He started with a tent, a portable smoker, and jerk cones at a farmers market. Now he's building cinematic brand stories and AI-powered enterprise tools. Three businesses in, and the MBA isn't even done yet.
Shawn Heide doesn't fit a category. Chef, filmmaker, AI founder - the common denominator is a stubborn preference for building things from scratch and making them matter.
The clearest version of this is The Kitchen at White Barn. Chef Shawn envisioned something deceptively simple: grow a restaurant from a farm. A menu that changes with the seasons because the crops do. A kitchen built on the same land where the seeds are sown. In 2021, that idea became a Neapolitan pizza restaurant in Wrentham, Massachusetts, where the dough is made from scratch and the produce is harvested the same week it's served.
That particular obsession with provenance - knowing exactly where things come from, how they're made, why they matter - turns out to be exactly the mindset the AI industry needs right now. Enterprise AI companies live or die on trust: trust in the data, trust in the outputs, trust in the decision-making chain. Shawn, through his connection to Upstage AI, brings a founder's instinct for ground-up thinking to a sector that's notorious for overpromising and under-explaining.
The dough must go on.
- The Kitchen at White Barn team mottoBefore the farm restaurant, there was jerk. Shawn and his brother went to college in New York City, where Jamaican neighborhoods gave them their first serious education in Caribbean cooking. Later, they ended up in the US Virgin Islands - working in a pizza sailboat operation, of all places - learning the local jerk tradition from source. When they came back to Boston, they brought the concept home: Wagwan Jerk Bar, launched at farmers markets in the summer of 2017 with a tent, a portable smoker, and two folding tables. The community showed up. The idea worked.
At some point, Shawn turned the camera around. 9muse Creative Studio is his Boston-based video production and brand storytelling company - co-founded with Jeff Spellman. The name nods to Greek mythology: the nine muses, goddesses of inspiration in the arts and sciences. That's not accidental branding. It's a philosophy.
9muse's clients include Specialized, 88 Acres, ONSUNDAYS, Land for Good, Trail Jerky, and a handful of New England's most interesting food and lifestyle brands. The approach is deliberately not about production value for its own sake. The argument at 9muse is that authentic narrative - knowing why something exists, who made it, what it stands for - beats technical polish every time. Which, again, is the chef talking. You don't rescue a bad ingredient with technique.
Authentic storytelling beats 4K every time. The story is the ingredient. Everything else is plating.
The studio's reel reads like a cross-section of the New England entrepreneurial landscape: farm-to-table producers, outdoor gear brands, nonprofits, food startups. Shawn understands these founders because he is one. He knows what it costs to build something and why it's worth telling the story right.
Boston's full-service video production and brand storytelling shop. Cinematic work for food brands, startups, and mission-driven companies.
Neapolitan pizza restaurant grown from a working farm in Wrentham, MA. Menu changes with the seasons. Ingredients sourced from the same land.
Caribbean-style cuisine with a New England twist. Started at Boston farmers markets in 2017 with a tent and a portable smoker. Still going.
Enterprise AI company focused on document intelligence, large language models, and structured data extraction. $326M in total funding as of 2026.
Upstage AI operates in a space that's about as different from a jerk bar as you can get, and yet the founder instincts translate perfectly. The company builds enterprise AI tools for document processing, large language models, and structured data extraction - technology that helps insurers process claims, helps legal teams parse contracts, helps healthcare organizations extract meaning from medical records.
Founded in Seoul in 2020, Upstage has built one of the most credible AI research operations in Asia: 140+ published papers, first place on the Open LLM Leaderboard, SOC 2 and HIPAA certifications. The company has offices in San Jose, San Francisco, Seoul, and Tokyo. It raised a $120 million Series C in March 2026, bringing total funding to $326 million.
The product stack - Solar Pro 3, Solar Mini, Document Parse, Information Extract - is built for enterprises that can't afford AI that makes things up or loses the chain of custody on sensitive data. It's precise, explainable, and auditable. Which is very much the kind of AI a chef who sources ingredients by name from specific farms would build.
Shawn is pursuing his MBA at Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business - the school that has spent decades arguing entrepreneurship is a practice, not a personality type. Given that Shawn started his first food venture before he'd finished any formal business training, the fit is obvious. Babson formalizes what he's already been doing.
The Babson MBA isn't changing his direction. It's sharpening his tools. The program's focus on entrepreneurship across sectors - technology, food systems, creative industries - maps directly onto the three-vector career he's already running. The theory of the case: the same ground-up thinking that works in a kitchen works in a startup works in an AI company. You start with the raw material. You understand the process. You build trust by being honest about what you're making.
How one could grow a restaurant from a farm - one whose menu changes with the seasons just as the crops do, a kitchen built on the same land that the seeds of its ingredients were sewn.
- Chef Shawn's vision for The Kitchen at White BarnThe GitHub account - Home Assistant addons, Python projects, Android TV tools - tells you the technical fluency is genuine. This is not someone who has been handed an AI title. The hands-on curiosity that made him willing to work on a pizza sailboat in the Caribbean is the same curiosity that drives weekend side projects in Python.
Most founders specialize. Shawn Heide multiples. And the thing that connects all of it - the jerk bar, the farm restaurant, the video studio, the AI company - is a shared obsession with provenance. Where did this come from? Who made it? Can you verify it?
At Wagwan, that meant sourcing organic carrots and beets from White Barn Farm and serving jerk made from scratch with ingredients you can trace. At 9muse, it means filmmaking that starts from the authentic story, not the desired impression. At Upstage, it means AI that is explainable, auditable, and certifiable - SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001. The through-line is consistency: make something real, know where it comes from, stand behind it.
In 2026, that's a rare profile. Most AI companies promise transformation and deliver demos. Most creative studios promise art and deliver deliverables. Most food entrepreneurs follow trends rather than farming cycles. Shawn is running all three against the grain.