Jodi Gernon, a startup veteran and HBS alum, joins the Rock Center team from Launchitivity, a company she founded in 1999 that provides advice for consumer health care startups.
Her resume also includes experience at Mothernature.com, PepsiCo, and Revenio.
The Rock Center, started in 2003 with a $25 million donation from venture capitalist Arthur Rock, offers programs to assist HBS students and alumni pursuing entrepreneurial careers. It is affiliated with the school’s Entrepreneurial Management Unit.
“I love the whole entrepreneurship environment,” Gernon said. “I really didn’t want to go back to a startup and working 24/7. This is the ideal opportunity to foster entrepreneurship and generate new business ideas.”
Gernon started July 20, replacing interim director Peggy Yu. — JESSICA GELLER
A stroke of luck, via a landline
Boston’s .406 Ventures is an oddball in the world of venture capital, where firms are highly likely to be named after trees, rocks, or bodies of water.
If you couldn’t guess, .406 takes its name from Red Sox legend Ted Williams’s record-setting batting average in 1941, a tribute to the Splendid Splinter’s famously disciplined approach in the batter’s box.
Less well-known is how the firm got its hands on a bunch of 406-prefix phone numbers for its office lines.
As it turns out, one of .406’s first investments was in Health Dialog Services Corp., a Boston-based seller of data analysis and patient communication services.
“Totally randomly, it happened to be their prefix,” says Liam Donohue, one of .406’s founders.
Donohue struck a deal to buy a block of the numbers, and a branding coup that consultants can only dream of was complete.
That stroke of luck has occasionally added to the mystique surrounding the firm’s name.
“I kid you not, we had one entrepreneur who came in and said, ‘I was trying to figure out how you came up with the name of your firm, and it finally occurred to me: It’s because of your prefix!’ ” Donohue says with a chuckle.
“Needless to say, we did not invest in his company.” — CURT WOODWARD
A sponsor to ‘Empower’ at Gillette Stadium
Putnam Investments will now compete with another financial company for the attention of Pats fans — and Bob Reynolds happens to run both businesses. How is that possible? As you might imagine, it gets a little complicated.
Empower Retirement, the Colorado-based retirement services division of Great-West Financial, just signed a sponsorship deal with Kraft Group to hoist the Empower name at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. Empower officials say the deal will have no effect on Putnam’s sponsorship at the stadium. Reynolds, by the way, happens to be CEO of both Great-West Financial and of Boston-based Putnam — sister companies under Canada’s Great-West Lifeco’s corporate umbrella.
Great-West launched Empower last year, combining its existing retirement services division with Putnam’s and a retirement-plan business acquired from JPMorgan Chase & Co. Empower instantly became the number two retirement services firm in the United States, after Boston’s Fidelity Investments. Reynolds tapped one of his Putnam lieutenants, Ed Murphy, to run Empower last year as its president.
Empower has also signed marketing agreements with the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs, two other teams near significant numbers of Empower employees. (Roughly 350 people work for Empower in Andover and in Boston.)
Murphy said he sees these deals as an important way to build the still-young Empower brand. At Gillette, he said, Empower’s name will be visible next to a clock in the end zone and appear in digital messages there. — JON CHESTO
Biotech brass turn out at Takeda party
The lords and ladies of life sciences turned the courtyard outside Takeda Oncology’s headquarters on Landsdowne Street into a biotech playground Thursday evening as the Japanese drug maker hosted an invitation-only reception with its top executives.
Takeda’s chief executive, Christophe Weber, and Andy Plump, the company’s new chief medical and scientific officer, greeted about 250 guests. “We know the creativity and energy is unique here,” Weber, a French national, told the Massachusetts biotech crowd.
Among those chatting up the Takeda brass and mingling on the grass with drinks and hors d’oeuvres were MIT provost Marty Schmidt, associate provost Karen Gleason, state economic development director Jay Ash, MassBio president Bob Coughlin, Atlas Venture partner Jason Rhodes, state Representative Jay Livingstone, ImmunoGen execs John Lambert and Sandra Poole, and Alnylam strategy chief Marko Kozul.
Also spotted in the crowd were Pfizer’s former Cambridge site leader, Jose Carlos Gutierrez-Ramos, who recently signed on as chief executive of Synlogic, and former Massachusetts Life Sciences Center president Susan Windham-Bannister.
“Once you partner with us, [you’ll see] we’re the best partner,” Plump told Takeda’s visitors as a trio of musicians, playing guitar, saxophone and upright bass, serenaded the crowd and Rhode Island event painter Mark DeSilva worked to capture the scene in a portrait.
“Ninety-five percent of what I do is weddings,” DeSilva said. “I paint the first dance. I’ve done a christening, I’m doing a bar mitzvah. This is my first corporate gig.” — ROBERT WEISMAN
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