I’m Gregg Walrod, your Startup Sous Chef, blending 20+ years of expertise in product development, strategic growth, and creative problem-solving to craft the perfect recipe for your brand’s success.

At Secret Sauce, we thrive on helping startups uncover their unique flavor—scaling product development, building standout campaigns, and mentoring teams with bold ideas and practical solutions. I’ve partnered with companies like Best Buy, Nerdery, Inspire11, and Aclaimant, and now collaborate with The Path and other startups to drive impactful growth.

Success isn’t just about execution—it’s about connection. Let’s turn up the heat, add a DASH, and create something unforgettable.

Mary is the VP of Global for the Western Hemisphere at the AI Collective, overseeing the health and growth of the community in North and Latin Americas.  She started her career in software engineering and has deep interest especially in distributed systems, which cover all spectrums in the computing world. She is also very passionate about tech advocacy and community work, and has been leading the Java users group in Chicago since 2015. She is recognized as a Java Champion and an Oracle ACE Associate. 

Nathan Frank is Director of Machine Learning Platform & Operations at Grainger, responsible for productizing platform capabilities, formalizing governance, and accelerating adoption of production ML across the enterprise. With an M.S. in Physics & Astronomy and experience spanning data science, sports technology, and ML consulting, Nathan brings both technical depth and operational empathy to platform strategy. He’s passionate about developer experience, robust model serving, and practical governance that makes the right path the easy path. Outside work he reads science fiction, bakes bread, and spends time outdoors.

Kristen Bender is a senior technology executive and former Chief Information Officer with deep expertise in global digital transformation. Known for building high-performing, trust-driven teams, she has successfully led organizations through ERP, cloud, and advanced analytics initiatives across manufacturing, marine, and industrial sectors. Kristen is passionate about turning complexity into opportunity—driving technology-enabled growth and operational excellence to create lasting business impact.

Steven Singer is the Chief Information Officer of Julius Silvert Inc., a century-old food distribution company serving the Mid-Atlantic. He is leading a full-scale ERP modernization, migrating from legacy S2K to Dynamics 365, with deep integration into BFC Dakota WMS, Paycom, Adobe Commerce, and Shopify Plus. Steven drives operational efficiency through IoT telemetry with Samsara, centralized analytics in Azure Data Lake/PowerBI, and GS1 Release 25.0 compliance for over 7,000 active SKUs. He is also advancing the company’s use of artificial intelligence, including AI-powered product mapping and menu intelligence to streamline ordering and enhance e-commerce accuracy. Positioned as a succession candidate for CEO, he combines technical modernization with business development leadership.

Cerulion is a cross-platform robot middleware that is redefining the developer experience for robots. Gone are the days of clunky installs, dependency management hell, or slow and finicky comms with ROS and ROS 2. Cerulion just works -- cross-platform, zero config and built for speed. Bring your robot dreams to life all the way from inception to production without skipping a beat.

Black-I’s revolutionary AI-based Fullscope mobile heavy lift arm offsets two to five workers per 24-hour shift, protects workers with a proprietary security perimeter and saves millions of dollars in fixed costs.

The maritime industry is the backbone of global trade and is responsible for moving over 80% of the world's goods. Yet this critical sector has been plagued by a persistent data gap in asset maintenance and performance. Fleet Robotics is developing advanced autonomous robotics specifically engineered to close this information gap. Our autonomous bipedal robots make it easy to reach and monitor previously inaccessible large assets, specifically ship hulls, transforming decision-making from guesswork to data-informed strategy.

By enabling continuous access to vessel hulls while ships remain in operation, we're collecting unprecedented data on hull condition and performance. This transforms how operators maintain their vessels, moving from reactive, scheduled maintenance to proactive, condition-based optimization. In an industry where fuel represents up to 60% of operational costs, our solution drives efficiency while reducing environmental impact, demonstrating how specialized robotics can revolutionize asset management in challenging environments.

Symage’s mission is to empower AI teams with high-integrity, photorealistic synthetic image data that enables faster, more accurate training—especially for edge cases and scenarios where real-world data is limited, biased, or hard to obtain.

Square Robot, founded in 2016, is an innovator in the world of robotic tank inspections, providing leading edge on-stream, internal tank inspections across the globe. Through its development of autonomous, submersible robotic inspection technology, data acquisition, and processing, Square Robot is uniquely positioned to provide data driven solutions in an ever-growing range of industries, above ground storage tanks, and the products they store.

Ubiros, specializes in fully electric soft robotic grippers designed to handle delicate, irregular, and fragile items with unmatched control. Unlike pneumatic or hydraulic systems, their grippers use precision motors to adjust grip force and position in real time—no air lines, compressors, or fluids required. This all-electric design ensures cleaner operation, lower maintenance, and better adaptability across industries like food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics where consistency and safety matter most.

Barrett Technology is a pioneering robotics company based in Newton, Massachusetts, renowned for developing advanced robotic systems that interact safely and intuitively with humans. Their flagship products include the WAM® arm, BarrettHand™, and Burt®—an FDA-registered medical device designed to promote brain plasticity during stroke recovery. These systems are powered by Barrett’s proprietary Puck® motor controllers, which are among the most compact and precise in the industry, enabling smooth and safe human-robot interactions.

When two architects from Zaha Hadid’s research lab first approached robotics, their idea was to explore applications specific to architectural engineering. But they soon discovered that modern automation wasn’t just unnecessarily complex – it was actively restricting innovation. And not just within their industry – in many others too. It was clear that robotic automation was a field where their combined experience in computational research and design could make a real difference.

Assembling a team of industry experts, Automata was founded with a clear aim: to enable new opportunities for innovation with automation.

Automata’s focus narrowed on an industry where they felt their expertise could have the most impact: the life sciences. Today, most lab automation tends to be defined by a series of very specialized benchtop instruments that are still reliant on human interaction. But Automata saw an opportunity for a new way of looking at automation in the life sciences: open, integrated automation.

That’s how they came to develop the world’s first fully automated lab bench, and its accompanying software. This enables labs to use staff and resources more effectively by ensuring total walkaway time and consistency, without compromising on valuable lab space.

I am the Head of Data Science at Attune, where we build healthcare-native, agentic voice AI that helps organizations engage patients and members thoughtfully, empathetically, and at scale. With 13 years of experience across data infrastructure and applied machine learning, I lead end-to-end data science development for production-scale AI systems in regulated healthcare environments.

 
My work focuses on selecting, fine-tuning, and optimizing domain-specific models that improve efficiency, reduce cost-to-serve, and deliver measurable business outcomes. I operate across the full lifecycle from model evaluation and experimentation to deployment and performance optimization, ensuring AI solutions are scalable, reliable, and production-ready.

Jen Anderson is a decision scientist and engineering leader at the intersection of human behavior and complex technical systems. With an MS in Computer Science and a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience, she brings a researcher's curiosity and an experimentalist's mindset to the way engineering organizations make decisions and build at scale. She has a deep appreciation for how patterns in biological systems and social networks show up in the platforms and teams we build, and a drive to keep probing those connections. She advises engineering leaders on the strategic decisions that define how their teams and systems evolve, and builds platforms that put that thinking into practice. She speaks and writes on technical leadership and the behavioral dynamics that drive or derail high-performing engineering teams.