What happens when paying for college becomes a six-figure financial risk, but families have almost no safety net when something goes wrong?

In this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, host John Shufeldt sits down with John Fees, serial entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of GradGuard, to talk about entrepreneurship, higher education, insurance, and the financial risks families often do not think about until it is too late.

Fees has spent his career at the intersection of education, financial services, and technology. He previously built and sold companies to Viacom and JPMorgan Chase before co-founding Next Generation Insurance Group and launching GradGuard, a company designed to reduce the financial risks associated with college life.

A major focus of the conversation is tuition insurance. Once a university's refund period ends, a student who has to withdraw for a covered reason may otherwise lose tuition, housing, and other academic costs already paid. GradGuard was built to provide protection against certain unexpected events and now works with more than 700 colleges and universities. Its programs have served more than 2 million students across more than 1,900 institutions.

John and John also step back from the product itself to ask bigger questions about how America pays for education. They discuss student debt, whether the current financing system creates the right incentives, the economics of medical education, and why the cost of becoming a physician or other highly trained professional can influence career decisions long after graduation.

The conversation then moves into entrepreneurship and insurance innovation, including why Fees believes technology and AI will pressure traditional insurance intermediaries, where specialized insurance models can still create real value, and why entrepreneurs should focus on solving problems rather than fitting into an existing industry mold.

They close with a fascinating discussion about pattern recognition. Experience can help founders and investors recognize opportunities, but it can also create blind spots. Fees shares how his own assumptions contributed to passing on Facebook early, sparking a broader conversation about challenging what experience tells you and deliberately looking for the counterargument.

About John Fees: John Fees is a serial entrepreneur who builds technology-enabled ventures at the intersection of financial services and education. He previously sold Y2M and Members Connect to Viacom and JPMorgan Chase, respectively, and later co-founded Next Generation Insurance Group. He holds a BS in History from Arizona State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

About GradGuard: GradGuard was created around a simple problem: families can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a semester of college, yet have little protection if an unexpected illness, injury, or other covered event forces a student to withdraw. Since 2009, GradGuard has built insurance programs specifically for the risks of college life, including tuition and renters insurance. Today, the company works with more than 700 colleges and universities and has helped protect more than 2 million students across more than 1,900 institutions.

About Xcellerant Ventures: Xcellerant Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in innovative private companies across healthcare, technology, defense, and other emerging industries. Xcellerant offers multiple investment vehicles, including the Jetstream Venture Fund ($5,000 minimum interval fund) and select SPVs, while partnering with founders through capital, strategic guidance, and its broader network.

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What if voice communication could work anywhere a text message can get through?

In this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, host John Shufeldt sits down with Julie Gerber, Founder & CEO of ShadowGen, and Chad Gerber, Founder & CTO, to talk about a new approach to voice communication built for the places conventional networks struggle most.

ShadowGen is a national security technology company developing resilient voice communications for degraded, congested, and unreliable networks. Its technology reduces the bandwidth required for voice by more than 99%, opening potential applications across defense, public safety, telecommunications, tactical networks, satellite communications, and other mission-critical environments.

The path to ShadowGen was anything but traditional. Julie began her career in global public health and disaster resilience, working with organizations including the World Health Organization before moving into music management, licensing, publishing, and technology. Chad built a career as a Gibson-endorsed artist and technologist, contributing to 10 gold and platinum records while also developing new tools for creative collaboration.

Their worlds converged through Meloscene, a spatial computing platform built for live creative collaboration. When Julie saw how the underlying technology could address a problem she had encountered years earlier in disaster response, she asked a simple question: “Can we do that with voice?”

That question changed the direction of what they were building.

John, Julie, and Chad explore how ShadowGen could keep people connected when traditional communications fail, why ultra-low-bandwidth voice matters in national security and public safety, and how the technology could eventually support areas like translation, secure communications, and data analytics.

They also get into what it is like to build a deep-tech company as a husband-and-wife team, how two radically different careers ended up converging around the same problem, and the moments that made them realize the technology could have applications far beyond music.

About ShadowGen: ShadowGen delivers voice where conventional communications struggle. Its technology cuts the bandwidth required for voice communication by more than 99%, helping keep people connected when networks are degraded, congested, or unreliable. Built for national security and other mission-critical environments, ShadowGen is advancing resilient voice across defense, public safety, and telecommunications.

About Xcellerant Ventures: Xcellerant Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in innovative private companies across healthcare, technology, defense, and other emerging industries. Xcellerant offers multiple investment vehicles, including the Jetstream Venture Fund ($5,000 minimum) and select SPVs, while partnering with founders through capital, strategic guidance, and its broader network.

About Deal Titan: Deal Titan is an AI-powered platform that helps investors evaluate early-stage companies faster by turning pitch decks into structured diligence reports covering the market, team, financials, competition, and key risks. Use code EntrepreneurRx for a free solo membership, including 10 full analysis reports.

What does it take to build a new American luxury car company from the ground up?

In this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, host John Shufeldt sits down with Kristie D'Ambrosio-Correll, Co-Founder and CEO of Dacora, to talk about what it takes to challenge one of the most established industries in the world and create a modern luxury automotive house built around beauty, craftsmanship, technology, and experience.

