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 $120M Series C in early 2026.
Joe Weil is the CEO of Unplugged, a privacy-first smartphone company that makes the UP Phone - an open-source Android device stripped of Google services, built with a hardware battery disconnect switch, on-device firewall, and a no-surveillance business model. Before leading Unplugged, Weil spent roughly a decade at Apple leading zero-to-one special projects for Apple Services, and before that built Psycho Films LLC, directing music videos for Kendrick Lamar, 21 Savage, A$AP Ferg, and Big Sean. He left Apple, by his account, after watching the company shift into political activism, soft censorship, and deep integration with China.
Jhanvi Shriram is the co-founder and CEO of Krikey AI, a San Francisco-based generative AI 3D animation platform that enables anyone to create professional-grade animations in minutes without prior technical experience. A Stanford BA and MBA graduate with an MFA from USC's Peter Stark Producing Program, Jhanvi previously worked at YouTube, JauntVR, and Participant Media before launching Krikey in 2016 with her sister Dr. Ketaki Shriram (CTO). Krikey has raised $22M, counts Reliance Jio, AWS Startups, T-Mobile Accelerator, and Thirty Five Ventures among its investors, and reached over 100,000 creators through integrations with Canva and Adobe Express. A Tribeca Film Festival-premiered documentary producer turned AI entrepreneur, Jhanvi sits at the intersection of creative storytelling and cutting-edge technology.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor who transformed R&B from the shadows of a Scarborough upbringing into a global phenomenon. With 75+ million records sold, a billion-dollar touring empire, and the most-streamed song in Spotify history, he is redefining what a career exit looks like — retiring the Weeknd persona after his 2025 album and film 'Hurry Up Tomorrow', the closing chapter of a dark pop trilogy, to begin again as Abel Tesfaye.