Our Members

The Staff

Angel Kwiatkowski

As the Founder and “Madame” of Cohere it’s my job to run the day to day of the business whilst helping the members connect with one another via personal introductions, educational events and social parties. After coworking for several months, I was bit by the freelance bug and now do consulting for space catalysts who want to start coworking spaces in their communities, general business consulting for people who are starting their own businesses and helping entrepreneurs/start-ups find the right freelancers for their projects.

Hannah Toole

Hannah Toole is a senior at CSU. She is studying public relations, business, and psychology. Hannah is also an avid TED fan, so much in fact, that she decided to organize TEDxCSU “Growning Greener Generations”. In the process of organizing this event she has discovered an undeniable passion for saving the environment.  Hannah is a half marathon runner, aspiring to one day run a full marathon. That however takes time, and upon discovering the real world she has discovered that no one seems to be able to find enough of it. Most importantly, Hannah works for Angel at Cohere, so if you need anything ASK ME!

The Members

Nick Armstrong

Nick Armstrong is a creative, geeky mad scientist known as a Geek Superhero. A former programmer, Nick gave up his C# skills and the use of his appendix to follow his dream of declaring war on business as usual.Specializing in turning outside-the-box ideas into profit, he connects businesses to new and emerging markets (those people you wish you could sell to but can’t) by improving the strength and number of connections to the customers, employees, and communities they serve. He’s passionate about helping small businesses get the right start in the areas of areas of technology, talent acquisition and management, and failure tolerance. Nick loves to make people laugh, most notably at Ignite. He’s previously spoken at Ignite Fort Collins, Ignite Spatial NoCo, Ignite Denver, and Ignite Boulder. You can watch his favorite talk.

Sarah Beek

Sarah Beek is a writer and editor with a good ear and an eagle eye. She hails from Minnesota, but has since lived in Germany, Austria, New York City, and now Loveland. Her favorite part of the writing process is the part where you get to stare out the window and call it “working.” Bad habits: tea, chocolate, and planting way more garden than she can maintain. Special skills: writing letters, finding things that are lost, and singing “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” by Great White at karaoke (which doubles as a bad habit). You can watch her wrestle her writing Muse over on her blog.

Ellen Bryant

Ellen is a graphic designer striving to make the world – at least the parts on paper and computer screens – a more beautiful place. Variety is the spice of the graphic designer’s life and she is lucky to get to tackle projects from business cards to websites, magazines to GUI design. Ellen spends many hours a day glued to her computer, working on shaping her hands into claws from keyboard shortcut gymnastics and developing a sexy hunchback.  In her free time, she can be found cookin’ up some tasty goodness in the kitchen, fending off dementia with a crossword puzzle, or jogging with her pony-sized dog. Other free time interests include delicious cocktails on patios, Facebookin’ and kicking ass in Trivia and Scattergories.

Beth Buczynski

Beth is a freelance writer passionate about leaving the planet in better shape than she found it. Founder of her own one-woman-wordsmithing company, See Beth Write LLC, Beth provides writing, online community management, and brand advocacy services for those who want to have a positive impact on our world. In 2010, Beth and her partner Eric spent three months Coworking Across America in Harvey the RV. Beth writes about coworking and collaborative consumption for Shareable Magazine, and is co-author of Coworking: Building Community as a Space Catalyst. Connect with Beth on Twitter as @ecosphericblog and @gonecoworking.

Michael Clingan

Michael Clingan is a professional organizational catalyst. He helps groups think about their purpose, goals, and constraints in ways both creative and logical. Michael’s clients are often marketing, sales or leadership teams that need to create a new level of dialog, either internally or with their customers. Sometimes these sessions are strategic marketing interventions designed to quickly increase a companies sales without new products or discounting. He’s got the chops for this very cool job – before answering consulting’s Siren call, Michael was sales and marketing VP for three companies and Chancellor (not the evil kind) for another. And he has the left and right brain thing going with a master’s in physics and a degree in English. Email him at michael@theclaymoregroup.com.

Dann Frazier

Dann Frazier is a free software developer with two n’s in his name. Dann divides his online time between his job with Canonical USA, his hobby developing the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, and otherwise using his computer for what his girlfriend calls “not fun things”. His electron-free hours are spent bicycling, beer making/drinking and wasting other’s time. Dann invites people to look for him on facebook or twitter.

