Startup Week: VC & Entrepreneur Perspectives w/ Samara & Ben Hernandez (Co-Sponsored by HMA)

Come hear Kellogg couple Samara and Ben Hernandez share their experiences working in venture capital and entrepreneurship.

Samara Hernandez is Principal at MATH Venture Partners (http://www.mathventurepartners.com), an early-stage venture fund investing in technology start-ups with differentiated approaches to customer acquisition. In this capacity, she leads new investment review, diligence and execution. Prior to joining MATH, Samara spent eight years at Goldman Sachs, where she was highly ranked in selling financial products, providing market insights, advising on portfolio construction, and consulting on business practices. She started her career in the Fixed Income, Currency and Commodity (FICC) group where she lead multiple technology enhancing projects across global exchanges. Samara is actively involved in the Chicago tech community and passionate about helping underrepresented groups get into STEM education, venture capital and entrepreneurship. She is on the leadership council for Women Tech Founders and an active mentor at 1871 and with the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Samara earned an Industrial and Operations Engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in Business Administration from Northwestern University.

Ben is the founder, CEO and a board member of NuMat Technologies – an award-winning advanced manufacturing Company that innovates at the intersection of high performance computing, chemistry and hardware to solve complex innovation challenges in the semiconductor, industrial and life sciences sectors. They are the first Company in the world to commercialize Metal-Organic Frameworks – an emerging class of programmable nanomaterials which can uniquely harvest the scarce resources the world needs. Since founding NuMat as a Kellogg student, Ben has gone on to raise close to $20 M in financing from leading investors. Prior to founding NuMat, Ben worked at a global private equity firm with over $30 B in invested capital as a member of their portfolio management team. In this capacity, he led board-level strategy, operations, and human capital initiatives at portfolio companies to drive enterprise growth. Before this, he was a management consultant at a leading strategy firm. Ben is a proud Northwestern Wildcat, having received an undergraduate degree from the McCormick School of Engineering and graduate degrees from the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the Kellogg School of Management through the JD-MBA program.

This event is co-sponsored by Kellogg's Hispanic Management Association (HMA).

Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club | Website | View More Events