Hosted by George W. Wright, Dean, Concordia University Irvine School of Business and Economics

Topic A | "Ethics & Values - Let's Agree to Start Here" with David Kinnear: Values underpin everything we do in our personal and professional lives, yet, few of us think deeply about our values. For companies in the startup stage, values are especially important for establishing the company culture, hiring employees who will embrace that culture, and pushing authority to information within the organization. It follows that in order to establish a firm foundation for a new company, one must first establish the values that will guide the organization. From those values, we can build the vision, mission, and strategy that will serve our stakeholders.

Topic B | "Creativity – Developing Value Through Impact Capacity" with Charles Antis: Early-stage entrepreneurs frequently myopically focus on their creation at the exclusion of the "impact" of their creation. Business leader and philanthropist Charles Antis passionately encourages entrepreneurs to consider their potential "impact capacity" on society through their creativity.

Topic C | "Balance - Someone to Make it, Sell it, Collect On It, and Steer It" with Abe Maghaguian: CEO Abe Maghaguian discusses the importance of finding, selecting, and developing the “right” individuals for the “right” time in the development phase of your personal entrepreneurial endeavor. This continuing challenge of balance between the founder and key team members over time is one of the more overlooked critical success factors.

Topic D | "Friends, Family, Founders and Fools" with Wing Lam: Entrepreneur, restaurateur and marketing guru Wing Lam digs deep into the long term impact of securing early funding for your endeavor. There is not only a balance between debt and equity but the balancing of investors between friends, family, founders and even fools. Keys include: 1) the clear development and articulation of the value of your product or service, 2) an understanding of the dilution of your decision making scope, and 3) the importance of developing and adhering to a short and long term repayment plan.

Topic E | "What to Do Today" with Dick VerWayne: Successful entrepreneur and SCORE Mentor Dick VerWayne discusses how a budding entrepreneur successfully moves from the sidelines to the crosshairs of entrepreneurship. Building on the due diligence of financing, ethics, people and time horizons he shares the keys to planning (focus, alternates, “shiny object syndrome” and exit strategies), relationships (family, investors, employees and suppliers) and demeanor (power of positivity, never stop selling through persuasion and remembering “why” this path was chosen).

Hosted by John Bradley Jackson, Director, CSUF Center for Entrepreneurship

Topic A | "Vision - Seeing a Better Future" with Ayisha Fareed: Becoming a successful founder requires you to have a clear view of what the future holds and how your business will positively impact it. How do you do this? This talk will give you answers.

Topic B | "Innovation - Delivering Value" with Richie Galinato: Innovation requires not only inventing a new product or service that meets unmet needs but also how you run your business and get your product or service to customers. This talk will discuss all points of delivering value to your customers.

Topic C | "Breadth - to Cover all the Bases" with Ravi Sharma: Being a founder means being a generalist. You need to be a jack of all trades so that you can lead all parts of your business, especially during your early stages of development, and this talk will discuss how best to do this.

Topic D | "Seed Investors" with Jeffrey Van Harte: Discussion about the pros and cons of equity investments and grants, this talk will help founders determine the best path forward for funding their business.

Topic E | "What to Do This Month" with Barry Sandrew: There are a thousand things that founders seemingly have to do. This talk will discuss how founders should prioritize what is most important for them and how to best execute.

Hosted by Kenneth Lamb, Director, Student Innovation Idea Lab, Cal Poly Pomona

Topic A | "Inspiration - Inspiring Others to Follow You" with Gary Bohamed: In order to move beyond the garage, all startups need to expand their team to include partners that position them for scaling. Building the right team is a challenge for every business. In this session we learn from Gary Bohamed's experience building a healthcare company with an intentional culture.

Topic B | "Patience - Driving Value" with Elizabeth Yang: After gaining traction with your MVP, adding value to your product or service requires creativity and a willingness to listen to your customer. Elizabeth Yang discusses how she built her team and her service lines from her own personal experience.

