Crush Your Debt. Fuel Your Future.

Laurel Taylor

Laurel Taylor is the founder and driving force behind FutureFuel.io. Laurel’s mission is to reduce student debt by $1.5B by 2021, in partnership with the private sector.

Laurel has lived the problem we solve for both of our customers – as a leader seeking innovative incentives to retain top talent and as a student funding her education. When presented with a 9% interest rate on a student loan to fund her stint at MIT, with a credit score north of 800, she knew there was both an arbitrage opportunity and a serious need to innovate our way out of the mess that is student loan indebtedness and inappropriate risk profiling.

Laurel previously held a Head of Industry leadership position within Google’s Global Business Unit within the Large Customer Sales division, where she was responsible for meeting and exceeding eight-figure revenue targets. During this time, she also served as a super connector and cross-functional bridge within Google: Google Ventures, Partnerships, X, and Enterprise. Prior to Laurel's role at Google, she served as the Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President of a technology and engineering firm in the San Francisco Bay Area, TEECOM. Her 15+ years at the intersection of technology and humanity enabled Laurel to internalize strong user preferences for all-things-mobile, efficiency, simplicity, instant access and engagement.

Laurel holds a Master of Business Administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management. She holds an undergraduate degree from Texas State University where she majored in Organizational Communication, graduating summa cum laude.

Scott McKay

Scott has over 35 years of professional experience in software, where he has architected, designed, and implemented numerous large, complex systems, including operating systems, network stacks, compilers, interactive development environments, high-volume transactional web sites, and the first successfully delivered from-scratch rewrite of an airline reservation system. He has managed projects, led tech organizations (currently ZappRx; and before that, Cleartrip), and has helped grow companies from early stage to IPO (Symbolics, Inc, which was Internet domain #1 – the very first '.com') or acquisition (ITA Software, acquired by Google for $750M in 2011).

When he's not building products, he enjoys laid-back sports like windsurfing, free skiing, and rock climbing; he is also an incorrigible and expert amateur cook and wine collector.

Rodrigo Souza

Rodrigo is a Brazilian-born Software Engineer with about 10 years of professional experience. He has deep technology expertise, and has worked with companies of different sizes throughout his career, ranging from multinational financial groups to early stage startups. When not programming, Rodrigo is a homebrewer and craft beer enthusiast.

Tiago Silva

Tiago Silva, software engineer, completed his MSc. in Systems and Networks Engineering in 2009. Since then, he is been working as IT professional in multiple contexts. From R&D projects in health and biology to online classifieds in one of the global leaders of this market. He worked for well known companies such as Unicer and OLX before moving to FutureFuel.io.

Along the years, he had the chance to work with mainstream development tools as well with cutting edge technologies in the fields of data mining, machine learning and computer vision. He is also expending his knowledge in product and project management.

Born in Oporto, moved to Lisbon in 2011. In his free time he enjoys to run and listen to new bands.

Tomas Monteiro

I've been working as a Web Developer for a few years.

I was studying political science when I decided to create a music centric startup with a few friends. Because we lacked investment I learned how to program with the help of youtube, stack overflow, etc. I’ve been programming ever since. My interest in psychology has pushed me to be an advocate for the user and to understand their needs so that I can improve my UX development in a modern and fun way. I aim to build intuitive platforms that leave a long lasting impression in the end user.

Tiago Raposeira

Tiago Raposeira started playing with computers since high school, where he took an IT Management and Development course, allowing him to start his ventures, on software and hardware ground.

After graduating as a Computer Scientist he got an opportunity to work at software development, and so he did ever since. With a major focus on the open source world, Tiago has been working with web frameworks as a full stack developer, building various web applications, websites and API’s in big companies and not so big ones.

Right now, he’s exploring the startup world, learning and expanding his tech savviness.

Sergio Moreira

Sérgio Moreira is leading the Design Process at FutureFuel. One of his main responsibilities is to ensure that every user has a great experience working with an intuitive, beautiful and functional platform. Sérgio has been a professional designer since 2005, which has allowed him to work with the whole spectrum of design processes, from graphic to digital, currently having UX and UI as his main focus.

A graduate from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, he specialized in Digital Arts, and gathered the knowledge and skill-set required to evolve in the technological environment as well. During that time, Sérgio was already working as a freelance Designer, gaining experience dealing with clients and the business world. As such, a great part of his experience comes from working in many different projects, with clients based all over the world, and different sectors, such as insurance, healthcare, financial institutions, government and communication.

