Matt Hollenkamp is an Emmy-award winning advertiser and marketing executive with 21 plus years’ experience building brands across consumer-packaged goods, health care and non-profit industries. He’s currently Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations for St. Elizabeth Healthcare. He previously spent 9 years at P&G where he held a variety of leadership positions in brand management and within their Ventures organization. Notably, as head of sports marketing he was awarded the industry-leading Clio award for his work in overseeing P&G’s NFL sponsorship portfolio and capability development for over 50 North American brands. Matt is active in the Greater Cincinnati entrepreneurship and innovation community serving as a connector, advisor and mentor. He’s also passionate about mental health and coaching. He received his bachelor’s in business from NKU and MBA from Xavier University. He’s a lifelong Northern Kentucky resident.

Valerie Gray Hardcastle joined Northern Kentucky University in June 2018 as the St. Elizabeth Healthcare Executive Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Vice President for Health Innovation. As the ED/VP, she advocates on behalf of the region, serves as a thought-leader around health policy, pursues an aggressive externally funded research program, promotes the transdisciplinary work of health innovation across the institution, and attracts talent to NKU and the region in the healthcare space.

Previously, she served as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and then as the Academic Director of the Weaver Institute for Law and Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati.   Before coming to Cincinnati, Hardcastle served as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech as well as Head of the Department of Science and Technology in Society and Director of the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech. 

An internationally recognized scholar, Dr. Hardcastle is the author of five books and over 170 articles. She received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in cognitive science and philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Houston, and a bachelor’s degree with a double major in philosophy and political science from the University of California, Berkeley.

She and her husband Jim Benton live on a farm in southern Campbell County, and she has three grown children.

Doug Ladd is a healthcare business innovator and entrepreneur with a 30-year career in global healthcare including sales, product development, marketing, business development and mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical, medical device, and payer industries.

Doug’s therapeutic category experience is extensive including but not limited to bariatrics/obesity, electrophysiology, cardiology/heart failure, cardiovascular surgery, gastrointestinal endoscopy, breast cancer, and general surgery and he has significant expertise in strategy, positioning and segmentation.

He is the Executive Entrepreneur in Residence and a Professor of Practice within Northern Kentucky University’s Institute for Health Innovation where he focuses on expanding healthcare start-up activity in the region.

In his most recent corporate role, Doug held a dual role of Vice-President of Marketing, Business Development, and Sales for Johnson Electric and the VP of Market Development for its Johnson Medtech subsidiary with responsibility for growing a $230MM business in the Americas.

As Chief Marketing Officer for EndoChoice, Doug led product and brand management and pipeline & strategic planning for one of the fastest-growing, medical device companies in the US and helped transition the company from venture capital-backed to a successful IPO on the NYSE and eventually to acquisition by Boston Scientific.

For 10 years, Doug held the position of Worldwide Director of Franchise Development for Ethicon/Johnson & Johnson, where he was responsible for executing the strategic plan to create new business units including product development pipeline, regulatory pathways, reimbursement, and clinical strategies. Prior to that, he served as VP of Sales and Marketing for AtriCure Inc.

On the payer side, Doug was in Marketing and Business Development for ChoiceCare Health Plans (now part of Humana) and he started his career in the pharmaceutical industry with a division of Dow Chemical.

Doug is an active Angel Investor and a member of Queen City Angels. He founded and serves as Chairman of the Board of Eagles Youth Baseball, a non-profit organization in Cincinnati.  Prior to joining Northern Kentucky University, Doug was an adjunct instructor for the University of Cincinnati’s Lindner School of Business and The Farmer School of Business at Miami University.

Pete Blackshaw is CEO of Cintrifuse, the syndicated venture fund, innovation catalyst and startup community that’s making Greater Cincinnati the #1 startup hub in the Midwest and among the top innovation hubs in the nation.

Pete leads with two core beliefs: “Trust your inner consumer” and “Understand how startups work — how they think, design, exploit data, and iterate — and then apply that understanding to everything you do.” These beliefs have been cornerstones of his career.

