At 19, Kentarou Siejak is already testing what can happen when students are given real responsibility instead of simulated experience. As president of Elevate at ASU, organizer of TEDx ASU, and a Venture Cafe Phoenix ambassador, he is building opportunities for students to work on ambitious projects, develop professional relationships, raise capital, and learn by actually doing the work.

That approach was tested early. When TEDx ASU lost its venue with only three weeks remaining, Kentarou and his team had to rebuild sponsorships, secure a new location, and begin marketing almost from scratch. The resulting event brought together hundreds of attendees and a team of roughly 80 students—an experience Kentarou now sees as training for much bigger projects ahead.

Throughout the conversation, Kentarou returns to one skill: resourcefulness. Whether he is finding sponsors, connecting experts, building partnerships, or helping students find mentors, his instinct is to ask who needs to be in the room and how to reach them. His larger goal for Elevate isn't simply helping students build résumés. It's helping them develop enough confidence, experience, and relationships to eventually build things of their own.

For Arizona's innovation ecosystem, Kentarou represents something worth paying attention to: a generation of students who don't necessarily want to wait until graduation to participate. His vision stretches from Arizona campuses to global—and even interplanetary—problems, but the starting point remains local: give young people meaningful work, connect them with people who can help, and create enough momentum for them to eventually create opportunities for others.

• Why Kentarou believes resourcefulness is one of the most important skills for innovation
• How the TEDx ASU team responded when its venue disappeared three weeks before the event
• How students can turn college organizations into laboratories for real-world experience
• Kentarou's approach to sponsorships, partnerships, and aligning incentives
• Why understanding psychology and sociology can make someone a better salesperson and leader
• How mentors can expand what young entrepreneurs and innovators believe is possible
• Why Kentarou wants students to eventually leave Elevate and build something of their own
• What changes when leaders begin planning in decades—or even centuries—instead of quarters

Kentarou Siejak is an Arizona State University student, president of Elevate at ASU, organizer of TEDx ASU, keynote speaker, and ambassador for Venture Cafe Phoenix. His work centers on connecting students with real-world projects, mentors, partnerships, and opportunities that allow them to develop as builders and leaders while they are still in school.

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Whitney Slightham didn’t set out to become a medical device founder. After more than 16 years working in science and technical communications, she moved to Flagstaff, built a practice serving life sciences companies, and became immersed in Arizona’s medtech community. Then her surgeon husband came home with an idea for helping reinflate collapsed lung segments in ventilated patients. A year later, that idea has become Ateleva, Inc., a medical device startup with patents pending and a growing network of physicians, engineers, manufacturers, and advisors behind it.

For Whitney, the problem is also personal. Her father spent significant time on a ventilator while she was his primary caregiver, and her son spent time in the ICU as a baby. Those experiences shape how she thinks about the people behind the technology—the patients, families, physicians, and hospitals trying to navigate some of the most difficult moments in healthcare.

This conversation is also a practical look at what it takes to build a medtech company when there is no simple roadmap. Whitney shares the realities of bootstrapping, early-stage funding, regulatory complexity, physician interviews, market validation, and the danger of developing a technically successful product without first understanding whether hospitals and clinicians will actually adopt it.

Her journey reveals something larger about Arizona’s innovation ecosystem. From Flagstaff manufacturers and former Gore Medical experts to FemTech AZ, Venture Cafe Phoenix, engineering groups, advisors, and healthcare leaders across the state, Whitney has built Ateleva, Inc. by connecting expertise that already exists here. Her experience is a reminder that innovation rarely happens in isolation—and that sometimes the most valuable infrastructure an ecosystem can provide is helping the right people find one another.

• Why Whitney moved from science communications into medical device entrepreneurship
• How a respiratory device concept went from a sketch on a toddler’s chalkboard to a medtech startup
• Why personal experiences with the ICU influence Whitney’s approach to healthcare innovation
• The funding and regulatory challenges facing early-stage medical device companies
• Why Whitney prioritizes physician interviews and market validation before commercialization
• How Arizona manufacturers, engineers, healthcare experts, and advisors have helped accelerate Ateleva, Inc.
• Why founders move faster when they build relationships outside their immediate circles
• How communities like FemTech AZ and Venture Cafe Phoenix create connective tissue across Arizona’s innovation ecosystem

Whitney Slightham is the co-founder of Ateleva, Inc., an Arizona medical device startup developing respiratory solutions designed to address lung collapse and related clinical challenges. Based in Flagstaff, she brings more than 16 years of experience in science and technical communications and is building Ateleva, Inc. through collaboration with physicians, engineers, manufacturers, advisors, and medtech leaders across Arizona.

