The Innovate State Speaker Series brings both emerging and accomplished Spartans back to campus for a fireside chat-style interview. These 60-minute sessions offer the chance for guests to share their perspectives on a wide array of topics like innovation, startup life, investments, and career paths. Students get the opportunity to hear firsthand about the hard knocks of the entrepreneurship & innovation hustle to maintaining work/life balance. These are stories of success, stories of failures, and stories of uncommon will—and you do not want to miss them. Innovate State kicks-off at 6 p.m. ET and are free to the community. Events will be offered in a hybrid-format, offering attendance options in-person & virtually. Early registration is highly encouraged.
About our Speakers
Brittney Urich, UX Designer, Amazon Business
Brittney is a UX Designer who specializes in helping others understand content strategy and implement it on design projects. She is passionate about crafting digital experiences that solve problems in a human-centered, empathetic way. As a champion for integrating content strategy and user experience design, Urich delivers presentations and interactive workshops about the two disciplines. She also speaks/hosts interactive workshops revolving around experience design and content strategy.
During Brittney’s time at MSU, she helped co-found a company called Conector to help engage college students with their communities through events. Throughout building Conector, Brittney helped grow it to six figures while establishing more than 100 partnerships. Urich enjoys exploring national parks and hiking in Colorado with her dog Izzy.
Josh Ogundu, Product Operations Lead, TikTok
Josh Ogundu is a product operations lead at TikTok. In his role, he seeks to help both the business and the product run better. Previous to TikTok, he worked in product management at media and communication tool companies. He got into tech by founding LykeMe, an identity- and interest-based social network he founded while studying economics at Michigan State.
At USC, where he attended business school, he formed deep ties to the Los Angeles tech ecosystem. He became a valued mentor at Techstars and a scout for a venture capital firm, Indie.Vc.
