Segment 1: What is it really like to succeed as a woman in the toughest business environment in the world – Silicon Valley? We dive into stories of women in Silicon Valley navigating interactions with their predominately male colleagues and the choices they made that paved their way to success. Julian Guthrie spent twenty years at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she won numerous awards and had her writing nominated multiple times for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of “ALPHA GIRLS: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley’s Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime”. ALPHA GIRLS is being adapted for television by Academy Award-winning producer Cathy Schulman.

Segment 2: Big data has been a buzz word that small business owners have heard about for a long time. But can small business owners actually use it? Our next guest says yes. We show you how small businesses can use machine learning and advanced analytics to help their company. Alex Bordei is the VP of Product and Engineering at Lentiq, a Chicago-based company offering a multi-cloud, production-scale data lake as a service platform. He has over ten years of experience in building cloud products as Head of Product Management at Lentiq.

Segment 3: Just about everyone has had an idea for a new product. But how do you go from having an idea to having an actual product that consumers want to buy? We talk to the founder of a product development company about what you need to know to bring your invention to life. Kevin Mako is the founder of Mako Design and Invent, a product development firm that helps inventors and startups bring their invention ideas to life. Kevin’s strong sense of community building enabled him to collaborate with Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec, Cobie Smulders, PepsiCo and Frito Lay to develop a nationwide competition called Dreamvention for young inventors.

Sponsored by Nextiva, Corporate Direct, MAKO and Web.com