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Anjanet Mort, our June employee spotlight, is not only the phenomenal (multi-tasking, early-rising) Client Services Manager here at Zerista, she’s also a perfect representative for our June Life Sciences theme.

Anjanet was born in California but then grew up in Colorado. She went to school at Purdue, where she earned a BA in writing and a minor in computer technology. Her jobs have spanned from being a release manager for Integware, a software provider for the Life Science Industry (our June theme!) to being a technical writer at Vidiom, a division of Time Warner. Today Anjanet is happily married to her husband Chris (who happens to work for a medical device company – Life Sciences Industry strike 2!) with whom she has an adorable 4 1/2 year old daughter named Gwena Viere.

She’s currently recovering from a full, cringe-worthy, Achilles rupture. In her spare time, she loves to read (a lot) and is organizing her book club to host a charity garage sale whose profits will go towards the Learning Source for Adults and Families.

When she isn’t reading, hurting herself, or saving the world one garage sale at a time, Anjanet loves to garden. She has gads of heirloom flowers from her grandmother back in Pennsylvania, along with rhubarb that is older than…well..dirt. “My garden obsession is keeping my husband’s hops out of my garden; my garage obsession is keeping his brewing equipment contained.” Towards the end of the season, the garden gets totally ignored as Anjanet turns her attention to college football; watching the boilermakers.

Besides gardening, she loves biking to the farmers market with her family, complete with Gwena on her training wheels, and petting her pup Lily.

Taylor, a Colorado native, grew up ski racing in Steamboat, Colorado. Rather than going to a traditional high school, he attended a “ski academy” where he wore ski boots 250 days out of the year and traveled all around the world.

After high school Taylor studied communications at DU and went on to work for Nordica as their North American factory rep.  His job was to be the face of the industry, driving all over the country and maintaining the equipment for clubs and athletes. It was a sports lovers dream – Taylor was responsible for keeping all of the athletes happy, from the Nordica athletes in the X-games to those in the Olympics.

Taylor went on to be an entrepreneur in two, very successful, software companies, before arriving here today at Zerista. Although he works with us as an account executive, it’s his incredible background in technology and software development that lets him be such an  effective liaison between the development team and our customers.

Today his interests are vast. His parents still live in Steamboat, where his mom runs “Strings,” a well-known yearly Steamboat music festival. This festival has been a big stepping stone for up-and-coming bands – a number of Best New Artist Grammy have been won the year after they performed at her festival. Growing up this translated to lots of starstruck moments for Taylor, who met people like Billie Corgan, David Bowie, and Trent Reznor during these summers.

When he isn’t skiing or meeting superstars, Taylor loves to cook and loves to eat – he’s even teaching his wife to cook at the moment. When they aren’t cooking together, Taylor and Katie spend a lot of time with their dogs – Chuck (a 5 year old lab/great dane mix) and Roxie (a 4 year old shitzu poodle) – both rescues. You think between the cooking, the eating, the skiing, and the Zerista-ing, Taylor would have enough on his plate – but no cigar: he just finished his first half-marathon, where he raised about $10,000 with his wife and sister for the Leukemia/Lymphoma society. The photo above was taken at this marathon, right at the 12.5 mile finish line.

First mover advantage is way overrated.  Trail blazing companies capture headlines, @Techcrunch articles and @Scoblizer tweets – no doubt.