ABOUT US
Ryan MacCarrigan, Co-Founder
Ryan is a cinephile and community builder who is best known as one of the early evangelists of the Lean Startup movement. In 2011-2012, he trotted around the globe, facilitating dozens of “Lean Startup Machine” trainings, which sowed the seeds of the movement. Most of his career has been at the intersection of product management and innovation management; he’s hosted hundreds of product and innovation-focused workshops and training programs. He’s the former president of the Columbia Venture Community (CVC), the largest shared interest group among Columbia University alumni in tech. He teaches Design Thinking and Prototyping courses in the full-time Immersive Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management programs at UC Berkeley and is the organizer of the Foundry Square AI Meetup. Ryan is a hardcore sci-fi geek who believes the genre instills a sense of civic responsibility in those who heed its warnings of future dystopia (yet somehow, he manages to remain a techno-optimist).
Irene Malatesta, Co-Founder
Irene Malatesta is an artist, creative director, and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, CA, with 20 years of wide-ranging experience in integrated marketing, communications, content, and brand strategy. She has honed her fullstack marketing expertise in the arts, nonprofit, media, finance, real estate, healthcare, and software/tech industries, and offers consulting under her firm, Elevate Content. Previously at Adobe, Irene led multichannel creative marketing strategies and global thought leadership programs engaging millions worldwide. She has also held leadership roles with nonprofit organizations such as FIGMENT Project, CODAME, and Columbia Venture Community (CVC), fostering creativity and collaboration through art and technology experiences. A lifelong student of art and culture, Irene sees cinema as a vital and accessible form of human expression—both a time capsule of cultural moments and a window into our deepest imaginings.