Vote for your favorite (mini) Minnebar sessions!

Presenter

Session Title

Session Description

Session Type

About the Presenter

Jeff Sussna

Delivering Strategic Outcomes with Scrum & Kanban

According to the Agile Manifesto, the highest priority is “continuous delivery of valuable software”. Too often, though, Scrum and Kanban lose touch with customer value in favor of just doing more work faster. Teams suffer from tunnel vision, unable to see beyond the next user story or the current sprint. Design feels restricted to nibbling at the edges of the user experience. Customers and stakeholders become frustrated by the inability to provide visibility into anything beyond “the next two weeks”.

This talk presents an approach to Agile that shifts the focus of tactics and strategy from outputs to outcomes. This shift overcomes the conflict between agility and strategy. It lets Agile teams use familiar practices to deliver business and customer value, not just work.

The talk explains how to:

* Use outcome-driven planning to align strategic direction with tactical implementation

* Connect Agile ceremonies to customer needs and company OKR’s

* Bring together product, design, development, and operations perspectives

* Iteratively make meaningful experience improvements

Design

Jeff Sussna is a highly respected coach, workshop leader, and speaker. He is known for introducing the global DevOps community to the importance of empathy, and is the author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT In the Digital Service Economy. Jeff is Founder and CEO of Sussna Associates, a Minneapolis consulting firm specializing in Agile, Lean, and Service Strategy.

Senthil Kumaran

AI and Future of Healthcare after Pandemic

In this session we will see how Artificial Intelligence is changing the medical diagnostic industry. Telemedicine was a buzz word before 2019 and now after the pandemic it is a quarter trillion Industry. A few telemedicine platforms are already using predictive analytics to reduce bottle necks and improve patient flow. This session will explore how virtuwell, a leading telemedicine platform from St. Paul, is using forecasting and prediction algorithms to analyze patient data and do systematic follow ups, connecting patients with the right clinician at the right time. Using the latest technology telemedicine environments are now funneling more relevant data to electronic medical records, leading to a reduction in total healthcare cost and helping doctors to spend more time with their patients.

With AI algorithms clinicians can already diagnose, monitor and treat diabetic retinopathy remotely via telemedicine. Infusing telemedicine platforms with machine learning algorithms will mean better diagnoses with less human effort not only on acute conditions but also on some chronic conditions. We will look to the future of AI in the telemedicine industry. We will also see who is working on Smart IOT machines that will decrease the cost of delivering healthcare services while improving quality of life for patients.

Development

Senthil Kumaran is currently serving as CIO for Virtuwell, a HealthPartners company. He is a pragmatic leader, architect, designer and developer in Web and Mobile technology in developing Internet, e-commerce, and multi-tier client-server applications including healthcare, highly secure financial applications, manufacturing, retail, and consumerwebsites. He is part of HealthPartners AI and Machine Learning and Enterprise architecture group and a key contributor to the HIPAA/HITEC security and a conference presenter on Predictive Data Analytics, Rules, and Web/Mobile initiatives. He is passionate about investing in both stocks and real estate and spends a lot of time analyzing cricket matches around the world.

Lemon & Simone

Building A Website For A Kid (With A Kid)

Hello, my name is Simone and I am 9 years old. I have a website that has photos and drawings of me. My dad and I want to do a talk about how we made the website and what we use it for.

Development

Lemon is a website maker. His website is here: https://ahoylemon.xyz/

Simone is in 4th grade at Yinghua Academy and LOVES chocolate. Her website is here: https://lookatsimone.com/

Kelly Heikkila

Building an accessible B2B web application

At Accessible360, we audit and train customers on making their websites, mobile apps and documents accessible to everyone. To track that work and provide to the customer, we needed a fully accessible web application for our staff to work in and our customers to interact with. Over the last four years we have built a very complex but fully accessible application called the A360 HUB. I’d like to share our experiences tackling tough but very interesting problems when building an application such as this.

Development

I am the CTO at Accessible360 and have been involved in the local tech industry for over 20 years including as a developer, architect, analyst, product manager, CTO and founder.

Matt Decuir

Developer hiring trends + job search and hiring advice

The job market has shifted dramatically as a result of the pandemic, and some really interesting (and positive!) hiring trends are happening as a result. Remote work is not going anywhere, salaries are inflating fast, and it’s a really good time to be looking for a new (dev) job. On top of that, employers are all hiring for the same positions (e.g. senior software engineers), which makes for immense competition. We’ll talk through these trends and what they mean for job seekers and employers alike, during this session.

