MileHigh

Confirmed Speakers

• Natalie Baumgartner
  Dr. Natalie Baumgartner is a Co-Founder and the Chief Psychologist at RoundPegg. RoundPegg is an online culture intelligence platform that quantifies the unique culture of organizations and then provides tools to align employee hiring, development, and engagement. Natalie has been the human form of RoundPegg for over a decade, consulting on culture fit with investors, senior executives and boards of directors. She holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and serves on the board of the Consulting Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. Natalie is passionate about helping people find “fit” in the workplace – and about the power that culture fit has to revolutionize how we work.
• Jeremy Bloom
  Jeremy began his career in professional athletics; both as a skier and football player. While playing with the NFL in Philadelphia, he completed a business entrepreneurship program at Wharton Business School where he studied real estate and finance. His education was followed by an employment opportunity for Peter Linneman’s private equity, American Land Fund. In 2009, Jeremy launched MDinfo.com, a health portal creating a dialogue between health experts and people throughout the world. MDinfo’s goal is to help 1 billion people worldwide by connecting them with medical professionals. In addition to his athletic achievements and business accomplishments, Jeremy has a driving motivation to give back to those around him. One of his most noteworthy contributions is Jeremy Bloom’s Wish of a Lifetime foundation. This 501©3 foundation was founded as a living memorial to his grandmother and grants wishes to low-income senior citizens. Next up was Integrate.com. Integrate achieved great notoriety from the beginning. Within a few short months, this technology platform had more than one thousand partners and had expanded into nearly every facet of performance marketing. Through his leadership and the developmental efforts of the technical team, Integrate came into the space with a bang. Jeremy specializes in moving fast and making an impact. His focus and motivation provide unbeatable inspiration for his team at Integrate, Mdinfo, and Jeremy Bloom’s Wish of a Lifetime.
• Kayvon Coffey
  Kayvon Coffey is a junior at Kent Denver School and a member of Denver Young Artists Orchestra (DYAO). He studies violin with Claude Sim, Associate Concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Born in Aspen, Kayvon saw his first 1/16th size violin at age 4 at the Snowmass Suzuki Institute and promptly declared, "I want a tiny violin!" After moving to Boulder at age 6 he got his wish and began studying with Boulder Suzuki Strings, then with Jennifer John, Faculty Emeritus of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) and Violin Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Kayvon studied at AMFS for four summers, the first at age 10, and most recently in 2011 with Cornelia Heard of Vanderbilt University, and as a member of the AMFS Concert Orchestra. He will return to Aspen for the summer of 2012. Kayvon earned his first AMFS Spotlight Recital in 2007 at the age of 12, won Third Prize in the Boulder Stars of Tomorrow Classical Competition the same year, and won the Concerto Competition of the DYAO Conservatory the next year at age 13. Kayvon joined DYAO in 2009, was a member of the Western States Honors Orchestra in 2011, and the Colorado All-State Orchestra in 2011 and 2012. He performed as a soloist most recently with the Littleton Symphony Orchestra in December of 2011, and will do so again in May of 2012 as the winner of Colorado's Symphony in the Valley Concerto Competition. At Kent Denver School Kayvon is on the Head Of School's List of students with GPAs of 4.0 or higher. He won Kent Denver's Nick Huston Prize for English Literature in 2010, the History of Music Award in 2011, and the Pre-Calculus and AP French Language Awards in 2012.
• Chris Davenport
  Two-time World Champion skier Chris Davenport is widely regarded as one of the premier big mountain skiers in the world today. Among his many ski mountaineering achievements, in 2007 Chris became the first person to ski all fifty-four of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks in less than one year. He has numerous first descents of peaks around the globe under his belt, and recently guided and skied on Mt. Everest Chris has been featured in more than thirty ski films by Warren Miller and Matchstick Productions. He is also a TV commentator for ESPN, ABC sports, and Outside Television, and is an Olympic and World Cup announcer for ski racing events. Chris is a professional speaker who often lectures on risk management as it relates to business and mountain sports. Chris is the author of two beautiful coffee-table books that celebrate North America’s mountains, Ski The 14ers and Fifty Classic Ski Descents of North America. When not traveling the globe Chris resides in Aspen, Colorado with his wife and three boys.
• Ken Arkind
  Ken Arkind is a National Poetry Slam Champion, Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion and published author who has performed his work in 49 States, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. He is the current Executive Director of Minor Disturbance, an independent literary arts organization dedicated to helping Denver youth find voice through the mediums of poetry of performance.