Sérgio has been using his career path to improve different skills and acquire new ones, such as HTML and CSS in order to better understand the complete design process.

By involving users and clients in the design process, and by working together with various creative disciplines, Sérgio strives to apply simplicity, visual appeal and design detail throughout his entire work process.

Jess Merrell

Jess Merrell is the Head of Sales & Marketing at Futurefuel.io. Being a highly driven entrepreneur in the Boston startup scene for years, Jess is ready to take on the opportunity to CRUSH student debt!

Prior to joining Futurefuel.io Jess's background has been geared towards SaaS and mobile technology startups in the retail and P&C insurance industries. Jess jumpstarted her career with Redstar Ventures, launching their second operating company, ThirdChannel a retail intelligence company. At ThirdChannel, Jess was tackling various channels such as marketing, sales, and operations. Ultimately, responsible for developing and growing the marketplace to 10,000 active users across 8 global retail brands.

Realizing marketing was Jess's true passion, she joined Wayfair.com to focus on building their new B2B & Registry pilots. During her tenure both pilots grew to become core revenue generators for the business. Deciding to then gain alternative industry experience Jess joined Goji, a P&C insurance aggregator, as their Head of Marketing. Through her various roles and experiences Jess knows what it takes to wear multiple hats and to get things done.

Jess holds a Bachelor's degree from Northeastern University where she majored in Economics & International Affairs. Outside of the daily hustle, Jess enjoys exploring new places, experiencing life through food, running, hiking, and simply having a great cup of coffee.

Connor Fitzgerald

Connor Fitzgerald is the Account Manager at Futurefuel.io. As a student at The University of Massachusetts Lowell, Connor became highly passionate about joining a small startup that was trying to solve a BIG issue. Enter FutureFuel.

Connor first met FutureFuel at his school’s career fair. Being the only company listed under Entrepreneurship that day, they would be the only organization he would speak to! For Connor, the risk paid off. Through continuous hustle and persistence, he worked his way up from Brand Ambassador to Intern to his current role today in FutureFuel as an Account Manager.

Being a recent college graduate, Connor is living and breathing the student debt problem faced by over 44 million Americans today. Knowing how hard it is for those with student debt, Connor has been resilient in his efforts at growing the FutureFuel name by making as many employers aware of this solution as possible. He hopes to one day see college graduates make life choices on their own, without worry of being burdened by student debt.

Outside of work, Connor keeps busy as a new dad with his son Dekker, who is one of the most active babies around! Connor also enjoys hiking, traveling to new places and being a “die-hard” Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics fan.

Sergio Pereira

Sergio leads technology and product development, and is responsible for setting the product vision and assembling the technology capabilities that allow FutureFuel.io to achieve that vision.

He brings 8 years of professional experience building technology, both as an operator, a founder and an executive. Sergio is a MSc in Computer Science who has been a self starter since college, where he built a machine learning enabled bot for the stock market. After that as an IT Consultant at Accenture, he evolved from a software developer in a small team to a tech lead in a large team distributed across several geos.

Eventually he left Accenture to become a founder. The first venture was Goalstat, a sports marketplace where Sergio was the sole founder, being in charge of both the technology and sales. He built the first iteration of the technology, and as he landed the first sales assembled a small team to improve the tech and do marketing. The company grew to 80 client accounts in a few months.

Prior to joining FutureFuel.io, Sergio has spent 2.5 years as CTO of Clickly, an AdTech marketplace. Clickly grew from two founders to a multinational company with clients over the main geos in Europe. The technology Sergio directed was responsible for serving 500M+ user targeted ad impressions a day, and managing considerable amounts of data.

Zoe Barry

Recently named to Inc. Magazine's 30 under 30, Barry began her career on Wall Street and later joined athenahealth as her foray into health care. However, it was her own brother who inspired Barry to found ZappRx. When her parents struggled to obtain his specialty medication, she was compelled to launch a health care technology company focused on facilitating patient access to specialty drug therapies. A graduate of Columbia University, Barry mentors budding entrepreneurs in the Columbia College Women in Business Society.

