BEN Colorado Welcomes New Advisors: Spring 2025
Meme Stokes Callnin
As an accomplished board director, Meme offers a unique combination of strategic growth expertise and human capital leadership. She has worked with Fortune 500 and private companies across diverse industries throughout her career and specializes in building sales strategies and developing people-centric organizations to drive long-term success.
Meme is an accomplished executive with over 30 years of experience in leadership, strategic growth, M&A, healthcare strategy and human capital optimization.
Renelle Everett Darr
Renelle Everett Darr is a strategic advisor working at the intersection of strategy, culture, and leadership. She partners with executives, founders, and organizations to navigate complexity, evolve systems, and lead meaningful transformation from the inside out.
As founder of InSight, Renelle has built an integrated ecosystem of offerings including strategic advisory, leadership labs, executive evolution, and systemic design. Her work spans Fortune 500 companies, high-growth ventures, and purpose-driven organizations. She brings a foundation in large-scale consulting from previous roles at EY, Deloitte, and The North Highland Company.
Blair Drake
Blair Drake is a transformational operations executive and the founder of Int(e3)grated Solutions, a Denver-based consulting firm specializing in simplifying operations, optimizing systems, and guiding teams toward sustainable growth.
Born and raised in Denver, Blair has a strong background in finance and operations, bringing a data-driven approach to scaling businesses efficiently. With experience in financial management, process optimization, and business strategy, she helps startups and small businesses streamline operations, improve profitability, and achieve meaningful KPIs.
Luis Duarte
Luis Duarte is a purpose-driven serial entrepreneur, investor, and storyteller dedicated to building a more empathetic and connected world. As the Founder and CEO of Amoofy, Luis is pioneering the future of storytelling—using artificial intelligence to elevate unheard voices, preserve intergenerational wisdom, and help organizations tap into the power of human stories to drive systemic change.
With two decades of leadership experience across the public, private, and philanthropic sectors, Luis has advised governments, scaled global organizations, and led multimillion-dollar portfolios.
Janice Engel
Janice Engel is an innovative healthcare leader with two decades of experience developing and launching transformative solutions that improve patient outcomes and access to care, strengthen provider relationships, and reduce costs.
Her career highlights include launching value-based care partnerships with health systems and payors, pioneering a mental health screening and counseling program for kidney care patients, and partnering across the healthcare ecosystem to successfully launch a state-wide health information exchange network across Colorado.
Shun-Luoi Fong
Shun-Luoi Fong is Founder and CEO of Forge, a design and innovation firm that helps startups create a world as it ought to be through human-centered strategy, creativity, and collaboration. With 25+ years of experience across multiple disciplines, he’s a trusted advisor and sparring partner to founders and organizations navigating high-stakes decisions.
Guided by his mantra—Listen, learn, love, create—he thoughtfully blends strategy, design, and technology, always with human connection at the core.
Joe Gagnon
Joe Gagnon is an ultra-endurance athlete, CEO, relentless growth hacker and entrepreneur with over 30+ years of experience. As a six-time CEO, he has focused on getting early-stage companies on a growth path. He is currently the CEO of RaYnmaker an AI platform to improve how small businesses sell.
Joe is a firm believer in the parallel challenges of leading a company and pushing physical fitness limitations. He has completed six Ironman Triathlons and over 90 ultra marathons.
Collin Jones
Collin lives in Golden, Colorado with his three daughters and wife Kenzie. He helped start and led a B2B hardware and SaaS company called Resi that grew to over 130 staff, eventually selling to a public company in 2021. He is now semi-retired and serves multiple nonprofits as well as being the Director of Strategy for Sovereign Family Office, along with real estate and generalist investing. His specialties include lived experience in scaling companies, P&L management, allocation strategy, and sales and marketing.
Jay Mays
Jay Mays’ sales career started in 1996 when he learned to sell dial-up internet accounts and web hosting plans to small businesses. Back in those days he used 4x6 index cards in an orange Nike shoebox as a CRM.
Over the past 25 years a lot has changed, but not Jay’s love for helping clients succeed. He’s booked hundreds of “closed won” deals with marquee clients like AT&T, Red Bull, and the Miami Marlins to name a few. For the sake of optimism, Jay never keeps track of his “closed lost” deals.
Gary Montes de Oca
Gary Montes de Oca is an internationally experienced leader with a background in the Outdoor Recreation, Consumer Goods, Travel, Hospitality, and Healthcare industries. He’s managed teams in over 25 countries and has held leadership positions across a plurality of operational functions that inform his comprehensive commercial perspective.
Adam Oliver
Adam has over fifteen years of experience in technology shipping software for startups, growth stage businesses, and enterprises. Prior to founding Crafted in 2018, he helped grow the product design and product management practices at Pivotal Software, eventually leading to their IPO. His technology background spans software development, product management, and design where he has both executed and grown teams.
Wendy O’Donovan Phillips
Wendy O’Donovan Phillips is founder and CEO of Big Buzz. Since 2007, Big Buzz® has helped Stage II to Stage III organizations systemize marketing to achieve growth goals, moving from survival to success.
We align marketing and sales teams to attract warm leads to achieve growth and scaling goals. From there, our strategists deliver big-picture marketing made clear in three ways: 1) trustworthy marketing expertise as an extension of your team, 2) our executives engaged in reaching your goals, 3) a proven marketing process.
Matt Rossi
As a Mechanical Engineer turned seasoned Business and Revenue Operations executive, I bring a disciplined mindset to driving measurable business outcomes. With over a decade architecting, scaling, and optimizing Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies, systems, and processes, I excel at transforming strategic vision into actionable, data-driven solutions that fuel growth in dynamic environments. Transparent communication, simplicity in execution, collaboration and data-driven decision making define my leadership style, enabling teams to thrive and deliver results.
A heartfelt thank you to the BEN Community for connecting us with this incredible group of experts, each one expanding the capacity and deepening the impact of our work with Colorado’s entrepreneurs.