Office Hours with Innovate@BU’s Entrepreneurs in Residence!
This year, Innovate@BU is honored to welcome three Entrepreneurs in Residence who are ready to share their expertise with the BU community. From social impact, to tech, to business, these experts come from a variety of professional backgrounds and play an integral role in the mentorship and guidance available to students right here in the IDG Capital Student Innovation Center. Office hours with Entrepreneurs in Residence are invaluable to innovators of all majors looking to boost their skills, seek advice, or simply have a one on one conversation with an experienced professional. Sign up using the links below!
Yasmin Cruz Ferrine
Yasmin Cruz Ferrine is the co-founder and current General Partner at Visible Hands , a pre-seed fund that invests in BIPOC or woman-founded teams. Visible hands also has a Boston-based fellowship program for early-stage entrepreneurs who are representative of Greater Boston’s rich racial and gender diversity. Prior to this, she served as Finance Director for TogetherFUND (PAC) and Deval For All 2020 (Campaign) from November 2019 to October 2020. In this role, she oversaw the fundraising function for both organizations and was responsible for planning and executing virtual events. Yasmin also served as Head of Growth & Strategy for the Boston office of Brown Advisory from July 2017 to November 2019. She was responsible for leading the office growth and strategy planning, overseeing external engagement and branding efforts, and contributing to advising clients on their philanthropic goals. Yasmin earned her Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in finance from Boston College Carroll School of Management. She also holds a Bachelor’s of Science in finance from Babson College. Yasmin currently serves as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Innovate@BU.
Jonathan Chang
Jonathan Chang is the CEO and Co-Founder at Markit AI, a modern texting platform with a suite of tools, enabling brands and businesses to make the most of their audience through automated and customized text messaging. Jonathan was previously a software engineer at Realtime Robotics, Inc. from May 2020 to June 2021. There, he developed a real-time, responsive motion planning and collision avoidance platform for industrial robots. Jonathan also interned at Draper from May 2019 to December 2019 where he designed navigation algorithms with Kalman filtering, signal processing, and sensor model design using MATLAB, C++, and Kotlin. As an undergraduate researcher at Tufts University, he participated in the NASA EML Space Processing Program, where he helped speed up and modularized the image processing pipeline that aided in processing images for celestial navigation. Jonathan has a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University in Computer Science & Mechanical Engineering. He is certified from LinkedIn in Figma for UX Design, Learning React.js, and Learning TypeScript. Jonathan currently serves as an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Innovate@BU
Erica Key
Erica Key is the Founder and Chief Learning Officer at Learning Seeds, an organization that works side-by-side with children to practice and develop social skills during unstructured play. After 25 years of successful real world, social emotional teaching, Erica founded Learning Seeds to scale the tremendous social and emotional growth she was seeing with their coaching methods (called Enlightened Shadowing). She expertly guides the Learning Seeds team as we combine social emotional learning and effective teaching practices with innovative technology to help preschoolers to grow their positive social habits, expand their autonomy, and build authentic social connections. Erica has a degree from the University of Chicago and has done post graduate work at Northwestern University. Erica currently serves as the Social Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Innovate@BU.
