Opening Keynote: Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive Innovation

• According to The Economist magazine, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of Disruptive Innovation is “the most influential business idea of recent years”. This opening keynote panel, moderated by Bryan Park, StartupGrind, will explore the concept of Disruptive Innovation with three expert panelists.

• One is Gautam Mukunda, an internationally recognized expert on leadership and innovation, is the Head of Research at investment firm Rose Park Advisors, co-founded by his mentor, Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. Rose Park focuses on making investments in companies whose strategies are based on harnessing the benefits of Disruptive Innovation.

• The panel will also feature CEOs of two fast-growing companies, Ankur Daga of Angara and Cherie Kloss of SnapNurse, who will discuss how their companies are revolutionizing their respective industries using emerging technologies: Individually Crafted Fine Jewelry and Healthcare Staffing (rapid onboarding and payment of staff). They will review how they created their disruptive business models, lessons learned, and challenges they have faced and overcome.

MODERATOR:

Brian Park
Managing Partner, Spark Labs and DC Chapter Director, Startup Grind
Brian is a startup evangelist, advisor, and angel investor. He is also the Managing Partner at the SparkLabs Cyber+Blockchain (Formerly AOL Fishbowl Labs), which is the premiere startup accelerator in the Washington DC area and he has helped raised more than $150M in funding for their portfolio companies (MHelpDesk, ThreatQuotient, Xmode, Urgent.ly, Curator, Airside Mobile). Read full profile…

PANEL:

Ankur Daga
CEO, Angara
Ankur Daga is Founder/CEO of Angara.com, a high growth, vertically integrated fine jewelry eTailer. Angara.com was named the Best Online Jeweler in the US by Newsweek in 2020 and has a growth rate of over 10x of the industry average. Angara’s vertically integrated operations span from rough gemstone cutting/polishing to designing jewelry to manufacturing jewelry to retailing over the web. Read full profile…

Cherie Kloss
CEO and Founder, SnapNurse
Cherie Kloss is the founder and chief executive officer of SnapMedTech, the parent company for SnapNurse, the largest healthcare staffing platform in the US, and its technology brands InstaStaff and Paymint. With more than 225,000 registered nurses serving over 1,000 partnered facilities, SnapNurse’s staffing technology fills short-term nursing vacancies in less than 48 hours, a departure from the 14-day average of traditional staffing agencies. Read full profile…

Gautam Mukunda
Head of Research, Rose Park Advisors
Gautam Mukunda is an internationally recognized expert in leadership and innovation. He often jokes that his life’s ambition is to have the world’s most confusing resume and that he’s most of the way there. He is the Head of Research at Rose Park Advisors, a firm co-founded by his mentor Clayton Christensen that provides companies that are supported by the theory of disruptive innovation the capital investment and strategy that allows them to grow to make the world a better place. Read full profile…