el-segundo
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Suresh Kothapalli and the education that kept paying forward
He founded iSpace in 2000. With his brothers, he also built a quieter legacy at Marist: a room named for their parents, a scholarship, and research fellowships that give other students a start.
Matt Knox and the business that paid for the next idea
Before Wonderful built digital products for other brands, Matt Knox needed a way to keep his own startup going. His career keeps returning to a practical question: what can you make useful with what you already have?
Sebastian Fischer and the art of changing the flight plan
From planetary spacecraft to delivery drones and self-driving cars, Sebastian Fischer built a career around making complex machines work together. At Wardstone, the company he co-founded with his brother, the next adjustment is bringing missile defense closer to the ground.
Drew Boyles and the long way to a wave
A broken surfboard became a product. A junk truck became a route to ownership. Now the former El Segundo mayor is working on a surf resort in Arizona, where the first challenge is everything that happens before the wave.
Isaiah Taylor Has a Factory Answer to the Nuclear Question
He learned to code, opened an auto shop, and spent years preparing to build a reactor company. Now Valar Atomics has a working demonstration and a far larger question: can a nuclear plant become something a factory makes again?
Kristen D'Arcy
Kristen D'Arcy is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Digital Growth at True Religion, the El Segundo, California denim and sportswear brand where she became the company's first-ever CMO in July 2023. With roughly two decades of marketing and e-commerce experience, she started on the agency side at Tribal DDB Worldwide and R/GA before moving brand-side to Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Coty, American Eagle Outfitters, PacSun and Homedics. At True Religion she has rebuilt the brand's cultural footprint through campaigns pairing fashion with music and sport - partnerships with the NFL and NBA, activations at the Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Game and Coachella, and campaigns starring Megan Thee Stallion, Key Glock and Quavo - while pushing e-commerce from roughly 35 percent of the business toward half of it. She has been named to Ad Age's Best Marketers Under 40, Brand Innovators' Top 50 Women in Brand Marketing, and Business Insider's Top 25 Most Innovative CMOs.
Ryan Heller
Ryan Heller is the Chief Marketing Officer of Fabletics, the membership-based activewear brand headquartered in El Segundo, California. He leads the company's creative, media and acquisition, CRM, brand partnerships and PR functions. A data-driven marketer with more than a decade inside the TechStyle Fashion Group family of brands, he rose from Vice President to Senior Vice President of Marketing and helped launch customer acquisition for Savage X Fenty before taking the top marketing seat at Fabletics in early 2021.
Bridgit Mendler
Bridgit Mendler is the co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, an El Segundo startup mass-producing phased-array ground stations to move data between satellites and Earth. A former Disney Channel lead (Teddy Duncan on Good Luck Charlie) and platinum-selling pop singer, she pivoted through the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School into deep-tech, and by early 2026 had raised more than $100 million and won a $49.8M U.S. Space Force contract to modernize the Satellite Control Network.
Jerome Tse
Jerome Tse is the founder and CEO of Berri Organics (also branded Berri Pro), a Southern California maker of certified-organic, plant-based hydration drinks. A Cornell-trained Hotelie and former competitive rower, he built the world's first plant-based organic fitness beverage, Berri Fit, from a dorm-kitchen prototype into a national brand. Its follow-up, Berri Lyte, an organic electrolyte solution, now anchors the company and sells in roughly 2,000 stores including Whole Foods, CVS, Target, Wegmans and Sprouts. Tse was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2019, and the company has raised more than $7 million.
Halen Mattison
Halen Mattison is the co-founder and CEO of General Galactic, an El Segundo space-propulsion company building Genesis, a water-fueled engine that aims to combine hydrazine-level thrust with xenon-level efficiency. A former SpaceX engineer who worked on propellant generation for Starship, he left after being told his Mars-fuel vision was too long-term, studied at Stanford, and started the company to build the propulsion and propellant infrastructure he believes will become a railroad to Mars. The company raised roughly $9.9M across pre-seed and seed rounds and first emerged converting CO2 into methane on Earth before sharpening its focus on high-agility spacecraft and water-based propulsion.
Will Bruey
Will Bruey is the co-founder and CEO of Varda Space Industries, a company building autonomous capsules that manufacture pharmaceuticals in orbit and then fly them back to Earth. A former SpaceX avionics engineer who flew Dragon on eight missions to the International Space Station, Bruey now runs the first company to manufacture a drug in space and successfully return it. His pitch is deliberately unglamorous: make space manufacturing routine enough to be boring, then build the supply chain that follows.
Nathan Mintz
Nathan Mintz is the co-founder and CEO of CX2, an El Segundo defense-tech startup building AI-enabled hardware and software to detect, disrupt, and destroy threats in the electromagnetic spectrum. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who spent 14 years designing radar and electronic-warfare systems at Raytheon and Boeing, he went on to co-found directed-energy unicorn Epirus and automotive-radar company Spartan Radar before launching CX2 in 2024. He argues modern warfare has reached 'consumer scale,' where multimillion-dollar missiles are wasted on cheap drones, and that control of the spectrum now matters as much as supply lines did in the 20th century. CX2 raised a $31M Series A led by Point72 Ventures in May 2025, part of $46M total funding.
Shauna Drumright
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.