Gaucho Grown: UCSB Alumni Entrepreneur Speaker Series & Professional Networking

Gaucho Grown: UCSB Alumni Entrepreneur Speaker Series & Professional Networking

UCSB Alumni invites you to join us for an evening for professional development and career networking hosted by Olé LA.

Join the conversation to learn about Gaucho Grown and hear from three impressive Gaucho entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. Following the speaker presentations there will be networking, beer/wine and pizza.

This event is open to all Gauchos.

$10 for first 20 registrants, $15 after that. Ticket price includes beer, wine & pizza.

Thank you to Event Chair Kristen Hayford '11 and the Olé LA Board.

Impact Hub LA is located above the Arts District Brewing Company. Walk through the parking lot to the stairs at the back of the building - Impact Hub will be on the third floor and through the double glass doors. Street parking is free after 6pm, parking in the adjacent lot is $4/15 minutes, maximum $20.

Featured Speakers:

Heather Hochrein MES '16
Heather is driven to create an inclusive clean energy economy both as an electric vehicle driver and the CEO of EVmatch, an app that allows electric vehicle (EV) drivers to find, reserve, and pay for charging stations and connect with other EV drivers. She's well versed in climate policy and electric utilities from her time working at and contracting with Pacific Gas and Electric Company. She also spent five years in leadership roles at Rising Sun Energy Center, where she managed an annual budget of $1.5 million and 25 staff members. She holds a master’s degree from University of California, Santa Barbara focused on Energy and Climate, and a Bachelor of Science from University of California, Berkeley.

Chase McElroy '09
Chase created two companies and after selling the second to Intuit, he shifted gears from finance and operations to learn iOS Development. Software development captivated him because it is the perfect mix of logic and creativity.

Chase is a UC Santa Barbara grad and a self-motivated entrepreneur who turned a successful college project into a business called Dura Doggie (Durable Ideas). At Dura Doggie he and his partners saw a real need for a simple inventory management system and launched Lettuce. Lettuce was a software company, which provided simple order and inventory management for product-based businesses. As Director of Operations, he managed the Finance, Customer Support, Quality Assurance and Human Resources departments. The acquisition of Lettuce by Intuit sparked his current consulting practice and freelance iOS Development practice.

Andrew Yakub '08

Andrew Yakub is the founder and CEO of Rayton Solar Inc., a solar manufacturing company whose proprietary manufacturing process makes solar panels 60% cheaper and 25% more efficient than the market standard. To date, Rayton has raised over $1 million in seed funding. Prior to Rayton Solar, Andrew founded ReGen America Inc., a solar finance company that developed and financed some of the largest commercial solar rooftop projects in Los Angeles. ReGen successfully received over $3 million in government grants and operates over 6MW of commercial rooftop solar. Before entering the solar industry, Andrew was a design engineer at the UCLA Particle Beam Physics Laboratory and an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on the Mars Science Laboratory exploratory probe. Andrew holds a Bachelors degree in Physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara.