Maxx brawer biography sample

Todd Ambs

Todd is the director of the Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition. For more than thirty-five years, Todd has worked in the environmental policy field. From 2010 until becoming director of Healing Our Waters in July, 2013, Ambs was president of the national conservation group River Network. Prior to that, he ran the Water Division for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for nearly a decade (2003-2010).

His extensive experience in both state government and nonprofit organizations includes serving as executive director of two statewide river organizations, policy director for the Ohio Attorney General and senior policy analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Justice .

Todd was the lead negotiator for the State of Wisconsin during the development of the Great Lakes Compact. Todd has served on a number of water-related boards and commissions including the Great Lakes Commission, Great Lakes Protection Fund, and the Upper Mississippi River Basin Association. He currently serves on the Regional Administrative Council for the North Central Region Water Network, advisory board for the Great Lakes Clean Communities Network, and on the board of the Southeast Wisconsin Watershed Trust.

Jon Allan

Jon joined the state of Michigan as director of the Office of the Great Lakes in 2012, contributing his considerable experience in aquatic ecology, fisheries and wildlife, and environmental policy and governance to the office’s mission to protect, restore, and sustain the Great Lakes.

With three decades of experience in environmental and energy policy, he has professionally applied his understanding of ecological management in a variety of academic, corporate, and public occupations. Jon’s research on wetlands, stream ecology, and water policy has been published in journals in the US and Canada.

Jon held executive positions in the private sector in environmental, government and regulatory affairs, and strategic planning. He has t

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies
in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

Trust me, after you’re halfway in, you won’t put this book down for dinner. Published in mid-2018, Bad Blood is a compulsively readable account of Theranos Inc., a Silicon Valley unicorn that truly was a fairy tale. Its charismatic young founder persuaded an A-list of wealthy people to invest hundreds of millions of dollars on a pipe dream: her spurious claim that a small, portable machine could accurately, speedily diagnose hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood.

At one point Theranos was worth $9 billion, and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University dropout with no medical or scientific training, was briefly worth more than $4.6 billion. She was hailed as the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg all rolled into one; in a nod to her hero Jobs, she even wore the same brand of black turtleneck sweaters that Jobs wore, and she got around Palo Alto in a black Audi sedan lacking license plates, only hers came with a chauffeur. Still in her 20s, she had a private Gulfstream jet at her disposal, she never went anywhere without a security detail, and her face was on the cover of national magazines.

Today, in her mid-30s, she is disgraced, broke, and, along with the company's president and chief operating officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, under federal indictment for fraud. As leaders, Holmes and Balwani did everything wrong. They lied, they cheated, they intimidated, they manipulated. They were self-aggrandizing, and they were arrogant. They were paranoid, secretive, amoral, insecure, and temperamental. Far from sophisticated, they were naive simpletons who picked a highly regulated industry with life and death implications for their shenanigans. But through shameless audacity and sheer force of her magnetic personality, Holmes persuaded a Who's Who of otherwise sophisticated investors to pour millions into her high-tech fantasy. They included Carlos Slim, George S