Pete came to Cintrifuse in November 2018 from Nestlé, S.A., where he was Vice President of Digital Innovation & Service Models, based in Switzerland. He guided digital innovation for Nescafé, KitKat, Purina, and hundreds of other Nestlé brands while creating and leading the company’s industry-recognized Digital Acceleration Team (DAT), Silicon Valley Innovation Outpost (SVIO), and Open Innovation Platform (Henri@Nestle).

Before Nestlé, Pete served as CMO of NM Incite, a joint venture between Nielsen and McKinsey. Earlier in his career, he co-founded Procter & Gamble’s digital marketing organization and then left P&G to launch PlanetFeedback.com, one of the web’s first consumer- feedback portals. He also co-founded the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).

He recently served as an Innovation Juror at the 2019 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

In his role as Cintrifuse CEO, Pete draws heavily on his experience as both a corporate leader and an entrepreneur. “Being able to see the world from both vantage points,” he says, “enables me to help entrepreneurs looking for business and corporate leaders looking for innovation. It’s a personal high when we help make these partnerships work.”

Pete is the author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World, and he is a featured columnist for Advertising Age. He was a 2015 MediaPost “Online All Star” Winner, a 2014 inductee of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Hall of Fame, and a 2010 Grand Prize winner of the “Great Minds” award from the Advertising Research Foundation. Most recently, he was inducted into the American Marketing Association’s “Cincinnati Marketing Legends” Hall of Fame.

Pete is a graduate of Harvard Business School and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He and his family live in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Paul Ehlinger joined Allos Ventures in December 2019 as the firm closed on its third fund, a $52M Series Seed/A fund investing in high growth technology companies in the Midwest. Since joining, he has been apart of Allos investments into Maven Machines, Coterie Insurance, and Encamp.

Prior to Allos, Paul started in venture capital with the Kentucky Enterprise Fund where he served as fund manager. The Kentucky Enterprise Fund is the state of Kentucky’s most active investor with more than 100 pre-seed and seed stage investments across the state. During his tenure, Paul led eight of the fund’s investments including those into Podchaser, Hippo Manager, and Pyrochem Catalyst.

Paul began his career with Medtronic in Irvine, CA. His primary focus was to design and develop the next generation of Pipeline Flex, Medtronic’s flagship embolization device for the treatment of wide-necked intracranial aneurysms. Finding corporate life slow and tedious, Paul then joined as an engineer (and employee number five) with Wallaby Medical. With Wallaby, he was awarded a patent for his work on the Avenir Embolizaiton Coil which has received the CE Mark and FDA clearance for endovascular embolization of intracranial aneurysms and other neurovascular abnormalities such as arteriovenous malformations and arteriovenuous fistulae.

Paul is passionate about increasing the diversity and inclusion of the venture capital asset class. He worked alongside Next Wave Impact to develop the Impact Investor Landscape, provided mentorship and investment to companies going through the Wild Accelerator, and is continuously striving to source diverse deal flow for Allos Ventures.

Paul is a graduate of the University of Missouri and University of California and is based in Northern Kentucky with his amazing wife.

Emily Geiger is a growth-focused venture builder who has worked at the intersection of startups, corporate venture and new product and service delivery models for a decade. Emily is currently the CEO of Vitamin Collective, a health venture collaborative and a Fellow at Northern Kentucky University. Emily partners with corporates and startups alike to build fresh, fast new models at the intersection of healthcare, self-care and wellthcare.

In 2016, Emily founded Spry Labs at Cintrifuse, which was formed to build new consumer-driven ventures in healthcare, fintech and CPG leveraging the Midwest’s startup and technology talent. Emily’s previous partners include Procter & Gamble, Humana, Mercy Health, Fidelity, Cincinnati Childrens and Kroger. Most recently, Emily was Vice President, BigCo Innovation at Cintrifuse, a public-private partnership founded by Cincinnati business leaders to spur the region’s next tech frontiers and attract capital and talent to our region. 

Emily has had growth and advisor roles at startups, worked in a corporate healthcare venture lab, and served on emerging channels and M&A teams at Abbott Labs. Her favorite work is helping others find their superpowers. Emily is married to a Star Wars fanatic and is a proud, exhausted, LEGO’d mommy of three rowdy boys under eight.