Terry Chase Hazell

Director, RampCorp

Entrepreneur in Residence

Terry Chase Hazell has advanced innovation and entrepreneurship as a successful start-up executive spinning out companies from Universities, as a university employee advancing innovation, and as a university advisor implementing new programs helping women become entrepreneurs and investors.

Her biotech-specific expertise is recombinant protein production, process scale-up and cGMP manufacturing. Hazell started her career in biotechnology at Martek Biosciences as a student researcher working with algae and oil production. Her first leadership position was managing the bioprocess scale-up facility at the University of Maryland where she developed and scaled the production of dozens of biologic products. She then managed clinical manufacturing projects at one of the most successful independent contract manufacturing organizations, BioScience Contract Production Corporation. Hazell was the founding CEO of a protein manufacturing and University of Maryland spinout company, Chesapeake PERL. She led the company from a University idea to a revenue producing and growing company. In 2003, she led the company through a merger with a competitor. Hazell co-founded SD Nanosciences, Inc., a start-up company spinning out of the University of Maryland. SD Nanosciences’ nanoparticle-based technology enables vaccine development and drug delivery. In Austin, Hazell served as a fractional Vice President of Terapio Corporation where she primarily focused on operations and outsourcing pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Today, she leads RampCorp to increase the number of women running and launching scalable companies and is a member of the National Advisory Board for Springboard Enterprises, helping women access capital. She leads conferences and boot camps for entrepreneurship an led the entrepreneurship tracks of the Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Texas Conferences for Women. She is a Charter Member of the Startup America Partnership's Women's Entrepreneurship Working Group. She serves on several start-up company boards and advisory boards, is a member of the selection committee for the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.  She writes periodically as an Entrepreneur Columnist for the Austin Business Journal.

@RampCorp www.twitter.com/RampCorp

 & LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/terrychasehazell

Laura Bosworth-Bucher

CEO TeVido™ BioDevices

Venture Executive, EDCO Ventures

Executive in Residence

Director of Operations

Laura Bosworth is CEO and co-founder of TeVido™ BioDevices, developing innovative skin-graft substitute medical devices for wound-healing, burns and reconstructive surgery. Currently at EDCO Ventures, she mentors innovative “start-ups” on all aspects of strategic planning from critical hiring, business development to capitalization. As Executive-in-Residence with a Texas State University applied entrepreneurship program she coaches aspiring women entrepreneurs, in El Paso and Austin, to develop their own high-growth (more than a $1 Million) companies.    She has been a partner in Austin Platinum Investments, a property investment firm, since 2004

Ms. Bosworth is a dynamic executive with over 22 years of cross-functional industry experience.  She led numerous strategy, marketing and engineering organizations both as Executive Director at Dell Computers and at IBM. With over 15 years in product development and customer insights at both the engineering and marketing level, she has experience launching new business start-ups within a larger corporation.  

With a B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso she started her career in manufacturing process development for IBM Austin. She quickly moved into management where she led custom software development projects and launched a Technical Marketing Center earning a General Manager’s Award for her contributions to sales.  At Dell, she led organizations in building strategic business partnerships, software product marketing and created multiple technical sales support functions: enabling over $500M in sales. She launched a professional services business unit and has expertise in support services.  Using her cross-functional and international experience, she developed corporate wide strategies that reduced operating costs by ~$120M and improved customer satisfaction by 40-50%.

Ms. Bosworth is honored to serve as Vice-Chair for UTEP’s College of Engineering Advisory Board.  In Austin, she serves on several boards in her community and volunteers as a Spanish interpreter at a Healthcare Clinic that serves low-income individuals who could not otherwise afford medical care. 

Tina Cannon

Co-founder and COO, Booqoos, Inc.

Entrepreneur in Residence

A seasoned entrepreneur, Cannon was the CEO and co-founder of PetsMD.com, the leading online pet health resource acquired by Pet360 in 2011. She is also the co-founder of Book-a-Vet.com, an online, real-time veterinary appointment application. Cannon has been a featured presenter at various technology events and has mentored numerous start-up businesses. Prior to her entrepreneur experience, she was a financial auditor and business consultant in the private sector. Cannon graduated from Texas State University with a Bachelors degree in Accounting.

Mary Haskett

CEO, Tactical Information Systems

Entrepreneur in Residence

Mary Haskett is a co-founder and President of Tactical Information Systems (TIS), a company developing a unique approach to biometric matching as an Internet cloud-based service, allowing the use of this technology in a wide variety of new consumer applications. She drives the business strategy and marketing direction, as well as manages the day-to-day operations of the business. Tactical Information Systems is her third venture.

Ms. Haskett’s first company was a skydiving school she co-founded when she was a student at Texas A&M University, where she earned a M.S. in Education Technology after receiving a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from The University of Texas at Dallas. The skydiving school was bootstrapped into a profitable business that operated three airplanes, taught thousands of students how to skydive and hosted regional skydiving competitions, including one broadcast on ESPN. During those years, she competed in skydiving at the collegiate level. Ms. Haskett won a bronze medal in the first World Freestyle Competition in 1990.

After selling the skydiving school in 1997, Ms. Haskett began in the defense industry, developing embedded simulation-based training for the Advanced Tomahawk Weapon Control System (ATWCS). In 1998, Ms. Haskett founded HCI Training, Inc., an Austin, Texas-based training development company she ran profitably until it was acquired by Ideal Innovations, Inc. in 2007. HCI Training was also bootstrapped and growth was funded through revenue.

At HCI Training, Ms. Haskett managed development and deployment of training programs for a number of clients, including Dell, Sybase, USAA as well as the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. Ms. Haskett was a pioneer in the concept of the virtual office; using a set of innovative web-based tools to foster online collaboration, she managed a virtual office responsible for projects worth millions of dollars, and earned a profit in a highly competitive, low-margin industry. Uniquely, she brought clients into the virtual team, allowing them to contribute to the design process from their offices.

