Past Entrepreneur-in-Residence participants
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ALEX 'PAPU' RINCON Alex Rincon, Jr., more commonly known as “Papu” has a passion for innovative ideas, design, marketing, business development and establishing strong networks with individuals & communities. He is an entrepreneur with a focus on community and a strong sense of social responsibility. Today, he is the founder & owner of a successful Montana lifestyle brand “fourOsix” which promotes art, music, style, forward thinking and Montana living. He chose to open his business in Helena, Montana, because he saw a need to help grow the arts, music & recreation in his community, specifically for the youth in his community. He is now looking to extend the fourOsix brand & message outside of Helena to other Montana communities, as well as regionally & select international partners. The United States White House honored Papu as a “Champion of Change”. The U.S. Small Business Administration honored Papu as Montana’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and Downtown Helena Inc. honored Papu as Helena, Montana’s Business Person of the Year. Currently, Papu serves as a member of the Board of Trustees at Carroll College. He graduated from Carroll College in 2003 with a triple major, including a B.A. in Business Administration with a special interest in Marketing, Management and International Business; a B.A. in Spanish Language & Literature; and a Multi-Disciplinary major in Visual Arts with an interest in Graphic Design. Papu strives to live life with purpose, and right now his purpose is to love life & promote a healthy, active lifestyle through his brand fourOsix. Living in Montana, he has learned how important quality of life is, and takes every opportunity available to play in the mountains, lakes & rivers. Papu has been snowboarding for over two decades, and does a lot of his thinking from a chairlift or while hiking in the snowy mountains of Montana’s backcountry. In the summer, he mountain bikes, rides his motorcycle, camps, hammocks & fly-fishes for trout on the majestic rivers near his home in Helena, Montana. Chapul started with only an $8,000 investment and raised $16,000 on Kickstarter (after setting a goal of $10,000). Last year, Pat pitched Chapul on Shark Tank and garnered a $50,000 investment from Mark Cuban for a share of the company. Pat's career path has taken him from surf guide, to whitewater rafting guide, to hydrologist, to now insect-eating entrepreneur, all driven for his passion to ensure a more sustainable water future. After a year of hitchhiking through Mexico and Central America, he returned to the US and received a M.S. in Watershed Hydrology, intending to use his education towards solving global water dilemmas he witnessed in his travels. His concern for our water future here at home increased as he observed the disproportionate rate of water consumption vs. availability. His early career path focused on agricultural water conservation, the largest global consumer of freshwater resources. After having worked for public water-planning agencies, Pat decided to address the issue from the consumer level, when he co-founded Chapul in 2012. His mission now is to introduce insects into Western cuisine as a more water-resource efficient form of food. The intent is to create a consumer demand that will drive changes at the agricultural level towards a more sustainable food system.
Andrew is a veteran of business-to-business marketing and the software-as-a-service space. As a passionate business technologist, Andrew is leading Elixiter to deliver on the promise of high impact marketing automation. Prior to founding Elixiter, he served in a wide range of functions at RightNow Technologies (acquired by Oracle) overseeing product messaging, campaigns, web properties, marketing automation, events, and marketing analytics which helped drive eight years of continual growth from 16 million to 200+ million dollars in revenue. Andrew holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and is a native of Montana.
Jeanne Callahan has experience working in the private, public, and non-profit sectors across a wide range of industries. For the first part of her career she worked for The Walt Disney Company, Fox Sports Net, AT&T, and several software startup entities, with an emphasis on developing sales and marketing strategies and writing business plans. While living in Denver between 1996 and 2012, she owned and operated a number of businesses, either on her own or in partnership with others. The businesses included a real estate development and construction company, a retail liquor store, a specialty metal fabrication shop, a landscape design and construction business, and a cabinetry business. While she credits the Fortune 500 companies with teaching her business planning skills and marketing savvy, she learned how to buy, sell, expand, and wind down small businesses through trial and error. Under the auspices of a federal grant from the Economic Development Administration, Ms. Callahan designed and launched a women's entrepreneurship center at the University of Denver Women's College in 2011. The center became a physical and virtual hub for women-owned businesses in the Denver metro area. She later served as an Executive Business Mentor in the Real Business Experience program at Butler University while living in Indianapolis. Ms. Callahan has an MBA from Columbia University in New York City and a BA in International Studies from Miami University of Ohio.
