Carepod makes the world's simplest and cleanest stainless steel humidifiers - filter-free, three-piece units with hospital-grade interiors that can be sterilized with boiling water. Invented by dentist Dr. Hyung Joo Kim after he found conventional humidifiers were impossible to clean and breeding bacteria, Carepod sells doctor-designed, award-winning humidifiers direct to consumers. After becoming the top-selling humidifier in Korea, the brand launched in the U.S. in 2021 and has shipped hundreds of thousands of units worldwide.
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.
Rishabh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of FERMÀT, a San Francisco AI-native commerce platform that builds personalized, content-native shopping experiences for direct-to-consumer and enterprise brands. A LiveRamp alum who saw Apple's privacy changes coming before most, he launched FERMÀT in late 2021 to rewire how brands sell when shoppers can no longer be tracked across the web. The company has raised roughly $86M across rounds, capped by a $45M Series B in June 2025, and counts Glossier, GNC, ILIA Beauty, BISSELL and Unilever's Olly among its customers.
Shauna Drumright runs Savage X Fenty, the inclusive lingerie brand Rihanna built. A subscription-commerce operator who cut her teeth at Procter & Gamble before spending years scaling TechStyle's JustFab and FabKids, she stepped into the CEO seat to turn a celebrity launch into a durable, data-driven retail machine. Her brief: keep the body-positive swagger that made the brand famous while making the math work across membership, stores, and a sprawling product range.
William Hicks is the co-founder and CEO of Magic Mind, the mental-performance shot that wants to retire your second cup of coffee. A Princeton cum laude grad who left Barclays after deciding investment banking was too soulless to stomach, he went on to co-found the lupini-bean snack company BRAMI before partnering with James Beshara to build Magic Mind into a brand poured into the morning routines of tens of thousands of people. He preaches '90-day trailing average emotions' as the only sane way to survive the violence of startup life.
Dan McCormick is the co-founder and CEO of Create Wellness, the New York brand that turned creatine from a bodybuilder's powder into a daily gummy. After years inside high-growth consumer companies like Away, Parade and the Not Boring newsletter, he started Create in 2022 with his wife Sienna and pioneered the first creatine monohydrate gummy. The company has sold over 250 million gummies, reached GNC and Target shelves, and raised a $20M Series B in 2026 led by Alliance Consumer Growth.
Monica Belsito is the CEO of Function of Beauty, the made-to-order personal care company that turns an online quiz into a custom bottle of shampoo. She took the top job in July 2025 after a career spent building consumer brands that get acquired: founding CMO at feminine-care brand LOLA, CMO at hummus maker Sabra (bought by PepsiCo in 2024), and senior brand manager at Dollar Shave Club before its $1 billion sale to Unilever. A Georgetown grad and Harvard MBA who started in crisis PR and Colgate's management program, she now steers Function of Beauty's push from DTC into shelves at Target, Sephora, Walmart, and Amazon.
Sienna McCormick is the co-founder and co-CEO of Create Wellness, the New York company that turned creatine - long stuck in the bodybuilder aisle - into a daily gummy. After six years at Goldman Sachs, she and her husband Dan bootstrapped the brand from their apartment in 2022, shipped the first creatine monohydrate gummy after more than twenty manufacturers said it could not be done, and have since sold north of 250 million of them. In March 2026 the company raised a $20 million Series B led by Alliance Consumer Growth, with the stated ambition of getting 100 million Americans onto daily creatine by 2030.
e.l.f. Beauty is an Oakland-based, publicly traded cosmetics company (NYSE: ELF) built on a simple disruptive idea: prestige-quality makeup and skincare that almost everyone can afford. Founded in 2004 as e.l.f. (Eyes Lips Face) and reshaped under CEO Tarang Amin since 2014, it has grown into a multi-brand house spanning e.l.f. Cosmetics, e.l.f. SKIN, Well People, Keys Soulcare, Naturium, and Hailey Bieber's rhode. Every product is vegan and cruelty-free, most cost under $20, and the company has become a case study in social-first, community-driven brand building.
Levi Strauss & Co. is the San Francisco apparel company that invented the blue jean in 1873 and has spent 170-plus years turning a piece of workwear into a global wardrobe staple. Today it owns the Levi's, Dockers, Beyond Yoga and Denizen brands, sells in more than 110 countries, and is reinventing itself under CEO Michelle Gass as a direct-to-consumer denim lifestyle brand while pushing water-saving manufacturing across its supply chain.