• Bobby LeFebre
  Bobby LeFebre is an award-winning spoken word artist, actor, and social worker. He is a two time Grand Slam Champion, a National Poetry Slam Finalist, an Individual World Poetry Slam Finalist, and has been a member of three National Poetry Slam Teams. LeFebre is managed by Layman Lyric Productions for performance poetry booking. As an actor, LeFebre is a company member with Denver’s only Latino Theater, El Centro Su Teatro, and is represented by Radical Artists Agency, who manages Colorado’s top actors for work in film, television, commercials, industrials, voice-overs, theater, and commercial print. Combining his passion for education and performance, LeFebre is founder of Cafe Cultura, Denver’s largest monthly open mic and artistic expression event serving the Mile High inner-city community. The event was voted “best open mic” in 2007, and has showcased both local and national talent. As a performer, LeFebre has taught and performed poetry across the United States. He has shared stages with the top performance poets in the world, Grammy-nominated musicians Les Nubian, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Dead Prez, UNIVERSES, Saul Williams, Bahamadia, The Chicano Messengers of Spoken Word, D.J. Kool Herc, Talib Kweli, Gil Scott-Heron, Sandra Maria Esteves, and The Last Poets. LeFebre was recently featured in the first-year report from the National Museum of the American Latino Commission to President Obama and Congress. LeFebre lives in Denver with his wife, Claudia Hernandez-Ponce.
• Adam Lerner
  Adam Lerner is the Director and Chief Animator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA Denver). He was the founder and Executive Director of The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar until The Lab merged with the MCA Denver in March 2009. He was the Master Teacher for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum from 2001 to 2003, and he was the Curator of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, before coming to Colorado. Lerner is known for a unique approach to museum programming that combines elements of curatorial and educational practice. He developed the popular program Mixed Taste: Tag-Team Lectures on Unrelated Topics in 2004 and he has traveled the program to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Sala de Arte Público Siqueros, Mexico City (Huevos Revueltos), where it is offered on ongoing basis. In Spring 2011, he was a Visiting Lecturer in the graduate program for Curatorial Practice at the California College of Art, in San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from the Johns HopkinsUniversity and his Masters from Cambridge University.
• Ryan Martens
  Ryan Martens founded Rally Software 10 years ago with the goal of being one of the first for-profit software companies to break the take-make-waste cycle of technology in our society. Today, he stands on the precipice of a major breakthrough toward that goal by launching a foundation that will bring together and fund citizen engineers to help solve some of our world's toughest challenges. Ryan is a founding board member and CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, which brings together local venture capitalists and start-ups to set aside 1% of their profits to charity and is likely to release $2M to endow Colorado within a 5 year span. Ryan is a mentor at the Unreasonable Institute and Boulder TechStars and a member of the engineering entrepreneurship efforts at the University of Colorado atBoulder. Ryan integrates work, life and sustainability on his farm, raising horses, dogs, chickens, goats, burros, bees, worms and canaries.
• Timothy Marquez
  Timothy Marquez is the founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Venoco, Inc., a publicly-held energy company based in Denver, Colorado. Venoco was founded in 1992 and is engaged in the acquisition, exploration and development of oil and natural gas properties. With Mr. Marquez’s leadership, the company progressed from a startup with an initial equity stake of $3,000 to a company with a total enterprise value of more than $1.4B. The company has been named Business of the Year in three different communities in which the company operates. Venoco was named the Best Corporate Citizen in 2006 by Oil & Gas Investor magazine, the premier oil industry publication. The company has also received numerous awards for operational excellence. In October 2002, Mr. Marquez founded Marquez Energy, LLC. Mr. Marquez began his career in the energy industry as an engineer and in several management positions with Unocal where he worked inCaliforniaand theNorth Sea. Mr. Marquez holds a B.S. Petroleum Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. Mr. Marquez and his wife Bernadette founded the Denver Scholarship Foundation, which provides financial assistance in the form of scholarships and loans to all Denver public high school students. Additionally, the Denver Scholarship Foundation works with the area high schools to offer academic counseling, college application assistance and guidance, and financial literacy education through “Future Centers” on the high school campuses. Mr. and Mrs. Marquez also formed the Timothy and Bernadette Marquez Foundation in 2006. The Foundation focuses on incentivizing big ideas in the fields of education and health care.
• Laura Merage
  Laura Merage was born in Tehran, Iran and immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of fifteen. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California and her Masters Degree in Art from New York University. With studios in Denver, Hawaii and Israel, Laura is an active artist/photographer with works in public and private collections internationally. Laura’s art reflects a continual exploration of her self and her emotions. Her "dolls", a series of soft sculptures that differ in size from tabletop to larger than life, express the full range of human emotions. Laura and her husband David are social entrepreneurs, having launched several philanthropic organizations advancing social change around the world. Laura’s most recent Colorado venture is RedLine, an urban art laboratory promoting the creative expression of contomprary art. RedLine serves as a catalyst for educational activities and fosters connections between resident and nonresident artists, collectors and lovers of art and the community. The David & Laura Merage Foundation also started a program providing education, training, and community connections to Israeli immigrants transitionining to a new lifestyle and culture, as well as other programs supporting community development and education in the underserved Negev region of Israel. In addition, the Merages have developed innovative systems and approaches to providing early childhood education in Colorado and across the United States.
