Dealmakers Conversations

Dustin is an award-winning business journalist, bestselling author, and the chief content officer of Smart Business. Over the past 30 years, he has interviewed thousands of business and civic leaders, and helped more than 50 CEOs and entrepreneurs transform their ideas into books. A trained investigative politics reporter and former digital media entrepreneur, Dustin joined Smart Business in 1997 after serving as an editor at several daily newspapers.

Ross Buhrdorf is the Founder & CEO of ZenBusiness PBC. He has over 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technology leader and c-level exec, angel investor and board member, and has helped transform the way consumers interact with technology. As CEO of ZenBusiness, Ross is helping historically underserved small business owners start, run, and grow their companies through a single, comprehensive guided platform that provides all the tools they need to get their business off the ground and running. Prior to ZenBusiness, Ross was CTO of HomeAway (now Vrbo), a vacation rental site.

Derek Nixon is the current CEO and President of Varel Energy Solutions. He is a dedicated, decisive leader and outstanding team builder with extensive experience both domestically and internationally, Derek has a proven track record of growing top and bottom lines in drilling and completions tools around the world.

Derek started working in the oilfield 14 years ago with Varel Oil Gas Drill Bits in the Barnett Shale as a field sales professional. Derek worked through various levels of responsibility towards becoming a US Regional Manager where he was responsible for the majority of US markets. Following his management role, he took a position in Houston as the Director of Western Hemisphere for Downhole Products, a legacy subsidiary of Varel. In doing so, Derek gained valuable international experience. He was instrumental in setting up the structure of distributers in Latin America along with the sales team and offices in North America. In his most previous position as Vice President for Downhole Products, he was responsible for every facet of the global operating business, including sales, operations, engineering, manufacturing and finance.

Brian Hill is the CEO of Edovo, a venture that aims to reduce recidivism by bringing tech-enabled education and communication tools to incarcerated people. The Edovo platform, which has scaled nationally, has already reached over 300K learners and in 2022 will be reaching over 500K incarcerated learners daily.

Matt Ford - CEO - Serial Entrepreneur in the Tech and Live Music space - founded spotlight.fm while in College which grew to hundreds of thousands of users and serviced some of the biggest promoters, agencies and music brands in the country. Went on to fund Solstice - part concert promoter part tech company. While building a concert promoter brand, booking thousands of concerts and building Solstice Festival, Ford was also building software to match venues and artists and streamline the planning of events. Prism ultimately emerged from this process.