BEAT THE BOMB is an immersive social entertainment company that turns teamwork into a real-life video game. Squads of four to six players suit up in hazmat gear and battle through a series of high-tech, motion- and touch-driven game rooms - dodging lasers, cracking codes, and racing a Bomb Clock. Fail the final mission and you get blasted with paint, foam, or slime. Founded in Brooklyn in 2017 by former Tough Mudder executive Alex Patterson, the company has grown into a national chain backed by $22M in venture funding, hosting corporate outings, school groups, and birthday parties across multiple U.S. cities.
Prose is a New York-based beauty-tech company that makes custom haircare and skincare to order. An online consultation feeds a proprietary AI engine that blends from a library of natural ingredients into formulas tailored to each customer's hair, scalp, skin, lifestyle, and even local climate. Founded in 2017 by ex-L'Oreal and Phyto executives, Prose is a Certified B Corporation, a Public Benefit Corporation, and a carbon-neutral brand that has produced millions of bespoke products and reached profitability while expanding into skincare and licensing its technology stack, Singular.
Alexander Patterson is the founder and CEO of BEAT THE BOMB, the immersive social video game where teams in hazmat suits race through networked game rooms and either disarm a bomb or get blasted with paint, slime, or foam. A former tax lawyer turned Tough Mudder marketing chief, he built BEAT THE BOMB into a multi-city experiential entertainment brand that has hosted corporate teams from Google, Citi, Bloomberg, and Amazon, raising $22 million to expand across the United States.
Josh Haimson is the co-founder and CEO of Inductive Bio, a New York based AI company building software to speed up small molecule drug discovery. Before starting Inductive in 2024 with Ben Birnbaum, Josh ran product for the machine learning and data curation teams at Flatiron Health, generating real-world evidence across a network of more than 2 million cancer patients. The company raised a $25M Series A in May 2025 led by Obvious Ventures, and its Compass platform helps chemists predict a molecule's ADMET properties before it is ever synthesized, attacking the 'whack-a-mole' bottleneck that slows drug development.
Mahmoud Abdelkader is the Egyptian-American co-founder of Very Good Security (VGS), a San Francisco-based data security platform that raised $105 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and Visa. Born near the Suez Canal and raised in Brooklyn, he built high-frequency trading systems at Wachovia, was employee #4 at Milo.com before its $75M eBay acquisition, then co-founded Balanced Payments through Y Combinator (W11) before founding VGS in 2016. VGS pioneered the 'Zero Data' category of data security as a service, serving 700+ customers including Fortune 100 companies. He stepped down as CEO in late 2022 and now invests in fintech companies including Ramp, Vercel, Alloy, Mercury, and Stytch while experimenting with AI.
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
Judene Jean-Louis is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's Cultural Leadership Fund - the first VC fund comprised exclusively of Black cultural leaders committed to Black wealth generation. A Jamaican immigrant and Brooklyn native who trained professionally as a dancer, she brought dual MFA and MBA credentials to Silicon Valley's most ambitious experiment in cultural capital. At a16z, she bridges world-class entertainers, athletes, and cultural icons with early-stage technology investments, while funneling all management fees and carry back into nonprofits that funnel Black talent into tech.
Alison Roman is a New York-based food writer, cookbook author, and newsletter publisher who turned unfussy home cooking into a cultural phenomenon. Best known for viral recipes like #TheCookies, #TheStew, and #ThePasta, she has authored four solo cookbooks - including the NYT bestsellers 'Nothing Fancy' and 'Something from Nothing' - and built a fiercely loyal subscriber base through her candid, witty voice. After stints at Bon Appétit, BuzzFeed, and the New York Times, she went fully independent, launching a newsletter, YouTube series, a Catskills corner store called First Bloom, and her own tomato sauce line in 2025.