Adam Goldstein ’16 ’17G
Finance
When the Mountain Hawks bested Duke in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, it helped make the name Lehigh feel more real for Goldstein. He was a first-year student at a university in Vermont and wanted to transfer. He wasn’t feeling challenged enough and sought a higher-caliber business education. Lehigh was on his list. The upset win in basketball made him explore more of what Lehigh offered. Soon his transfer was complete. At his first career fair that fall, his selection was confirmed when he saw the Big Four accounting firms all in attendance and vying for Lehigh talent.
That first year on South Mountain, Goldstein put his leadership skills to a test. He was named captain of the hockey team halfway through the season. Senior players would have to take direction from a sophom*ore who sought to change the culture of the team and build greater momentum. By his senior year, the team won its first playoff game and made it to the championship.
While he took many lessons from this experience, what remained with Goldstein was the idea that life meant doing the work you were passionate about while also creating space for personal passions. It made sense for a student who earned his real estate certificate, minored in entrepreneurship, and could have minored in music. By the time his senior year rolled around, he had an offer in hand for a rotational program at a notable industrial manufacturer. He decided instead to pursue a master’s in technical entrepreneurship. He was glad he did. During that year, he landed an offer at EY — the only job he had ever dreamed about.
While working in real estate at EY was meaningful, Goldstein’s role lacked an entrepreneurial component. He had lots of ideas for new approaches and varied iterations, but it became clear that ideas flowed down from the top.
A seminal moment came when Goldstein attended Ozy Fest, a two-day festival in Central Park that brings together a diverse group of performers and thinkers. At a lecture by Malcolm Gladwell, Goldstein was selected, by chance, to ask him a question. Goldstein was at a crossroads — he had a job he had dreamed about yet held a desire to be an entrepreneur. Which would be a larger net positive? Gladwell told the audience that we owe it to ourselves to go out and try, that what we are here for is to put our best foot forward.
Goldstein took the answer to heart and was soon at a real estate startup called Manage by Q. When the business was acquired by WeWork, Goldstein moved to an office furniture startup called Branch — he was its first operations employee and worked to build out its domestic supply chain. When COVID-19 hit, the company took six weeks to shift its business operations from B2B to B2C. It worked, and the company now has a 60-person team.
Still, Goldstein wanted to start his own venture and kept returning to an idea he formed while sitting in one of Lehigh students’ favorite coffee shops: Saxbys. How might he create a comfortable and congenial shared office space? WorkBistro was born … well, after Goldstein and (soon-to-be spouse) Abby Farrell ’15 ’16G sold his car and moved to California and after he found a short-term lease that would allow him to test his business model.
On the first day WorkBistro was open, Goldstein made $5 from a drop-in co-worker. After a bit of marketing, he had more people sharing space. A pivot to a membership model yielded even more co-workers. Then something happened that altered his direction: Someone called and asked to book the space for a baby shower. After the addition of a few furnishings and homey touches, events were now an option. Soon event bookings were outpacing co-workers.
By 2022, WorkBistro grew enough that Goldstein shifted to part time at Branch. By May 2023, Goldstein, thanks to his wife, recognized that the co-working aspect of WorkBistro's business had run its course. Sway was born, a new way to manage events where the Sway team and its growing platform become the connective tissue between client, venue, and vendor. It blends Goldstein’s love for physical spaces, entrepreneurship, tech, service, and community. These are the same things that he speaks to Lehigh students about when they reach out via Lehigh Connects or participate in Lehigh Silicon Valley.
True to form, as a person focused on the future, Goldstein has built Sway so it can scale, and if all goes according to plan, it may soon manage an event near you.
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Julia Pardee ’21
Business Information Systems and Marketing
When Pardee was considering Lehigh, she went to accepted students day and was planning to attend a law class. When that was canceled, she reluctantly joined an accounting class. By the end of the session, not only did she know Lehigh was the perfect fit for her, she also knew that she’d be taking a course with that accounting professor who had the ability to turn a subject she had little interest in into something beyond compelling.