CHRIS MUMFORD Chris Mumford is the founder of Joe Start up, a StreetSmart entrepreneurial education website which includes whiteboard animation, easy-to-use start up plan builder and social network. During the last 15 years, Mumford founded several businesses in the US and Asia. He served in roles as CEO, CFO, COO, VP Sales and VP Design while raising over $30 million from angel, VC and private equity for several projects. He was an investment banker for 7 years. His experience includes consumer products, technology, education, and social networks. Mumford is also the cofounder of Launch Chapel Hill, a venture lab and co-working space. He is on the faculty of Kenan-Flagler business school at UNC-Chapel Hill. He grew up in Chapel Hill NC where he graduated from UNC-CH with a degree in Philosophy with Honors. Mumford has two children with his wife Joelle Permutt. He enjoys competing in triathlons, mountain & cyclocross biking, fly fishing and coaching. One day, he hopes to finish editing his novel about his experiences wandering around the world.
Rob Irizarry has spent 25 years in the technology industry, working with hardware and software in the finance, garment and automotive industries. He's worked in and with public and private sector organizations from 10 people to the Fortune 10 building systems, processes and teams in the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South Africa and spent a decade living in Asia. After his stint in Asia, Rob returned to the US & joined an East Coast startup that pioneered smart card financial systems that were sold to banks, universities and the US Navy. While working in this venture, he started using software from RightNow Technologies and joined the company shortly thereafter when the financial systems company was acquired by ICL/Fujitsu. Rob was an early employee at RightNow Technologies in Bozeman, joining in 1999 and working in a variety of roles in Sales, Product Management and the Customer Experience group. RightNow was a pioneer in the multi-tenant Software as a Service revolution, providing Customer Experience software that served about 2,000 of the world’s largest consumer firms like Nike, Motorola and AMEX, becoming one of the world’s 100 largest web sites in terms of traffic. After Oracle's $1.8 billion acquisition of RightNow in 2012, Rob moved to the next phase of his career, founding StartupBozeman.com to help the Montana startup ecosystem grow. Since 2014, he has been a part of the Oracle Service Cloud Center of Excellence. Rob has a Bachelors degree in Electronic Engineering and has three patents pending on technology he has helped develop. Greg Ruff is the founder of White Space Strategy, a strategic market innovation consulting firm based on the principles in his upcoming book White Space. Unlike other “innovation focused” approaches, Mr. Ruff’s White Space Strategy approach emphasizes identifying and capturing new, strategically important market opportunities in unaddressed and under-addressed market spaces to achieve rapid adoption and to subsume and extend existing markets. This “market innovation” approach to strategy ensures both strategic market potential and sustainable competitive advantage to build successful new companies and markets. Greg has been consulting to high tech companies since 1987 when he joined Booz, Allen and Hamilton as a senior engagement manager after a 13 year career in sales, marketing and management at Hewlett Packard. At Booz Allen, Mr. Ruff consulted to industry leaders in companies ranging from American Express and IBM and led teams that restructured markets and companies. In 1990 Mr. Ruff left Booz, Allen and Hamilton to build a new Market Strategy Consulting Practice at Regis McKenna Inc., where he initially worked with Geoffrey Moore (Author of Crossing the Chasm) and became managing partner before leaving to found G.L. Ruff & Company, an affiliate of Mr. Moore’s Chasm Group in 1995. During that time Mr. Ruff Consulted to industry leaders such as Adobe, SCO, HP and BEA (now Oracle) and built strategies for startups that became billion dollar companies such as Informatica. In 2006 he founded White Space Strategy to focus on market creation and growth strategy. He took a leave from his consulting practice in 2007 to assume the CEO role for two of the start-ups he was consulting to in the robotics and on-line music markets. Greg has written numerous articles for industry organizations such as Dealmaker Media and The Chasm Group and has spoken about Web 2.0, 3.0, Entrepreneuring and new market