
Before she coached executives through uncertainty, Jovita Jenkins spent more than two decades making complex aerospace systems behave. Her second career asks a harder engineering question: what keeps capable people from changing themselves?
The product-management school gives aspiring technologists something awkward to acquire: experience building with other people. Its classroom is a small team with a real deadline.
Tracy Saunders spent two decades placing executives for Google, Amazon and Cisco. Then she flipped the model - and built a discreet network that gets senior women hired, paid and promoted without the noise.
Jennifer Rankin Byrne is the founder and principal of MERIT Coaching Communications Consulting in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she coaches leaders and communicators to sharpen their voice, build executive presence, and lead with authenticity. She brings more than two decades of communications leadership, including years as Vice President of Corporate Communications at PBS and earlier roles at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, AOL, and Turner Broadcasting/CNN. Her practice blends real-world corporate experience with a curiosity-led, customized coaching approach summed up in her tagline: 'Communicate with purpose. Grow with confidence.'
CoA Nexus, Inc. (formerly Srust, Inc.) is a Tokyo- and Menlo Park-based deep-tech HR startup that uses proprietary AI to read tens of millions of research papers and patents, visualize a scientist's real skills, and match R&D talent with companies - from university spinouts to large manufacturers. Its flagship platform, CoA Researcher, is billed as Japan's largest researcher-matching platform, supporting full-time roles and side work across biotech, chemistry, medical science and semiconductors. The company raised a roughly ¥300 million Series A in October 2025 to expand its global researcher database and go beyond the reach of conventional job ads.
Tom James is a Certified Franchise Consultant and the founder of Prophecy Consulting, a Fort Worth, Texas advisory practice that helps corporate executives and military veterans decide whether to buy a franchise, and if so which one. A FranServe affiliate and member of the International Franchise Association, he matches candidates across 700-plus franchise brands through a free, structured coaching process. His approach is shaped by having owned a franchise himself, a SpeedPro large-format printing operation in the Los Angeles area, and by a corporate career spanning HR, IT, operations, project management, finance, and sales and marketing.
Athena Alliance is a subscription community and learning platform that helps senior women executives build what it calls a 'Portfolio of Impact' - advancing into the C-suite, onto corporate boards, and into investing, entrepreneurship, and thought leadership. Founded in 2016 by Coco Brown, it blends a curated peer network, a learning library, 1:1 coaching, live salons, and direct board-opportunity matching. Its membership spans leaders from companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Disney, Databricks, and Stripe, and the organization says it has helped place hundreds of women on corporate boards.

Shawn 'swyx' Wang is a Singapore-born AI engineer, founder, and community builder who pivoted from a $350k/year quantitative finance career to become one of the most influential voices in AI engineering and developer tools. He coined the term 'AI Engineer', co-founded the AI Engineer Summit (now the world's largest technical AI conference for engineers), co-hosts the Latent Space podcast reaching 10M+ readers/listeners, and is the author of the seminal 'Learn in Public' essay that has shaped how millions of developers think about career growth. He is the founder of Smol.ai and a prolific creator with 626+ published essays, talks, and tutorials.