Kristie's relationship with cars started long before Dacora. She grew up working on cars with her father before studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where she immersed herself in artificial intelligence at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. She later became CTO of MIRROR, helping bring the product to market and leading the company through its $500 million acquisition by lululemon. That experience gave her a firsthand look at what can happen when beautiful design and technology are built to work together.

Today, Kristie and her husband are applying those lessons to Dacora, with the ambition of creating America's next great luxury marque. John and Kristie discuss why American ultra-luxury may be ready for a resurgence, what the automotive industry can learn from Tesla's willingness to question everything, and how Dacora's coachbuilt model allows the company to focus on the elements it believes matter most to the customer while reducing complexity, cost, and time to market.

They also explore Kristie's evolution as a founder and leader, from a career driven by achievement and perfectionism to one shaped more by courage, resilience, and a willingness to take risks. Kristie opens up about the difficult pregnancy and birth of her daughter, how that experience changed her relationship with control and success, and why she now believes growth comes from the experiences you accumulate rather than the titles or security you hold.

About Kristie D'Ambrosio-Correll: Kristie D'Ambrosio-Correll is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dacora. Before founding Dacora, she served as CTO of MIRROR, helping lead the company through its $500 million acquisition by lululemon. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, where she studied AI at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Today, Kristie and her husband combine a lifelong passion for cars with deep experience in technology and consumer products to build Dacora, reimagining the automobile around experience, personalization, and human connection.

About Dacora: Dacora is an American luxury automotive house creating a new vision for modern transportation centered on beauty, craftsmanship, personalization, and human connection. Its coachbuilt vehicles are individually commissioned, combining timeless design and exceptional materials with an AI-native architecture designed to quietly adapt to the people it serves. Since emerging from stealth, Dacora has built a reservation pipeline exceeding its planned first year of production and begun commissioning its first Founder Series vehicles.

About Xcellerant Ventures: Xcellerant Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in innovative private companies across healthcare, technology, defense, and other emerging industries. Xcellerant offers multiple investment vehicles, including the Jetstream Venture Fund ($5,000 minimum) and SPVs, while partnering with founders through capital, strategic guidance, and its broader network.

About My Custom Wine: My Custom Wine lets you build a wine around your own taste. Tell Augustan, its AI sommelier, what you're craving, and it can blend, taste-test, and refine a custom wine from thousands of options before it is bottled with your own blend and label. Visit My Custom Wine to build yours.

What happens when a college student looks at a decades-old surgical tool and asks a simple question: why hasn’t anyone made this safer? 

In this episode of Entrepreneur Rx, host John Shufeldt reconnects with Casey Qadir, Co-founder and CEO of Hubly Surgical, several years after her first appearance to talk about how far the company has come, from an undergraduate idea to FDA-cleared technology being used in hospitals across the country. 

Casey started Hubly while studying neuroscience at Northwestern University after learning that emergency cranial access still relied on hand-crank drills without automatic stopping technology. Working with neurosurgeon Dr. Amit Ayer and CTO Tyler Panian, she co-developed the Hubly Auto-Stop Drill, designed to automatically stop after penetrating bone and help protect the brain beneath it. 

John and Casey revisit one of their earliest meetings, when John put his hand beneath a demonstration skull and drilled through it to see whether Hubly’s technology would stop. It did, helping turn a pitch meeting into an investment. 

Since then, Hubly has moved from early development to commercialization while expanding beyond cranial access. Casey shares how feedback from neurosurgeon customers led the company into spine surgery, resulting in FDA clearance for laminectomy and laminotomy procedures, and why clinician feedback continues to shape what comes next. 

The conversation also gets into the realities of building a medical device company: raising the first million dollars during COVID, finding physician champions, selling into hospitals, challenging the status quo, and staying confident when investors insist that if an idea were really that obvious, someone else would have done it already. Casey also shares what she has learned about balancing conviction with humility. 

About Casey Qadir: Casey Qadir is the Co-founder, CEO, and co-inventor behind Hubly Surgical. She started Hubly while studying neuroscience at Northwestern University and has since led the company from a classroom concept through two FDA clearances, nationwide commercialization, and use in thousands of patients across the United States. Casey holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in computational mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Healthcare list for 2026 and serves as an entrepreneur-in-residence and advisory board member at Northwestern’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. 

About Hubly Surgical: Hubly Surgical is a medical device company committed to making surgery safe. Its flagship product, the single-use, cordless Hubly Auto-Stop Drill, combines automatic breakthrough detection, mechanical plunge prevention, and real-time force indication to give clinicians greater control during high-stakes procedures. Initially developed for cranial access in the Neuro ICU, the platform now has FDA-cleared applications in both cranial access and spinal decompression procedures, including laminectomy and laminotomy. Since its commercial launch in 2024, Hubly Drills have been used to save thousands of patient lives nationwide. 

About Xcellerant Ventures: Xcellerant Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in innovative companies across healthcare, technology, defense, and other emerging industries.  Xcellerant partners with founders to provide capital, strategic guidance, and support as they build and scale their companies.  Learn about their newest fund, Jetstream Venture Fund, and its $5,000 minimum.

About Deal Titan: Deal Titan is an AI-powered platform that helps investors evaluate early-stage companies faster by turning pitch decks into structured diligence reports covering the market, team, financials, competition, and key risks. Use code EntrepreneurRx for a free solo membership, including 10 full analysis reports.