CWRU Entrepreneurship Speaker Series | Mel McGee, Founder, We Can {Code} It and Ashley Weingart, Founder, Perfectly Imperfect Produce (via Zoom)

Mel McGee

Founder

We Can {Code} It

https://www.linkedin.com/in/melmcgee/

Founder and CEO of We Can Code IT, Recipient of multiple tech and entrepreneurial awards including Taft’s Notable Women in STEM, Crain’s Cleveland 2018 Notable Woman in Tech and 2014 Woman of Note, and Tech Czar / Cleveland.com Top Ten Tech Evangelist in 2017. She’s a software engineer with over 20 years of professional experience, as well as speaker, educator, and entrepreneur.

Mel McGee has worked with clients like Tyco International, DeLorean Motor company, and hundreds of others to develop software. Her programming experience translated to the classroom nearly as soon as she began coding.

An experienced educator, she has taught computer science and engineering subjects to kids, teens, and adults at We Can Code IT, colleges, and overseas. Mel’s knowledge of over 20 programming languages allows her to adapt curriculum to students in a variety of ways. As a certified Scrum master and a Gestalt trained facilitator, Mel’s interests in collaborative work are woven throughout We Can Code IT’s culture and classroom experience.

Her love for sharing her creative computing techniques has not gone unnoticed. Her innovative early wearable computer was featured in Howard Rheingold’s book Smart Mobs. Her web development expertise was featured in books like Curt Harler’s Beyond the Browser. She has been featured on NPR, publications like Motor World, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, and many more. Her artificial intelligence bots, Zoe-bot and Skeletor-bot, have been entertaining the masses online and at community events since the early 2000s. She continues to enjoy innovating with artificial intelligence.

She has a daughter who is learning how to program, and two dogs who follow her everywhere they possibly can.

Ashley Weingart

Founder

Perfectly Imperfect Produce

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-weingart-0320b1118/

Ashley Weingart joined her family’s fourth generation wholesale produce business in 2015 as Director of Communications & Community Outreach. Her goal, in part, was to get healthy food into the hands of people in need living in the food deserts that surrounded Forest City Weingart Produce (FCWP) and the Cleveland Produce Terminal. In her travels, she quickly took notice of the amount of perfectly fresh produce being wasted at every step of our food’s journey from seed to spoon; much of it due to growers’ and supermarkets' expectation of consumers’ desire for perfection.

A light bulb turned on and she went to her husband Andy, President of FCWP, with an idea for boxing up such produce to reduce waste and help people eat healthier, all while donating more food to the hungry. Perfectly Imperfect Produce was born as a program of FCWP in May of 2016. Back then, Ashley and Andy would pack up the weekly orders on their own. Soon, local and national media like Cooking Light magazine and Huffington Post started calling,wanting to know more about the country’s first program of its kind to be run by a wholesaler.