October 3rd, 2017 Breakfast Event - Robotics, Automation, AI: The New World of Business

Conrad Gann is Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Cerebellum Capital, Inc.  Mr. Gann has twenty five years of experience in hedge funds, quantitative macro and equities research, and asset management corporate development.  Mr. Gann has a Master of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as Udacity Nanodegree’s in Machine Learning and Deep Learning Foundations.

From 2005 to 2009, Mr. Gann was President and Chief Operating Officer of TrimTabs Investment Research and Managing Partner of TrimTabs Asset Management.  At TrimTabs, which provides institutional research on global equity market liquidity, Mr. Gann was responsible for the management of research, sales, marketing, technology and operations. During his tenure, the firm doubled revenues, achieved shareholder profitability and expanded from domestic to global coverage.  In 2008 Mr. Gann managed the sale of an equity stake to Goldman Sachs and established distribution through Goldman’s global equities business.

Mr. Gann began his career as a Research Coordinator at the Macroeconomic Research Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where he built econometric models to forecast GNP, inflation, and interest rates.   Mr. Gann then worked at Bank of America for nine years, starting in Corporate Strategy and Development.  In 1998, he was promoted to Senior Vice President of the Asset Management Group, where he advised senior management on various large-scale acquisitions and joint ventures.  In 2001, Mr. Gann became a Managing Director and founded the BACAP Alternative Investments Group, the banks first internally managed multi strategy fund of hedge fund group.  In 2002, Mr. Gann joined Citadel Investment Group as Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development. 

Martin is CEO of Bossa Nova Robotics (Bossa Nova), a spin off from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. Bossa Nova is creating a robotics platform based on the ballbot technology invented by Prof. Ralph Hollis. The unique platform, codenamed mObi, is omni directional, safe around humans and boasts a footprint designed for navigation in complex environments. Expect to see first commercial deployment in 2014.

Bossa Nova has previously built, commercialised and exited a business designing and distributing robotic toys. The experience of building, user friendly, cost effective platforms at scale is being leveraged in mObi.

Mai Le is engineering leader at Uber responsible for Business Platforms, the foundation platform that enables Uber to operate effectively and intelligently at global scale. She leads an engineering organization that creates the core semantics definition of Uber’s businesses and the technologies used to engage with the customers. Mai is a seasoned leader with over 20 years of experience leading organizational, cultural and technical transformation holding senior leadership roles at Yahoo, Walmart, Microsoft and Symantec. She is a diversity advocate influencing and driving change as a mentor, advisor and supporter of resource groups.

Brady Watkins is the Head of Revenue at SoftBank Robotics America, where he is responsible for revenue generation strategies, which include go-to-market solutions, business development, sales, and sales operations of the company. Brady has a passion for growing strong technology brands and has used strategic sales programs and marketing strategies to introduce SoftBank’s humanoid robot, Pepper to businesses across the US. Prior to joining SoftBank Robotics, Watkins drove strategic sales and planning at Ubisoft for over a decade, growing the company’s properties and franchises into some of the most successful brands in entertainment. Brady lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and two children.

William Studebaker is President and CIO, while also serving on the Index Committee. Prior to ROBO, he joined Apex Capital in April 2002 (through June 2015) and was the portfolio manager covering industrials. For the previous seven years he held a number of positions at Merrill Lynch, including trader on the New York Stock Exchange floor and, most recently, director in institutional equity sales. From 1991 to 1994 William Studebaker was an analyst in the structured finance group of Cargill. He received his BA in Political Science and International Relations (double major) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1991.