long-beach
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Dan Piemont
Dan Piemont is the co-founder and CEO of Long Wall, the Long Beach defense company formerly known as ABL Space Systems. An MIT physics and economics graduate who came to rocketry through Wall Street trading and venture capital rather than an engineering bench, he spent seven years building low-cost, containerized launch vehicles before pivoting the company in 2024-2025 toward mass-producible missile defense. Long Wall now develops the Cyclops exoatmospheric interceptor, RSX liquid boosters for threat replication, and Ironwood mobile ground systems, repurposing the hard-won technology of a launch startup that survived two failed orbital attempts into a bet on American homeland defense.
James Dorris
James Dorris is the co-founder and CEO of Odys Aviation, a Long Beach company building long-range, hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft that take off and land like a helicopter but cruise like an airplane. A former fusion physicist who started at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, he helped build the propulsion and levitation tech at Virgin Hyperloop One before turning to flight. At Odys he is chasing aircraft that can lift off from a helipad, fly up to 1,000 miles on a hybrid system, and cut regional travel emissions sharply while serving defense, logistics, and passenger markets.
Nanna Nielsen
Nanna Nielsen is the Chief Business Officer of Critical Loop, a Los Angeles-area industrial power company that helps factories, airports and data centers get electricity in days instead of years by pairing battery storage with autonomous control software. A Danish-born operator who once ran banking operations for fintech unicorn GoCardless - overseeing more than $52 billion in transactions for 93,000+ businesses - she now applies that same operational rigor to fixing America's grid bottleneck. The company raised a $26 million Series A in April 2026.
Richard Gerstein
Richard Gerstein is the Chairman and CEO of Cargomatic, the marketplace that matches local and regional freight with the trucks already driving past it. He grew up on the docks of his father's less-than-truckload business in Chicago, founded the multi-modal logistics software company IntelliTrans, and since 2017 has rebuilt Cargomatic into a leading provider of local LTL, drayage, and white glove freight services. He pairs a UC Berkeley transportation engineering background with a lifetime spent around loading docks.
Shane Dawson
Shane Dawson (born Shane Lee Yaw) is one of YouTube's original superstar creators, a Long Beach kid who turned a camera and a knack for characters into 4.8 billion combined channel views. Over nearly two decades he pivoted from sketch comedy to celebrity documentary deep-dives, co-authored two New York Times bestselling memoirs, won multiple Streamy Awards, and launched a record-setting makeup collaboration with Jeffree Star. After a high-profile controversy and YouTube demonetization in 2020, he returned in 2021, relocated to a Colorado farm with his husband Ryland Adams, and in 2023 welcomed twin sons. By 2025 he was back with another Jeffree Star docuseries, rebuilding quietly but unmistakably.