• Todd Neff
  Todd Neff is a writer and editor of CleanEnergy.com. He is author of From Jars to the Stars, the story of how Ball Aerospace — an organization evolved from the Ball Brothers Company of Muncie, Indiana and a group of students in a University of Colorado basement — managed to blast a sizable crater in the comet 9P/Tempel 1. He is also an adjunct instructor teaching narrative nonfiction at the University of Colorado Boulder, and formerly covered science and the environment for the Boulder Daily Camera. Todd graduated with a business degree from the University of Michigan, where he played soccer, and with a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Before becoming a journalist at the turn of the millennium, he was an IT and strategy consultant. He spent the 2007-2008 academic year on a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at CU, focusing on energy and climate change issues. Todd began his journalistic career as a technology writer for business-focused weeklies in Boston and Denver, and has written for many regional and national publications. He lives in Denver’s Lowry neighborhood with his wife and two daughters.
• Jessica Posner
  Jessica is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Shining Hope for Communities, a non-profit that combats extreme poverty and gender inequality in Kibera—Africa’s largest slum. Shining Hope is pioneering an innovative, community-driven model that combats extreme poverty and gender inequity by linking the slum’s first tuition-free school for girls to a set of accessible, comprehensive community services for all. These services include a community health clinic, clean toilet initiative, Kibera’s largest water point, youth and community education, and economic development initiatives. Jessica is a nationally recognized social entrepreneur and activist. She won the 2010 Do Something Award and was named “America’s top-world changer 25 and under” live on VH1. Jessica also received the prestigious 2010 Echoing Green Fellowship. Shining Hope for Communities won the 2010 Dell Social Innovation Competition and has been recognized for innovation and excellence by Newman’s Own Foundation. Jessica has been featured for her work by CNN, NBC Nightly News, Vogue Magazine, and by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. Jessica graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors from Wesleyan University. She is twenty-five-years-old and fluent in Swahili. Although a native of Denver, Colorado Jessica is currently based in Nairobi, Kenya.
• Woody Roseland
  Woody is a natural born entertainer constantly socializing and telling jokes much to the chagrin of virtually every teacher he ever had. Once Woody reached high school he started playing football and quickly moved up the ranks seeing varsity playing time in just his sophomore year. As Woody trained for his senior year of High school football a nagging pain in his left leg left his Doctors, trainers and coaches puzzled. Eventually a biopsy showed that the pain that had sidelined Woody was a rare form of Bone Cancer. Woody immediately started an intense regiment of chemotherapy along with a complete knee replacement that ended his football career. The cancer returned four separate times, each with it’s own unique set of challenges. In June of 2011, a four inch tumor was discovered in Woody’sleft calf requiring immediate amputation. During his time in the hospital is when Woody first realized that his affinity for comedy could be combined with his experiences enduring the hardships of chemotherapy. He initially honed his skills by talking and joking with his doctors, nurses, and fellow patients. He now shares his message of hope, perseverance, and positivity everywhere from charity fundraisers, corporate events, to school assemblies and hospital rooms.
• Theo Wilson
  A relative unknown, Lucifury shook up the Slam Poetry world by taking 5th in the International World Poetry Slam, 2009. He is a founding member of Denver Slam Nuba. Their first year out, they saw finals stage at the National Poetry Slam in 2007, and have been a fearsome force in Slam ever since. They have gone on to win countless regional titles since their inception in 2007. A native of Denver, Colorado, his introduction to spoken-word occurred at the N.A.A.C.P. ACT-SO Competitions. He spent his teenage years as a community activist with the Denver N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council, and got his introduction to public speaking in various rallies and protests. His knack for public speaking has grown into a full time passion. He can still be found in the community, teaching poetry workshops at elementary schools, high schools, universities and correctional facilities all across this nation. Lucifury is an accomplished stage and film actor, and received his BA in performing arts from Florida A&M University in 2003. He has been in several main-stage productions at Denver’s prestigious Shadow Theatre Company, Cleo Parker Robinson’s stage, and in the traveling company of the St. Louis Black Repertory Theatre. This stage training and theatrical foundation is apparent in the power of his live performance. His passion for the art form makes his live performance uniquely impactful among spoken-word artists. He has shared the stage and opened for various groups, such as Dead Prez, The Flobots, Bahamadia, Saul Williams, Taylor Mali, and Universes to name a few.