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Episode Description

Aaron Bare has spent years helping build the connective tissue behind Arizona’s innovation ecosystem. An entrepreneur, author, technologist, and longtime community builder, Aaron was involved in the early formation of Venture Cafe Phoenix and helped bring together the people, partners, and support needed to turn the idea into a weekly gathering for the region’s entrepreneurial community.

In this conversation, Aaron reflects on what happens when leaders stop trying to control everything. His perspective was shaped by both success and failure: after building and selling companies, working across technology and education, and helping launch community initiatives, he came to see leadership less as having all the answers and more as creating the conditions for other people to contribute.

Aaron and Alex explore why founders can suffocate organizations by staying too close to every decision, why the people closest to a problem are often best equipped to solve it, and why subtraction can matter more than constantly adding more. They also discuss AI, incentives, intuition, failure, and Aaron’s belief that the next era of technology may actually require people to become more human.

At the center of the episode is a lesson that has helped shape Venture Cafe Phoenix itself: strong ecosystems are built by people who give first, create connections, and then get out of the way. For Arizona, that means building more places where entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, students, executives, and unexpected collaborators can keep finding one another.

What You'll Learn

• Why Aaron believes leaders should make fewer decisions, not more
• How founders can empower the people closest to a problem
• Why failure can be a better teacher than success
• How subtraction and letting go can create room for opportunity
• Why Aaron believes incentives shape organizations, communities, and behavior
• How AI could push people toward more human forms of work and connection
• What Aaron learned from helping launch Venture Cafe Phoenix
• Why giving first can completely change the experience of networking
• How diverse, recurring communities create unexpected collaboration
• Why strong innovation ecosystems depend on people creating platforms others can build upon

About Aaron Bare

Aaron Bare is an entrepreneur, author, technologist, speaker, and community builder whose work has crossed startups, education, technology, leadership, and ecosystem development. He helped lay the early foundation for Venture Cafe Phoenix and has continued working to create stronger networks, better incentives, and more meaningful collaboration among entrepreneurs and leaders.

About Venture Cafe Phoenix

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Kathleen Celmins is a marketer, technologist, Venture Cafe Phoenix’s marketing director, and the founder of boomp, a platform designed to help local businesses maintain a meaningful digital presence without becoming full-time content creators. Her story also captures something happening across Arizona’s innovation ecosystem: AI is lowering technical barriers and giving people new ways to build ideas they once would have needed significant capital or specialized teams to pursue.

Kathleen arrived at Venture Cafe knowing almost nothing about AI automation. One demonstration was enough to send her down a rabbit hole that lasted nearly two years. She taught herself to build software, discovered that a traditional engineering path could cost her $60,000, used AI to keep iterating instead, and eventually learned an important lesson about entrepreneurship: sometimes you have to be “a little bit brave, a little bit stupid” to attempt something you don’t yet know how to do. Venture Cafe later created another unexpected turning point when an IP session caused her to rethink the brand she had already built and ultimately rebrand it as boomp.

But this conversation goes beyond software. Kathleen talks about why the best networking isn’t transactional, why founders need other people to help them see the value of what they’re building, and why becoming known inside a community takes more than showing up once. She also shares refreshingly practical advice about self-promotion: stop apologizing for taking up space, follow the threads of what genuinely interests you, and keep showing up even before everything feels finished.

Kathleen’s larger mission is distinctly local: helping Arizona businesses compete for attention against franchises and corporations with far greater resources.

• How Kathleen went from seeing a simple AI automation demo to building her own software platform
• Why AI is allowing nontraditional technologists to tackle projects that once required significant capital and engineering resources
• What an IP conversation at Venture Cafe taught Kathleen about protecting what you build
• Why customer feedback became part of the development process for boomp
• How automation can eliminate repetitive work and create more room for creativity
• Why effective networking is about becoming known, not immediately making a sale
• How community can help entrepreneurs recognize strengths and opportunities they struggle to see themselves

Kathleen Celmins is the founder of boomp, an AI-powered social media platform built to help local businesses create a consistent digital presence without having to become content creators themselves. She also serves as Marketing Director for Venture Cafe Phoenix, where she applies her experience in marketing, AI, and automation to help more people discover and participate in Arizona’s innovation community. boomp.net

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Rashad Armstrong is a comedian, professional emcee, and one of the people helping shape the culture of Venture Cafe Phoenix from the inside out. As the voice welcoming people into the room each week, Rashad sees his role as more than entertaining a crowd: he reads the room, helps people find the right connections, and works to make sure newcomers feel safe, included, and closer to whatever brought them there in the first place.