Dani Grant

Dani Grant Owner and General Manager of Mishawaka Amphitheatre, Investor in Chipper’s Lanes, President of SpokesBUZZ Fort Collins and Vice President of Sustainable Living association.  I am a serial entrepreneur and a huge fan of music.  My expertise is in project and personality management.  I rely heavily on people who are smarter than me and my inability to see obstacles clearly.  I am optimistic about everything and enjoy challenges.  I graduated from George Washington University, with a BA in Psych, in 1993 and attended Denver University Daniels College of Business for one year in 1997.  I diverted my grad school financial aid to launch my first consulting firm in 1998 and never went back for my second year.  I think  it has all worked out fine although my kids will not be allowed to do that.  I am the mother of 3 beautiful smart young ladies, Abbott 10, Gretta 9 and Eva 7 and my life partner and business partner is Matthew Hoeven.

Shantel Hansen

Shantel Hansen is a marketing + social media strategist. She has over 15 years of experience working within the corporate, non-profit and educational sectors. She specializes in companies who often have limited marketing budgets. For each client, Shantel customizes an online branding strategy and helps clients move beyond being producers of static content by using  “inbound” marketing techniques to listen to what the prospects are saying related to the product/brand topic. In addition, Shantel specializes in lead generation using keyword research, link building and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. As a result, her clients have experienced an increase in site traffic, brand building and new business. She is also working on a documentary, Waste?, enjoying happy hours, and going to the movies.

Derek Haynes

Derek is the co-founder of Scout, the performance monitoring service developers love to use. Hundreds of innovative companies – including Zynga, The New York Times, and Skype - use Scout to help them find and fix performance issues in their web apps. Derek enjoys bringing clarity to ugly problems and spends most of his days using a combination of Ruby, Javascript, and HTML to do that. When he’s not at Cohere, he’s probably on an outdoor adventure with his wife and baby daughter. As required by Fort Collins city code, he enjoys riding his bike and micro brews.

Allen Heneveld

Allen is an entrepreneur at heart always looking for the next great adventure.  He has supported entrepreneurs most of his career (using his MBA, CPA and JD) serving as CEO, COO, CFO, In-house Counsel and Consultant for numerous companies.  He (and his wife, Nina) are currently building their own business distributing Aqua Delight (www.delightwater.com) – a bottled water for chemo patients and others who suffer from metallic taste.  While all other waters taste metallic/nasty to those folks, Aqua Delight tastes great to them.  It is the first product of its kind.  It helps chemo patients “get hydrated, stay hydrated, optimize recovery”.  Since its launch in late November, Allen has found the oncology/cancer community difficult to penetrate and is on the constant “treasure hunt” to discover the “secret”.  Got any ideas or leads?

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer

Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer is a writer, journalist and blogger. She is also the Mayor of Heiditown a blog about Colorado events, festivals and road trips. HeidiTown is not a calendar of events, but rather stuff the Mayor likes, and she enjoys unique, small town celebrations like Niwot, Colorado’s Lefthander Days. Heidi has lived in Colorado for over a decade and there’s no other place she’s rather be. Heidi has a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy and in 2003 she barely escaped becoming a lawyer. Instead, in 2006, she got her first writing gig at a northern Colorado newspaper and never looked back. She now writes for Lydia’s Style Magazine, CBS Denver and more. Heidi writes for money, so if you need a writer and you are willing to pay, she’s willing to write. You can follow the Mayor on Twitter@HeidiTown.

Chris Lenfert

A graphic designer at heart since the late 90′s and professionally since 2004, Chris now spends his time cleaning up the all too dated style of those years. Working for publishing companies, direct mail catalogs, photography studios, and membership organizations, the tools were in place to start his own freelance business Lenfert Design in 2009. By building and refreshing brands, updating marketing materials, and developing an online presence, Lenfert Design helps small to medium sized businesses gain the real advantages of great design. When he’s not bending layouts to his will, Chris enjoys a slew of other activities, from skating, hiking, camping and biking, to working on his new house with his wife Cassandra and fighting his monstrous puggle Lucy.

