Michael Pollak is a New York based serial founder who keeps spotting personal-care rituals stuck in old-fashioned settings and rebuilding them as warm, branded experiences. He co-founded Heyday, the company that pulled the facial out of the spa and grew it into a national chain, then in 2024 launched Great Many, a hair growth studio and telehealth brand in NoHo that treats thinning hair with the comfort of a lounge and the rigor of a clinic. Trained at the Cornell Hotel School, he leads with hospitality instincts and gut-first decisions.
Neil Cohen is a Manhattan-trained investment banker who co-founded American Rock Salt Company, the largest-producing salt mine in the United States, after the historic Retsof mine collapsed and flooded in the 1990s. As Founder, Co-CEO and Vice Chairman, he helped assemble the financing for the first successful new U.S. salt mine in over four decades, in Mount Morris, New York. In parallel he runs Emerald Development Managers LP, an early-stage venture capital firm he founded in 1994, backing science-heavy startups in diagnostics, digital pathology, nanotechnology and fuel cells. His career spans the deeply physical (20,000 tons of rock salt a day, mined 1,200 feet underground) and the deeply speculative (frontier-tech venture bets).
Nick Freeman is the co-founder, co-CEO and CTO of Marco Experiences, a San Francisco and New York company that helps companies plan and book team offsites, retreats and group experiences. Before Marco he was one of the founding backend engineers on Instagram Stories, where he helped scale the product from launch to 500 million daily users, and he shipped Cortana for Xbox One at Microsoft. A UC Berkeley computer science and economics graduate, he left Brex in 2020 to build Marco with Suman Siva on the bet that, done thoughtfully, technology can build community. Marco now serves 800+ companies including Meta, Bain and Netflix.
Ronn Friedlander is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. A New Jersey native who came to Boston in 2009 for a PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, he traded a career in medical engineering and biomaterials research for a brewery built on microbiology. He cultivates wild and custom yeast strains in an in-house lab, scaling them in a bioreactor from pilot pours to 500-gallon batches, and helped grow Aeronaut from a living-room homebrew operation into a regional craft beer brand with a second 'Cannery' facility in Everett and a 2023 strategic merger with Dorchester Brewing under the Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Shiza Shahid is a Pakistani-American entrepreneur, investor, and activist. She co-founded the Malala Fund with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and served as its founding CEO, then went on to co-found and co-lead Our Place, the cookware brand behind the viral Always Pan. She also founded NOW Ventures, an early-stage fund backing mission-driven founders. Her work braids together social impact, immigrant identity, and the everyday ritual of cooking.
Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Alastair Adam is the co-founder and Co-CEO of FlatWorld, the Boston-based publisher on a mission to bring US college textbook prices back down to earth. A Cambridge-trained lawyer who started in London M&A, he spent two decades advising the information and publishing world before buying the assets of the old Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilding it. Today FlatWorld's peer-reviewed, low-cost titles are used by faculty at well over 1,500 North American institutions. He also chairs the board of PLOS, the nonprofit open-science publisher.
Alex Sappington is the Co-CEO of Page Vault, the legal web-capture company whose software turns a tweet, a TikTok, or a vanishing webpage into court-admissible evidence. He bought the business in 2022 alongside his Stanford classmate Luke Suydam through a search fund, taking the wheel from founder Jeffrey Eschbach. Under their shared leadership Page Vault has landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies three years running. A Princeton economist turned BCG consultant turned operator, Sappington talks evidence law at the dinner table too - his spouse is a federal prosecutor.
Amit Kapur is co-CEO of Flawless, the London-based AI filmmaking company building 'assistive AI' tools for visual dubbing, performance editing and film localization. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who grew up in South Dakota, Kapur rose to COO of MySpace at its 125-million-user peak, co-founded the AI personalization startup Gravity (acquired by AOL in 2014), ran AOL's publisher platform, and later worked as an executive in residence at Redpoint Ventures. He advised and sat on Flawless's board for two years before stepping into the co-CEO seat alongside filmmaker Scott Mann, drawn by what he calls the company's ethical-AI approach to amplifying filmmakers rather than replacing them.
Andrew Dervan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cajal Neuroscience (Cajal Therapeutics), a Seattle biotech that launched in 2022 with $96 million to rethink how drugs for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and other neurodegenerative diseases are discovered. A Harvard-trained physician with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Yale, he spent years leading cell therapy and immuno-oncology business development at Celgene and Bristol Myers Squibb. Unusually for a biotech CEO, he still sees patients as a practicing clinical geneticist at the University of Washington, evaluating people with adult-onset neurological conditions.
