Traveling Spoon is a food-tourism marketplace that lets travelers eat home-cooked meals, take private cooking classes, and tour local markets with vetted home cooks - mostly women - in their own kitchens around the world. Founded in 2011 by Haas MBA classmates Aashi Vel and Steph Lawrence, the company turns a stranger's dining table into the most authentic seat in a foreign city, giving hosts a new income stream and travelers a meal you can't find on any restaurant menu.
Shawn Heide is a Boston-based entrepreneur who blends culinary creativity with digital storytelling and enterprise AI. As co-founder of 9muse Creative Studio, he crafts cinematic brand films for companies across New England. His culinary arc spans founding Wagwan Jerk Bar in 2017 — a Caribbean-meets-New England pop-up launched at Boston farmers markets — to directing culinary operations at The Kitchen at White Barn, a Neapolitan pizza restaurant grown from a working farm. Pursuing his MBA at Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, Shawn is also connected to Upstage AI, the enterprise AI company known for document intelligence and large language models that raised a $120M Series C in early 2026.