Shawn Ramsey

Elaine Bolle is a self-proclaimed recovering entrepreneur.  Throughout her 20-year career, she has filled almost every seat at the investment table – including running companies, selling companies, buying companies and more. It was natural for her to step into the role of angel investor when she moved to North Carolina in 2010.  We talked with her about how she approaches her work and how entrepreneurs need to be smart about their relationships. Who is RTP Capital Associates and what is your role there?  Unlike some other angel “groups” or venture funds, RTP Capital Associates is a member-based angel investor network founded...

Christy Shaffer knows more than a little something about running a company and raising venture capital.  She spent nearly 15 years as the president and CEO of Inspire Pharmaceuticals. During that time, she raised more than $300 million, took the company public and led its $430 million sale to Merck in 2010.  Today, she says she enjoys her seat on the other side of the funding table as a general partner at Hatteras Venture Partners in Durham.  Q&A  What is your investment focus?  I am a general partner at Hatteras Venture Partners and focus on the early-stage life science space. I work...

A series profiling North Carolina women in investing would be incomplete without a conversation with one of the leaders of the angel group in our own backyard, Jan Davis.  Davis took a break from her role as Entrepreneur in Residence and “professor of the practice” for Minor in Entrepreneurship at UNC, where she was preparing for a series of lectures on entrepreneurial finance and capital formation.  While that topic may be beneficial to many of our readers (maybe another piece, another time), we focused this interview on her role as angel investor with Triangle Angel Partners (also known as...

One might say that things have come full circle for Kimberly Campbell.  After earning her MBA from the University of Virginia’s the Darden School of Business in 2004, she spent three years with Johnson & Johnson. There, one of her roles included re-engineering an internal venture program, to better facilitate what she calls “corporate venturing” for the $70 billion company.  Today, she is back in North Carolina creating value for large organizations through her investments. She holds a leadership position at Mosaic Health Solutions, the direct investment arm of Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC (BCBSNC), as their head of...

For the second installment in our Women on the Other Side of the Table, we sit down with Natalie Blacher, a member of Asheville Angels ventureasheville.com/angel-investors/ and an active early-stage investor.  When Asheville, NC, was recently named one of the top 25 best places for women entrepreneurs (along with Durham-Chapel Hill), Blacher wasn’t the least bit surprised. She says Asheville is a good place to be a female investor, too.  After more than three decades leading marketing and strategic initiatives in the restaurant industry, she decided to add “angel” to her resume. She is the sole woman in the 25-member Asheville...

Welcome to The Power of She, a new blog series dedicated to featuring women entrepreneurs and leaders. With this series, we hope to create a platform to help readers better understand the unique challenges that women entrepreneurs face, the opportunities they have created and the lessons they can share with other women who are interested in following the same path. The full series appears on the Crossroads blog. Who starts a tech company when she’s four months pregnant with her second child? Carol Vercellino, of course. What better time to create a new “baby” with one on the way and...

Welcome to The Power of She, a new blog series dedicated to featuring women entrepreneurs and leaders. With this series, we hope to create a platform to help readers better understand the unique challenges that women entrepreneurs face, the opportunities they have created and the lessons they can share with other women who are interested in following the same path. The full series appears on the Crossroads blog.  MaryAnne Gucciardi is no stranger to entrepreneurship. Early in her career, she founded and spent 14 years as managing partner of a Hong Kong-based textile trading company. But this time around, her...

Welcome to The Power of She, a new blog series dedicated to featuring women entrepreneurs and leaders. With this series, Crossroads PR hopes to create a platform to help readers better understand the unique challenges that women entrepreneurs face, the opportunities they have created and the lessons they can share with other women who are interested in following the same path. The full series appears on the Crossroads blog.   When Melissa Kennedy left a career at Cisco Systems five years ago and set out on her own, she didn’t have a plan. What she did have was a strong...