Experienced Voices Moderated By: Jeanne Gray, Publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today(R)

First-time entrepreneurs often have great business ideas that provoke their passion to start a business.  Our guests, Stacy Pena and Brian Engleman, are Fund Managers for the San Diego Angel Conference and they will share their experience as to how angel investors view founding entrepreneurs and the business ideas they pitch for funding.  Don't miss this chance to gain insight into how to best position your startup to gain the support of investors.

Join author Mark Atkeson on his 30-plus year journey of living and working in China, an eyewitness to China's great transformation into a superpower.  As both an entrepreneur and investor, Mark shares his firsthand experiences in a country that lifted 800 million people out of poverty over that period, spurred in large part by innovating Chinese entrepreneurs. In his book "Risky Business in Rising China" Mark offers why the U.S. will remain competitive with China, identifying both the country's strengths and challenges. 

Not many college students can claim that their startup won $100,000 at a pitch competition held at the San Diego Angel Conference and then also gained seed funding.  Student athlete Dominyck Bullard, now student entrepreneur, accomplished both soon after launching his digital media startup Athletiverse. His company manages the digital assets of colleges, universities, and collectives, supporting student-athletes and athletic departments. Dominyck shares how he navigated from the initial business concept through key milestones that landed him the support of outside investors---positioning his startup to scale.

Hear Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder of SEQSTER, a healthcare technology startup.  Ardy shares his journey to solve a giant pain point in the healthcare industry, achieving funding and his one-on-one meeting with Bill Gates to discuss his disruptive model. SEQSTER is on the frontline of healthcare innovation, breaking down health data silos, using an enterprise operating system which aggregates disparate health data from a range of sources to provide a single, 360-degree view of a patient in real-time. 

Sri Solur, CEO of Kenmore Brands at Transformco, takes listeners through his journey of transforming the Kenmore brand in today’s digital world, leaving behind its one-hundred-year history as a top Sears appliance brand. Hear how through his leadership he changed the company’s "retail-captive" culture to embrace innovation, while also applying his 25+ years of experience as a Chief Product Officer at top product-based high-tech companies such as Hewlett Packard and Berkshire Grey.

Finding investor funding for a startup is an enormous challenge, William Santana Li, an intrapreneur at Ford Motor and its youngest senior executive at the age of 28 provides frank insight about startup funding—having raised over $120 million for his robots venture Knightscope.  He shares the unconventional and visionary mindset that enabled him to move his startup forward despite great obstacles.