DEN Business Plan Competition at Tuck
Judging panels:
April 24th (Prelims)
Judge 1: Audrey Kania (World Poker Tour, Disney)
Judge 2: Mark Wolf
Judge 3: Chris Pearson (CEO of Sound Innovations)
May 8th (Finals)
Judge 1: Phil Ferneau or Matt Rightmire (Borealis Ventures)
Judge 2: Tom Caputo (ATV Ventures)
Judge 3: Tillman Gerngross (Founder of GlycoFi, Adimab)
Judge 4: Jay Benson (Vice President, Global Strategic Planning, Tele Atlas)
Audrey Kania
Audrey D. Kania T’90 has a wealth of start-up and business management experience. She is a former Senior Vice President of World Poker Tour, Disney Executive and business strategy consultant.
Over the course of her twenty-year career, Kania has launched seven new business ventures for both entrepreneurial and Fortune 50 companies. During her tenure with the Walt Disney Company, Kania managed the new venture development efforts for two divisions of Disney's Consumer Products Group, where she launched a multi-million dollar film venture and expanded the Winnie-the-Pooh brand into a new global category. Kania has since consulted to major sports franchises, television broadcast companies, and numerous successful internet-based businesses on start-up and marketing strategies.
Prior to Disney, she was a COO of an entrepreneurial toy company in Boston, worked in Strategic Planning and Corporate Development for FMC'S chemical division in Philadelphia, developed marketing strategies for Apple Computer, and pioneered the integration of digital imaging technology into the printing and package design industries for Continental Can Company in Connecticut.
Kania earned her B.S. degree from Carnegie-Mellon University in Management Science and Printing Technology, an M.B.A. from The Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College and studied Creative Writing at Oxford University, England.
Mark Wolf
Mark Wolf is a successful Senior Executive / Entrepreneur with management experience in a diverse range of industries including wireless and fiber optic communications, semiconductors, and electronic components.
Upon completing his two degrees from MIT, he was an early employee at start-up company, Tachonics Corp, one of the first GaAs component companies supplying products to the wireless industry. Mark then embarked on a 9 year, successful career at M/A-COM (purchased by Tyco), where he eventually became the Vice President/General Manager of Global Optoelectronics, a $400M optical component business supplying products to the telecommunications and data communications industries. Mark then decided to return to his entrepreneurial roots and became CEO of venture-backed, MIT spinout company, AmberWave Systems, the leader in strained silicon technology.
After almost 4 successful years, Mark went on to found and run Chacham Consulting, a consulting company focused on working with and sometimes investing in small and start-up companies trying to grow their businesses.
Mark is currently the President and CEO of Humanbook, a web 2.0 company focused on creating a global directory of people and their connections. He is an active Mentor with MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service, a world renowned organization, established to grow and educate Entrepreneurs and start-up companies around the world, and an early member of First Founders, Inc., an organization set up to spin out and found companies based on university intellectual property.
Chris Pearson
Chris is currently CEO of Sound Innovations, a startup in White River Junction, VT which seeks to commercialize noise-cancelling headphone technology developed at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.
Chris graduated from Swarthmore College in 1995 with a BA in History and earned his MBA from the Tuck School of Business in 2003. Prior to Tuck, Chris worked in the pharmaceutical industry with a focus on economic modeling and process design of clinical research outsourcing. In his second year at Tuck, Chris focused on finding a start-up opportunity through the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network (DEN).
Upon graduation, Chris worked with several DEN teams before co-founding Sound Innovations in 2004 to commercialize a proprietary Active Noise Reduction (ANR) technology developed and patented at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Sound Innovations’ mission is to be the leader in high-end communication headsets for the military, first responder, and industrial markets. Sound Innovation’s first product, the ACE™, is an Active Noise Reduction communication earplug for military aircrew. The ACE™ has been developed with funding from the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force and is currently in qualification testing as a critical component of the next generation U.S. military flight helmet.
Phil Ferneau
Phil is Managing Director and Co-Founder of Hanover-based Borealis Ventures. Phil capitalizes on over ten years of experience working with entrepreneurs in the extended Dartmouth College network to identify and support the most promising technology commercialization opportunities. He currently is a Director on the boards of Borealis portfolio companies Avedro, Bar Harbor Biotechnology (chair) and FetchDog. Phil led previous Borealis investments in Medical Metrx Solutions (acquired by AIG Altaris Health Partners) and GlycoFi (acquired by Merck & Co.).
