Gary Apito is the Chief Executive Officer of Rouxbe, the online culinary school that has trained more than one million students across 180 countries. A career culinary-education operator, he spent seventeen years helping build the French Culinary Institute and International Culinary Center in New York before moving into online learning, joining Rouxbe in 2016 and rising from VP of Operations to COO to CEO. His focus is scaling professional-grade cooking instruction through high-definition video as traditional brick-and-mortar culinary schools close worldwide.
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.