Her father wanted her away from the assembly line. She carried that wish from Flint to the Starbucks executive suite - and spent the next five decades holding doors open behind her.
Adrienne Becker is the CEO and co-founder of Level Forward, the public-benefit entertainment studio she launched in 2018 with filmmaker Abigail Disney. From a Los Angeles base, she finances and produces films and stage work that pair compelling stories with real-world advocacy - a slate that has earned a combined 37 Tony nominations (Jagged Little Pill, Oklahoma!, Slave Play, What the Constitution Means to Me, Suffs) and Oscar-recognized films (The Assistant, Red White and Blue). A former CEO of DailyCandy and SVP at Nielsen and IAC who got her start on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, Becker treats entertainment as a tool for economic and cultural change.

Lorenzo Thione is a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer, AI pioneer, and venture capitalist who sold his search engine startup Powerset to Microsoft for $100 million in 2008. As Managing Director of Gaingels, he leads one of the world's largest LGBTQ+ venture syndicates with $1B+ deployed across 2,700+ portfolio companies. He founded StartOut, the largest LGBTQ+ entrepreneur network, and has produced acclaimed Broadway shows including Hadestown, The Inheritance, and Allegiance with George Takei. An Italian-born computer engineer turned operator-investor-activist, Thione builds what he calls a flywheel of queer economic empowerment by positioning diversity as a source of better returns.