Phil joined Borealis from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, where he was the founding Executive Director of the Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship and an adjunct professor teaching venture capital and entrepreneurship topics. Under his leadership and day-to-day management, the Center developed innovative research, education and outreach initiatives at Dartmouth and in Boston, New York, and Silicon Valley. Phil helped to assemble an active Advisory Board for the Center consisting of prominent venture capital GPs, institutional LPs, entrepreneurs, and other private equity industry leaders. He remains a Fellow at the Center and teaches an advanced venture capital seminar each year. Phil is also a Fellow of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network and a board director of the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center.
Prior to joining the Tuck faculty, Phil held senior strategy and business development roles at a privately-held application software company in New Hampshire. Earlier in private legal practice, he counseled technology startups, Fortune 500 companies and foreign governments on sensitive trade, tax, and investment matters.
Phil received an A.B. degree from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law and a M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (with High Distinction). A Tuck Scholar, Phil also received the Tuck School’s Adams Award for Entrepreneurship and the Walter Jacobs Prize for Intellectual Leadership.
Tom Caputo
Tom is currently a Vice President at Advanced Technology Ventures. Tom joined ATV in 2007 and focuses on investments in the software and services, internet and infrastructure market sectors in ATV's Waltham, MA office. Tom is most actively involved with ATV portfolio companies [x+1] and Sanovi.
Prior to joining ATV, Tom was Group Product Manager at Microsoft for Windows, where he developed business strategy and managed execution of the Windows Independent Software Vendor (ISV) ecosystem and initiatives. In this role, Tom structured co-marketing arrangements with key software partners and developed programs to grow the multi-billion Windows software market. During his tenure with Microsoft, Tom was also a Senior Product Manager in the Developer and Platform Evangelism group where he marketed the Windows Server platform and Visual Studio developer tools to early adopter customers and software partners. Prior to Microsoft, he was Product Manager of QuickBooks at Intuit; and Business Manager of E-commerce Strategy at Capital One Financial, where he drove online customer acquisition efforts and gained international experience working in the company’s London office. He started his career as a Consultant with Mercer Management Consulting. Tom is also the founder and developer of the profitable online golfer community site, MyScorecard.com.
He holds an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.A. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Biophysical Chemistry, with Honors, from Dartmouth College.
Tillman Gerngross
Dr. Gerngross is a Professor of Bioengineering at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College and an Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Biology and Chemistry at Dartmouth. Gerngross is Co-Founder of biotechnology companies GlycoFi and AdiMaB.
Gerngross received a M.S. (Dipl. Ing.) in Chemical Engineering (1989) and later a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. Following his studies in Austria he became a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later a Postdoctoral Associate from 1991 to 1993. From 1993 to 1998 he headed the fermentation and process development group at Metabolix Inc., a small startup company in Cambridge, MA. In 1998 he left industry to join the faculty at Dartmouth where his research has focused on protein engineering, glycoprotein engineering in yeast, and life cycle analysis of competing manufacturing technologies.
In 2000, Professor Gerngross co-founded GlycoFi, Inc., and served as the company’s Chief Scientific Officer until its acquisition by Merck in the spring 2006. In the fall of 2006 Dr. Gerngross joined SV Life Sciences as a venture partner where he advises on investments in the bio-therapeutics area. In 2007, Dr. Gerngross co-founded AdiMaB, Inc. with Prof. Dane Wittrup of MIT, to develop a novel platform for the discovery of human antibodies in yeast.
Jay Benson
Jay Benson is vice president of global strategic planning at Tele Atlas located in Lebanon, NH. He is responsible for the company's strategy and pricing. Since joining Tele Atlas in 1999, Benson has held several positions including director of business development and vice president of development. In these roles Benson has helped build the company's presence in several new markets, including the evolving location based services (LBS) marketplace covering navigation, fleet management, internet and wireless navigation applications. Prior to joining Tele Atlas Benson was a management consultant. Benson holds a bachelor's degree in geography from Dartmouth College and a master's in business administration from Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business Administration.