His path to that role wasn’t conventional. Rashad came through hospitality, comedy, and a period when he says his “back was against the wall” before deciding to pursue entertainment seriously. That decision eventually expanded into something bigger: building a business, becoming a professional host, and learning how to turn creativity into a career through consistency, professionalism, and a willingness to take risks.

But the larger story is about community. Rashad has gone from being mentored inside Venture Cafe to mentoring newer voices himself, helping people strengthen their public speaking and confidence. He describes the process as a kind of trickle-down effect: people invest in one another, those people grow, and eventually they begin opening doors for someone else.

For founders, innovators, students, creatives, and ecosystem builders, the conversation is a reminder that innovation doesn’t happen through ideas alone. It happens when people have places to experiment, relationships that keep them moving, and people willing to notice potential before it is fully developed. As Rashad puts it, “we can’t do this alone.”

What You’ll Learn

• Why creating a strong innovation ecosystem starts with how people experience the room
• How hospitality, comedy, and entrepreneurship can develop surprisingly transferable leadership skills
• Why Rashad thinks the best opportunities often come from identifying people who need just one more connection or piece of support
• How mentorship can compound as people who were once helped begin helping others
• Why having a purpose outside your day job can strengthen confidence, identity, and resilience
• What professionalism can add to a creative career beyond talent alone
• How Venture Cafe creates opportunities for unexpected collaborations across industries and backgrounds
• Rashad’s practical advice for getting the most out of your first Venture Cafe Phoenix experience

About Rashad Armstrong

Rashad Armstrong is a comedian, professional emcee, entrepreneur, and the MC of Venture Cafe Phoenix. Through his work onstage and inside the community, he helps create an environment where people feel welcomed, connected, and encouraged to pursue their ideas—and increasingly mentors others who are developing those same skills.

About Venture Cafe Phoenix

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona’s innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Zoe Bibbes is building something unusual in Phoenix: a community where electronic music, wellness, entrepreneurship, and human connection meet—often before most nightclubs would even open. Through Club Lumen and Lumen Entertainment, she creates sober-curious morning dance parties while building a platform for local artists, small businesses, and creative people to find one another.

The idea emerged from an entrepreneurial path that was anything but linear. Zoe moved through real estate, health and wellness, insurance, a car dealership, staffing, pressure washing, and a day job before deciding she was ready to find her “forever business.” An unexpected connection to electronic music—and a sober trip to EDC—helped her recognize an opportunity hiding in plain sight: people wanted the energy and community of nightlife without necessarily needing the substances, late nights, or disconnection that often accompany it.

In this conversation with host Alex Koupal, Zoe explores what she has learned about creating spaces where strangers actually interact, why she refuses to separate people into VIP sections, how small businesses and artists can benefit from community-driven events, and what it takes to turn an organic idea into an organization with standards, processes, partnerships, and a team. Her experience offers a useful lesson for Arizona entrepreneurs: sometimes innovation isn't inventing something entirely new. It's noticing how people's needs are changing and creating a new intersection around them.

Zoe's story also illustrates what an innovation ecosystem can look like beyond traditional startups and technology companies. Phoenix's entrepreneurs, creatives, wellness professionals, artists, businesses, and community organizations don't have to operate in separate worlds. When the right environments bring them together, relationships become opportunities—and entirely new communities can emerge.

• How Zoe turned a personal connection to electronic music into a new kind of Phoenix community
• Why sober-curious events reflect changing ideas about nightlife, wellness, and connection
• How Club Lumen creates opportunities for artists and Arizona small businesses alongside its events
• Why defining who a community isn't for can help strengthen who it is for
• What Zoe learned moving from solopreneurship toward building a team, standards, and processes
• Why she sees entrepreneurship and leadership as an “inside job” requiring accountability and personal growth
• How networking, relationships, and simply showing up helped turn an idea into partnerships and opportunities
• Why unconventional gathering spaces can strengthen connections across Arizona's broader innovation ecosystem

Zoe Bibbes is the founder of Lumen Entertainment, Club Lumen, and Lumen Artists, building experiences and opportunities at the intersection of music, wellness, community, and entrepreneurship in Phoenix. Her work brings together artists, ambitious professionals, local businesses, and community partners while exploring new ways for people to connect through shared experiences.