Sarah Biller

Sarah Biller is very active in the FinTech community as an Entrepreneur, Advisor and Investor. She is the co-Founder of the FinTech Sandbox and currently sits on its Board of Directors. Sarah also sits on the Advisory Board of start-ups in the robo-advisory, blockchain and FX trading sectors and teaches a graduate level course on the evolution of Financial Technology at Brandeis University .

Sarah was most recently the Head of Innovation Ventures at State Street Bank and its Chief Operating Officer for Innovation. Prior to joining State Street, Sarah was a Principal in the launch of several successful venture-backed start-ups in the FinTech and Life Sciences sectors. She was the Co-Founder and President of Capital Market Exchange (CMX), a venture-backed predictive analytics platform utilizing investor sentiment to help capital markets professionals anticipate near-term changes in bond and CDS spreads.

Sarah has also held roles at Fidelity Investments; worked on MCI’s corporate venture team; and launched and led research divisions for Fortune 500 CFO’s and treasurers at the Corporate Executive Board. Ms. Biller studied Finance at West Virginia University and George Washington University.

Kevin Walker

Kevin is a serial fintech / edtech entrepreneur. He started his career by founding a language school in Russia. Kevin was the second employee at student loan pioneer, First Marblehead, where he led a unit that developed custom student loan programs at dozens of colleges. He later started and led the company’s marketing department. Following First Marblehead’s IPO, Kevin founded SimpleTuition (acquired by LendingTree), which has helped more than 20 million students and parents make sense of college financing choices. Kevin has been CEO and founder/acquirer of several businesses focused on lowering college costs: SmarterBucks, a bank and rewards program that helped graduates earn rewards to pay down their student debt. SmarterBucks was acquired by Gradifi (now First Republic). ValoreBooks, a textbook marketplace, grew more than 8x in three years, exceeding $100MM in sales in 2015 and appeared twice on the Inc. 1000. Boundless, a digital textbook platform, served more than 50MM students/educators in 2015. ValoreBooks and Boundless were acquired by Follett Higher Education. In addition, Kevin was a VC for a Russia-focused fund, working for the chairman of Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine. Kevin was also a management consultant at the Parthenon Group. Kevin has been a presenter/panelist for many fintech and edtech events, and was a New England finalist for EY Entrepreneur of the Year. Kevin holds degrees from Amherst and Harvard.

Kirstan Barnett

Kirstan Barnett is the sole partner of kbb capital llc, which invests in private companies across sectors and at the pre-seed and seed stage. She is an active angel investor in Boston and New York start-ups. Kirstan has 20+ years of management, M&A, financing, regulatory, strategic, operating and Board experience. She was a partner at Bracebridge Capital, one of the world's leading investment advisory firms with over $10 billion in aum, for 13 years. As a member of the senior management team of a company in high growth mode, she played key strategic roles with respect to risk, operations and management. She built out the regulatory, legal and compliance team and directed all legal and regulatory affairs. Ms. Barnett founded and is Chairman of the Board of SheGives, which has been acclaimed for its innovative model of giving. Together with a cohort of 100 of Boston's most accomplished women in healthcare, biotechnology, finance, venture capital and technology, in its first three years SheGives made grants of over $720k to a carefully diligenced portfolio of high impact nonprofits in Greater Boston.

Before that, Kirstan ran financing and M&A deals for major law firms in Boston and NYC, primarily for technology entrepreneurs, VCs and leading investment banks.

Kirstan has a BA from the University of New Hampshire, a JD from Georgetown University and an MBA from MIT.

Michael Westover

Michael Westover, Advisor, grew up around computers, buying his first computer, a Commodore 64, in 8th grade. He graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Arts in History, but was employed as "the computer guy" for a number of small firms both during and after college. After a brief stint working in San Francisco, Michael headed to the East Coast and Boston College for an MBA. He graduated in 1997 with a concentration in Finance. Following graduate school, Michael started in the Corporate Research group at Liberty Mutual. He continued at Liberty Mutual progressing through various technical leadership roles. In 2006 Michael left Liberty Mutual in search of more entrepreneurial pursuits, involving a few startup business and consulting with major insurance carriers on innovation in software development. Most recently he held the role of Chief Information Office for Fidelity Life Association.

Michael has served as an advisor to FutureFuel since the early days, stepping in as Interim CTO while the search for the perfect CTO was conducted. He is currently in the early stages of an insuretech startup.