Ciaran Long is the CEO of a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. (NYSE: AKA), a portfolio of next-generation fashion brands targeting Gen Z and millennial consumers. A qualified Irish Chartered Accountant with 25-plus years of financial and strategic leadership, Long joined a.k.a. Brands as CFO in 2021, stepped into an interim CEO role in 2023, and was named permanent CEO in January 2025. Under his leadership the company returned to net sales growth with three consecutive quarters of double-digit U.S. sales expansion, repositioning the portfolio around a demand-driven 'test-and-learn' merchandising model and a major bet on physical retail expansion. He previously served as CFO of Samsclub.com and held senior roles across Walmart's e-commerce division, and earlier in his career he co-founded CleanGrow, a water quality sensor technology startup.
Karl Strovink is the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-born specialty roaster now owned by Nestlé. A Berkeley native with an MBA from MIT Sloan, he arrived in 2019 from a twelve-year run at Converse and has spent his tenure pushing Blue Bottle toward oat milk by default, instant espresso, zero-waste cafés, and aggressive expansion across Asia, all while protecting the brand's small-batch identity inside a thirty-billion-dollar coffee parent.
Michelle Gass is the president and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., the first woman to lead the 172-year-old denim company. A chemical engineer by training, she built Starbucks' Frappuccino into a $2 billion brand, ran Kohl's for five years, and is now reshaping Levi's into a direct-to-consumer denim lifestyle retailer.
Tarang Amin is the Chairman and CEO of e.l.f. Beauty, the affordable cosmetics company he took public in 2016 and grew from a $135 million equity story into a multi-brand portfolio anchored by e.l.f. Cosmetics, e.l.f. SKIN, Naturium, Well People, Keys Soulcare, and - as of May 2025 - Hailey Bieber's rhode in a $1 billion deal.
Babylist is the operating system for new parenthood — a universal baby registry that grew into an ecommerce destination, a content engine, a healthcare brand, and now a chain of experiential showrooms. Founded in 2011 by ex-Amazon engineer Natalie Gordon, the company hit $750M in 2025 revenue while staying founder-led, profitable, and unapologetically focused on the parent.
Gorgias is a conversational AI and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce brands. It unifies email, chat, SMS, voice and social into one inbox, then layers an AI Agent that resolves a majority of tickets automatically while turning support into a revenue channel.
OLIPOP is a prebiotic soda company that turned the soft drink industry on its head by proving that soda can be both delicious and good for your gut. Founded in 2018 by Ben Goodwin and David Lester, the Oakland-based company combines nostalgic flavors with functional ingredients - each can delivers 6-9 grams of prebiotic fiber from plant-based sources like cassava root, chicory root, and nopal cactus. After reaching $400 million in revenue and profitability in 2024, OLIPOP closed a $50 million Series C at a $1.85 billion valuation in 2025, making it the fastest-growing non-alcoholic beverage brand in the United States.
Albert Wang is the co-founder and CEO of PatPat, a direct-to-consumer children's and family apparel brand he built from a mobile app in 2014 into a global platform serving 21 million customers across 140 countries. A Carnegie Mellon-trained engineer and former Oracle founding member, Wang spotted the gap in affordable, stylish kids' clothing when he and his co-founder Ken Gao both became fathers the same year. PatPat has raised over $465 million in funding, including a $160 million Series D2 from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021, and has pioneered innovations like Go-Glow light-up apparel technology.
Sam Ross is the Co-Founder and CEO of Numeral, an AI-native sales tax compliance platform built for ecommerce and SaaS businesses. He discovered the pain of multi-state tax complexity while running his own eight-figure DTC brands after leaving Airbnb, where he worked in growth under Gustaf Alstromer. That firsthand frustration became Numeral's founding insight. Backed by Y Combinator (W23), Benchmark, and Mayfield, Numeral raised a $35M Series B in September 2025 at a $350M valuation, with over $71M raised in total. The platform processes more than $5 billion in transactions annually, has filed over 150,000 tax returns, and serves 2,000+ businesses including Eight Sleep, Ridge, and Graza.
PatPat is a global direct-to-consumer children's and family apparel brand founded in 2014 by two engineer-fathers, Albert Wang and Ken (Can) Gao. It uses a data-driven, mobile-first model to deliver affordable, trend-forward kids' clothing, family matching outfits, and proprietary innovations like the stain-resistant Go-Neat fabric and the light-up Go-Glow line to more than 23 million customers across 140+ countries.