Following that starting point, she jumped into Lehigh with both feet and has been well recognized and awarded along the way: dean’s list, an Asa Packer Walking Stick for leadership, the Nelson Leighton Bond Memorial Prize for a junior business major, marketing honor society inductee, and business honor society inductee.
Pardee served as student senate president, Technology, Research, and Communication writing fellow, orientation leader, and Soaring Together adviser for the 50th anniversary of coeducation. But what she talks about the most are the entrepreneurial experiences: Tauck Scholars Program, Lehigh Silicon Valley, and Global Entrepreneurship Fellowship. Through these opportunities she learned, networked, and discovered her future career path. One internship was at a Dutch startup where she rebranded and redesigned its website. Another was at a San Francisco startup where she developed a product positioning strategy. COVID-19 took away a startup opportunity in Paris, so she jumped into a venture fund internship where she helped cybersecurity startups launch and supported their marketing strategies.
That opportunity prompted her to take a venture capital course during her senior year. She liked how venture funding is at the forefront of technology. That is where she began her post-Lehigh career at Cyber Mentor Fund, which works with the most impactful leaders, operators, and venture capitalists in cybersecurity. After three years, she joined Munich Re Ventures, a global investor supporting climate, privacy, cybersecurity, energy, and transportation technologies. In both of these roles, Pardee has met with hundreds of startups and helped source and execute dozens of investments in early-stage companies.
Her passion for and pride in Lehigh makes her want to serve students in the same capacity as the alumni who helped her. She remains active on the West Coast with Soaring Together, regional events, Young Alumni Council, Lehigh@NASDAQ, and individual student mentoring. And the connections with amazing Lehigh people happen in and out of the office. Case in point: Her Lehigh water bottle helped forge a connection during a recent session at her hot yoga studio.
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Dean Kroker ’16
Computer Science and Business
When Kroker was 14 years old, he canvassed the neighborhood, offering to repair computers, printers, and BlackBerry mobile phones. Did he know how to fix them? No, but he knew how to use Google and get it done. By the time he was 16 years old, his company, Whitemarsh Technology, was pulling in thousands a week and had several hundred clients. He employed seven to 10 of his buddies — each had an interesting title and worked on a range of projects, like computer repairs, website builds, photo scanning, video editing, and more.
Money was a sensitive topic for Kroker’s family, especially following a divorce; it pushed Kroker to make and spend his own money. Like a typical teenage boy, he’d blow it on frivolous things like the latest iMac, digital camera, and Dolby surround sound. He still put some away to trade the stock market and used much of it for his education. Clients continued to call him for help into his sophom*ore year at Lehigh. That’s when he sold the book of business to another hungry teenage entrepreneur.
By that time, he had moved on to his next business venture, Endless Tone, a musical instrument price-comparison website. Kroker is a guitarist and had bought a sweet axe. He noticed an opportunity in this vertical when navigating clunky websites, difficult search comparisons, and no helpful applications. Through programs at Lehigh and the city of Bethlehem, he raised six figures in investments and grants to get the company off the ground. For four years, he and his college pals worked to make Endless Tone a reality. The company ultimately failed, mainly when Kroker and his co-founders — Don Scott ’17 and Greg Potter ’16 — went on to build other things. The process of building this company made Kroker who he is today.
After graduating, Kroker joined a startup as its sixth employee that specialized in cloud and data platform solutions using Microsoft’s Azure platform. That company was acquired by Hitachi Solutions in 2019. Microsoft was so impressed with Kroker’s deep understanding of Azure that he soon joined its team in Seattle.
By 2023, Kroker had the itch and ideas to start his own ventures again. One is off and running: Western Hemlock, a team of friends (no surprise) who all are former big tech employees and consult with notable companies like Lyft and Google on a range of projects including technology architecture, product design, and AI tools. The other company uses niche iOS tools to help social people like Kroker strengthen their existing friendships and build new ones.