Topic C | "Commitment - To Weather the Storm" with Sam Lytle: In this session we hear from Sam Lytle who had education and experience in engineering but always wanted to start his own business. While some of the people around him questioned his drive to start his own business, Sam could see his service providing value to his customers. In this segment hear about how he weathered his own storm and was able to pass through it to a successful exit.

Topic D | "Angels" with Kiem Tjong: When is the right time to seek angel funding? How should you prepare to pitch to angel investors? Kiem Tjong, a member of the Pasadena Angels Investment group ,talks about the answer to these questions as well as what led her to become an Angel investor and how she evaluates potential investment opportunities.

Topic E | "What to Do This Year" with Chris Thornham: In the final interview of this segment, we talk with Chris Thornham about the major take aways from this session and also get his advice on what an entrepreneur should focus on during the next 365 days.

Hosted by Barry Lieberman, Professor, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo & CMO, Everything Food

Topic A | "Scaling a Product and Venture" with Michael Cerda: Michael Cerda is an amazing story himself, having lead product organizations at Disney+, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, MySpace and now is the EVP and executive in charge of guiding the leading Spanish entertainment, news and sports company, UniVision into streaming and online content. He talks about how to scale brand organizations and their products and services. He describes the changes in culture and leadership needed to facilitate those changes.

Topic B | "Leading the Marketing & Sales Efforts to Scale a New Venture" with Howard Gordon: To generate rapid growth an organization needs to scale customer development and all facets of their customer facing operations. Howard Gordon scaled and grew Cheesecake Factory from a few LA locations to a nationwide chain over 100 restaurants. He talks about how Cheesecake Factory never advertised but used local community events and efforts to launch their locations. Howard also talks about the marketing efforts needed to scale customer development.

Topic C | "The Experience & Leadership it takes to Scale a New Venture" with Simon Arkell: The proof of excellence in entrepreneurship is the ability to successfully build, scale & exit multiple ventures. Simon Arkell is proof of excellence as a serial entrepreneur. Simon now leads Deep Lens AI which is revolutionizing how health providers analyze oncology imaging data. Simon talks about the changes Leadership must through from a pre-revenue organization finding product market fit to a business driving revenue, growth and innovation.

Topic D | "Rapid Growth Funding to Scale" with Len Brandt: Funding to scale a growth stage company is quite different than funding to prove concept with seed money. Len Brandt long time experienced VC in the medical industry explains the differences in funding and funding criteria for rapid growth ventures. Including the milestones and signals a company must show to qualify for funding at this level.

Topic E | "Rapid Growth Strategies & Focus" with Brett Eldridge: Brett Eldridge played an integral role in the growth of Palo Alto Networks and a number of other high profile Silicon Valley success stories. He helps us understand the strategies the executive team embraced to generate that growth. How they kept focused and what are the watch outs when in the rapid growth phase.

Hosted by Matthew Hanson, Director, New Ventures, UCI Beall Applied Innovation

Topic A | "Celebration - Celebrating the Human Endeavor" with Sean White: You and your team have reached a major milestone. What did it feel like? How did you celebrate?

Topic B | "Humility - You Never Accomplish Alone" with Pamina Barkow: Success, however you define it, has 'many parents', as they say: you, your family and friends, your management team, employees, suppliers, partners, service providers, investors, customers and, yes, even your compeition contributed to your personal and company success. How did you share the spotlight, accollades, rewards and recognition?

Topic C | "Pride - In Being on the Winning Team" with Lori Torres: While success is a team sport, every player played a role and shares in the pride of building something that never existed before. What are you most proud of and why?

Topic D | "Exit Strategy" with Kayvan Baroumand: The Harvest is, in some ways, just another sale: did you sell all or part of your company to your management team? Your employees? Your industry partner? Your competitor? Your creditors? The public? How did you position for this? How did it go?

Topic E | "What’s Next?" with John Shen: Are you going to Disneyland for a day? Maui for a month? Yosemite for a year? Lodi for life? Or are you on to building the new "new" thing?