A very diverse cohort starting their journey with LISA — Part 1
On the 28th of April LEAD LISA kickstarted Cohort 4 onto their innovative journey to create or grow their venture. This new cohort is just as diverse as the previous one; which adds greater opportunity for substantial growth and development. Here we introduce the founders and their projects.
Pago
Pago´s vision is to create value as a socially responsible venture and to be the first marketplace for exchanges of kindness initiatives between those with means and those in needs. It covers social and non financial activities.
Amy Pragel is an active Stanford LEAD alumni so she naturally heard about LISA. Having mentored founders of the past cohort, she was already familiar with the LISA program so she joined as a founder for her own journey.
Amy Pragel has spent the last 15+ years in the FinTech space in Sales, Product, and Strategy. She started off her career as a key accounts enterprise relationship manager and salesperson at Bloomberg and S&P Global covering investment banking and investment managers.
Amy subsequently was hired to start the Financial Services vertical at a startup later acquired by Rakuten. After several successful years, she has ventured into the blockchain space in Product Management. Amy is the founder and CEO of Pago, which aims to be a leader of kindness-centered social impact.
For over fifteen years, Alana Zavett Green has dedicated her career to nonprofit community outreach and engagement through effective fundraising, board development, event coordination, and program execution.
Alana has served in a variety of roles, which include consultant, development director, program director, volunteer manager, educator, and spokesperson. Her current and former clients include: Ujima Family Recovery Services, Fiscal Management Associates (FMA), San Francisco Parks Alliance, United Way, Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta, and more. Alana is proud to serve as the co-founder of Pago, a company that aims to be a leader in kindness-centered social impact.
Qadir Nawaz is a global tech leader with 16+ years of experience in transforming companies with the help of people, processes, and tools. Experienced in dynamic and fast-changing organizations; he has developed strategies for IT function and aligned them with the broader business strategy for the successful transformation of the digital landscape, while reducing cost by process optimization, automation, and optimizing the IT spend.
Qadir does non-profit and volunteer work with organizations in the U.S. and Pakistan and is proud to serve as co-founder of Pago, an organization that will lead the kindness-centered social impact.
VOXTR
With the acceleration of home office, hybrid workplaces and digital nomad ways of working, VOXTR aims to provide a platform that brings professional grade workplace capabilities into residential estates.
Tim Frenzel wanted to work on his own venture alongside his current corporate job. He heard about LISA as a Stanford LEAD alumni and applied to join cohort 4 in order to test his MVP.
Tim Frenzel, MBA, CFA, FRM is the founder of Mezza LLC, a cloud‐based data analytics, risk management, and asset allocation platform and consultancy services for financial institutions and startups. He is also Assistant Professor of Business Analytics, Quantitative Finance, and Real Estate at Chapman University since 2017.
Prior to Mezza, Tim was the Head Portfolio Manager of the top‐rated Global Opportunities Fund and was responsible for managing the Multi-Asset and Factor‐based investment strategies at Tecta Invest with approximately $1.2 billion in Assets under Management for more than 7 years. In addition, he developed and built several proprietary quantitative models and risk management strategies to mitigate risk across asset classes since he started his career in investment banking during the financial crisis in 2008.
Tim is a solution-focused data analytics expert, cross-functional collaborator with deep experience in financial markets and software engineering, well-versed liaison between the technical and the business world; an entrepreneur at heart, and a team player recognized for his impassioned but data-oriented approach and out-of-the-box thinking.
As CEO of VOXTR, he is interested in creating an innovative, scalable, and consumer-oriented platform that supports the workspace revolution.
Norman Gensinger is a Financial Analyst with 6 years of experience working as a consultant within the real estate industry having underwritten deals over $10B in total. He specializes in data analysis and financial modelling for commercial and residential real estate transactions for both private and institutional investors and developers. Norman is passionate about driving innovation in the way people live and work in physical properties — as Head of Real Estate at VOXTR he is responsible for identifying market trends, establishing corporate partnerships and supplying hybrid residential space to users and members.
FAIR: Fair and Accessible Home Insurance Rates
FAIR aims to design a platform to leverage AI and the known probabilities of natural disasters to provide a more accurate risk assessment when estimating the cost of home insurance.
Yuri Maximov, is a first time entrepreneur who wants to join a program that can support him on his journey. He heard about LISA as a Stanford alumni and is convinced being part of cohort 4 will be a good start for his venture.
Yury Maximov has graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology with a Ph.D. degree in Operations Research. Later on, he worked for several research centers and universities in Europe and the US. Now he is leading power grid protection and emergency control efforts at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Yury has won many awards and contributed many publications on very complex topics, which shows his unique capacity to learn and grow and his outstanding expertise to resolve and achieve excellence in every projects he contributes to.
There’s no doubt Yury will devote all this energy to succeed in this new venture.
AI for Zero Waste
AI for Zero Waste aims at improving the monitoring Waste processing in order to help policy makers and companies in the value chain to optimise the process and reduce landfill waste.
Dr Xin-Jing Wang wants to be active in the Stanford LEAD community and learn from other alumnis and entrepreneurs, so she naturally applied to join LISA as part of cohort 4 for her own venture.
Dr. Xin-Jing Wang is a Senior Software Engineer at Google, based at Mountain View. Before joining Google, she worked for Facebook as an Applied Research Scientist and Microsoft Research as a Researcher. She has a solid R&D background in Information Retrieval, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, and Software Programming.
She studied at the LEAD program from the Graduate School of Business of Stanford in 2021–2022. She obtained her PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, China. Her LISA project is named “AI for Zero Waste”. She aims to leverage AI technologies to reduce landfill waste.
LEAD Incubator and Start-ups Accelerator (LISA)
More info on LISA — GSB-LEAD-LISA
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