Michael Mandel is the co-founder and CEO of CompStak, a New York-based commercial real estate data platform that crowdsources lease and sale comparables from brokers, appraisers, and researchers, then sells verified analytics to landlords, lenders, and investors. A former Grubb & Ellis broker who got tired of chaotic Monday-morning comp-swaps, he launched CompStak in 2012 with Vadim Belobrovka and has since raised roughly $89M and built a national platform used across every major U.S. market.
Shawn Heide is a Boston-based entrepreneur who blends culinary creativity with digital storytelling and enterprise AI. As co-founder of 9muse Creative Studio, he crafts cinematic brand films for companies across New England. His culinary arc spans founding Wagwan Jerk Bar in 2017 — a Caribbean-meets-New England pop-up launched at Boston farmers markets — to directing culinary operations at The Kitchen at White Barn, a Neapolitan pizza restaurant grown from a working farm. Pursuing his MBA at Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, Shawn is also connected to Upstage AI, the enterprise AI company known for document intelligence and large language models that raised a $120M Series C in early 2026.