Development

I’m a self-taught software engineer and founder Invisible Network.

Greg Ledray

Docker Compose: It’s Better Than just Docker

I explain why I use Docker Compose and then demonstrate a complex example. (10 minutes of slides 10-15 minutes demo). https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gr4wJDqJTAZPz_fs14-lOmH1cZ5FWSenUTvdg6hq86c/edit?usp=sharing

Development

Luke Hemken

Hill Charts: A Better Status Update

Hill Charts will make your project progress 100% understood by 100% of people in 100% of the world. OK, maybe not, but they are an easy and quick way to talk about status of work.

Other methods make it tough to measure and communicate the nuances of work to done.

How can we effectively communicate the complexity and nuance of the work to be done in a simple and visual way?

Hint: Hill Charts 😉 🤓

Following the framework originally created by Basecamp, Hill Charts have become a better way to find alignment with stakeholders and communicate where we are in the process and how much further we have to go.

Development

Hey👋 I’m Luke Hemken and I’m the Business Operations Manager at SONG, a small custom software dev shop in MPLS.

I didn’t graduate from college but landed an internship that helped launched my career. I started out doing software development and then moved into the project management space. I’ve enjoyed leading teams and working with clients to make their businesses better.

I’ve found that I really like the business operations side of the house and using my process improvement mindset to better the business as a whole – Finance, HR, Operations, etc.

Ahnaf Prio

JUNIOR DEVELOPER : LEVEL UP!👾🆙

If you are a junior developer starting in the realms of software engineering, things can often seem a little intimidating. You would assume after working a year or two or after numerous hours of spending your time learning the in-s and out-s of data structures and algorithms you’d be ready for the real world…But you quickly realize that there is not just one way of solving a problem, and something that seemed the best approach in theory (that you learnt in school) can very likely not be the right solution in the workplace because of constraints like maintenance, resources available etc. There are so many things to learn, and as soon as you’ve learnt one framework or tool, there seems to be something new out there. You’re doing web dev? what about mobile applications or even smart home apps? You collect data in your app, so what about data science? As a Junior developer myself who has been doing this for the last 3 years, I would like to talk about some tricks and tips I thought I’d share that helped me to strive to be better and atleast “try” to keep up!

Development

Ramsey Shaffer

Sentiment Analysis for Stock Market News

Today, the news has more influence than ever before on the performance of stocks and cryptocurrencies. Thankfully, the world of open source code is quickly developing ways to process and codify large swathes of text. In this talk, we’ll showcase a few methods for quantifying the “mood” of stock market news using sentiment analysis techniques in Python.

Development

We are two co-founders of Babbl, a Minneapolis-based start-up creating tools to help DIY investors track the impact of the news on their portfolios. Our v1 news sentiment analyzer website is currently in beta!

Shalanah Dawson

Take a Meditation Break – Kind Cloud App

Take a break, and learn about loving-kindness meditation.

Bonus: Hear about Kind Cloud’s history, development, and ask any tech/design/ux questions.

Kind Cloud (kindcloud.app) is a React built PWA that is sound-free (text-only).

Development

Shalanah Dawson loves creating frontend-only side projects. See more of her projects at github.com/shalanah.

She resides in Twin Cities with her husband, cat, and plays competitive broomball.

Shalanah works for the Minneapolis startup We Sparkle – wesparkle.co.

Dane Smith

Today’s Lucky Winner: Developing Junior Developers

We were all junior at the beginning. Eager, earnest, and green. Let talk about how to help the next generation of developers learn and grow. We’ll talk about how to teach and mentor, business advantages of hiring junior devs, and how it helps mid and senior levels grow too.

Development

Dane Smith – Senior Instructor and Engineer at Prime Digital Academy

Tom Ferrara – Director of Production at Apiary

Pejman Ghorbanzade

What’s broken in the software industry and how to fix it

The software industry is generally perceived as a well-oiled machine, churning out new products every day that noticeably improve our quality of life. While this perception is grounded in reality, every new version of existing software is released at a great cost and through an inefficient process.

Software engineers spend 17 hours each week maintaining existing software: writing tests, fixing bugs, improving code. This time is excessive because we do not sufficiently train them to perform these tasks. We call them developers and teach them how to add new features. We teach students to write code, interview job candidates to implement algorithms, and foster a culture that accrues technical debt, limits teamwork to agile planning and pushes technical skill sharing to async code reviews. We shun existing code as legacy code and celebrate rewrites. We hop from one company to the next to work on shiny new products, blaming the fast-paced progress of our industry.