Bogdan Nesvit is the Ukrainian co-founder and co-CEO of Holywater, an AI-first entertainment company he started in Kyiv in March 2020 with Anatolii Kasianov. What began with a failed live-wallpaper app grew into a global media ecosystem - My Drama, My Passion, and My Muse - that reaches tens of millions of users across more than 190 countries. Holywater turned vertical, phone-sized microdramas into a serious format, drew a strategic investment from Fox Entertainment, and in January 2026 raised a $22 million Series A, the largest microdrama round outside Asia.
Brian Barlow is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), the Alphabet spinout that owns, operates, and invests in next-generation energy, mobility, water, and digital infrastructure. He brings three decades of private equity, venture capital, and infrastructure investing - including a stint inside Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs and an early seat at Michael Burry's Scion Capital - to the question of how to fund and build the infrastructure cities actually need. SIP launched in 2020 with a $400 million backing from Google and has since seeded ventures like Renew Home and AMP Robotics.
Christine Williams is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Foxtrot Services, a women-led, Foundry-native Palantir partner based in Washington, D.C. A Palantir alumna with a background spanning intelligence analysis, national security, and enterprise consulting at firms like Accenture, Peraton Labs, and Victory Six Advisors, she co-leads a company that helps organizations move AI out of the lab and into governed, operator-trusted production. Under her and co-CEO Nicole Sanders, Foxtrot grew from two people to more than 60 employees, posted 9.1x year-over-year revenue growth while remaining bootstrapped and profitable, and closed a Series A in early 2026.
Danny Mayer is the co-founder and co-CEO of Windmill, the design-led air care company often called 'the iPhone of air conditioning.' A Harvard economics grad who spent a decade in investment banking, private equity and health-tech leadership, he teamed up with his brother Mike and third-generation AC expert Ryan Figlia in 2020 to reinvent the unloved window air conditioner. Windmill launched to thousands of waitlist sign-ups within 24 hours and has since expanded into air purifiers, fans and a connected smart-air suite, raising a $5M Series A in 2024.
Eric Wei is the cofounder and co-CEO of Karat Financial, the Los Angeles fintech building banking, credit, and tax tools for full-time content creators. A Harvard economics grad who passed through Blackstone, McKinsey, and a product role on Instagram Live, Wei left big tech to build the bank that creators - who often earn six and seven figures yet get rejected by traditional underwriters - couldn't get anywhere else. Karat's flagship Black Card approves applicants on income and audience metrics rather than FICO scores. The company has raised over $100 million from SignalFire, Union Square Ventures, GGV, Y Combinator, Visa, and a roster of top creators, and partners with Visa to issue cards.
Ian Schmertzler is co-CEO and co-founder of Dispel, an operational-technology cybersecurity company he started in 2015 with his brother Ethan. A Yale-trained industrial engineer and former crew coxswain, Ian helped build Dispel's zero trust platform around Moving Target Defense - a system that keeps shifting network access points so attackers never find a static target. He serves as a principal investigator on three NIST National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence projects and as vice president of the National Defense Industrial Association's NY-CT chapter, working to keep factories, water utilities, and power grids running quietly and safely.
Han Lee, Ph.D., is co-CEO of Vibrant Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biotech building logic-gated, conditionally activated antibody prodrugs designed to switch on only inside diseased tissue. A Yale-trained geneticist with an MBA who can read a sequencing run and a term sheet with equal fluency, Lee spent 15 years as the finance and dealmaking engine behind cell-therapy companies - Arcellx, Neogene, and ImmPACT Bio - steering more than 75 transactions worth billions, including two startup exits to AstraZeneca and Lyell Immunopharma. In January 2026 he joined founder Larry Wang to scale Vibrant globally and push its lead masked T-cell engager, VIB305, into the clinic.
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
James Hawkins is the co-founder and co-CEO of PostHog, the open-source product analytics platform built for engineers. He pivoted five times inside Y Combinator's W20 batch before landing on PostHog, then turned a Hacker News launch and a single tweet into a developer cult following and a $1.4 billion valuation. A former marketing operator and self-described 'very bad developer,' Hawkins runs PostHog on radical transparency, tiny autonomous teams, and a refusal to be boring.
Jason Wachob is the founder and co-CEO of mindbodygreen, the wellness media company he started in 2009 and grew into a platform reaching millions of monthly readers. A former Columbia varsity basketball player turned Wall Street equities trader, he traded the trading floor for organic cookies and then for a digital publication built around the idea that real wealth is measured in well-being, not net worth. He hosts The mindbodygreen Podcast, wrote the bestselling book Wellth, and co-authored The Joy of Well-Being with his wife and business partner Colleen Wachob.
