Roll Out Right

Aaron Walls is an entrepreneur who is the co-founder and CEO of BEERMKR Inc., a company that creates high-tech beer brewing devices for consumers. Mr. Walls has led the company through multiple successful Kickstarter campaigns and product launches. He participated in the eLab Accelerator and is a Cornell MBA ’14 alumnus.

Andrea Ippolito is a lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University as well as the founder and Director of Women Entrepreneurs Cornell (W.E. Cornell). She is also the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, a company supporting every family on the baby-feeding journey.

Prior to joining Cornell, Ms. Ippolito served as the Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Center for Innovation. She completed her M.S. in Engineering and Management at MIT. Prior to MIT, Ms. Ippolito worked as a research scientist within the Corporate Technology Development group at Boston Scientific. She obtained both her B.S. in Biological Engineering in 2006 and Master’s of Engineering in Biomedical Engineering in 2007 from Cornell University.

Andrés E. Gutiérrez A. is co-founder and chief executive officer of Comake, a smart workstation that consolidates the vast number of accounts and cloud services used by workers. Comake wraps around the productivity tools that people use, providing one place to view, search, communicate, share, and collaborate on the content within third-party systems. Mr. Gutiérrez received a B.Arch. from Cornell University then went on to pursue an M.S. from the longstanding Program for Computer Graphics at Cornell’s College of Computing and Information Science. During his graduate studies, his research focused on the intersection of technology and the built environment: sustainability, BIM, and BEM; emerging technologies like virtual reality as well as their current and future applications; and the impact of drawing within the design process. His thesis was a 3D drawing application that can share geometry data with a popular 3D modeling application. Mr. Gutiérrez and co-founder Adler Faulkner (also a Cornell graduate) first explored the concept for Comake through Cornell’s Life Changing Labs incubator. Next, in Cornell’s eLab accelerator program, they learned to describe their relatively abstract business idea in concise terms and made several successful funding pitches. In 2019, Comake was awarded a grant through the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 0 program, which helps entrepreneurs develop their products for market and apply for further funding.

Levon Atoyan is co-founder and chief executive officer of Active Energy Systems, a technology company working to develop and commercialize an enhanced form of ice thermal energy storage and enable a new form of electricity storage. Dr. Atoyan’s functions primarily reside at the interface of technology development and industry, market, and investor engagement. In particular, his interests are in new energy sources, environmental sustainability, and space exploration. Dr. Atoyan holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University and a B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from McGill University. His work has focused on characterization of high-energy density plasmas relevant to the MagLIF fusion scheme as well as on high-voltage, high-power transmission systems. As president emeritus of the Cornell Technology Entrepreneurship Club, Dr. Atoyan has worked with many high-tech startups to develop their commercial strategies.

Tom Schryver is the Executive Director of the Cornell Center for Regional Economic Advancement (CREA) and a Visiting Lecturer at the Johnson Graduate School of Management. CREA’s programs include Rev: Ithaca Startup Works, the Southern Tier Startup Alliance, and support of Cornell’s regional economic advancement efforts. Mr. Schryver leads the Upstate NY I-Corps Node and is the lead instructor for Cornell Engineering’s Commercialization Fellows program. He serves on the teaching team for eLab, Cornell’s student business accelerator, and teaches entrepreneurship and business strategy at Cornell.

Mr. Schryver is an experienced entrepreneur, having served as a startup founder and senior finance executive of high-growth companies. Previously, he was Director of Finance for the Triad Foundation, where his responsibilities included investing the Foundation’s $250m portfolio to top-quartile returns. Mr. Schryver’s board affiliations include the Cornell Agriculture and Food Technology Park and Tompkins County Area Development, and he serves as board vice-chair of the Business Incubator Association of New York State.