Join me in a conversation about building software capital. Let us share practical solutions for creating a working environment that promotes engineering products for the long haul, more efficiently and more sustainably.

Development

Pejman Ghorbanzade is the Founder and CEO of Touca.io, building developer tools that help software engineers see how their code changes affect the behavior and performance of their software.

Pejman has 5+ years of experience, working as a software engineer at Canon Medical Informatics and VMware Carbon Black, building mission-critical software at scale.

Pejman is passionate about solutions for improving the stability and maintainability of products with large, ever-changing codebases.

Anna Bliss

Estate Planning for Your Product

We all know that eventually our products will be put to rest, but we don’t like to talk about it much. It’s far more exciting to think about the early days of our product’s life when it’s learning to walk, learning new words, maybe reading its first book. But what about the end of life? What happens then? Have you planned (or even thought) about that? No one wants your product to go to probate – so how can you start planning now for that eventual end? Do you want to donate vital organs so other products may use them? Do you need to ensure that a child of your product can continue living in your framework? Who gets the proceeds of your product estate – or do you leave it all to the dog?… And how can you use that thought process now to shape your product’s life and vision?

Other

I am a senior product manager at Best Buy. I co-lead the Twin Cities Product Community meetup and co-host the Women in Tech – Twin Cities podcast. Recovering liberal arts major.

Angela Remer

F Word in Business

It’s nothing more than the F word, but why is talking about this subject so taboo in the business world? Once one realizes that IT IS business and IT IS personal, you can leverage the magic of the forbidden word. This talk will cover why bringing feelings into business can increase your effectiveness and your bottomline.

Other

As an empathetic leader who is known for driving innovation by bringing diverse perspectives together. By creating trusting, inspiring, and safe environments, I empower cross functional teams to use their creativity to the max. I understand the importance of not only having the team become the best form of themselves but also in having them become part of the united organization. I involve multiple levels of stakeholders every step of the way to ensure that everyone is buying into the success of our products and that things are being built the right way.

Ben Stumpf

Information(Data): From Data to Information and back again

We are all dealing with Data and Information all the time and in software play with these contexts more than most. I will explore the the idea space of Data, Information, and Context and how they influence us with a brief look at the ethical implications this brings. I find the last poignant given the recent news. Heuristics, algorithms, quality, play, imagination, and language are all ideas I will be touching one to describe how Data, Information, and Context can be used to think about what we are doing, how we can think about it, and where we can look for further ideas.

Other

I am a recent Computer Science and Philosophy double major. In thinking orthogonally, I both look at questions and the world differently. I use my skills from computer science to build idea models and my philosophical skills to fill and evaluate them. I have been working on this current project for 3.5 years and plan on working on it several years more.

Jon Bauer

Lean Sideways – The Subtle Art of Giving A Damn

Lean Sideways discusses the ways you can show you care and get personally invested in personal and professional projects, and also how to protect yourself from completely draining yourself in an industry that never sleeps, full of projects that are never complete.

The close knit, supportive community of the Twin Cities tech world is easy to get fully invested in. This ‘give a damn’ focus has resulted in amazing work, not to mention countless friendships and professional relationships, but this investment can come at a price. While it’s amazing so many of us are willing to go above and beyond in our projects, there’s a very real risk of fatigue, irritation, and even burnout when you’re constantly giving everything possible.

Other

Jon brings a unique perspective of more than 20 years of experience in technology, solutions, and marketing. As a non-developer in a world of developers, he’s often the one making sure business objectives, as well as technical needs, are considered when approaching projects. In his current role as Solutions Consultant – Technology Partnerships at FFW, Jon promotes technology enablement within the solutions team, ensuring they’re confidently utilizing the right technology to solve our clients’ technical challenges.

Abby Allen

Parenting Makes Me a Better Product Manager

Since the start of the pandemic, parents have had to play full time employees and full time care givers to our children. Far too often, we talk about our kids as a distraction from our core work, but our children surprise us with their insight, teach us to see the world in a new way, and inspire us to be better. As a Product Manager, I’ve found these lessons especially important as I strive to build products that make the world a better place for our kids and a workplace culture where they can thrive as adults. By sharing my experiences as a parent, I hope to combat the implicit bias in our culture that says performance at work suffers when we become parents, especially when women become mothers, and focus the conversation on how parenting helps us be better teammates, teaches us how to really listen, and gives us the courage to create a better world for all our children.

This talk will be loosely based on my medium article: https://productcoalition.com/becoming-a-parent-made-me-a-better-product-professional-a056e1e7f2f3

Other

I am a user-focused product manager with an engineering and entrepreneurial background. I pride myself in building applications that solve problems for real people. I’m currently a Product Manager at Dispatch on a team that builds last-mile delivery infrastructure.

Paul DeBettignies

Recruiting Best Practices Now and into 2022

Are you recruiting and experiencing a somewhere between difficult and darn near impossible time trying to find and hire who you are looking for? I’ll give you a number of tips to make this less hard. And we’ll talk retention too.

Other

Matt Schraan

Six Practical Steps for Helping Your App and Server Development Teams to Go Faster, Together.

Since the dawn of the client-server model, digital product organizations have been forced to cope with the beauty and chaos of disparate teams working on disparate systems all in the name of achieving a common product goal. Whether you work on a mobile app, web app, or server-side development team… how can you cut through the mayhem and keep your teams well-coordinated, moving fast, and free of swirl?

In this session, we’ll share some of the hard-fought lessons our team has learned about how to accelerate collaboration across product design, client and server development teams.

If you have ever experienced any of the following frustrations , please join this session!

– Our API documentation may as well have been written in Latin!

– Our release candidate seems to regard the intended product design as a loose suggestion at best.

– Our client and server development teams can’t decide between doubles and floats, and now they are no longer on speaking terms!

Other

Matt Schraan leads Product Management at Livefront. Sam Kirchmeier leads Engineering at Livefront.

George (Geo) Niece

Soup to Nuts Cloud-native Microservices

Accelerated guide from start to finish of building Cloud-native Microservices that any person, not just uber-nerds, can participate in from a geek who has been in business, consulting, digital transformation, IT, MIS, and a bunch of other buzz-words and acronyms for 3 decades or thereabouts.

Other

Lifetime nerd originally from Grand Forks. Father, husband, opa, chef, earth supporter, outdoorsman, ally, and life enthusiast. linkedin.com/in/georgeniece

Colton Kratky

System Moitoring: How to do it and why humans are bad at it.

An overview of what system monitoring is, my version of how to do it, and why trusting a human to monitor your network and server environment is a bad idea.

Other

I am an IT Network and Server Administrator with 8 years in the field. I started in the military working a service desk and worked my way into specializing in network and server administration from there.

Tim Anderson

911 Streaming

Streaming app for 911

Startup/ Business

Jeff Lin

Airbnb as a Side Hustle

How to turn your property into a source of passive income in the laziest way possible.

Startup/ Business

Jeff Lin is the CEO & Founder of Bust Out. He and his wife Sarah have operated an Airbnb property in Uptown for the past six years, hosting over 200 guests from all around the world.

Charles Edge

An Abridged History Of Venture Capital

One of the biggest drivers of mass marketing innovation since the end of World War II has been venture capital. Today we’ve put everything from education to health care to companies on an assembly line. Pre-seed, accelerator, seed, Series A, etc. That funding helped propel transistorized computing, networking, the web, and now an app-based economy. In this session, we’ll look at how these evolved and what history teaches us about the future of capital markets.

Startup/ Business

Charles Edge is the CTO of bootstrappers.mn. He holds 35 years of experience as a developer, administrator, network architect, product manager, entrepreneur, and CTO. He is the author of 20 books and more than 6,000 blog posts on technology, and has served as an editor and author for many publications. Charles also serves on the board of directors for a number of companies and non-profits, and frequently speaks at conferences including DefCon, BlackHat, LinuxWorld, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and a number of Apple-focused conferences. Charles is also the author of krypted.com and a cofounder/host of the MacAdmins Podcast, the Jamf After Dark Podcast, and The History Of Computing Podcast.

Patrick Donohue

Breakout Value

Discover the real drivers of value in your business and work and why it matters!

Startup/ Business

Patrick’s background in business spans over twenty years with extensive experience as an investor, stock analyst, investment banking and starting four companies from scratch as an entrepreneur.

Milan Shroff

Cognitive Bias

5 common cognitive biases that can affect your product strategy. We will cover fun real world and real work examples! Note: this is not racial bias session.

Startup/ Business

Agile and Leadership Coach in Tech Industry.

Chris Caton

Don’t Break Your Business: Building for Success At Scale

Your business works perfectly at 10 users, but how will it work at 1,000 users, or 10,000 users, or 1 million users? Scaling a business isn’t only about server capacity and database design – it’s about business processes, team management, and future-proofing through robust planning.