Friendships have always mattered to Kroker. Several Lehigh friends have worked alongside him at jobs and startups. Kroker likes to build things with friends and leverage their smarts to challenge himself and create things that impact the world. He has a high tolerance for risk and doesn’t fear failure. It helps that he tries to do work he loves with people he loves. He extends that love to many Lehigh students via Lehigh Connects … so his network of friends continues to grow.
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Deanna Kocher ’17
IDEAS
Kocher grew up with the mantra of “carrying fun in [her] pockets.” She kept this idea with her and had long known that she wanted to be an engineer, but the playfulness and creativity brought out by “keeping fun around” also opened her up to being more. Lehigh’s IDEAS program made that possible, allowing her to combine mechanical engineering, product design, and child development. Her hope: to design toys that inspired future generations and future engineers.
Kocher found ways to employ this love of play and “playful learning” through her Lehigh career and beyond. PVC pipes became temporary toys in Cebadilla, Nicaragua, where Kocher traveled as a lead on the Engineers Without Borders team. This playfulness not only helped build meaningful relationships in the community, but it also helped her to train the community to maintain the water distribution system they were there to install. She was empowered by the social impact of engineering and how play could serve as a universal language.
As Kocher navigated her career, the focus on playfulness turned into a theme of social impact and human-centered engineering. While in the IDEAS program, she focused her coursework on accessible STEM-based play, but her extracurriculars (like Engineers Without Borders) focused on other meaningful avenues of technology. If you’ve been to Alumni Memorial recently, you’ll find a desk that was designed in tandem with facilities and staff while still being in homage to Lehigh’s renowned architecture. Her investment was in play, but she put people at the forefront of all of her engineering activities.
After a year in industry, Kocher returned to school for a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Cornell — where she would be able to dedicate herself to working on developing toys at the intersection of child development and engineering. She built a number of robots and toys in her time at Cornell, including a room-scale exhibit where children learned about making maple syrup with a robotic “forest creature” named Maple and a goofy R2D2-esque robot that helped children take plants. Inspired by these ideas, she took the time to develop an environmental education bot that was a finalist in the Future Play Design Challenge.
Caught off guard by the chance to pivot to a potential startup, Kocher found herself evaluating her career opportunities. A few months later, Cornell offered her an engineering position with its hardware accelerator programs. She now spends her days working with startups to move them through the product development process and help them launch scalable products. She finds that the startup space aligns closely with play — the energy surrounding innovation is always playful, exciting, and new. She has worked with over 50 startups and recently took a position teaching in the engineering school, where she emphasizes user-centered mechanical engineering.
Kocher continues to develop and make robots and toys with a focus on following her passions. Keep your eye out for a Kickstarter someday that helps put fun in everyone’s pocket.
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Diana Nicholas ’19
Marketing
Nicholas spent her younger days literally looking up to Lehigh: She could see South Mountain in the distance from her backyard. For this Bethlehem native, the campus was a regular destination for summer camp. She was immersed in the South Side arts as part of Pennsylvania Youth Theatre, starring in 20 main stage productions over the years. She even knew her favorite Goose sandwich (Turkey Gander) before attending Lehigh.
She also knew Lehigh was prestigious in a range of academic areas. Her vocal talents had her considering a music major, but Nicholas enjoyed the entrepreneurship courses she took in high school and running the social media accounts for her school’s chapter of the Future Business Leaders of America. She applied early decision to the College of Business to pursue a major in marketing and minor in entrepreneurship.
Of course, Nicholas was in the marketing club, but she also sat on the executive board of her sorority, judicial board of the panhellenic council, and executive board of university productions, tasked with bringing live entertainment to campus. But her life changed during her junior year when she participated in Lehigh Silicon Valley.
While in the Bay area for the 10-day intensive program, Nicholas had the opportunity to immerse herself into numerous companies, meeting CEOs, founders, and executives at startups and big tech. During the program, Nicholas sat next to a cybersecurity CEO who was a speaker for the students. He spoke of the importance of investing in relationships when networking and life at a startup in a more transparent and blunt way than some of the others they had met throughout the course. Working at a small and scrappy startup appealed to her more than the traditional career path.
