first-generation-founder
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Ayeshah Abuelhiga Put a Biscuit in an Ice Chest - and Found a Bigger Table
She left the corporate ladder to fix a disappointing biscuit. The restaurant drew lines; the frozen dough traveled farther - and turned a Baltimore lesson about comfort food into a national grocery business.
Armando Torres
Armando Torres is the co-founder and CEO of KARDA, Inc., a San Francisco AI startup that turns body-camera footage and other media into court-ready police reports in minutes. A Stanford-trained chemical engineer, Gates Scholar, and Milken Scholar from Paramount, California, he pivoted from energy and biomedical R&D to building CJIS-compliant generative AI that aims to give officers back hours of their shift. KARDA has worked with U.S. agencies including the Boston Police Department and raised a $200K seed round in 2024.
Rashad Hossain
Rashad Hossain is the founder and CEO of RYZE Superfoods, the mushroom coffee brand he started in his mother's basement in March 2020 and grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer company. A Harvard economics graduate who quit a brand-marketing job at Kraft Heinz to build a coffee he would actually want to drink, he blended six functional mushrooms with organic arabica into a product that has racked up more than 175,000 customer reviews. He earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Food & Drink list in 2022. Before RYZE he founded Keepspace, a social journaling platform that won a $50K Harvard innovation award and later became the HOW I RYZE gratitude app.