I’m a dad, entrepreneur (Co-founder & Chief Revenue Officer of Bump Health), speaker, investor, Airstreamer, wannabe woodworker and aspiring competitive shooter. Curating Pew Pew Training on the side. Previously: Managing Director @1776

Michael Zuercher is CEO and cofounder of Prismatic, the dev-first integration platform that enables B2B software companies to more easily build, deploy, and support integrations for their customers. Prior to Prismatic, Michael was CEO of Zuercher Technologies. Michael founded Zuercher in 2003 and scaled it from a bootstrapped tech startup into a national industry disruptor in the public safety software market. To accelerate growth, he led the 2015 sale of Zuercher to a private equity-backed company and grew Zuercher by 5x in three years as a division of that company. He played a key role in the sale of the joint company to Bain Capital in 2018.

Fomeno is a platform that offers the simplest thrifting experience yet! Co-founders Ashlynn Atwood, Payton Ryz, and Brigit Blote created the company in order to combat the negative environmental impacts of the fashion industry. The team of three competed with this business idea in the 2020 Hult Prize Business Global Entrepreneurship competition where they were selected to represent the United States with Fomeno! Out of 300,000 global applications, the students from the University of South Dakota made the final 10 teams and were recipients of $100,000 in seed capital. Since then, the team has gone on to raise $150,00 from the Falls Angels Fund out of Sioux Falls and are preparing for the official launch of Fomeno

PorchLight is the creation of Jessica Meyers and Peggy Schlechter, who found each other while participating in a remote leadership course during the pandemic of 2020. Our mission is to prepare rural communities in the Midwest for a remote workforce and to prepare people to be remote workers. The traditional workspace is quickly becoming a thing of the past and remote work options will make the Midwest both a competitive place to work and live.

Mike Grigsby currently serves as the Director of Innovation and Technology for the City of Sioux Falls. In this role he is focused on identifying emergent opportunities to improve organizational efficiencies, enhance citizen engagement, and build a smart and connected community. He brings a depth of experience from previous roles in both public and private sector and has consulted on a variety of subjects including Smart Cities, Public Safety Technology, and Transportation Innovation. Mike is a veteran of the military and law enforcement and resides in Sioux Falls with his family.

Arthur McCray’s entrepreneurial journey began as a college student when he started a marketing consulting company while attending the University of South Dakota’s Beacom School of Business. Since that time, he has successfully helped many businesses around the world solve complex marketing problems.

Today, McCray is Founder and CEO of a startup called ADVIE. ADVIE matches small- to medium-sized companies with suitable marketing agency partners using a sophisticated formula that aligns business goals with agency skills and expertise. Realizing that smaller companies lack marketing knowledge and sufficient time to acquire it, ADVIE helps to form meaningful win-win partnerships that benefit both parties.

Driven by her passion for making a difference, Cindy Peterson, MSW, CFRE, has dedicated her twenty+ year career to impacting the lives of those she has never met. Holding a Master of Social Work degree from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, in 2010, Cindy founded Maximizing Excellence, LLC. Each day her consulting firm helps organizations with mission-driven resource development, strategic planning, and nonprofit capacity building, allowing them to improve their effectiveness and achieve high results. Cindy’s bold approach, creative problem solving, and never-quit attitude has allowed her to modernize the science behind the services her team provides.

Cindy is dedicated to her community serving on the boards of Downtown Rotary and Levitt at the Falls, mentoring through Start Up Sioux Falls, and lending her expertise to uncovering the power of philanthropy in Sioux Falls. Cindy has earned a reputation as a local thought leader and as the "go-to" fundraiser in eastern South Dakota. Last year Prairie Business magazine selected Cindy as one of their Top 25 Women in Business

Eric Weisser is the founder and CEO of Weisser Distributing. Weisser Distributing was founded in 1978 by Eric's father Bob and for 35 years operated selling body shop supplies locally via a mobile truck to body shops in the Sioux Falls area. Ten years ago, Eric joined the company and brought those same products to marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Walmart. Since then the company has grown into multiple states, international manufacturing, brand creation, and 210 employees. Eric's focus in the company now revolves around product development, sourcing, employee culture, and their own curated version of the entrepreneurial operating system called Traction. Most recently, Weisser acquired its first DTC brand, FCGoods.com. FCGoods repurposes old baseball gloves and turns them into many giftable products like men's wallets. Eric is an active angel investor, as the vice chair of the Falls Angel Fund, nearly 150 individual investments with early stage investments in unicorns, Cabify, Grove.co, and Kin. Eric is also a founding investor in Sioux Falls based company Terror29. A haunted house near the Crooks exit. Eric is very involved in the local entrepreneurial scene, facilitating the inaugural startup co.starters program program at StartUp Sioux Falls.

Matt Paulson is an entrepreneur, an angel investor and an advocate for the startup community. His primary business, MarketBeat, is an INC. 5000 financial media company that publishes investment newsletters to more than 1.1 million subscribers. Matt has invested in more than 40 startups including Buffer, Cafe X, Dollar Shave Club, Lyft, Ripple, and Wikia. He also serves as the chair of Falls Angel Fund, is a general partner at Cresten Properties, and serves on the board of Prismatic. Matt also founded Startup Sioux Falls, which aims to serve as the ecosystem organization for the startup community in Sioux Falls.