Lara Cohen is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Media, Creators & AI at Cloudflare, where she leads efforts to help publishers and creators control, protect, and monetize their content in the age of AI crawlers. A veteran of Twitter (two stints spanning nearly a decade), she orchestrated some of the platform's most iconic cultural moments - including Ellen DeGeneres' record-shattering 2014 Oscars selfie - before serving as SVP at Linktree, championing fair creator compensation at scale. Now at Cloudflare, she sits at the intersection of internet infrastructure and the creator economy, building the policy and partnership frameworks that will define how human-created content interacts with AI systems.
Dolls Kill is a San Francisco-based online retailer for self-proclaimed misfits - selling rave, goth, y2k, kawaii and festival-ready apparel to a global Gen Z audience. Founded in 2011 by ex-DJ Shoddy Lynn and entrepreneur Bobby Farahi, the brand grew from selling fox tails out of a backpack into a Sequoia-backed, ~$50M-revenue digital boutique that runs its own house labels (Current Mood, Sugar Thrillz, Widow) alongside outside brands.
Yash Kewalramani is the co-founder of Cherry App, a Bengaluru-based social commerce startup that pays Instagram creators cashback for shopping and sharing. Backed by All In Capital, Cherry lets users earn 30-70% cashback by posting about brands on social media - turning everyday shoppers into micro-marketers. A Swarthmore College mathematics and economics graduate, Yash previously worked as a product manager at Jupiter and at Adappt Intelligence before launching Cherry in 2024 with co-founders Sharnam Singhwal and Samarth Mahapatra.
Nick Stamos is the CEO of Rakuten Advertising, one of the world's largest affiliate and performance marketing networks, where he leads an AI-driven initiative called 'Affiliate Intelligence' to reshape how brands and publishers connect. A MIT-trained strategist turned serial entrepreneur, Stamos previously co-founded Sindeo, a digital mortgage startup, built mobile analytics at Telephia through its acquisition by Nielsen, and spent nearly a decade in management consulting before pivoting to tech. Based in Mill Valley, California, he champions the convergence of brand and partner marketing and has positioned Rakuten Advertising at the forefront of influencer and affiliate innovation.
Jerry Qian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reacher, an AI-powered creator marketing platform headquartered in San Francisco. After stints at Meta and NASA and graduating from UC Berkeley, Qian co-founded Reacher in 2024 with Bora Mutluoglu to automate influencer discovery, outreach, and campaign management for brands on TikTok Shop, Instagram, YouTube Shopping, and Amazon. The company is a Y Combinator S25 alum, holds the #1 spot on the TikTok Shop App Store, serves 1,000+ brands including Under Armour and Logitech, and has crossed seven figures in ARR.
Stuart Sopp is the British-born CEO and co-founder of Current, one of America's largest New York-based fintech platforms serving nearly 4 million consumers. A former FX and rates trader who spent 15 years at BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, Citi, and Morgan Stanley across four continents, he walked away from Wall Street in 2014 after a CTO-to-be handed him the Bitcoin whitepaper and asked him to reconsider who banking was actually for. Current — built on a proprietary core banking stack, backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Tiger Global at a $2.2B valuation — targets Americans with sub-620 FICO scores who have been systematically underserved by traditional banks. Sopp aims for IPO readiness by 2026-2027.
Mark W. Schaefer is a globally recognized marketing strategist, bestselling author of 12 books, keynote speaker, and Rutgers University professor who has spent 30+ years pioneering human-centered marketing. Known for writing the world's first book on influencer marketing and six #1 Amazon marketing bestsellers, he champions the idea that 'the most human company wins' — a philosophy that has taken on new urgency in the AI era. His latest book, Audacious (2025), features the world's first AI-activated augmented reality book cover.
Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.