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Melo7 was founded out of shared interest between Anthony and Goldfarb after the pair connected socially. Anthony's interest was piqued when the New York Knicks, his former NBA team, began using the Catapult wearable to track data analytics on player performance.

Melo7 Tech Partners is a venture capital firm founded by Stuart Goldfarb and NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony and is located in New York, New York.

Melo7 was founded out of shared interest between Anthony and Goldfarb after the pair connected socially. Anthony's interest was piqued when the New York Knicks, his NBA team, began using the Catapult wearable to track data analytics on player performance.

The company primarily invests in early-stage digital media, consumer internet, and technology ventures. Menlo7 has made over 30 investments, 12 diversity investments, and has made 15 exits. It has invested in companies like Lyft, SeatGeek, Mercury, Bonobos, and more.

Ryan Pawell is the Founder and CEO of Indee Labs, a biotech company located in Berkley, California.

Pawell received a Bachelor's of Science Degree, Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara. While in college, Pawell had an internship at a medical device company started by three UCSB students. Although his internship was intended to last one summer, Pawell stayed with the company for 18 months. He developed an interest in stem cell regenerative medicine that led to his eventual founding of Indee Labs.

Sumon Sadhu is the founder of Snaptalent, a job advertisement network that closed in 2009. Sadhu now serves as the Chief Revenue Officer of Aesthetic (formerly Plato Design), a graphic design company.

Sadhu is a global angel investor participating in 4 exits and has invested in over 35 companies, including Benchling, Xendit, Mobius Motors, and Framed Data. He has invested money alongside several venture capital firms, including, but not limited to, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, and Sequoia Capital.

In 2012, Lyons moved to Silicon Valley to participate in the NewME Accelerator, an accelerator for start-ups led by minority peoples, but in 2013 he accepted a position alongside Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z, as the Chief of Staff. After five years serving as Chief of Staff, Lyons developed and became head of the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) at a16z, a $16.5 million

In 2012, Lyons moved to Silicon Valley to participate in the NewME Accelerator, an accelerator for start-ups led by minority peoples, but in 2013 he accepted a position alongside Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z, as the Chief of Staff. After five years serving as Chief of Staff, Lyons developed and became head of the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) at a16z, a $16.5 million fund. The CLF is a limited partnership between Andreesen Horowitz and influential global cultural leaders like Shonda Rhimes, Chance the Rapper, Quincy Jones, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett-Smith. The fund is aimed to bring more cultural diversity into the tech industry. The fund has invested in startups such as Wonderschool, Overtime, and Propel.

Chris Lyons is a Managing Partner and the Head of the Cultural Leadership Fund at Andreesen Horowitz (a16z).

Education

Lyons attended Georgia State University, where he received an Associate's Degree in Business Management. Additionally, Lyons went to Full Sail University, where he received another two degrees, an Associate's of Science Degree, Recording Arts, and a Bachelor's of Science Degree, Entertainment Business.

Career

Lyons began his professional life in the music industry, first working as an event coordinator. In 2009 he took a job as a sound engineer for Jermaine Dupri, a Grammy-Award winning music producer based in Atlanta, Georgia. By 2010 Lyons had developed a restaurant application called PictureMenu, a digital menu that allowed restaurant patrons to not only view their meal before ordering but also rate the dish afterward.

In 2012, Lyons moved to Silicon Valley to participate in the NewME Accelerator, an accelerator for start-ups led by minority peoples, but in 2013 he accepted a position alongside Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z, as the Chief of Staff. After five years serving as Chief of Staff, Lyons developed and became head of the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) at a16z, a $16.5 million fund. The CLF is a limited partnership between Andreesen Horowitz and influential global cultural leaders like Shonda Rhimes, Chance the Rapper, Quincy Jones, Will Smith, and Jada Pinkett-Smith. The fund is aimed to bring more cultural diversity into the tech industry. The fund has invested in startups such as Wonderschool, Overtime, and Propel.