Later that year, the same CEO returned to campus to speak with students. Nicholas attended and took him up on an offer he made to everyone about shooting him an email about an internship at his startup, vArmour. She sent a very long email, which Nicholas now recognizes, but the CEO replied. Soon she was talking to the head of operations. Soon after that, she was trying to figure out how to walk back her acceptance of an internship at another company and find housing in San Francisco for the summer.
The cheapest option after a lengthy search was an Airbnb near Google headquarters. She’d have to share a room. Only when Nicholas arrived was it clear that sharing meant there were 23 people living in the place. It was a hacker house, filled with millennial tech-obsessed engineering minimalists. She shared a bedroom with the three other women who called the place home and one bathroom for 12 of the housemates. Sorority life more than had her prepared.
The people in the house helped Nicholas as she faced a steep learning curve in cybersecurity. As a marketing intern, she had to understand the tech in order to sell the tech. She’d research and work by day and break down that information with her housemates by night. It did the trick. She continued to work for the company during her senior year.
When she graduated, Nicholas had an opportunity to continue that work and headed back to San Francisco, where she focused on event marketing and building alliance partnerships with companies like AWS and Microsoft. She leaned into it and gained a strong sense of the business.
With great lessons, after five years at the company, Nicholas left in December of 2022. In March of 2023, she co-founded a new startup called Anetac with $16 million in funding. Prior to building the company, she and her co-founders interviewed over 40 security executives to validate the problem and the product market fit. The company officially launched out of stealth in May and is positioned as the leader in identity vulnerability and security.
While cybersecurity may dominate her workdays, music, which was such a mainstay in Nicholas’ early life, is back. She sings and plays piano, opening for major acts in the Bay area and performing at local bars. Despite finding new haunts, she still visits the old standbys. She is active with students at Lehigh@NASDAQ, returns to South Mountain for Reunion (having chaired her five-year reunion committee), and tries to grab a Turkey Gander when in town.
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Mimi Bestwick ’14
Finance
Bestwick was on a traditional path, moving through the early career stages at Prudential when a profound family crisis catalyzed change. She decided that her life would have more meaning if she focused on creating collective opportunity rather than individual wealth. So she left her job and moved to the city of angels to enable transformation. Joined by her mother, two sisters, brother, and partner, Bestwick soon entered the MBA program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She selected it because of its focus on social impact entrepreneurship.
Over the two years, Bestwick was a leader as she served as president of Anderson’s Net Impact Club, an organization focused on using business skills to effectuate impact, and as a leader of Anderson Venture Impact Partners, a student-led impact investment fund.
She worked at the ECMC Foundation, whose goal is to improve higher education among underserved populations through evidence-based innovation. She managed an impact investment portfolio focused on fueling female founders. While she enjoyed helping bring an entrepreneur’s dream to life, Bestwick wanted to get closer to the ground level where she could be part of the action, strategizing, building partnerships, growing a team, and leading change.
She again took a moment to pivot — soul searching for a new opportunity. That arrived in the form of food rescue. She had been volunteering at a local community garden and compost program and learned about food recovery — rescuing quality surplus food from the waste stream and redistributing it to those experiencing food insecurity. Bestwick identified Replate as an innovator in the food rescue space, and what was originally planned to be a gig opportunity rescuing food turned into a full-time role writing grant proposals. Within a few months, she evolved into a lead capital advocate and shortly thereafter became Replate’s CFO. That last jump came when she helped the organization find a way to scale its model by partnering with a strong network of food recovery organizations.
This sense of leadership and insight is something that Bestwick honed at Lehigh. Her experience at the university helped her elevate her sense of self — what she could take on and accomplish. She started to aim higher, push harder, try new things, build networks, and create shared value. That sense of leadership came through the culture of excellence in Gamma Phi Beta, where she learned that being exemplary means bringing others with her through collaboration and mentorship. This momentous journey in such a short time fills her with immense gratitude as she looks back on her high school years waiting tables at the Friendly’s in Reading, Pennsylvania. She’s a firm believer in letting the universe guide a path toward shared opportunity.
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