Nick Wilkoff is the Chief Marketing Officer of L.L.Bean, the 111-year-old Maine outdoor brand known for its lifetime guarantee, Bean Boots, and Outdoor Discovery programs. A Middlebury environmental policy graduate who started his career as a Forrester Research analyst, Wilkoff leads brand, marketing, and customer engagement for a company doing roughly $1.7 billion in annual revenue. He champions an outdoors-for-everyone philosophy, pairing L.L.Bean's heritage of quality and durability with a modern, inclusive, community-first approach to keeping a legacy brand relevant.
Benjamin Chesler is the CEO of North Spore, a Portland, Maine company that sells mushroom grow kits, spawn, sterile substrates and fungi wellness products to home and commercial growers. Before mushrooms, he co-founded Imperfect Foods, the grocery delivery startup that rescued cosmetically imperfect produce and recovered more than 250 million pounds of food. A Brown graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he is a self-described systems thinker who got his start co-founding the Food Recovery Network as a college student and later helped build startup programs at Northeastern's Roux Institute.
North Spore is a Portland, Maine company that makes growing mushrooms at home approachable for everyone. Founded in 2014 by three college friends - a mycologist, an organic farmer, and a photojournalist - it sells grow kits, spawn, substrates, lab supplies, and mushroom wellness products direct to consumers. With more than 350,000 growers served and a 25,000-square-foot production facility, North Spore has grown from a tiny mushroom farm into one of the most recognized mushroom-cultivation brands in the United States.
Reid Christian is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the longest-running venture firms in Silicon Valley. A former college basketball captain who grew up on a dirt road in rural Maine, he joined CRV in 2017 after stints at Battery Ventures, Symmetric Capital, and startup Salsify. Reid focuses on early-stage B2B companies - particularly developer tools, security, infrastructure, and vertical SaaS - and has backed breakout companies including Vercel, Postman, Tailscale, Factorial, Squire, and Clerk. His investment thesis centers on founder-market fit and the expanding role of developers as enterprise buyers.
Alyson Watson is the CEO and Chair of the Board of Woodard & Curran, a Portland, Maine-based integrated science, engineering, design-build, and operations firm specializing in water and environmental challenges. A Stanford-trained chemical engineer and licensed PE, she became the firm's third CEO in 2021 — and its first woman to hold that title — after more than 20 years leading water resources projects and building environmental consulting teams across the western United States. A self-described 'water brat' with roots in the industry, Watson is a passionate advocate for clean water access, outcome-based contracting, and employee ownership, guiding a firm of 1,300 people across 27 offices nationwide.

Heather Cox Richardson is a Boston College historian who turned American history into a daily newsletter phenomenon. Her Substack 'Letters from an American' has nearly 3 million subscribers, making it one of the most-read independent newsletters in the world. She connects current political events to historical patterns with a clarity that has made her one of America's most influential public intellectuals - all from coastal Maine, where she lives with her lobsterman husband.