Startup/ Business

Having successfully exited my own business, I work as a strategy advisor to startups and small businesses trying to develop and execute internal growth plans.

Tyler Webb

How to Get Your First 100K Followers (And Why They Don’t Matter)

This session will outline the data-driven strategies I’ve used in my 7+ years of social media management to grow a number of Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, Facebook and YouTube pages to 6-figure follower counts and 6-figures in earnings.

I’ll outline the growth strategies that have allowed me to reach 10’s of millions of people per month across the several dozen social media accounts I currently manage, how I keep these brands and communities engaged, and how I adapt to the evolving landscape of organic algorithms and privacy updates.

Finally, I’ll explain why I believe all of this growth to be unnecessary, and highlight examples and strategies I’ve used to monetize much smaller accounts for myself and clients.

Startup/ Business

Dave Mathias

How to rapidly prototype your SaaS startup into reality with a no-code development platform

You don’t know how to code but have an idea you want to launch. Maybe it is time to leverage one of the great no-code development tools out there. I will share some of the no-code development options out there and will even dive into one of them. Together we will build something in one of these no-code platforms so you can see how easy it is.

Startup/ Business

Dave helps consults with team around product management and analytics through Beyond the Data. He has also been involved with many of the product and analytics community orignations in different roles including ProductCamp Twin Cities, MinneAnalytics, PDMA MN, and Twin Cities Data Viz Group.

Ben Ihde

Impact with and through Tech

Technology is a critical tool as startups and corporations start to track their impact on the community. Learn from a panel of Impact Hub members about the ways their technology achieves and tracks impact, and share the challenges and opportunities you experience in your work.

Startup/ Business

Nolan Singroy – Co-founder of ForeverWare, which creates reusable takeout containers for restaurants, as well as the physical hardware to conveniently check them back in. Participant in BETA 2021.

Michelle Tran Maryns – Founder of WeSparkle, which creates chat software to streamline scheduling and other operations for retail businesses, especially women-owned firms.

Ben Ihde – Intermittent social entrepreneur and current community host at Impact Hub MSP, a coworking space supporting mission-driven businesses as part of a global network. His most recent software project was written in Fortran 77.

Thomas Kosgei

Making prescription medications more affordable for everyone

Teach attendees how to make prescription medications more affordable to everyone. We will do a discussion on how we developed IntelligentRx. Our FREE platform provides a prescription pricing comparison tool with FREE coupons/discounts that can be used to save up to 85% of the retail price on medications at more than 80,000 pharmacies in the US.

Startup/ Business

Milan Shroff

Misunderstandings of MVP

MVP is all about learning. But learning what? We will cover 3 key things to validate and industry techniques…many which companies use on us everyday!

Startup/ Business

Agile Professional and Trainer

Adam G. Southam

Pivot or Perish

The session explores the power of the pivot in business and life, how that has changed over time, and especially with COVID. We will discuss examples of successful pivots, failures due to the lack of pivots, and the rare but important cases where successful pivots were failures. This session will inspire the practice of looking for pivots, when to stay the course, and when to jump ship along with the art and science of maneuvering with limited resources and being disciplined about “failing fast” while not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Startup/ Business

Adam Southam is a broad-based strategic thinker with more than 35 years of leadership, innovation, strategy, invention, business start-up, branding, and marketing excellence. He has conceived several patented and patent-pending inventions related to functional and preventative medicine, health, wellness broadcast media, eCommerce, and distribution channel management. His most important invention is his patented Efficacy Engine® — a solution for practitioners, patients, payers, providers, and people-at-large to use in determining what ingredients are effective in the treatment or prevention of disease or the pursuit of wellness goals. The Efficacy Engine utilizes unbiased peer-reviewed clinical studies to deliver its results.

Montana Fredrick

Putting the food back into the food industry

Have you ever tried shopping for groceries online and found yourself presented with weird substitutions? Like sub pickle juice for oat milk. Everyone has their own version of online grocery fails, and it comes down to data. At Foodspace, we like to say when data is good you don’t notice, but when it’s bad it’s hard not to. With food being a constant for everyone, our mission at Foodspace is to give CPG brands all the right tools to help consumers discover products that match their needs anywhere they shop online. Foodspace team members will share their journeys to understanding food as their passion point, and how they want to put the food back into the food industry through rich, accurate, and shopper-centric product data.