Better Tomorrow Ventures is a venture capital firm founded by Jake Gibson and Sheel Mohnot in January 2020. Better Tomorrow is located in San Francisco, California, and invests in the financial technology (FinTech) industry around the world.

Portfolio Companies

Gibson and Mohnot previously built the 500 FinTech accelerator, and Gibson is a co-founder of NerdWallet.

Together Gibson and Mohnot have invested in Albert, ChipperCash, Ethic, Drip Capital, Ethos Insurance, Hippo, Kin, and more. BTV is a $75 million fund investing in pre-seed and seed-stage FinTech and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) funding internationally. BTV also consults with companies on mentorship in hiring, distribution, building company cultures, and forming partnerships between companies.

Invested in

Pete helped his company's founders, Dan and Frank Carney, to build Pizza Hut into the largest restaurant chain in the world by 1971. He doesn't show up in the advertising anymore -- real-life celebrity endorsements have taken over the spotlight -- but Pete is still in the kitchen . . . and still smiling.

[While he was named Pete, I've also seen him referred to on Pizza Hut paper items simply as "Pizza Man".]

Two Pizza Hut Petes stood watch on the sign on our old Pizza Hut. The store was in a strip mall and the sign was to resemble the red roof with the name Pizza Hut in the middle. The two Pete's flanked the name. In the early eighties, the store moved to a new traditional red roof building, but Pete did not make the move.

Founded by Tikhon Bernstam, James Yu, Ilya Sukhar, and Kevin Lacker, Parse is a cloud-based software developer providing kits for building desktop, mobile, and embedded device applications.

Parse was part of the Y Combinator S11 Batch, founded by participants of the 2011 Y Combinator Program, but was acquired by Facebook in 2013 for $85 million. Before Facebook acquired Parse, the platform was used by 20,000 mobile developers and saw a 40% customer increase monthly. By 2014, after the acquisition, it was reported the platform was hosting over 500,000 applications.

In January of 2016, Facebook announced it would be closing the Parse Hosting Service. However, the Parse code was open-sourced by Facebook, to allow the migration of apps to self-host. Parse provided a server, called MongoDB, allowing developers to migrate to a new self-hosted server while continuing to have access to the Parse dashboard. However, several vendors are capable of hosting Parse applications, allowing developers to move their applications to avoid self-hosting. On January 30th, 2018, Parse discontinued its hosting services.

Novartis products include oncology medicines, generic and biosimilar medicines and eye carcare devices. The Innovative Medicine segment of the company is divided into Novartis Oncology and Novartis Pharmaceuticals. Novartis Pharmaceuticals consists of global business franchises in ophthalmology, neuroscience, immunology and dermatology, respiratory, cardio-metabolic and established medicines.

Divisions

Novartis Oncology

Novartis Oncology is focused on the development and manufacturing of medicines directed towards improving and extending people's lives.

Sandoz

Alcon

Novartis Gene Therapies

Previously known as AveXis, Novartis Gene Therapies works to develop and commercialize gene therapies. They have a specific focus on neurological genetic diseases. Their initial gene therapy is for spinal muscular atrophy and has been approved in the United States, Japan, the European Union, and Brazil.

Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR)

Part of their research and development program, the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) is working on developing informatics tools for drug discovery with a focus on open-sourced software.

Habitat

Habitat is a software developed to be a self-contained object storage management system. Based on Amazon Web Services, Novartis says Habitat is capable of virtually unlimited storage and can be used as a local repository for a single application or shared and used with many clients.

Yet Another Data Abstraction (YADA)

Novartis says Yet Another Data Abstraction (YADA) is a data aggregation tool capable of accessing data sets at any data source in any format and from any environment with a single URL and a single configuration. YADA is intended to be a lightweight framework for data retrieval, searching, storage, and manipulation.

OntoBrowser

OntoBrowser is a web-based application for managing ontologies. Developed by Novartis, they say the tool is intended to provide an online collaborative solution for curators to map code list terms to preferred ontology terms. OntoBrowser also offers visualization of ontologies in hierarchical or graph format, advanced search capabilities, and web service access to data.

