Chuck Temple, MBA
Founder, Startup to Sold. Part-time chief AI officer.
Chuck has started, scaled, and sold businesses across completely different industries. His first, DVD Your Memories, grew from a $1,500 slide scanner in a friend's bedroom into one of the largest and highest-rated media transfer companies in the country, with four locations and a team of 27, before he sold it. He then built the Electric Scooter Guide into the top media company in its industry and sold that too.
As COO of Happy Moose Juice, he built the company's first ERP and delivery infrastructure from scratch and helped triple revenue. Along the way he wrote the book on it, literally: Startup to Sold, published by Inc. Magazine in 2023. He taught business at UC Berkeley Extension to both master's and undergraduate students, and earned his MBA from UC Davis, where he won the Big Bang business competition.
Today he works as a part-time chief AI officer. He fixes how the business runs first, then brings in AI where it helps. He doesn't hand clients a binder and disappear. He builds the systems, automates the busywork, trains the team, and stays responsible for the results.
Noah Alper
Senior Business Advisor. Founder of Noah's Bagels, author of Business Mensch.
Noah is one of the Bay Area's best-known entrepreneurs, and a serial founder long before that. On the East Coast he started Bread & Circus in 1973, which grew into the Northeast's largest natural foods chain and is now part of Whole Foods. On the West Coast he founded Noah's Bagels in Berkeley in 1989 and, six and a half years later, sold it for $100 million, at the time the largest kosher retailer in the United States. Across his career he has founded six ventures.
He wrote Business Mensch: Timeless Wisdom for Today's Entrepreneur, a guide to building a company with your values intact, and has spent the years since advising founders, speaking, and doing deep philanthropic work in the Bay Area. He has guest-lectured at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and helped establish the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco.
Chuck and Noah have worked together for years. Noah first advised Chuck on expansion strategy at DVD Your Memories, later advised at Happy Moose Juice, and the two reconnected when Noah was guest speaking at the UC Davis business school. Today Noah advises Startup to Sold on strategy: concept and category creation, branding, and the kind of rapid-growth decisions he has navigated more times than almost anyone.
