Will Pacio is the co-founder and CEO of Expo, a Dallas-based AI platform that pulls a restaurant's scattered data - POS, inventory, labor, guest feedback - into one dashboard operators can talk to. A Stanford psychology grad who walked away from a planned medical career to cook on the opening team at Thomas Keller's Per Se, he ran IT for the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, founded the fast-casual chain Spice Kit, then built the restaurant-staffing marketplace Pared before spinning it into Expo. His pitch: bring the 'Moneyball' approach to multi-unit restaurants so non-technical owners can make decisions with data instead of gut feel.
Simon Grimm is a German developer educator and solo founder who has spent over a decade teaching web developers to build mobile apps. Best known for Galaxies.dev and his earlier Devdactic blog, he was voted the #1 React Native video creator by the community. Beyond tutorials, he's building Tiny Harvest - a cozy idle farm RPG - entirely by himself. He went fully self-employed in 2017 and hasn't looked back.