Wisbusiness: The Podcast

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Andrea Dlugos, co-manager for Wisconsin Investment Partners, one of the state’s largest angel investor networks. “That means we’re a group of individual angels — each member makes their own investing decisions,” she said. “In our group, each member has their own contribution to make. Both in terms of monetary contributions, but also what each member has to add from an experiential standpoint to the group.” Dlugos gives an overview of WIP, which has a portfolio of investments totaling more than $25 million. She explains why individual investors would band together in a partnership, also highlighting the types of companies WIP chooses for investment. “When we started, we were focused on investments in the life science business sector,” she said. “But in recent years WIP has expanded to investing outside life sciences, including software, health IT and high-tech manufacturing.” She also previews the upcoming Early Stage Symposium, held each year

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Taralinda Willis, co-founder and CEO of Curate Solutions, a Madison startup with a platform for aggregating and analyzing publicly available documents. Curate scans through public municipality data, including documents from city councils, school boards and county boards of supervisors. The company searches these documents for clues to upcoming projects and delivers insights to its customers. These are typically general contractors in the commercial space looking for private projects. “In this area, a lot of people tell me they read the Madison Plan Commission, but there’s no way they could also get to Verona, and Sun Prairie and Waunakee and all those other areas that are expanding potentially even faster than Madison is,” she said. She says Curate is active in 22 states and plans to expand to all 50. That effort will be supported by a recently completed funding round for $1.65 million, which brings the company’s total investment so far to $2.2

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with returning guest Craig Doriot, CEO for an Appleton-based startup called Dodles. He gives an update on his company, which is developing a social animation platform that aims to make it easier for anyone to animate. He also talks about a new venture that spun out of Dodles, called Pound Social, focusing on social media engagement and growth for companies and individuals. On the previous podcast with Doriot, in August 2018, he outlined his strategy for user acquisition, which involved both face-to-face interactions at comic cons and other events, as well as online engagement through other social media platforms and influencers. This time around, he explains how that strategy shifted, expanded and eventually led to the launch of Pound Social. “We’re definitely more on the social side now than the traditional comic con approach — we’re exclusively in that area now,” he said. “And we’ve actually built out that strategy, and that’s where the spin-off com

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with JP Miller, curriculum director and programs lead for a Madison company called Maydm. Maydm aims to teach girls and youth of color in sixth grade through high school about opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. “We teach them skills such as web development, Android app development … all sorts of these STEM-related engineering skills that can be used in the workplace,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to reach parity with national demographics.” Program participants are as young as 10 years old, and JP says Maydm’s recent summer program had about a dozen middle-schoolers. These kids get started with a simplified coding program that helps them learn through a process that’s similar to solving a puzzle. “These kids are amazing — kids in general are amazing. They’ll surprise you everyday if you just open your eyes and your ears and listen to them,” he said. Miller stresses the importance of making these activities

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Eric Borgerding, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Hospital Association. He discusses WHA’s budget priorities ahead of the Assembly and Senate taking up the spending bill passed by the Joint Finance Committee. He touches on provisions that would increase reimbursement, as well as budget changes to regulations surrounding telehealth. Borgerding said the budget put forth by Gov. Tony Evers was “probably the strongest health care budget I’ve seen in 30 years.” He said the guv listened to concerns raised by WHA and others, and proposed a “really strong piece of legislation.” “While it’s not everything he wanted, it’s not everything we wanted, it remains — coming out of Joint Finance — a very strong health care budget,” he said. “By and large it still remains very positive.” Borgerding said telehealth is a “critical technology” for expanding access to health care. “It’s a technology issue, it’s an infrastructure issue like broadband capacity,” he said

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Sean Marschke, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association and chief of police in Sturtevant. He discusses a bill from bipartisan authors that would provide health insurance to the families of police officers killed in the line of duty. The legislation has 91 sponsors, representing about 70 percent of state lawmakers. “These legislators are saying, finally this is something we can do to say that we back the badge, that we back first responders in our state, and that we’re going to take care of their families,” Marschke said. He says committee hearings are tentatively planned for this fall and said passage by the end of the year would be “a great Christmas present.” “We’ll do whatever we can to help it pass,” Marschke said. The legislation has been introduced by: Sens. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, and Janet Bewley, D-Mason, as well as Reps. John Spiros, R-Marshfield, and Steve Doyle, D-Onalaska. It’s been introduced before with differe

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Ellen Sexton, CEO for UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Wisconsin. She discusses a housing support program UHC is piloting with a goal of reducing health care costs for some of its “most complex” Medicaid members. The program is covering all housing costs for 12 individuals with some of the highest costs and utilization numbers, many of whom were previously homeless. These individuals are housed throughout Milwaukee County and were able to choose the area they wanted to live. The program was launched last summer in partnership with the Milwaukee County Housing Division, which helped locate housing for participants. “Think about somebody who has diabetes; they have to keep their insulin at a certain temperature,” Sexton said. “It’s pretty hard to do that when you’re living out of a shelter, or living out of your car.” In the past year, the program has significantly reduced the number of emergency room visits and inpatient hospital stays for par