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Every thriving innovation ecosystem depends on people who make meaningful connections happen. Sarah Waschler is one of those people. With more than 26 years of experience producing events and leading complex operations, she serves as Venture Cafe Phoenix's Experience and Event Manager while also running her own event management business. In this conversation, Sarah shares how creating spaces where people can connect, collaborate, and learn has become one of the most impactful ways to strengthen Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

After spending more than two decades in corporate event management, Sarah made the difficult decision to leave the safety of a familiar career to prioritize her family and build a business of her own. She reflects on the unexpected challenges of entrepreneurship—including spending months stuck trying to name her company—and how the Venture Cafe community gave her the confidence to stop waiting for perfect and simply begin.

Listeners will hear how strong communities are intentionally designed, why Arizona's innovation ecosystem grows when organizations collaborate instead of compete, and how programs like mentor hours, hackathons, international delegations, and community partnerships create opportunities that extend far beyond a single event. Sarah also shares why some of the most important work in innovation happens not on stage, but in the conversations taking place before and after the programming ends.

As Arizona continues to emerge as a global destination for entrepreneurs, researchers, investors, and innovators, conversations like this remind us that breakthrough ideas don't grow in isolation. They grow because people like Sarah create environments where relationships, trust, and opportunity can flourish.

• Why community infrastructure is essential to a thriving innovation ecosystem
• How stepping outside your comfort zone can unlock unexpected opportunities
• Lessons from transitioning from a 20-year corporate career into entrepreneurship
• Why collaboration across organizations strengthens Arizona's startup community
• How Venture Cafe Phoenix connects founders, researchers, investors, students, and community leaders
• The role mentor hours, hackathons, and ecosystem partnerships play in helping innovators succeed
• Why flexibility and continuous learning are critical leadership skills in today's workplace
• How global relationships are expanding opportunities for Arizona entrepreneurs
• Why meaningful innovation often begins with simple human connections

Sarah Waschler is the owner of Expos & Events, an event management company with more than 26 years of experience producing conferences, trade shows, and large-scale events across multiple industries. As Experience and Event Manager for Venture Cafe Phoenix, she helps design the experiences, partnerships, programming, and community connections that make Arizona's innovation ecosystem more welcoming, collaborative, and impactful.

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.

Arizona's innovation ecosystem isn't built by technology companies alone. It's also built by the entrepreneurs who create the places where founders meet, ideas are shared, and communities gather. In this episode, Alex Koupal sits down with Joey Palomarez, founder of JP's Catering, Spaghetti Shack, and Tita's Tacos, to explore how food became his platform for building relationships across Arizona's entrepreneurial community.

Joey shares the realities of launching a restaurant during COVID, expanding too quickly, and learning difficult lessons about growth, financing, and leadership. Rather than chasing scale for its own sake, he discovered that his greatest opportunity wasn't opening more restaurants—it was solving a bigger problem for organizations by becoming a long-term partner instead of simply another caterer.

Listeners will hear practical insights about finding the work that matches your strengths, surrounding yourself with people whose talents complement your own, and listening closely enough to customers that they help shape your next business. Joey's story is a reminder that some of Arizona's most meaningful innovation happens by improving everyday experiences rather than inventing entirely new technologies.

As Arizona's startup ecosystem continues to grow, conversations like this highlight the importance of every entrepreneur who helps strengthen the community. Whether through technology, education, manufacturing, or simply bringing people together over a meal, innovation is ultimately powered by relationships—and Joey is helping create the spaces where those relationships can flourish.

• • Why solving customer problems matters more than chasing growth
• • Lessons from scaling a business too quickly—and how to pivot successfully
• • How authentic relationships create long-term business opportunities
• • Why founders should spend more time working in their unique strengths
• • The importance of building teams with complementary skill sets
• • How listening to customers can lead to entirely new business models
• • Why hospitality plays an essential role in Arizona's innovation ecosystem
• • Practical leadership lessons for entrepreneurs building growing organizations

Joey Palomarez is the founder of JP's Catering and the creator of local Arizona brands including Spaghetti Shack and Tita's Tacos. Through a relationship-first approach to hospitality, he partners with businesses, community organizations, and events across Arizona, demonstrating how food can strengthen collaboration, culture, and entrepreneurial communities throughout the state's innovation ecosystem.

Venture Cafe Phoenix: An Extraordinary Podcast explores the people, stories, and relationships shaping Arizona's innovation ecosystem.

Hosted by Alex Koupal, the podcast features conversations with founders, innovators, investors, educators, executives, policymakers, researchers, and community leaders working to make Arizona a place where ideas grow, businesses thrive, and meaningful connections happen.

Powered by CEI (Center for Entrepreneurial Innovation), Legacy Sponsor the City of Phoenix, and produced by Extraordinary.