Christine de Wendel is the co-founder and U.S. CEO of sunday, the QR-code checkout company that shrinks the worst part of dinner - waiting for the bill - from roughly fifteen minutes to about ten seconds. She spent two decades scaling European e-commerce unicorns Zalando and ManoMano out of Paris before founding sunday at age 40 with Big Mamma restaurateurs Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, then moved home to Atlanta to plant the company's U.S. flag. A Georgetown School of Foreign Service graduate who once wanted to run the United Nations, she now runs a hospitality-payments business that has processed billions in restaurant transactions.
Conor Sen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and founder of Peachtree Creek Investments, an Atlanta-based money management firm. He built a national following by reading the economy through housing, demographics and the slow grind of millennials moving through their life stages, and turned a habit of arguing with strangers on Twitter into one of the most-cited macro voices in financial media. His tagline, 'The future is a policy choice,' doubles as his worldview.
Nic Reese is AVP of Digital Media Enterprise at Adobe, based in Atlanta, Georgia, with over 15 years of experience driving enterprise sales and adoption of Adobe's creative and marketing technology platforms. He has championed Adobe's generative AI initiative - Adobe Firefly - and works at the intersection of creative software, marketing cloud, and enterprise digital transformation at one of the world's leading software companies.
Bryson Koehler is the CEO of Revinate, a hospitality SaaS company specializing in guest data platforms, CRM, and marketing automation for hotels. A career technology executive with deep roots in enterprise data and cloud infrastructure, Koehler previously served as CTO at IBM Watson & Cloud Platform and as EVP/Chief Technology, Product, Data & Analytics Officer at Equifax. He built the legendary Weather Company data platform - processing 4GB of data per second from 40 million mobile devices - before IBM acquired it in 2016 partly due to his work. His return to hospitality with Revinate merges two career obsessions: data engineering at scale and the guest experience.
Karthik Puvvada - universally known as KP - is the Head of Community at Netlify and the de facto face of the Build In Public movement. After waiting 12 years to found his own company due to visa constraints, he built and scaled programs that have helped 500+ founders across 68 countries. He hosts the Build In Public Podcast (top 10% globally), has championed 150+ Product Hunt launches, and evangelizes radical founder transparency as both a philosophy and a growth strategy.
Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, the only analyst firm exclusively focused on go-to-market strategy for B2B SaaS companies. Before that, he co-founded Terminus (2014), the platform that defined the account-based marketing software category, and served as CMO at Pardot through its $2.5B acquisition by Salesforce. A WSJ and USA Today bestselling author of three books, host of the 900-episode FlipMyFunnel podcast, and curator of the GTMonday newsletter with 175,000+ subscribers, Vajre is one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. An immigrant from Nagpur, India who arrived in the U.S. with $350, he became an American citizen in late 2024 after 22 years in the country.
Lil Baby is one of Atlanta's most commercially dominant rappers, born Dominique Armani Jones on December 3, 1994. He went from dealing drugs in Southwest Atlanta to releasing four consecutive number-one Billboard 200 albums between 2020 and 2025. His 2020 album 'My Turn' was the best-selling album of the year across all genres, and 'Drip Too Hard' with Gunna is RIAA Diamond certified. In his Trendsetter era (2025-2026), he released the birthday mixtape 'The Leaks' and the charting singles 'Mrs. Trendsetter' and 'Mr. Trendsetter,' continuing to define Atlanta trap for a new generation.
Teddy Swims (born Jaten Collin Dimsdale) is a Georgia-raised soul-pop singer whose tattooed exterior and raw emotional delivery mask a voice that sounds like it was forged in a Pentecostal church and tempered by decades of Marvin Gaye records. After years in Atlanta metalcore bands and a viral YouTube cover career, he signed with Warner Records in 2019 and spent the next few years quietly building toward an explosion - 'Lose Control' (2023) became the #1 song in America for 2024, spent 112 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, earned Diamond certification in four countries, and accumulated 1.7 billion streams. His debut album project 'I've Tried Everything but Therapy' (Parts 1 & 2) earned Grammy nominations and festival headlining slots worldwide, cementing him as one of the defining voices of mid-2020s soul-pop.
NishA Acharya is a tech talent executive and career strategist with 14+ years of experience placing engineers and consultants at Ernst & Young. As US Talent Acquisition Recruiting Lead for EY Technology Consulting, she has built pipelines for some of the most sought-after tech roles in consulting, with a growing focus on AI, Physical AI, and Robotics. She runs 'The Leverage' newsletter, helping tech professionals navigate career growth, and speaks at Women in Tech events globally on recruiting, STEM, and how to build a career that compounds.