Railroadtracks

Railroadtracks is a Python package Novartis says is intended to handle connected computation steps for DNA and RNA sequencing.

Yet Another Pipeline (YAP)

Yet Another Pipeline (YAP) is an extensible parallel framework developed by Novartis and written in Python using OpenMPI libraries. The software is intended to help researchers build high throughput data pipelines without knowledge of parallel programming.

RDKit

Developed by Novartis, the RDKit is a collection of cheminformatics and machine-learning softwre written in C++ and Python. The distribution includes a PostgreSQL-based cartridge allowing molecules to be stored in a relational database and allowing users to retrieve information via substructure and similarity searches.

GridVar

GridVar is a JQuery plugin that visualized multi-dimensional datasets as layers organized in a row-column format. Novartis says the software is intended to allow users to visualize data as a background color and enables characteristics of a dataset to be layered on top of each other.

Nerve Live

Developed by Novartis to use big data and data analytics, Nerve Live is an advanced analytics platform is intended to be used as part of a drug discovery program. Novartis sees the platform as enabling machine learning and cognitive computing systems to extract information which traditional data analysts and users might miss.

Novartis, previously called Ciba-Geigy, was one of the few pharmaceutical companies involved in tyrosine kinase inhibitor research when it began a collaboration with oncologist Brian Druker which resulted in discovery of the kinase inhibitor drug Gleevec (also known as Glivec or imatinib). Gleevec was FDA approved in 2001 to treat patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Kinases perform phosphorylation, a mechanism that controls the activity of proteins in the cell. CML patients have a mutation causing their tyrosine kinase to be overactive, which signals cell to proliferate at a high rate, resulting in accumulation of immature white blood cells. Based on revenue, Gleevec was one of Novartis’s top ten pharmaceutical products in 2017.

The Nerve Live was developed by first building a data lake. This was followed by developing an analytics engine to process the data and derive assets from it. And the final stage of development of this program involved designing user modules that would make predictive analytic insights and offer these insights to add value in business decisions.

Novartis hopes to develop Nerve Live to offer features to help manage resources, including using predictive models to plan medical supplies for medical centers.

data42 Program

The data42 program is a digital research and development platform Novartis believes will help in drug discovery and drug testing while costing less. The program would include large pools of patient and pharmaceutical data and an artificial intelligence to assist researchers in their development. As of March 2020, the program was still in the initial phases of development.

Research

Gleevec

Novartis, previously called Ciba-Geigy, was one of the few pharmaceutical companies involved in tyrosine kinase inhibitor research when it began a collaboration with oncologist Brian Druker which resulted in discovery of the kinase inhibitor drug Gleevec (also known as Glivec or imatinib). Gleevec was FDA approved in 2001 to treat patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Kinases perform phosphorylation, a mechanism that controls the activity of proteins in the cell. CML patients have a mutation causing their tyrosine kinase to be overactive, which signals cell to proliferate at a high rate, resulting in accumulation of immature white blood cells. Based on revenue, Gleevec was one of Novartis’s top ten pharmaceutical products in 2017.

Kisqali

Tikhon Bernstam is an American businessman, founder, and angel investor, living in the San Francisco Bay area. He attended Dartmouth College, and participated in Y Combinator's accelerator program twice, once in 2006 and again in 2011.

After completing the Y Combinator program in 2006, Bernstam founded Scribd, an online reading subscription service, where users may read or listen to books, magazines, podcasts, sheet music, and other published materials. Scribd has over 80 million active users.

In 2011, Bernstam again attended a Y Combinator program and co-founded Parse with Kevin Lacker, James Yu, and Ilya Sukhar; as a part of the Y Combinator S11 Batch. Parse is a cloud-based software developer providing kits for building desktop, mobile, and embedded device applications. In 2013 Facebook acquired Parse for $85M.