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Context Relevant CEO Stephen Purpura is working on the leading edge of big data — helping companies use their data more effectively. But Purpura, whose company scored $21 million from Bloomberg Beta, Madrona, Vulcan and others earlier this year, followed a career path many of his peers advised him against.After working at Microsoft, Purpura decided to go back to school, earning a degree from Harvard and studying at Cornell before returning to found his own company. He describes being CEO of

Former Seattleite Jon Jenkins, the Head of Engineering at Pinterest, has taken the lead of a “super scrappy, super agile” team of engineers building one of the biggest social networks on the web today. Using billions -- or maybe even trillions -- of data points supplied by users around the world, he and his team are curating personalized experiences for every Pinner, helping to show them new things they didn’t even know they liked yet. I sat down to talk to Jon about solving some of the most

Though he’s only held one other job since college, WhitePages founder and CEO Alex Algard thinks he’s found a pretty good fit in his growing company. “I like the feeling of making an impact and a positive difference in the world,” he says of his role running a site that boasts over 50 million monthly users who come to them for contact information. And it’s not hard to see how he translated this into his role running a company based on delivering “directory assistance to the masses for free”. He

As a one-time English PhD student, Janis Machala didn’t always know her career would lead her down a business path. But now she helps other people pursue their passions and get the education they need to achieve their dreams, as the Executive Dean of Continuing Education at Bellevue College. On this edition of Nextcast, I interviewed Machala and learned how technology is changing education and why working at a big company might be a better first job for recent graduates. Plus, Machala shares her