Kathleen Gallagher
Midwest Moxie HostKathleen Gallagher is the host of Midwest Moxie and previously the host of How Did You Do That?.
She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who is Executive Director of 5 Lakes Institute, a non-profit focused on building and connecting the Great Lakes Region’s high-tech entrepreneurial economy and culture. She is also a columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Previously, during more than two decades as a reporter at the Journal Sentinel, Kathleen covered banking, technology and entrepreneurship and wrote a weekly Investment Trends column. In 2011, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a series of articles about how doctors and scientists in Milwaukee for the first time in history sequenced all the genes of a patient for diagnosis. Kathleen and co-author Mark Johnson wrote a book based on that series called One in a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine.
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Jon Pearce got an internship with a startup while still in college, setting his path toward becoming a founder. Valarie King-Bailey spent more than 20 years working for other companies before starting one of her own. Despite different timelines, both found their calling. -
Mo Faisal set out to build better and more energy efficient semiconductor chips. Lindsay Tjepkema wanted to update the business-to-business marketing playbook. Both founded startups to do it.
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Niko Skievaski and his co-founders started building an interface for accessing health data so members of their coworking space could more easily grow their tech companies. But the interface itself turned out to be the basis for a scalable tech business that would provide a platform developers can use to build and distribute software that is revolutionizing healthcare.
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Sridhar Deivasigamani knew the world was ready for smarter, more efficient water heaters. Zach Halmstad knew businesses needed more software tools to manage their Apple devices. It turns out that both of them were right.
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Brian Wiegand started his first company in the early days of the internet, which he’s been mining ever since. Craig Markovitz found his success with medical technologies. They share one important characteristic: A willingness to take risks — over and over again.
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Alisyn Malek has impacted sustainability as an engineer and innovation leader at General Motors, as co-founder of self-driving shuttle startup May Mobility and now as head of the nonprofit Coalition for Reimagined Mobility. Her work has influenced not only how new transportation technologies are being developed, but how they are being integrated into our social fabric.
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Ankur Gopal struck out into the world but returned home to Kentucky to start his companies. Michael Chambers stayed in North Dakota and built a high-growth company right there in his own backyard. Both of their home states have benefitted.
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Christopher Day grew up in rural Indiana without much visibility into any career. Tom Gajewski grew up in Chicago with his eye on a medical career. Both became serial entrepreneurs.
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Jim McKelvey was a nationally known glass blower, but blew past that accomplishment to grow an even bigger reputation with Square. The company Jim co-founded forever changed the credit card industry, and perhaps even more amazingly, successfully fended off competition from Amazon.
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Introducing Midwest Moxie, a new podcast about the successes, failures, insights and opportunities that shape some of the Midwest’s most exciting entrepreneurs.
