2015 Ignite - An Entrepreneur Forum - March

Ignite 2015 - An Entrepreneur Forum is targeted to business startups and growing small businesses. The forum will bring together a panel of local entrepreneurs to offer insight on how to stay viable and successful through good and bad climates, followed by a Q&A session.

MARCH PANELISTS

Brandon Kruse started in technology and telecom while looking for website servers. He met Mark Spencer in a local 2600 meeting. He expressed his interest in linux, servers, clustering and scalable web design. After interviewing at the age of 15, Spencer gave him a chance to work at his company, Digium. While there, Kruse was always hungry to start his own company. He took a rather big step by quitting Digium to start a telecommunications company named Dialmaxx. Kruse saw a need for a higher level of integration and support for smaller telecom companies. Fanafi - find a need and fill it. Through this experience, he learned about how a business is started, and more importantly, how to boot-strap it. As a small business owner, Kruse learned to be able to wear all the hats, Sales/Support/IT/Janitor. He is also a strong advocate on radical transparency. On November 10, Kruse sold Dialmaxx to YMAX Communications. He has a strong expertise in telecommunication companies and technology, with a strong focus in small/medium business, entreprenuer'ing, bootstrapping, pre-round growth, voip (international/domestic/clec), complex voip implementations, scalability and efficiency.

Peyton McNully wants to live in a world with innovative people starting companies and solving their customer’s biggest problems. As a former Military Intelligence Non-Commissioned Officer and a “reformed” government contractor, he has started, led, and “turned-around” technology companies in Biz2Gov, Biz2Biz, and Biz2Consumer models. In his newest venture, Leavendary, he seeks to align the very newest science to the very old art of brewing good beer.

Mark Spencer revolutionized digital telephony in 1999, when he created Asterisk – the world's first open source telephony platform. Running a tech support company at the time, and faced with proprietary, expensive telephony solutions, Spencer used his knowledge of the open source Linux operating system, computer engineering, and programming to build his own telephony platform. And thus Asterisk was born. Widely seen as a technology leader, in 2006 he was featured in a Forbes Magazine article “Dial ‘D’ for Disruption” and also gives keynote speeches around the world on technology and entrepreneurship. Spencer was Digium's CEO from 1999 to 2007 and currently serves as its Chairman and CTO. An aviation enthusiast, he also runs Avilution which makes aviation software for mobile devices.

NO WALK-IN REGISTRATION ACCEPTED FOR THIS EVENT.

WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

Ignite is a quarterly event and will be held upstairs at Amendment XXI.