Jim Nolen, Distinguished Researcher and Lecturer in Finance at The University of Texas
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Jim Nolen is President of CFO Services, Inc., a middle-market business consulting firm specializing in raising capital, business valuations, and merger and acquisition advisory services. He also serves on the boards of directors of an independent community bank, a medical distribution company, a recycling firm, an event rental company, an employment services company, and an enterprise software company. Mr. Nolen has owned and operated a printing operation and managed a waste management company and an industrial lighting company. Mr. Nolen is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the Department of Finance. He received his B.B.A. and M.B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Nolen has received numerous teaching awards. His research and teaching interests include entrepreneurship and corporate finance, including business valuation and mergers & acquisitions.
Mr. Nolen will discuss his research and where venture investment stands in Texas.
Tom Bachar, Founder and CEO of Pei
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Tom Bachar is the CEO and CoFounder of Pei, an app for automatic retailer cashback, in bitcoin or cash, on existing credit and debit cards. Originally from Los Angeles, Tom moved his startup to Austin to participate in the Sputnik ATX accelerator during the January 2018 batch. Tom met his co-founder, Michael Jannain, in college while the two studied Finance and Computer Science and worked together to trade derivatives based on data set strategies. This passion ultimately led them to explore solutions for making finance work for people in convenient ways. Prior to Pei, Tom led Financial DevOps at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and was pivotal in merging the Global Delivery Department with Computer Science Company into what is now DXC, a Fortune 500 enterprise IT company. Six months since moving their startup to Austin, Pei has the largest merchant support for cashback rewards and the team has been growing exponentially with expertise from Anaconda, Uber, and JP Morgan. Having currently raised their Seed round, Pei has dis-intermediated the card rewards market and is on track to innovate an archaic industry.
Tom will speak about why he moved his startup to Austin, Texas from Los Angeles.Â
David Veal is Chief Investment Officer of the City of Austin Employees’ Retirement System, a $2.7 billion defined benefit pension plan serving more than 16,000 beneficiaries. Â
He has held senior positions at both the Texas Teachers and Texas Employees Retirement Systems, worked for Morgan Stanley as an equity research analyst, and served as a US Navy officer. Â
He earned an MBA from the University of Michigan and a bachelor of industrial engineering from Auburn University.
Zeynep Young has 20 years of entrepreneurship and consulting experience in the tech sector. She currently serves as a Venture Partner at Next Coast Ventures. Zeynep was the founder / CEO of Double Line Partners (DLP), an ed-tech data company she bootstrapped and grew to $18M in revenue prior to a successful exit. Prior to DLP, Zeynep was a portfolio manager with the Dell Foundation and an Associate Principal at McKinsey. Zeynep was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist in Central Texas in 2013 and was on the Forbes list of Women Who Built Outstanding Companies. Zeynep has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and a BA from Rice University. Â
Once part of the strategic teams of McKinsey and Motorola, Sputnik ATX Managing Partner and CEO Dr. Oksana Malysheva used her skills and passions in leadership and education to shift focus to building strategies for positive social change and innovation. Dr. Malysheva holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in physics. Originally from the Ukraine, Malysheva found Austin to be a location with the structure and flexibility to host a new accelerator for local business growth. As a venture capitalist, her interest in elevating the trajectory of people to reach their fullest potential is central to her mission and her vision in all of her professional endeavors.Â
Cat Dizon is the Executive Director of the Alamo Angels, the San Antonio-based group of Angel Investors. She also serves as Chief Operating Officer of Active Capital, a venture firm focused on leading seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies. Prior to Active Capital, she spent 11 years at Rackspace leading in areas of Corporate Development- M&A, Growth Businesses and Staff Operations.  Cat has called San Antonio home for over two decades. She is the proud spouse of a former US Marine, has one young daughter and is a graduate of the University of Texas at San Antonio holding a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminal Justice, with an emphasis in Legal Studies.
Andrea Caldwell is a Doctoral Candidate in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses primarily on early stage startups and accelerators, with a particular emphasis on social ventures and underrepresented founders. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores the impact that mentors and advisors have on how early stage ventures form and refine their strategies. Before joining the PhD program at UT, Ms. Caldwell worked in marketing strategy at DuPont and held positions in knowledge management and business development at Deloitte. She has undergraduate degrees in Marketing, Spanish, and International Studies from Penn State University and an MBA from the University of Notre Dame.
