Scott Kokones is co-founder and CEO of Enspire DBS Therapy, a Cleveland Clinic portfolio company building an implantable deep brain stimulation system paired with physical rehab to restore arm function in stroke survivors. He is running the RESTORE pivotal trial after the EDEN proof-of-concept study, having raised $27.9M total including a $17.6M Series B in 2023 and a $10.3M Series B1 in January 2026. Alongside Enspire he is a general partner at Guide Medical Ventures and a co-founder of Qr8 Health and CardioSolv Ablation Technologies. His earlier career runs through Intelect Medical, Boston Scientific, Enpath Medical, and Medtronic.
Felux is a Cleveland-based software company building the operating system for the steel industry. Its AI-powered platform reads request-for-quote (RFQ) emails straight out of a sales team's inbox, structures them automatically, and turns fragmented steel sales workflows into a unified dashboard for demand analytics, pricing intelligence, and deal tracking. Paired with a B2B marketplace connecting buyers and suppliers, Felux helps steel service centers, mills, brokers, and manufacturers see the demand they have been missing and modernize a trade that still largely runs on phone calls and spreadsheets.
Sam Schatz is the CEO and co-founder of Biohm Technologies, a Cleveland-based microbiome company betting that the future of gut health lives in fungi, not just bacteria. After spending a decade as AeroFarms' first employee scaling vertical farming from a startup into a global leader, he pivoted to the gut, turning a direct-to-consumer wellness brand into a B2B ingredients and data company built on a proprietary dataset of bacterial and fungal gut populations. He pairs data science with biology, raised a $4.52M Series B in 2025, and shipped Mycohsa, a probiotic blend clinically shown to break down digestive biofilms. Off the clock he is an Adirondack 46er and open-water swimmer.

Joe Pulizzi is the originator of the term 'content marketing' and the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which he built from a cocktail-napkin idea to a $17.6 million exit. Known universally as 'The Godfather of Content Marketing,' he has written nine books, spoken in 20+ countries, and now publishes the Orangeletter newsletter to 50,000+ subscribers while advising creators to own their audiences before AI makes discovery obsolete.