One Ring Networks

Kris Maher/One Ring Networks

With over a decade of industry experience, Kris Maher is the trailblazer behind One Ring Networks and its responsive, customer-focused culture. Maher heads the field and channel sales company-wide and leads sales teams for all of One Ring Networks fiber and fixed wireless customers in Atlanta, Dallas and Fort Worth. He is a member of the Atlanta Promise Neighborhood Initiative and loves spending his time outside of the office with his family and dog, Ivy. When Kris isn’t helping businesses stay connected, he can be found enjoying the great outdoors skiing, golfing, and searching for the next great golfer to help bring home the win at the annual customer golf tournament.

Kris holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Management and Marketing from Canisius College in Buffalo, NY.

Lee Farabaugh/PointClear Solutions

Lee Farabaugh is a senior user experience research and design expert, having worked in user experience in healthcare for the past 8 years. She has worked on projects in a variety of healthcare domains, from public health and life sciences to consumer- and provider-facing healthcare applications. As Chief Experience Office at PointClear Solutions, she currently leads the User Experience, Clinical Insight, Business Analysis, and Project Management teams.

Before becoming a founding partner of PointClear in 2006, she was a usability engineer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, GA. Lee is a member of the adjunct faculty of University of Alabama’s School of Health Professions, teaching Masters level students in the Health Informatics program about user experience in healthcare information technology. She also serves on the HIMSS EHR Usability Task Force.

Lee holds a Master of Health Informatics from University of Alabama at Birmingham, a Master of Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech, and a Bachelor of Arts from Wake Forest University.

Sarah Lodato/The Iron Yard

The Iron Yard exists to create exceptional value for people and their ideas through code education, startup accelerators and coworking spaces.

Through our broad, deep and growing network of teachers, programmers, designers, entrepreneurs, investors, employers and coworking spaces, we have developed a thriving community where serendipity happens en masse.

We are people-centric.

We put our students, teams, investors and supporters first in all of our decision making. Our success is entirely dependent on their success.

Our challenge is immense.

The world has huge problems that need to be solved, many of which technology is perfectly suited to address. Companies around the globe are answering this call, but anyone with boots on the ground can feel the acute shortage of talent needed to rise to the occasion. That gap is widening right now, and over the next decade the shortfall will affect industries, economies, businesses and individuals as they fight to add value in a digital world.

The Iron Yard is a solution at that juncture of supply, demand, business and a broken education system.

We are committed to training the highest-quality developers and startups in the world, both in skill and in character. Our mission is to find people who want to pursue the craft and life-long adventure of technology, teach them the tools of the trade, and then release them into the world with the drive and capability to make a difference. We believe that passionate, talented people who love what they do will create great families, jobs, companies and solutions to the world’s problems.