How Immigrants Help Startup Companies

Immigrants are inherently entrepreneurial. They have the courage, ambition,and determination to succeed in their new homeland. Skilled foreign-born workers help to build up economies and industries with the unique capital they bring: distinctive knowledge, backgrounds, skillsets,and styles.In the same way, interdisciplinary perspectives can help make a productmore viable. The diversity of languages, experiences,and approaches is crucial to success in a globalized, interconnected innovation ecosystem.

Hear from immigrant life science and biotech entrepreneurs as well as investors and employers on how immigrants add value to your team, give it an advantage, and help it to grow. How to access foreign markets, what multicultural perspectives bring to product innovation and how to engage with foreign-born investors. Moreover, learn the tools and strategies that capitalize on your team’s diversity, to promote the flow of groundbreaking ideas and enhance the culture of your company for everyone’s benefit.

Agenda:

6:00-7:00 PM – Registration & Networking

7:00-7:10 PM – ENET Chairman’s Announcements

7:10-7:25 PM – eMinute PITCH – up to 3 startups give a 90-second elevator pitch

7:25-8:15 PM – Expert speakers on the night’s topic

8:15-8:30 PM – Q & A

8:30-9:00 PM – Final networking, including meeting speakers

A question and answer session follows the presentation, and panelists will be available afterward for responses to individual questions. You will also get the chance to network with the panelists and other meeting attendees, both before the start of the meeting and afterward.

Speakers:

Claritza N. Abreu, Co-founder/CEO, LatInc.us; Vice President, Enterprise Technology Risk Management – Global Technology Operations, State Street Corporation

Claritza has extensive experience providing leadership and vision to large information technology organizations. Ms. Abreu functions as VP of Enterprise Technology Risk Management for State Street Corporation, previous to this post she was one of the Directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston serving the Federal Reserve System. Also, Claritza serves as Program Chair and Senior Faculty of Information Technology at the Cambridge College School of Management.

LatInc Corporation is the first and only mobile social media platform available for Latino communities to connect and to advance their careers. A lifelong community leader is supporting public health, research, STEM education, mentorship, civic engagement, and social justice issues.

Born in the Dominican Republic, she holds a BS in computer systems engineering from the Technology Institute of Santo Domingo and an MS in computer information systems from Boston University.

Sandro Catanzaro, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, dataxu

Before co-founding dataxu, Sandro held positions at Bain & Company and NASA, where he straddled the worlds of science and business strategy.

Dataxu’s core technology platform is based on research Sandro conducted at MIT and a real-time optimization algorithm he co-invented. Sandro’s perspective on the future of marketing has been influencing the industry for more than a decade. He is a founding member of the ABCD cross-functional PTV working group, which includes AOL, FOX, Havas, IPG and Omnicom Media Group. Sandro holds master’s degrees from the MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a BS from the University of Buenos Aires.

Born in Peru, he is the winner of The Immigrant Learning Center’s 2017 Immigrant Entrepreneur Award for High-Tech Business. Prior to attending MIT, he launched five businesses in South America, including one that was acquired by Unilever.

Bernat Olle, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Vedanta Biosciences, Cambridge, MA

Dr. Olle been a member of the founding teams of several companies of the PureTech portfolio and served as a member of the Board of Directors of Vedanta Biosciences and Follica Biosciences.

An immigrant from Spain, in 2013 Dr. Olle was named “Innovator of the Year” in MIT Technology Review Spain’s “Innovators under 35” awards. He completed his doctoral work at the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT, where he developed a novel method for large-scale bacterial culture. During his graduate work, Dr. Olle was awarded the “la Caixa” fellowship. Dr. Olle received his BS in Chemical Engineering from Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in the Republic of Catalonia, his MS and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT, and his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has published his work in journals including Nature and Nature Biotechnology.

Clement Cazalot, Managing Director, Techstars Boston

Clement Cazalot is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and startup advisor focused on working and advising early-stage startup. As managing director of Techstars Boston, he leads the expansion of one of the most prestigious, impactful and founder-friendly startup accelerator and early-stage investors in the world. Techstars is the No. 1 Global Tech Accelerator with $80 billion in value created.

Before TechStars, Cazalot was the co-founder and CEO of docTrackr, which was acquired by Intralinks in 2014, after having partnered with industry leaders among which Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk and Box. He built the company from its inception in his hometown in the south of France to the point where their technology was deployed to 99% of the Fortune 1000 in the U.S. four years later. Cazalot holds a both an MS in Intelligence and Innovation from Universite Aix-Marseille (France) and an MBA from Ecole de Management de Marseille (France).

Moderator:

Denzil Mohammed, Director, Public Education Institute, The Immigrant Learning Center, Inc., Malden, MA

Denzil works to build understanding across boundaries utilizing an asset-based approach. He believes immigrants’ success is a crucial component of America’s economic and social well-being. As director of the Public Education Institute at The Immigrant Learning Center, Inc. in Malden, MA, he manages specialized online education, a variety of research initiatives, New England’s only Immigrant Entrepreneur Awards, and collaborative public events that promote immigrants as economic and social assets to America. On immigration, he has appeared in The Boston Globe and the New England Journal of Higher Education. Denzil is a frequent speaker at education, workforce development and immigrant integration webinars and conferences nationwide.