Startup/ Business

Kayla Kaplan (she/her) is truly passionate about building sustainable, equitable food systems and improving nutrition education. She has a background in Human Biology, Food and Nutrition Programs and Policy, and experience as a Critical Food Studies researcher. Kayla brings a strong scientific-communication presence to the team as well as a lot of questions that inspire people to expand their perspective. You can find Kayla sharing intersectional vegan resources on Instagram, walking with her dog, or diving into another new project.

Ayo Oshinaike (he/him) was born for entrepreneurship. You give him an idea, he’ll build you an entire vision. He started his career as a financial analyst but it wasn’t long until his desire to build, evangelize, and tie in his passion for cooking launched his new path. Ayo believes everyone should have access to a secure food future, and credits his mom with shaping his outlook on this. You often find him in the constant company of his closest friends, in the middle of his tenth phone call, or bringing the Foodspace team more wild ideas to run with.

Tim Anderson

Re-imagining 911

Our start up will stream 911 video to the cloud accessible by 911 and first responders

Startup/ Business

Entrepreneur citizens of Minneapolis who wants a better policing system

Brandi M Bennett

So you want to collect customer data? What now?

A conversation breaking down modern data privacy laws and how to get ahead of the legal quagmire while building responsible products.

Startup/ Business

I am a long time startup attorney and now data privacy specialist for some of the biggest brands in the world. I’ve counseled big brands like UFC, PBR, and Legends, while also working with startups in the dating, social, online gambling, video games, SaaS and adtech segments.

Stephanie Rich

The Mechanics of Venture Capital

There’s lots of news about tech companies raising major funding rounds but what does it actually mean? What are the mechanics of venture capital? Who is part of it? And how does it’s structure impact the way companies grow.

Startup/ Business

Stephanie Rich is Head of Platform at Bread and Butter Ventures where she works to add continuous value to portfolio companies and founders. She is also Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator in partnership with Cargill and Ecolab. Steph has worked with numerous early stage startups as a mentor and advisor, and has received the Techstars #givefirst award three separate times. She has hands-on expertise in bringing products and companies to market while building, cultivating and sustaining customer bases online and off.

Mary Grove is Managing Partner of Bread and Butter Ventures. She brings nearly two decades of leadership experience in technology, early stage investing, and startup ecosystem growth. She began her career working on the Google IPO, and went on to lead new business development partnerships, negotiating early stage product and technology deals worldwide. Mary then served as the founding director of Google for Startups, leading the company’s global efforts to support entrepreneurs in over 100 countries.

Brett Brohl is Managing Partner of Bread and Butter Ventures. He is also the Managing Director of the Techstars Farm to Fork Accelerator, partnered with Cargill and Ecolab. An experienced entrepreneur, investor and mentor, Brett is driven by making a difference in the world through helping entrepreneurs succeed.

Jeffrey C. Robbins

Use equity to attract and motivate your team — and save taxes!

A startup entrepreneur’s most valuable asset is the company’s equity. Learn how to use it to your advantage to attract, retain and motivate your employees and consultants. My talk will include:

— when and for whom to use equity

— how much equity is appropriate

— how to value your equity

— how to structure equity arrangements to save taxes

Startup/ Business

I’m entrepreneurial counsel with Avisen Legal, P.A. and founder of AngelPolleNation, a local investor group. For over 35 years, I’ve been legal counsel to technology startups and their investors. Leverage my knowledge and years of experience for your own company and attend this session!

Montana Fredrick

Using AI to read CPG package labels

POV: You’re at the biggest conference for your industry, you’re jazzed, you’re ready to (hopefully) land some deals and all you’re getting are No’s. Foodspace co-founders Ayo Oshinaike, CEO, and Daniel DeMillard CTO share how a breakthrough phone call between the two on “can we use Machine Learning to read CPG labels” turned into a major success to give CPG brand teams like Mars, Tyson, and Health-Ade more time to solve complex industry problems.

Startup/ Business

Daniel (he/him) wants to enable a future of work that focuses on more creative, critical thinking, and interpersonal skills. He uses his background in math and spirit of learning to explore the depths and possibilities of computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning. He finds himself at home building a team focused on creating products to improve people’s lives. You can often find him reading the latest AI paper’s on arXiv or in an online class to keep pace with automation.

Ayo (he/him) was born for entrepreneurship. You give him an idea, he’ll build you an entire vision. He started his career as a financial analyst but it wasn’t long until his desire to build, evangelize, and tie in his passion for cooking launched his new path. Ayo believes everyone should have access to a secure food future, and credits his mom with shaping his outlook on this. You often find him in the constant company of his closest friends, in the middle of his tenth phone call, or bringing the Foodspace team more wild ideas to run with.