead the strategic vision for how WP Engine continues to be inspired and fueled by the voice of our customers.
“One of our core values is ‘Customer Inspired’, a value that Tina lives and breathes everyday,” said Heather J. Brunner, Chairwoman and CEO of WP Engine. “I’m thrilled to expand her role by announcing her promotion to Chief Customer Officer and to acknowledge her creation and advancement of a globally recognized, operationally excellent, customer experience team. As WP Engine builds and integrates more solution offerings, her charter and teams will continue to rise to deliver increasing customer experience and expertise.”
Prior to joining WP Engine, Dobie was a client services executive at Bazaarvoice, an Austin, TX SaaS company that turns social media into social commerce for global brands. She is a proud Longhorn, having earned her BBA and MBA from the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business. Read more.
Loreen Gilbert, BBA ’87, kicked off International Women’s Day with tennis great, Maria Sharapova, as they establish a program through NAWBO to mentor women entrepreneurs. Gilbert is Chair Elect of the National NAWBO Institute and founder of WealthWise Financial Services. Five-time Grand Slam tennis champion, Maria Sharapova, has experienced some monumental moments in her career: Among them are in 2004, with the life-changing win at Wimbledon, and in 2012, with the launch of her own successful candy company, Sugarpova. Today, in the spirit of philanthropy and women’s empowerment, Sharapova is proud to announce that she is partnering with the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) along with her team to mentor female entrepreneurs through the Sharapova Women’s Entrepreneur Program kicking off in Spring 2018 with a nationwide call for applicants from which up to six business women will be selected. Sharapova naturally turned to NAWBO as a partner for finding and identifying potential participants, and as a resource to help develop a robust curriculum for the 12-month-long mentorship program. “I only wish when I was starting out with my own company, Sugarpova that I had a group of mentors and the team I have now to help guide and support me. I recognize that supporting women – owned businesses by sharing expertise and valuable business resources can have a dramatic impact of growth of a business and can be a real catalyst for advancing the success of a business. Simply put, this partnership is about Women helping Women.” Over the past six years, Sharapova has learned the many business dimensions of starting a company with all the challenges and hurdles of the real-world experience along the way.
Being a young startup, Sharapova wore many hats in growing Sugarpova, her off-the-court business. With Sugarpova reaching global sales penetration with double-digit revenue growth the last several years, Sharapova decided the time is right to pay forward her well-honed business skills – joining with the hefty rolodex and strong relationships of her business team — and set aside time from her busy competitive tennis schedule to help other women entrepreneurs, via mentoring support and networking opportunities and allocating her team’s resources to help grow these women’s businesses. About the program: The Sharapova Women’s Entrepreneur Program will consist of 6 Women Business Owners that are selected from a nationwide call for applicants by Sharapova, in partnership with NAWBO and the NAWBO Institute. The program will run for 12 months, and is a cohort-based virtual/in-person hybrid program that will include mentorship, peer-to-peer support, mastermind and educational components to be delivered on a monthly basis by NAWBO and the Sharapova Business Resource Team led by Traub Consumer. Through the Sharapova Women’s Entrepreneur Program and NAWBO partnership, female businesswomen will be selected to receive support and resources from Sharapova’s longtime marketing and business development teams as well as the NAWBO Institute. Each of the women selected will receive support from a range of both NAWBO and Sharapova’s personal business resources in growing their business and in reaching their business goals.
Houston TV news station, KHOU, recently interviewed alumna Lisa Richardson, MBA ’14, about her popular bakery and coffee house, Blond Biscotti. Richardson opened the business in 2013 with her mother and they are planning more locations.
Richardson shares her story saying it had been her dream ever since she was seven years old to open a bakery. She got started on the path while a junior in high school when her grandmother signed her up for cake decorating lessons. Afterward, she started a successful wedding cake business that paid for a portion of her rent while she was an undergraduate student studying nutrition.
Richardson’s mom shared the dream of opening a bakery and had the idea to focus exclusively on biscotti. Later they realized that that coffee was the perfect pairing, and that was how the idea for Blond Biscotti came to fruition. The name comes from the very first biscotti that her mom made for her. Their biscotti and coffee are unique because the biscotti is soft-baked and their coffee is a “hand-poor-over” style. See the full interview.
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