creation at events such as the Web 2.0 Expo and Summit, and Office 2.0. He has guest lectured at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, Santa Clara University and been a judge and mentor for companies presenting at the International Business Plan Competition at the University of San Francisco (USF). Greg has a BSEE from the University of Virginia and an MBA in International Management and Finance from NYU. STEVE TRAUTMAN Steve Trautman is corporate America’s leading knowledge transfer expert. For more than two decades, he has provided executives at blue-chip companies and those in the nonprofit and public sectors with the simplest, most relevant and quick solutions for knowledge transfer. His pioneering work in the field of knowledge transfer and related risk management tools—which he began at Microsoft in the early 1990s—is now the nationally-recognized gold standard used by companies ranging from Boeing to Nike, Kraft to Zynga. And he continues to innovate. He has written two books, speaks internationally, and provides business leaders with consulting, presentations, and executive retreats. He is known for his high energy style that combines humor, street smarts, and board room wisdom.
Shannon Stowell is currently the president of the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA). His personal and professional background is well suited for the adventure travel industry. He’s lived in Fiji, trekked Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and China, and has spent time in many places around the world including Taiwan, South Africa, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Brazil, Qatar, Norway, Mexico and Canada. Among the diverse adventures he’s enjoyed: summiting Mount Rainier & Mount Hood, diving in Mexico, sitting out a riot in Jakarta, being involved in Fijian kava ceremonies, caving in Thailand, and many more. Shannon is an active traveler, trail runner, swimmer, mountaineer, skier and fly-fisher. He brings a special passion to this industry borne of experience and a desire to see others experience the world in a richer way. His 17+ years of business experience, connections, marketing insight, environmental science, vision and passion for adventure travel have prepared him well to serve and lead as the president of the Adventure Travel Trade Association. Early in his career, with a B.S. Biology from Seattle Pacific University, Shannon worked as a fisheries observer on ships in Alaska for the National Marine Fisheries Service. After a stint on the Bering Sea, and work with the Colorado Division of Wildlife, he spent eight years at an environmental testing laboratory as a biologist/chemist. He was promoted into management to develop and spearhead the company’s international vision and Asian presence with the President of North Creek Analytical International. Shannon then engaged in the dot-com revolution as a co-founder of Altrec.com, a successful outdoor and adventure travel gear retailer (www.altrec.com). He directed the company’s business development, affiliate marketing and non-profit relations for six years. Despite the dotcom boom and bust, Altrec survived, then thrived. During his time at Altrec.com, he struck deals with Amazon.com, CBS Sportsline, National Geographic and National Geographic Adventure, Backpacker Magazine, Virtuoso, Nike, Gore-Tex, Outward Bound, Virtuoso and Mountain Travel Sobek among many others. He wore many other hats during his tenure, overseeing aspects of marketing, PR, affiliate programs, ad sales, advertising program development and development of Altrec’s sister site, www.greatoutdoors.com. GARY GANNON Gary Gannon has lifelong experience envisioning, forming, managing, and growing companies
and organizations in diverse fields in the US and around the world. He has demonstrated
a solid track record and leadership in anticipating global trends, and has built numerous
businesses that both leveraged and added value to these emerging trends. Currently, Mr. Gannon is involved in a number of businesses and philanthropic activities. On the philanthropic side, Mr. Gannon is working around the world to stimulate major cities to adopt sustainable economic, social, political, and environmental sustainable practices through the Global Compact Cities Programme, for which he is an international advisory board member. For more information about the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program, please contact the Dean's Office, JJCBEDeansOffice@montana.edu .
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