Josh Tabaj is the Chief Marketing Officer and one of four co-founders of Branded Bills, the Arizona headwear and apparel company that turned a hand-branded leather patch into a national custom-merchandise business. Branded Bills started around 2015 in a Mesa garage with a branding iron, a knife, and roughly $1,000 from each founder; its first patch hat went to a South Dakota brewery. The company grew from state-pride hats into a vertically integrated operation that sources and produces its own headwear, runs a custom and corporate-branding division, sells officially licensed collegiate gear, opened its first physical store inside the Phoenix Suns' Footprint Center in 2022, and moved into a 96,000-plus square foot Tempe headquarters in 2025. Tabaj handles the marketing side of that machine - the brand voice, the customer story, and the argument that a logo deserves better than a screen print.
Axio Education is an AI-native learning platform, spun out of Arizona State University's Luminosity Lab in 2023, that helps colleges and universities design, deliver, and improve courses. It combines LMS, CRM, and SIS capabilities with agentic AI to compress course development from months to minutes, deliver personalized learning pathways, and give faculty real-time insight into how students are doing - while keeping instructors in creative control.