Flywheel is a Baltimore-born digital commerce company that helps brands grow on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart and 400-plus other online marketplaces. Born in 2014 as one of the first specialists in the messy mechanics of selling through Amazon, it pairs cloud software (the Flywheel Commerce Cloud) with managed services across retail media, retail operations and market intelligence. After being bought by Ascential and then by Omnicom for roughly $835 million in 2024, Flywheel now serves more than 4,500 brands - including over half of 2022's top 100 publicly listed CPG companies - with about 2,600 colleagues across the Americas, Europe, APAC and China.
Jennie Strobeck is AVP of State & Local Sales, Digital Media at Adobe, where she leads government sales strategy across city, county, and state agencies. With a career spanning enterprise tech sales at DLT Solutions, immixGroup, and Avaya Government Solutions, she has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology and public sector transformation. At Adobe, she previously served as Chief of Staff and Channel Sales Manager before stepping into the AVP role in 2022. She is particularly focused on digital accessibility, helping governments meet DOJ WCAG compliance requirements and modernize document workflows at scale.
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Munier Afshar is a co-founder at Maze, the AI-powered user research and continuous product discovery platform trusted by over 60,000 brands including Atlassian, Lowe's, and Sony. Based in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, Afshar helped build Maze into a category-defining research platform that raised a $40M Series B in 2022, bringing total funding to over $57M. Beyond tech, he serves as Vice President of the Afghan Relief Fund, lending organizational leadership to a nonprofit supporting vulnerable Afghan families. His career spans entrepreneurship, operations, and community impact.
Austin Rief co-founded Morning Brew in 2015 as a college sophomore after cold-emailing a classmate about a PDF newsletter. He helped grow it from a campus PDF to a 5-million-subscriber media company with $70M+ revenue before Axel Springer bought it outright. He served as CEO from 2021 to 2025, then stepped back to Executive Chairman while building Oceans Talent (an offshore staffing platform at $15M ARR) and Rief Ventures, a seed fund with 16+ investments including enterprise AI unicorn WRITER.