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Jacob Knudsen
Jacob Knudsen is the Chief Marketing Officer of Blade HQ, the Lehi, Utah knife and everyday-carry retailer that has grown from a 2003 startup into one of the largest online cutlery stores in the United States. An industrial designer by training - he earned a BFA from Brigham Young University - Knudsen joined Blade HQ in the mid-2000s and spent roughly sixteen years as its Chief Creative Officer before moving into the CMO seat in 2023. His fingerprints are on the brand's design language and on the content engine behind a YouTube channel with more than half a million subscribers. He is also a serious balisong collector, a subject he walked viewers through on Blade HQ's Collector's Corner, and a co-host of the first episode of the company's Steel and Stories podcast.
Justin Johnson
Justin Johnson, CFA, is Senior Managing Director and Co-CEO of Valuation Research Corporation (VRC), a national valuation and advisory firm founded in 1975. He built VRC's San Francisco office from scratch into one of the firm's leading practices, with a deep focus on private equity funds and their portfolio companies. Since August 2017 he has shared the chief executive seat with PJ Patel, splitting the country between them - Johnson runs the West Coast and Central regions while staying hands-on in technical work on solvency opinions, fairness opinions, and complex securities valuation.
Kyle Harrison
Kyle Harrison is a General Partner at Contrary, the talent- and research-driven venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He joined in 2022 to co-found the firm's later-stage investment practice, bringing nearly a decade of experience from Index Ventures, Coatue Management, and TCV, where he backed companies including Ramp, Pave, Anduril, GitLab, Databricks, Snowflake, Figma, and Robinhood. Beyond deploying capital, Harrison built Contrary Research - one of the largest private market research platforms in the world, with 100,000+ subscribers and 500+ published reports. He also publishes the Investing 101 newsletter on Substack (26,000+ subscribers) and co-authored 'The Anduril Thesis,' a 300-page deep dive that took two years and 500+ sources to produce. Married to Camden, father of four, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.