Kristin Mastre

Kristin Mastre is a wife, a mother to two boys, a Personal Trainer and a Professional blogger. She has been blogging for five years on three different blogs; a parenting blog, a fitness blog and a restaurant review blog, all of them receiving world-wide recognition.  After noticing a lack of food bloggers in Fort Collins, she decided to throw her hat into the ring and is now the #1 food blogger writing restaurant reviews onFeastingFortCollins.com, specializing in craft beer and pairing dinners.  Being an honest writer, she’ll tell it like she tastes it.  With a keen ability to build successful blogs and market them, Kristin consults other writers wishing to reach new heights in blogging.  She also provides restaurant consulting for those who wish to improve their customer experience and refine their menu. Find her on Email, Twitter,Facebook.

Brian McCallister

Brian McCallister is a programmery kind of guy who loves that folks are willing to pay him to write code. In previous lives, Brian worked in other fields, but they were not nearly as fun (except possibly the stint as a guide in the Adirondacks). In addition to open source hackery, occasionally still getting into the mountains, being a dad, and trying to figure out how to describe himself in bio blurbs, Brian works remotely for Ning.

Lisa McDonald

Lisa is a career consultant and recruiter for a special group of medical practitioners – integrative medical professionals.  She’s combined an extensive background in Human Resources with her passion for integrative medicine to create her dream job at Integrated Connections.  Through her work she aspires to help in the transformation of healthcare from the current disease management mentality to a preventative and wellness mentality. She enjoys being with her two awesome children in the Colorado outdoors.  Lisa’s personal recipe for her own wellness is a mix of good friends, good food (mostly organic and whole), good wine, a bunch of laughter, a dab of yoga, a dash of running, abundant sunshine and life is good.

David Medberry

Dave is a husband, dad, dog owner and geek.

Now that his kids are grown, he spends his time doing all the yard work and playing with computers and consuming media. He pays for all that by working on Ubuntu and other open source software for Canonical.

He also hikes and bikes.

Lindsay Ogden

Lindsay Ogden left a successful career in botany and vegetation mapping to have more control over her life. She turned her talents to web development, graphic design, and business processes consulting. She is passionate about the Cloud and teaching businesses how to leverage it to increase productivity, decrease costs, and make workforces more flexible. She builds websites in Drupal, Google, and WordPress and loves creating custom themes for her interesting clients. Lindsay finds coworking to be an excellent resource for access to new ideas and talent as well as a refreshing break from the usual living-room environment.

Scott Parrish

Scott is a System Admin,

Katrina Pfannkuch

Katrina Pfannkuch is a writer, consultant, teacher, intuitive and Reiki Master who lives to write and create. She started Buzzword Communications, LLC to help people and businesses hone in on what they truly want to say in a way that is engaging and “hook-worthy”. Katrina has over 12 years of experience with writing,editing and content strategy for marketing and web content, and specializes in business, health and wellness and metaphysical topics. In addition to writing , Katrina guides people and their creative ideas, providing practical tools, strategies and support to help them connect with inner most creative fire. Her blog CreativeKatrina explores various perspectives on creativity, and ideas and tools for being more creative in every day life. Katrina is also a contributor for BellaSpark Magazine and Yoga Connection Magazine, and teaches writing and blogging classes at Front Range Community College.

Matt Rose

Matt Rose is a Fort Collins-based Ruby on Rails developer for Composition9.  Born and raised in Chicago, IL, he worked and schooled his way through a master’s degree in Management Information Systems.  In 2005, he moved to Fort Collins, CO where he has been doing freelance web development and writing pretty good code ever since.  He is undecided about favorite colors, but his favorite flavor is savory.  He thinks it is an amazing time to be working with information technology.  Email him at matt@composition9.com, please.

Ian Schneider

Ian is a developer of open source spatial software currently employed by OpenGeo and is very happy he is not commuting to the New York office. Ian has degrees in Geology and Computer Science from Colorado State University. His first maps were drawn by hand using a compass and colored pencils and detailed the geology of various locations in Colorado. He prefers web mapping now, but still collects rocks. He also enjoys gardening, mountain biking, skiing and other outdoor activities.

Darrin Sharp

Darrin telecommutes to his day job as a climate researcher at the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. In addition to his research, Darrin is also OCCRIʼs de facto IT department, where he draws from his experience in the high-tech industry. He has degrees in Computer Science, and also earned an MS in Ecology a few years ago. This explains how he made the jump from high-tech to climate research. Darrin likes Cohere because it provides opportunities for interaction with a new group of bright, interesting people. And, when the walls start closing in at home, it gives him access to a space where he can be productive. When heʼs not in cyberspace, Darrin can often be found piloting his mountain bike along one of the many delicious trails in the area.

