MacLean-Fogg is a fourth-generation, family-owned American manufacturer founded in 1925 that grew from a single railroad lock nut into a global maker of fasteners, engineered components, plastics, and additive-manufacturing tooling. Headquartered in Mundelein, Illinois, the roughly $1.2 billion-a-year enterprise supplies the automotive, heavy-truck, electric utility, telecom, and industrial markets from dozens of plants across North America, Europe, and Asia. In 2025 it marked its 100th anniversary still owned and led by the MacLean family.

Bob Abboud (Robert G. Abboud) is a nuclear engineer turned energy-storage executive who runs Beacon Power, the company that keeps spinning carbon-fiber flywheels to steady the U.S. power grid. Trained at Purdue and Northwestern, he cut his teeth researching at Argonne National Laboratory and engineering reactors at ComEd before founding RGA Labs, an Illinois engineering firm, and picking up patents in magnetics and superconducting technology. He also spent nearly a decade in local politics as village president of Barrington Hills and ran for U.S. Congress in Illinois's 16th district in 2008.
Sean Evans is the co-creator and host of Hot Ones, the YouTube phenomenon where celebrities eat increasingly spicy chicken wings while answering impeccably researched questions. Since launching the show in 2015 with First We Feast, Evans has turned a deceptively simple format into over 4 billion views, a Daytime Emmy nomination, TIME100 Creators recognition, and a co-ownership stake in First We Feast after the brand was acquired for $82.5 million in December 2024.
Corrine (Corrie) Sahli is Area Vice President, Content Supply Chain - Enterprise Accounts at Adobe, based in Chicago. With 20+ years in SaaS sales and 15+ years in MarTech, she leads enterprise relationships around Adobe's content supply chain platform - helping major brands in CPG, retail, financial services, healthcare, and automotive scale personalized content production. A former VP at Sitecore and Kontent.ai, she is a recognized industry voice on content operations, composable DXP, and AI-driven marketing workflows.
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.

Krzysztof Marzec is Co-Founder of Trove, the branded recommerce platform powering more than 75% of the U.S. branded resale market. Originally founded as Yerdle in 2012 and rebranded to Trove in 2016, the company has raised over $153 million in funding and serves clients including Patagonia, Levi's, Lululemon, Canada Goose, and Carhartt. With a background spanning commodity futures trading at Geneva Trading USA and early-career roles at Northern Trust and Morningstar, Marzec brings a rare blend of financial markets discipline and entrepreneurial technology vision to the fast-growing recommerce sector.