Coffee & Conversation

With Charmaine Farber Charmaine Banach, member of the Cal Poly Art and Design faculty since 2006, is passionate about typography and creative experimentation. Charmaine is a strong design advocate and will be discussing how to incorporate design and research in building a fantastic user experience for your customers. Come learn about the power of user experience!

Paul Edmondson is a Cal Poly graduate and one of the three co-founders of HubPages. After working as an intern with Hewlett Packard, Paul began to work as part of the executive team with Mongo Music, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2000 to form MSN Music. In 2005, he launched a Search Engine Optimization service, which ultimately helped evolve the idea for HubPages. Paul will be talking about how to restart a business to grow it back to success after a downturn or difficult stage of development.

Another coffee shop in SLO? Yes, we can! How to Be Successful in a Crowded Market with Scout Coffee owners Jon and Sara Peterson. Jon and Sara Peterson, owners and operators of Scout Coffee, have spent the last 10 years exploring and thriving in the coffee industry. Their background would impress anyone: Jon was the Marketing Director for Verve Coffee Roasters and Sara the Director of Retail Operations and was the top-ranked female barista in the country. Come hear their story of how they managed to bring another coffee shop to the wildly saturated downtown San Luis Obispo, and make their business boom and expand into another new location.

An Emerging Strategy to Grow Your IRA:  Private Placement Startups Want to help support innovative startups? Have IRA funds you want to maximize? Investors can learn how to do both by attending Coffee & Conversation at the SLO HotHouse on November 16, held by the Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (CIE) and The Entrust Group. Learn about emerging strategies for funding startups. Munzer Ghosheh, Regional Business Development Manager at The Entrust Group, will explain how to use certain pension plans such as IRAs as a funding source for startups. Free coffee is always included, along with plenty of time for Q&A.