CEO TeVido™ BioDevices
Venture Executive, EDCO Ventures
Executive in Residence
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.
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. 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 Chair of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund Advisory Committee. She writes periodically as an Entrepreneur Columnist for the Austin Business Journal.
@RampCorp www.twitter.com/RampCorp
LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/terrychasehazell
CFO in Residence
Sue Georgen-Saad draws on more than thirty years of progressively complex financial and operational management experience in public accounting and consulting, and has held numerous executive management positions at publicly and privately held entities.
She led a full-service consulting practice providing investment and managerial services to private and publicly traded companies including numerous M&A, “turn-around” and complex transactional negotiations, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA and/or DCAA evaluations, preparation of SEC filings and international treasury, as well as asset liability management. Her career started in the audit department at KPMG Peat Marwick in Manhattan, which she parlayed into executive level roles as CFO at numerous publicly traded companies including drkoop.com, IntelliQuest Information Group and Clinicor Inc. Sue’s work has spanned a variety of industries including technology, financial services, insurance and life sciences, and she has guided three SEC-reporting companies in raising more than $150 million in cumulative public filings.
Sue is a Certified Public Accountant and holds a BBA in Accounting from the University of Notre Dame.
RSE Consulting, Managing Director
Entrepreneur in Residence
Grace Lanni is the Managing Director with RSE Consulting and a certified career manager. RSE focuses on supporting clients launching new businesses and expanding their current markets and strategic partnerships. These efforts often include professional branding, executive development, and complete career transitions. With 20+ years of experience in hi-tech, internet and traditional business, Lanni successfully evaluates customer needs to employ solutions that solve real business problems.
Ms. Lanni is recognized as a solutions innovator, and business leader, and often speaks about technology innovation creating opportunities within vertical industries. Prior experience includes building intellectual capital and raising equity funds for corporate growth. Lanni’s executive skills are immediately apparent as she is a dynamic leader; process orientated, organized, disciplined, and a teacher as well as a student among professionals.
The founder and CEO of an Austin Ventures funded and KPMG STANDOUT STARTUP award winner, patent holder, and author of ebook series, StartUp Secret Sauce, Lanni now leverages her entrepreneurial and technical skills to accelerate growth for her clients. Grace also sits on the Board of the Professional Entrepreneur Institute and Change My Town. Lanni earned Bachelor of Science degrees in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering from Syracuse University.
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.
Technology Commercialization Coach
Rosemary French is a specialist in the commercialization of early-stage technologies, turning faculty-led research into marketable products and services. As a university-industry liaison, Ms. French honed her skills in intellectual property management, marketing of university-based technologies, strategic university-industry partnership formation, and start-up creation through her previous work at the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas at Austin, in which she jointly managed a portfolio of over 100 life science patents within an office that generated over $14 MM in annual revenue. Ms. French has worked with over 75 innovators at the local and international level to orchestrate strategic university-industry partnerships for technology R&D and has helped negotiate over 15 patent license agreements.
Ms. French received her BA in Biology and Spanish from the University of Texas at Austin, and was awarded University Honors and admission into the National Scholars Honors Society. Today, Ms. French provides technology commercialization mentoring services in several Spanish-speaking countries, and in addition, she has an Emergency Medical Technician Basic certification and much experience on the ambulance. Ms. French helps partner university-based innovators with the appropriate hospital research partners, FDA regulatory consultants, clinical trial partners, potential licensees, and other strategic collaborators to turn their ideas into market-ready products.
True to the Longhorn mission, “what starts here changes the world”, Ms. French’s trains and mentors budding entrepreneurs, innovators, and technology transfer specialists to fine-tune their skills in all aspects of early-stage technology commercialization. In her current role as an Innovation Strategist at the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, Ms. French provides extensive training and mentoring services to innovation leaders in Colombia, Mexico and Portugal. Ms. French makes repeated, long-term independent trips to Portugal to provide on-site, one-on-one training, offering mentorship and active university-industry connections to dozens of fledgling entrepreneurs, technology transfer officers and faculty innovators at over15 public universities and affiliated incubators across Portugal.
Director of Strategy, Aipil Logistics
Market Validation Consultant
Ms. McDonald leads Aipil Logistics' corporate strategic planning department; Aipil is a Chicago based market research and strategic planning firm she founded in 2009. Her expertise in market research and validation has assisted technology companies save on average $300K per project in R&D, advertising, and other expenses related to failed product launches by preparing the client with sound, market driven research to launch the best product to the best market segment. As Director of Strategy, Ms. McDonald successfully evaluates client's industries, works closely with them to craft articulate and meaningful business plans, writes technology road maps, and advises on strategic plays. In this role, Ms. McDonald doubles her efforts by leading Aipil Logistics in the same diligent approach.
As a consultant, Ms. McDonald teaches small and medium size companies, government organizations, and individuals her two step validation approach to vetting a technology, service, or product prior to launch. Her clients quickly learn how to determine if their product is right for the market, how to modify if needed, and how to write a technology road map. As a market validation expert, Ms. McDonald has successfully assists individual clients meet their business goals by teaching them the skills needed to quickly evaluate technologies, modify products, and determine the best market segment all to maximize market saturation and revenues. Her clients have reported savings from $5k to as much as $455K on projects they have worked with her on.
Ms. McDonald has a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas. Prior to launching Aipil, she worked with emerging technologies from India, Korea, NASA, and Texas Tech and covered industries from bio-medical, semiconductors, agriculture, and software. Prior to a career change into the technology field, she worked as a licensed interior architect in Chicago and has a Masters of Architecture.