We are set to launch this year's new TYE class tomorrow, October 1st. Are YOU ready? The event will take place from 6:30 to 9:30 PM at Reservoir Woods, 930 Winter Street, Waltham, MA.
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We have some excellent speakers who will help us kick off this year's events. We have included their bios below. Think about some questions that you might want to ask them!
Matt Lauzon, Co-Founder and CEO: 
Matt Lauzon founded Paragon Lake in 2006 as a student at Babson College. Lauzon enrolled at Babson because of its reputation as the number one school in the world for entrepreneurship education and leveraged all the college had to offer while exploring various business opportunities. Paragon Lake was born when Lauzon and a fellow student uncovered a niche in the jewelry industry at the intersection of e-commerce and mass customization. Serving as co-founder and CEO, Lauzon took Paragon Lake from an idea incubating in a Babson dormitory to become an institutionally funded company in just two years.
Lauzon created a leadership team that includes industry veterans from both the software and jewelry spaces and built a national network of independent jewelers that use Paragon Lake’s proprietary platform to drive made-to-order sales in their stores. In addition to building the team and driving growth, Lauzon led the company through two rounds of institutional funding totaling over $6M in financing from Highland Capital Partners and Canaan Partners.
Lauzon earned a B.S. in Business Management from Babson College where he was an Arthur M. Blank Scholar. At Babson, he was named one of “America’s Top Entrepreneurs Under the Age of 25” by BusinessWeek, was the winner of the John H. Muller Jr. Business Plan Competition, and was awarded the Shelby Cullom Davis prize for social entrepreneurship.
Tarra Mitchell, Founder & Managing Director, WAVE Capital PartnersMs. Mitchell directs WAVE’s strategic planning and management of the Partnership. She is responsible for building and managing the firm’s execution strategy & platform; securing equity, debt & project financing for portfolio companies; and negotiating terms of sale including public offerings. An important component of her value will involve looking across the portfolio and understanding what is happening, maximizing efficiency, with a view towards getting to a liquidity event quickly.
Ms. Mitchell’s accomplishments include creating scaleable business platforms, which maximize efficiency and improve returns. She’s done this repeatedly in prior work environments including marketing & sales, relationship management, and eBusiness. Prior to founding WAVE she created a professional platform for Landmark Partners (www.landmarkpartners.com), a private equity firm founded in 1999, which expanded assets under management from $3.5 to $7.5bn during her 6.5 year tenure. For Landmark, Ms. Mitchell directed fundraisings of over $2 billion and sourced several hundred million in transactions. She also spearheaded Landmark’s entry into Asia forging a joint venture in Korea and developed new business relationships in Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong.
Prior to her career in private equity, she was a management consultant to large financial services clients including J.P. Morgan and The Hartford through her employment with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Wheelhouse. Ms. Mitchell created international market entry strategies for small businesses for the Export Consortium during business school, was an equity analyst for Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Prior to business school, Ms. Mitchell served as account manager to global consumer products goods manufacturers for an organization called MMI that provided analytical tools, services, and data.
Ms. Mitchell has an MBA in International Business from the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina and a BS concentrating in International Business from The Pennsylvania State University where she graduated cuma sum laude. She also serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Association of Venture and Equity (www.women-wave.org), the only national organization dedicated to the development of women in the field of private equity and venture capital and an advisory board member of NetageSolutions (www.netagesolutions.com).
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