
From selling a Beanie Baby at the mall to overseeing brand, loyalty and menu innovation at Panera, Andrew Rebhun has made one career bet repeatedly: choose the hard assignment, then make the experience feel human.

The Newk’s co-founder turned an accidental restaurant job into a lifelong study of food, people, and the invisible machinery behind a good lunch.

Big Way Hot Pot grew by asking a precise question: what if a shared ritual worked one bowl at a time? Co-founder Christiana Luo turned customization into the menu, the message and the route across North America.
Stephen Klein is the co-founder and CEO of Hyphen, a San Jose food-robotics company that builds the automated Makeline - a hybrid manual-and-robotic assembly system that runs beneath the counter to build bowls and plates at up to 350 meals per hour. A self-described foodservice fanatic since childhood, Klein started a text-to-order frozen yogurt business in college, helped scale Instacart in its early days, and ran operations at robotic coffee bar Cafe X before launching Hyphen in 2020 with co-founder Daniel Fukuba. Hyphen has since drawn investment from Tiger Global, Chipotle and Cava and deployed systems with chains and foodservice operators across the country.