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Wally Block, founder of TherVoyant, a Madison research startup focused on precision guidance for complex medical procedures. “We’re experts in guiding this therapy called convection-enhanced delivery,” Block said in a recent interview. “You put small holes into the skull, put catheters into the brain, and then under pressure, you push the drug through the spaces between cells to move it much further than you could go with just a hand injection.” In many cases where this therapy was attempted and failed, Block says autopsies revealed the drugs didn’t go where they were expected to go. “Our value is, we allow you to test the drug, not the drug delivery, because we immediately provide the feedback that the drug is going where you want it to go,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Amy Achter, managing director of UW-Madison’s Office of Business Engagement. She’s held the position for about a year, since the university’s former Office of Corporate Relations shifted to its current structure as the Office of Business Engagement. She discusses details of that transition, including how OBE is developing new strategies for connecting with businesses in the state and elsewhere. “Folks realized that companies view us as one UW, and want to be able to come here and talk to one person about all the opportunities — and that wasn’t really happening,” she said. “They may want to talk about talent, or training, or sponsored research, or opportunities for philanthropy and we can now address all of those.” Earlier this year, the university announced a new American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, which was an expansion of an already existing relationship between the university and the Milwaukee insurer. According to Achter, OBE helpe

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features an interview with John Sauer, president of LeadingAge Wisconsin, a nonprofit nursing home company based in Madison. In the discussion, he highlights challenges facing nursing homes in the state, and explains why LeadingAge is backing an $83 million budget request for the coming biennium. If approved, he says those funds would be used to boost reimbursement for nurses and other care providers. Sauer notes that Wisconsin has the second-worst Medicaid nursing facility rates in the country. And one in five caregiver positions in the state are currently unfilled, based on a survey conducted earlier this year. That means about 16,000 positions in assisted living and skilled care are vacant. These pressures are causing many nursing facilities to fold. Since 2016, more than 30 nursing homes in the state have shut down — 11 of which closed since the start of this year. “It’s a well-documented workforce crisis,” he said. “We can’t just simply raise our pric

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Ali Bakhshinejad, a researcher and founder of a Milwaukee startup called VasoGnosis. After working as a research assistant and earning his PhD from UW-Milwaukee, Bakhshinejad spent six months in a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical College of Wisconsin where his research formed the basis of his early-stage company. He’s creating software that could help guide health care specialists as they attempt to diagnose brain aneurysms and plan surgical approaches. Building on years of research, Bakhshinejad officially launched the company in February and is continuing to develop specialized software tools. “We are not claiming that we are diagnosing,” he said. “We are going to help radiologists and the surgeons that are treating these patients to be better for diagnostics and surgical planning.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Amy Arenz, CEO of Concero, a recruitment consulting firm that works in the software and technology space. The Madison company doesn’t recruit software programmers and others for the technical side of these businesses, although Arenz said that’s a potential area of growth. For now, Concero focuses on recruiting for senior executive positions in sales and marketing. “That’s why being here in Madison works, because it’s not necessarily recruiting for companies at their corporate sites, which would be San Francisco or the Bay Area for us,” she said. “It’s challenging; the market is tight and there’s a high demand for this talent.” She says Concero differentiates itself from competitors both by the “years of experience we have, and the tools we use.” “We work with some of the top 100 software companies globally; we also work with early stage Series A and Series B startups, so there’s a broad range,” she said. “We are partnered very close with the ventur

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Elmer Moore Jr., the executive director of Scale Up Milwaukee. He was recently announced as one of the co-chairs of the upcoming Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference, to be held June 4-5 in Milwaukee by the Wisconsin Technology Council. In this week’s podcast, he discusses what attendees can expect from the event, as well as some of the work Scale Up Milwaukee is doing to foster growth in the area’s business ecosystem. “We are consistent, very loud, very provocative champions for growth,” he said. “We recognize how entrepreneurial growth can really catalyze a region.” In the past five years, he says Scale Up Milwaukee has helped more than 100 companies through its various accelerator programs. Last year alone, those companies collectively added about $50 million in revenue. “There’s a way that we can collaborate and coordinate our activities so that we’re fostering growth,” he said. “Growth in revenue, growth in the number of businesses, growth