Jenny von Podewils is the co-CEO and co-founder of Leapsome, the people enablement platform she launched in Berlin in 2016 with Kajetan von Armansperg. After bootstrapping the company to roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue, the pair raised a $60 million Series A in March 2022 led by Insight Partners - their first outside money in six years. Trained at St. Gallen, Oxford, and Singularity University, she relocated from Berlin to New York in early 2023 to scale Leapsome's U.S. business, and was named Female Founder of the Year at the 2023 German Startup Awards.
Wes Sonnenreich is the Co-CEO and co-founder of Practera, the experiential-learning platform that turns real industry projects into scalable, credit-bearing coursework for tens of thousands of students a year. An MIT-trained engineer who once wrote the book on network security - literally, more than one - he has spent 25-plus years building at the seam between technology and learning: from a 1990s web-metrics startup and a security consultancy to running Deloitte Australia's innovation program. Today he splits his attention between Sydney and Cambridge, Massachusetts, evangelizing a future where people learn alongside machines instead of competing with them.
John Meadows is the co-founder and co-CEO of Bowery Valuation, a New York-based proptech company building the first vertically integrated appraisal-tech platform for commercial real estate. A certified appraiser who valued more than $3 billion of property at BBG before he turned 30, Meadows left the legacy appraisal world in 2015 to rebuild it from scratch with partners Noah Isaacs and Cesar Devers. He runs the company as a co-CEO partnership, has raised over $80 million in venture funding, and treats company culture as a system to be engineered rather than a slogan.
John Simpson is Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Digital Health Strategies (DHS), a Washington, D.C.-based data and technology company he started in 2014 with Ben Texter after both worked at Blue State Digital, the agency behind Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 digital campaigns. DHS builds the Share of Health patient loyalty platform, using propensity modeling and precision marketing to help large health systems - including Scripps Health, Providence, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Geisinger and Hackensack Meridian Health - deepen patient relationships, close care gaps and turn grateful patients into donors. A McGill and University of Chicago graduate who spent two decades in media and digital fundraising at Digitas and Deep Focus, Simpson closed a Series A round in December 2023 and has landed DHS on the Inc. 5000.
Jon Wang is the co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, a San Francisco company building voice AI agents that answer the phone for doctors' offices. A Stanford bioinformatics graduate and Gates-Cambridge Scholar who walked away from UCSF medical school, Wang spent two years studying why patients wait on hold before launching Assort with Jeff Liu in 2023. The company has since handled more than 42 million patient interactions and raised $102 million, including a $76 million Series B led by Lightspeed in 2025.
Justin Johnson, CFA, is Senior Managing Director and Co-CEO of Valuation Research Corporation (VRC), a national valuation and advisory firm founded in 1975. He built VRC's San Francisco office from scratch into one of the firm's leading practices, with a deep focus on private equity funds and their portfolio companies. Since August 2017 he has shared the chief executive seat with PJ Patel, splitting the country between them - Johnson runs the West Coast and Central regions while staying hands-on in technical work on solvency opinions, fairness opinions, and complex securities valuation.
Luke Suydam is the Co-CEO of Page Vault, the legal-tech company whose patented technology lets lawyers capture web and social media content as court-admissible evidence. A former Bain Capital private equity investor with a Stanford MBA and a Dartmouth degree in philosophy and economics, Suydam left the buy-side to buy a company of his own. In 2022, alongside business-school friend Alex Sappington, he acquired Page Vault through a thesis-driven search fund and the two have run it as co-CEOs ever since, steering it onto the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies three years running.
Manish Vora is the co-founder and co-CEO of Museum of Ice Cream, the candy-colored immersive attraction that turned a 2016 self-funded pop-up in New York's Meatpacking District into a global chain of 'experiums' with locations across the US and Singapore. A former Citigroup investment banker turned art-and-experience entrepreneur, he previously co-founded the contemporary art platform GREY AREA and ran the experience-tech venue Lightbox before partnering with Maryellis Bunn. He now co-leads Figure8, the experience-first development company that is the parent of Museum of Ice Cream and raised a $40M Series A in 2019 at a $200M valuation.
Michael Topol is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of MGT Insurance, a San Francisco-based company he runs with his brother Graham and describes as the world's first vertically AI-native neo-insurer for commercial property and casualty risk. After helping scale the insurtech Collective Health from 30 to more than 500 employees and a stint in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, he set out to rebuild a commercial insurance carrier from the ground up on a modern AI stack. Two years in, MGT has reached profitability, signed roughly 30,000 customers, posted about $3 million of recurring revenue per employee, and closed an oversubscribed $21.6M Series B led by Mubadala Capital in October 2025.