Nick Wiseman is the co-founder and CEO of Little Sesame, a Washington, D.C. born hummus company that grew from a 500-square-foot restaurant basement into a national consumer brand sold in nearly 3,000 stores. A third-generation Washingtonian who started cooking at 15 and trained on New York's fine-dining line, Wiseman built Little Sesame with chef Ronen Tenne and cousin David Wiseman, anchoring the brand to regeneratively grown organic chickpeas from Montana. In July 2025 the company closed an $8.5M Series A to fund a new 23,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and a push to convert 10,000 acres to regenerative farming by 2027.
Spain Salinas is the chief executive at Global Gourmet Catering, the San Francisco caterer that feeds Silicon Valley's biggest companies and largest events. He started as a sous chef in 2004 and worked his way up to running the company, which Apple, Google, Netflix and Salesforce hire when they need restaurant-quality food at stadium scale.
Joshua Weissman is a Los Angeles-born, Austin-based YouTube chef and cookbook author who turned a teenage weight-loss journey into one of the largest cooking channels on the internet. With over 10.6 million YouTube subscribers, 2.2 billion views, and two New York Times bestselling cookbooks, Weissman blends fine-dining technique with everyday accessibility, making professional-grade cooking feel thrillingly achievable. He launched his first food blog at 16, published his first cookbook at 18, trained in Austin's fine-dining scene at Uchiko, and eventually left restaurant kitchens to go full-time on YouTube in 2019.
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.
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.
Amanda Natividad is VP of Marketing and Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the audience research platform co-founded by Rand Fishkin. She coined the term 'zero-click content' — the practice of creating platform-native content that delivers full value without requiring a click — and turned it into a framework, a podcast, a consultancy, and a forthcoming book. A trained chef and former tech journalist before she was ever a marketer, Amanda brings a rare blend of narrative discipline, culinary generosity, and data-driven rigor to a field that often settles for one of the three. Her newsletter 'The Menu' reaches 16,000+ subscribers and was named by Forbes among the top marketing newsletters. She has 200,000+ combined social followers and has guest lectured at Columbia Business School, Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Washington.
Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.