Eric Hunter is the Chief Executive Officer and Board Member of World Market (Cost Plus World Market), the specialty retail chain known for globally sourced furniture, home decor, artisanal foods, and international gifts. Based in Alameda, California, Hunter joined World Market in May 2021 as Chief Commercial Officer, was elevated to President in June 2022, and became CEO in July 2023. He brings deep retail marketing expertise from executive roles at Pier 1 Imports, JCPenney, Kellwood Company, and Ascena Retail Group's plus-size division (Lane Bryant, Cacique, Catherines). Under his leadership, World Market has pursued digital transformation, flexible payment solutions, and continued its mission of delivering unique, globally inspired products across nearly 250 stores and online.
Tania Brown is an ACCA-qualified executive and entrepreneur who serves as Area Vice President of APAC Strategic Customer Engagements (Elevate) at ServiceNow, the $13B+ enterprise cloud platform company. A digital and accounting leader with roots in venture capital, tech startups, and real estate, she has built a career spanning Brisbane, London, Melbourne, Singapore, and Sydney. Alongside her corporate career, she co-founded Jacq Leigh, a women's leather laptop bag brand launched in 2019 after noticing a gap in the market for functional, stylish bags designed for corporate women.
Matt Levin is the CEO of Modern Health, a leading global workplace mental health platform. A serial CEO with two decades of leadership across HR technology, health care, and benefits, Levin has helmed Benefitfocus (sold to Voya Financial), People 2.0 (a 50-country HR platform), and held C-suite roles at ADP and Aon. He was part of the core team that engineered the landmark $4.9 billion Aon-Hewitt merger and was recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013. A Chicago-based operator and longtime lecturer at both Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he now leads Modern Health's mission to bring proactive, globally equitable mental health care to the world's workforce.
Steve Smith is the Chief Executive Officer of Zayo Group, one of the world's largest independent fiber network and infrastructure companies. A West Point engineering graduate and former eight-year U.S. Army officer, Smith built his reputation scaling Equinix from a $2 billion company to a $34 billion global data center giant over 11 years as CEO. Appointed to lead Zayo in October 2020 after the company went private under EQT and Digital Colony, he is now steering the company through a massive AI-driven infrastructure buildout - securing over $1 billion in AI-related deals in 2024 alone, with a pipeline exceeding $3 billion. Under his leadership, Zayo operates 240,000+ route miles globally and 34 million fiber miles, serving customers across healthcare, finance, media, and enterprise sectors.
Subbu Iyer is the President and CEO of Aerospike, a real-time NoSQL database company powering some of the world's most demanding data workloads at sub-millisecond latency. With 30 years of enterprise technology leadership across Oracle, VERITAS, HP, Dell EMC, and Riverbed Technology, Iyer took the helm at Aerospike in January 2022 and has since led the company through a pivotal transformation into AI infrastructure, closing $109M in growth capital in April 2024 and an additional $30M in December 2024. Under his leadership, Aerospike expanded from a key-value store into a multi-model database supporting vector, graph, and document data - positioning it squarely at the intersection of real-time data and generative AI.