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Jon Young, head of WARF Therapeutics, a relatively new effort at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “The UW-Madison campus has always had a strong focus on biological and clinical translational sciences,” Young said. He noted two of the most lucrative products in the WARF portfolio are Warfarin and Zemplar. He says these “life-changing” drugs have impacted the lives of thousands of patients, and generated millions of dollars in royalties. Those funds were then used to catalyze new research on campus and improve infrastructure at the university. In his new role, Young says he wants to establish drug-discovery processes with internal and external partners. “The overall goal is to build a portfolio of drugs that will meet the high-quality standards that industry is expecting against diseases with unmet medical needs,” he said. “The boundary between academia and the pharmaceutical industry is becoming more permeable as the two converge on commo

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with John Imes, executive director of the Wisconsin Environmental Initiative. He discusses the state’s push toward clean energy, touching on Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to get the state to carbon-free electricity, as well as how businesses could capitalize on this shift. “If you believe in climate change and you believe in science, well then it’s reasonable to expect that we can accelerate and scale up the solutions that are in front of us and create a green economy for the state,” he said. “The science to me is demanding that we be bold. So let’s be bold.” Imes notes many businesses in the state are investing in sustainability efforts as well as clean energy technology such as solar panels. And he says the Foxconn development in southeastern Wisconsin represents a major opportunity in that space. “Where are the opportunitites to employ rooftop solar to offset carbon emissions associated with the production that happens at that facility?” he said. He added

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a conversation with Barbara Hastie, founder and CEO of PoWER, a startup that aims to provide security certification for ride-sharing apps. She’s joined by Paul Jones, a lawyer with Michael Best & Friedrich who specializes in startups, venture investment, business development and other related topics. As an experienced entrepreneur himself, he’s acting as a mentor to Hastie as she works toward launching her early-stage business. The company’s name stands for Protecting Women Every Ride. “PoWER is a rideshare enhancement app and also a certification service that connects female passengers with PoWER-certified drivers for a more safe and secure ride,” Hastie said. “We also have elements that have pre-ride safety features and in-ride features as well.” Hastie says she and Jones are meeting soon with directors of TitletownTech in Green Bay, an effort between the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft to invest in and develop early-stage tech startups. “I

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Lane Brostrom, CEO for Cmxtwenty, a Milwaukee company developing a pain management drug that could serve as an alternative to opioids. The company recently completed a Phase 1 human clinical trial that showed its drug candidate has similar effects to strong opioids without the negative side effects normally associated with opioids. These include respiratory depression, risk of addiction, nausea and constipation. Brostrom says company leaders are currently focused on preparing for a Phase 2 proof of concept study with an intravenous form of the company’s drug, also called CMX-020. It will be tested on patients who’ve recently undergone a hip or knee replacement. “We want to show CMX-020 would be good for post-operative pain,” he said. “This will set the stage for showcasing that we can in fact replicate the analgesia of opioids but without adverse events.” Brostrom says the drug is still “a few years away” from the market, but adds: “We’re getting

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Mike Partsch, chief venture officer for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “Because of our role with the university, we have a major impact on the ecosystem in Madison,” he said. “And because of that, I think we also have a role, a responsibility to help the ecosystem statewide.” Under a newly formalized structure called WARF Ventures, WARF’s $110 million investment fund will invest directly in startup companies. The organization typically invests in UW-Madison startup companies that rely on WARF intellectual property. “There can be some investments outside of that space, but there have to be strong connections to the university,” he said. Although Partsch is the inaugural chief venture officer, WARF has been making direct investments from the fund for a number of years. As part of his role, Partsch will be managing the existing portfolio of 16 companies. “In addition, of course, I’ve got to make new investments, and oversee the investment

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Scott Birrenkott, assistant director of legal for the Wisconsin Bankers Association. He provides an update on a survey released in December gauging bankers’ views on industrial hemp. At the time, WBA found about 80 percent of banker respondents said they wouldn’t provide loans to industrial hemp farmers or processors. But over the past several months, Birrenkott has seen that shift in conversations with members. He said someone responded in the negative. “But after reading more about it, after learning more about it, discussing it, they’re feeling that they’re more open to it.” He says this represents a trend of Wisconsin bankers feeling more inclined to do business with companies in the hemp industry.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Brad Hollister, founder of a Madison-based logistics firm called SwanLeap. SwanLeap was named by Inc. magazine as the fastest-growing U.S. company of 2018. Hollister discusses that meteoric rise, as well as his plans for sustaining the company’s growth. Over a three-year period, SwanLeap grew from $113,000 in revenue to over $100 million, for a growth rate of over 75,000 percent. “It’s been an absolute rocketship,” he said. “The numbers look really big and impressive when they start small. But now that the numbers are big, certainly we’re seeing a lot of growth but we definitely can’t continue the percentage that got us to the notoriety nationally and internationally that we’ve had.” SwanLeap helps business customers save money on shipping costs using an artificial intelligence system. He says the company’s success is built in part on listening to clients, understanding their needs and crafting software solutions to fit those requirements. That s