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Businesses ranging from a vegan restaurant in Danville to a firm manufacturing an innovative medical device to remove kidney stones were honored in San Ramon last week when the Innovation Tri-Valley Leadership Group celebrated its ninth annual #GameChangers Awards.
Danville honoree Susan Virgilio described how she had to change her approach to meals when her daughter in high school declared she was vegan.
As Virgilio dug into ensuring her daughter received the necessary balanced nutrition, the family became vegan. She said she has no background in food. Her degree was in math.
After the diet change, she said the whole family was healthier, with less inflammation, and she had plenty of good recipes. Thinking about how she could share them, led to the Blossom and Root Kitchen with the team around her to execute on the restaurant business.
Pleasanton recognized Calyxo, which designs and manufactures CVAC, which removes the kidney stones non-surgically using vacuum technology. Patient outcomes are better because the entire stone is removed instead of being broken into pieces in traditional treatments.
Founded in 2017 by Joseph Catanese and located in Hacienda Business Park, Calyxo’s device already has been used in 20,000 procedures. The company has just closed its “F” funding round and has 350 employees growing to 400 by year-end.
The GameChanger from Dublin was SavvyMoney that relocated there from its founding offices in Pleasanton. JB Orecchia, the CEO, has lived in Pleasanton for many years and founded Free Credit as a subscription service in San Francisco. When Credit Karma came along, that changed and he started pondering a different approach.
He embedded credit checks so it could be inside financial institutions’ web offerings so they could maintain the contact instead of sending a client to an outside vendor and potential competitor. At a friend’s suggestion, he based it a few minutes from his office, a welcome change after riding afternoon BART trains.
SavvyMoney has found a sweet spot with its software used in more than 16,000 institutions and 43 million inquiries a day.
The San Ramon honoree was the Pac-12, an organization that has ridden a tough roller coaster over the past few years. The once showcase West Coast college athletic conference imploded in 2023 when USC and UCLA announced they were headed for the Big Ten and shortly were followed by Oregon and Washington. Four other schools departed for the Big 12 and Cal and Stanford scrambled to find a new home in the ACC.
That left just Washington State and Oregon State. The conference was based in Walnut Creek for decades before moving to San Francisco in 2012. The production studio was established in Bishop Ranch in 2023 and, after the implosion, the remaining schools decided they had an asset worth preserving although doing so cost more than 120 people their jobs.
It’s now turned around with eight universities joining in the fall for football plus national basketball powerhouse Gonzaga will field all other sports. Michael Molinari, senior vice president of business development and studio operations, said they will broadcast more than 1,000 events in the upcoming school year. The live football show will be produced in Pleasanton at Goal Line Studios.
Mike Dunne, the chief technology officer of Inertia, related how he’s lived in Livermore for 11 years and endured the ugly commute “with millions of people” to the Stanford University campus where he worked as a professor. He’s also been a leader at the linear accelerator there.
Dunne recalled he was walking his dog one day when it accosted some neighbors he hadn’t met. Making his apologies developed into a conversation about what each of them did and it turned out that the neighbor had a hi-tech glass company that could potentially make parts of the commercial fusion prototype that Inertia is developing with a license from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and its National Ignition Facility.
The NIF team proved that fusion could take place in a lab after 60 years of research that began when a young John Nuckolls (who went on to serve as lab director) saw the potential of using lasers to implode the atoms. The giant NIF facility has 192 laser beams focused on the BB-sized target.
Dunne went on to relate how they’ve discovered a cluster of businesses that can support Intertia’s effort already located in Livermore when they’ve opened a 50,000-square-foot facility.
The Stanford connection played out with the Founder’s Award that capped the evening and went to Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley, one of the long-time supporters of the group. CEO Misty Jones accepted the award and paid tribute to the broader team. Her predecessor, Rick Shumway, chaired the leadership group for two years before he was promoted and moved to the Palo Alto site.
Stanford has invested tens of millions of dollars in the Tri-Valley, buying a three-building complex in Hacienda Business Park and just broke ground last week on a three-story expansion of the main Pleasanton hospital that includes a much larger emergency room.
Keynote address from Southwest Airlines COO
Andrew Watterson, chief operating officer of Southwest Airlines, returned to the event and gave the keynote address. He received the Founder’s Award on behalf of Southwest in 2025. It just celebrated its 37th anniversary of Oakland operations.
He shared the lessons learned and changes implemented since Southwest played the Grinch who stole Christmas with its meltdown when a blizzard hit Dec. 22-23, 2022. Watterson frankly said the company had both operational issues and financial ones after years of excellent returns for shareholders.
They tackled issues specific to operations that spanned from more de-icing equipment to improved crew communications and scheduling as well as real-time dashboards and increased phone call capacity.
To deal with the financial situation, they moved to assigned seating with four seat choices as one element of improving the in-flight experience, a new credit card deal with Chase with three tiers and improving network connectivity and flight allocation. Southwest started flying red-eyes for the first time. The airline is installing Recaro seats throughout the fleet that will have in-seat power and Rapid Rewards members will receive free Wi-Fi.
It flew more flights into its key hubs of Midway Chicago and Denver as well as adding flights to popular destinations (Nashville up 41%, Orlando up 32%).
The changes have paid off as it climbed from No. 4 to No. 1 on the Wall Street Journal’s annual ranking of airlines.
Watterson was introduced by Craig Simon, director of aviation at the Port of Oakland, and Port Commissioner Stephanie Dominguez Walton. Simon noted that the name issue has been settled with San Francisco International and there was a huge East Bay client base flying.
He encouraged businesses to make it policy for their travel groups to check Oakland first and let them know if their people have to fly out of a different Bay Area airport. Simon said they want to communicate that to the airlines.
