Smith is an Asbury Park-based hospitality group that grew out of a 1990s branding and design studio. Beginning in 2006 with Brickwall Tavern, its partners helped restart a stalled downtown, then built a collective of restaurants and bars - Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick - that pair scratch kitchens with art-filled rooms. Smith treats hospitality as an instrument of urban renewal, designing, branding, and operating each venue in-house.
Anthony Vidergauz is the former CEO of California Closets who turned a struggling $2 million acquisition into a $300 million-per-year national brand. A South African immigrant and trained lawyer who arrived in the US in 1986 with $5,000, he joined California Closets in 1987 as legal counsel, then acquired the company from Williams-Sonoma in 1994. Over the next 13 years, he transformed it through lifestyle marketing - including a magazine sold at Barnes & Noble - and franchise relationship-building, growing to over 100 locations across North America and six countries. After selling in 2007, he now runs The Paradise Group, a boutique consulting firm advising franchise businesses on strategy, culture, and leadership.
Domestika is a global learning platform for creatives - illustrators, designers, photographers, animators, writers - built around professionally produced video courses and an enormous community of working professionals. Founded in Spain in 2002 as a forum, it became a unicorn in 2022 and now hosts millions of students taking courses in more than 10 languages.
Antoine Pitrou is a Paris-trained product designer based in San Francisco who turns complex digital problems into elegant, simple experiences. As the Founder and CEO of Hayes Studio and co-founder of SYLAPS (a browser-based video collaboration platform), he has shaped product design across fintech, legaltech, and SaaS - including a notable tenure as Senior Product Designer at Human Interest, the 401(k) platform redefining retirement savings for small businesses.
Chris Cockreham is the founder of beewise Media LLC, a Fort Lauderdale-based digital and creative consulting firm. Drawing on years of hands-on experience as a content producer, editorial associate, and designer at companies like Ecomii and DermApproved, Cockreham built beewise Media around the idea that the best creative work, like a beehive, emerges from collaboration and collective intelligence. The firm delivers web design, branding, marketing, and content services, positioning itself as an embedded creative partner for clients seeking to grow their digital presence.
Byron Hoffman is the Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Offset, a Napa Valley-based company that is simultaneously a premium wine ecommerce platform and a brand design studio. Born and raised in Napa to a family steeped in food and wine culture - his grandfather was a winemaker at Christian Brothers and his grandmother Sally Schmitt was the original founder of The French Laundry - Byron brings both heritage and craft to his work. He co-founded Offset by merging his design studio Hoffman & Co. with Tyson Caly's 750 Group in 2015, having first collaborated on Last Bottle wine in 2011. Today, Offset serves legendary wineries like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Kosta Browne, and Realm Cellars. Beyond wine, Byron spent ten years producing and designing his grandmother's memoir and cookbook 'Six California Kitchens,' which won the 2023 IACP Award for Best American Cookbook and generated coverage in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.
Josh Orum is the CEO of Pharos Systems International, a certified B-Corporation and leader in cloud-native print management software. With over 25 years spanning startups, brand agencies, and enterprise software, Orum stepped into the CEO role in October 2023 after serving as Pharos's CMO since 2021. He is the architect of PrintOps - a new category that repositions enterprise print from a device-centric headache into a cloud-native, user-centered operational discipline. Before Pharos, he founded Loud Dog Corporation, a San Francisco branding agency that served B2B tech giants including Google, Cloudera, and Intel, and later joined private equity firm Spotlight Equity Partners as an Operating Partner.
Daymond John is the founder of FUBU, the streetwear brand he built from a $40 budget in his mother's Queens house into a $6 billion global empire. Known as 'The People's Shark,' he's been a main cast investor on ABC's Shark Tank since its debut in 2009, championing underdogs and minority entrepreneurs. A five-time bestselling author, cancer survivor, Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship, and creator of Black Entrepreneurs Day, John proves repeatedly that being broke is not a limitation - it's a competitive advantage.
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.
Gary Vaynerchuk, known as GaryVee, is a Belarusian-American serial entrepreneur, CEO of VaynerMedia, Chairman of VaynerX, and founder of VeeFriends. He grew his family's $3M liquor store into a $60M e-commerce empire before building one of the most influential digital marketing agencies in the world. With 38+ million social media followers, 8 bestselling books, early angel investments in Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Venmo, and Coinbase, and a relentless content machine that runs 365 days a year, Gary Vee is one of the most recognizable voices in entrepreneurship, brand-building, and the creator economy.
Digital strategist, experience designer, and founder of Penumbra and Brandneu. A frequently cited expert in international media (NYT, CNN, Bloomberg) on Pakistan's tech landscape, known for bridging the gap between culture, technology, and government policy.