In 2002, she was nominated as one of the Austin Business Journal's Profiles to Watch in tech-savvy Austin, Texas. Ms. Haskett has served on the boards of directors of the Austin chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the Austin chapter of the Association of Internet Professionals (AIP) and the International Interactive Communication Society (IICS). She presented at training industry conferences and trade shows including Online Learning, Training Director's Forum, Computer Training World and e-Learning.

After the acquisition by Ideal Innovations in 2007, Ms. Haskett was asked to stay on as the Vice President of Software and Training for I-3 to lead system integration teams responsible for providing comprehensive biometric solutions to both U.S. and foreign governments. She was responsible for managing the first satellite office of I-3, growing from 4 people to 20 people with a project budget of $15M. As part of this effort, she led a program to integrate Iraqi refugees into the company, as well as assist their assimilation into US culture. Her tenure with I-3 resulted in exposure to the cultures and related needs of a variety of clients, including customers and end-users in Iraq, Kurdistan and Afghanistan. She has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan on a number of occasions, and was responsible for deploying the National Afghanistan biometric database system.

Monica Moreno

President, Job Connection

Regional Director Texas Entrepreneur Networks

Entrepreneur in Residence

Monica Moreno is the president of two companies: The Job Connection-a temporary staffing service, and The Outsource Connection - a call center staffing and management company. She is a 17 year veteran of the staffing industry.  .

Moreno started out in the family business under the franchise of TRC Staffing-El Paso.  She grew the TRC El Paso franchise to one million billable hours in a one year time period. TRC El Paso was the first and only franchise out of 80 branches to achieve this goal. At its peak the branch was billing 40,000 hours per week. In 2000, the franchise was sold and Monica launched her two current companies. She was instrumental in reacquiring all but one of her previous clients after a one year non-compete expired with TRC Staffing in 2001.

Ms Moreno’s business experience and network contacts are highly valuable she embarks on a new journey as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Texas State University’s applied entrepreneurship program designed to teach aspiring women entrepreneurs to develop their own high growth, scalable company. Monica has also accepted an appointment as the Regional Director for Texas Entrepreneur Networks which provides networking, mentoring and funding at the Angel investor level. Her responsibility will include organizing open funding forums in the El Paso area.

Monica Moreno is a graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso. She was awarded a Bachelors of Business Administration degree with a concentration in Human Resource Management in 1996 and a Masters of Business administration in Management in 1999.

Monica has current and past affiliations with many organizations in El Paso. She is currently a member of the El Paso Society for Human Resource Management and is a former board member. She is also a member of the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce and a volunteer for the Sun Bowl Association on the CBS Host Committee.

Leah Steinbrink

President, Nichenista Media, LLC

Marketer in Residence

Leah Steinbrink is the president and founder of Nichenista Media, LLC, a Central Texas Internet marketing firm dedicated to showing business owners how to drive sales and build online visibility through social networking and tailored branding strategies.

With an eye for the future of business processes and an intuitive sense of ‘the next big thing,’ Steinbrink is known for working smarter rather than harder, for introducing efficiencies before they become ‘mainstream,’ and for encouraging creative solutions to problem solving.

From 2008 until the beginning of 2011, Steinbrink served as the first and only inbound marketing development officer and community manager for Texas State University, managing online relationships with alumni and prospective donors. It was this experience in social media and relationship building that she saw the opportunity to create a business that focused on social networking.

Responsible for creating the platforms by which these audiences were engaged, Steinbrink’s was one of the first campus departments to use social media channels to create alumni-university dialogue. As the community manager, she built and managed several Facebook pages, connecting more than 10,000 university alumni and fans.

From 2003 to 2008, Steinbrink managed several communication projects within Texas State’s Information Technology Division. Here, she focused on streamlining campus-wide technology-related communications, implementing a proactive communication strategy and spearheading various technology-related collateral projects and managing special events.

While at Texas State, she also taught a popular professional development workshop, “Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say; a Survival Guide to Email Etiquette on Campus.”

Prior to the years that led to her entrepreneurial pursuits, Steinbrink amassed nearly two decades of communication experience – from television anchor to features writer.

After graduating from Texas State University-San Marcos with two Bachelor of Arts degrees, one in Political Science and the other in Mass Communication, Steinbrink anchored and reported news in central Texas and upstate New York for three years. 

She went on to serve as Marketing Director for La Madeleine French Bakery, where she directed all online and offline marketing functions for the $200 million, 60-restaurant national chain, and was instrumental in introducing the concept of “database” marketing to the company. It was here that Steinbrink pushed for bringing much of what had been outsourced, in house, controlling marketing costs and encouraging higher levels of staff productivity.

She later oversaw North America communications for more than 5,000 Conoco Dealers as Communications Coordinator, Conoco, North America. Steinbrink was the first to recommend Conoco take advantage of an intranet system by which N.A. dealers could collaborate in real time with corporate executives, reducing costs across the board – from travel, communications and shipping costs.

But Steinbrink always dreamed of running her own business. She earned an Entrepreneurship Certificate from Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University in 1999. And in 2010, completed a 35-week course called ACTiVATE – a program aimed at fitting women to run or lead scalable, technology-based businesses.

In the end, this was the impetus she needed to finally cut loose and join the ranks of the self-employed. Something she hopes to share with others who find themselves in similar situations.

Steinbrink lives in Buda with her husband, her mother, two (usually) fabulous children, and three semi-talented dogs. She works in a virtual world that knows no borders and never ceases to entertain.