Quince is a San Francisco e-commerce company that sells luxury-grade essentials - Mongolian cashmere, washable silk, Italian leather, Turkish cotton - at prices that look like typos. It does this by skipping the wholesale layer entirely and shipping straight from partner factories using its own Manufacturer-to-Consumer (M2C) operating system.
Wendy Yu is the CEO of Cuyana, the San Francisco-based sustainable fashion brand built on the philosophy of 'fewer, better things.' A data-and-analytics-trained operator with a BS from MIT and an MBA from the University of Michigan, she worked her way through gaming, consulting, and digital marketing before joining Cuyana as Chief Digital Officer in 2018. When founder Karla Gallardo stepped down in 2025 after 14 years, Yu stepped into the CEO role - bringing her decade-plus of growth marketing and digital operations experience to the helm of a brand that has generated nearly half a billion dollars in lifetime DTC sales.
Byron Hoffman is the Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Offset, a Napa Valley-based company that is simultaneously a premium wine ecommerce platform and a brand design studio. Born and raised in Napa to a family steeped in food and wine culture - his grandfather was a winemaker at Christian Brothers and his grandmother Sally Schmitt was the original founder of The French Laundry - Byron brings both heritage and craft to his work. He co-founded Offset by merging his design studio Hoffman & Co. with Tyson Caly's 750 Group in 2015, having first collaborated on Last Bottle wine in 2011. Today, Offset serves legendary wineries like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Kosta Browne, and Realm Cellars. Beyond wine, Byron spent ten years producing and designing his grandmother's memoir and cookbook 'Six California Kitchens,' which won the 2023 IACP Award for Best American Cookbook and generated coverage in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.
Kirsten Green is the founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with nearly $3 billion in AUM that made early bets on Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Glossier, Bonobos, and Chime. A former equity research analyst who walked mall parking lots every Friday counting shopping bags, Green built Forerunner over a decade of SPV investments before raising her first institutional fund in 2012. Her consumer-first thesis - that following where people spend their time and money reveals where the economy is heading - has made her one of the most recognized venture investors in the world, appearing on the Forbes Midas List and Forbes World's 100 Most Powerful Women consecutively since 2017.
Chase Dimond is a partner at Structured, a full-stack ecommerce marketing agency, and one of the most-followed email marketing experts on the internet. He co-founded Boundless Labs in 2018, grew it into a 7-figure agency generating $35M+ in email-attributable client revenue, and sold it to Structured in 2020. Today he runs a media empire with 750,000+ cross-platform followers, a 100K-subscriber newsletter with a 46% open rate, and has helped ecommerce brands collectively generate $200M+ in email revenue. Shopify named him the #1 influencer to follow in ecommerce.
Ezra Firestone is a self-taught ecommerce entrepreneur who dropped out of high school, played poker in NYC underground clubs, and went on to build and sell multiple 7-, 8-, and 9-figure brands - most notably BOOM by Cindy Joseph, which crossed $200 million in cumulative revenue. He runs Smart Marketer (his education platform), Zipify Apps (serving 18,000+ Shopify brands with $600M+ in facilitated upsell revenue), and has acquired and turned around brands like oVertone Haircare. His philosophy - 'Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit' - is backed by results, and his operating principles around content-first marketing, brand mission, and sustainable growth have influenced an entire generation of ecommerce operators.
Molly Pittman is the CEO and Managing Partner of Smart Marketer, a leading digital marketing education and agency company. She rose from an unpaid intern at DigitalMarketer to VP of Marketing by age 24, personally managing over $16 million in profitable ad spend and generating 500,000+ leads. Co-host of the Perpetual Traffic Podcast (5M+ downloads), author of 'Click Happy' (2020), and founder of Fields of Freedom Dog Rescue - a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has saved 2,500+ dogs from euthanasia in Kentucky.
Taylor Holiday is the founder and CEO of Common Thread Collective (CTC), one of the most respected eCommerce growth agencies in the DTC (direct-to-consumer) space, serving 230+ brands totaling $2.3B+ in annual online revenue. A former minor league baseball player drafted by the New York Yankees, Holiday went from a 100-square-foot office above a bakery in Old Towne Orange, California to building a fully remote agency of 70-150+ people. He is also a partner at 4x400, a brand acquisition holding company, and one of the most influential voices on Twitter/X in the eCommerce world, known for contrarian takes, deep analytical frameworks, and a relentless focus on profitable growth.