Skippy

Skippy is a Dark Lord of the visual arts and Art Curator for Cohere. He is the self-proclaimed Creative Genius of On The Fly Photography; a theatre technician for hire, working with several local theatres; and dabbles in video and audio as well. Skippy teaches photography and Adobe Lightroom to groups and individuals. Skippy is unconventional in his approach and very serious about what he does – but not at all serious about how he does it. There is some question at Cohere about Skippy’s age. Is he 35 or 65? There is evidence for both conclusions.

Al Stone

Al has been working with computers since the Dark Ages (the 1970′s), back before there was an Internet.  He did a stint as a rocket scientist for a while, but then decided he longer wanted to use his powers to build weapons.  He’s been working on all sorts of software since then. A few months ago, Al joined Canonical to work on the Ubuntu Linux system – software given away for free to help make the world a better place. And, he has a dog.  And a cat.  And, he has been married for 34 years to the most wonderful woman on the planet.

Julie Sutter

A former print journalism major, Julie Sutter still loves words and stories. She currently divides her time between cheerfully accepting freelance copywriting assignments and putting the art in party as the co-founder of Articulate City, an arts-and-culture social club with an ever-expanding membership base and a reputation for hosting memorable monthly parties.  She’s passionate about her work because she gets to find creative ways to shine a spotlight on other people’s passions. She loves coworking because executive office suites can give you some perks, but coworking gives you some peeps. And that’s how she works best – as an independent spirit in an interdependent world. Email her at julie@articulatecity.com

Jerry Touslee

As a recovering ad agency professional, Jerry now spends his work days consulting with clients on all things marketing through his company Left Field Marketing. That means brand development, communications strategies and campaigns, web content, marketing plans, and creative services that can be added to all of those menu items to make it a combo meal. He takes the experience and purple hearts he earned from working with clients like Microsoft, Intel, Starbucks, and Boeing and applies it to the kinder and gentler clients he works with now. When he’s not doing that, you might find him logging some cycling miles, hiking or fly fishing up in the hills, or being a lonely CU fan in a CSU town.

Jeremy Trujillo

Once a lover of words, Jeremy grew sick of the seemingly endless ambiguity they rained upon him. Now Jeremy stays within the safety zone provided by numbers, counting the money of entrepreneurs as he strives to become one himself. He finds balance in your balances, credit in your debits, and totality in his tallying. Actually, he’s a lot more interesting than all of this. And once he washed his cat in the dishwasher. Also, he loves gin, and is willing to put you in the hospital if you say it tastes like PineSol. If you’re a freelancer who needs a sidekick (or a full-on superhero) to tackle your business bookkeeping and accounting, he’s your guy. When he’s not crunching numbers, Jeremy is usually outdoors with his dog, tooling around with his car, fending off his evil cat, or on a random road trip to someplace awesome.

Kevin Udy

Kevin is a computer nerd who enjoys building his knowledge of search marketing and web development as the “search engine nerd” at NerdyMind Marketing. He spends Wednesday evenings working on hobby and side projects at Cohere. Kevin also enjoys supporting and helping to cultivate local tech events in Fort Collins like Ignite Fort Collins.

When he finds time to get off of the computer, Kevin appreciates the value of a nap, the aesthetic value of clouds, gardening, and whiskey.

Carrie Visintainer

I split my time between literary and freelance writing. My essays have been published in the Travelers’ Tales “The Best Women’s Travel Writing” anthology, Matter Journal, Cahoots Magazine and Melusine. Currently, I’m writing my first novel. In addition, I’ve written pieces on science, health, travel and women’s issues for local non-profits and governmental agencies, and I’m working to build my portfolio as a freelance science writer.

Alex Williamson

Alex is an open source software developer who enjoys hacking on operating systems and playing with, and sometimes breaking, new toys.  Alex works remotely for Red Hat on the KVM virtualization team, helping computers to do even more strange and wonderful things.  When not tinkering with code, Alex can often be found working on a home basement finishing project, fiddling with home automation, finding new ways to go green, or enjoying the Fort Collins staples of beer and bikes, and maybe the occasionalsnowboarding trip.