
He spent nine years reading markets for Goldman and Bill Ackman. Now he is handing small brands the data science that used to belong only to the giants.
MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.

Jake Vadeboncoeur is the founder and CEO of MediaGlobe, a Boston-based paid media facilitator that gives serious advertisers whitelisted, enterprise-class ad accounts on Meta, Google, and TikTok. The company positions itself as a partner for high-spend buyers in ecommerce, affiliate marketing, and lead generation, promising lower CPMs and no arbitrary spend caps. A Merrimack College business graduate who cut his teeth in media buying, Vadeboncoeur built MediaGlobe into a venture-backed operation that raised a Series A in 2023 and reports serving well over a thousand clients.

Sinisa (Siggi) Rakovich is the founder and CEO of Hunch, a creative performance platform used by paid social teams at global brands and agencies to automate ad creative, media buying, and cross-channel insights across Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat. Split between New York and Belgrade, Hunch was co-founded in 2018 by Rakovich with Igor Simovic and Nikola Milenkovic, a team that had worked together for more than 15 years. Before Hunch, Rakovich founded Building Explorer, a real-estate platform acquired by PBF in 2010. Hunch raised a €4M round led by Catalyst Romania in 2022 and works with more than 100 global brands.
Will Sartorius is the CEO of SelfMade, a New York performance marketing company, and the builder behind Skipper, an AI creative intelligence platform. He took over a near-dead agency in 2023 and rebuilt it around a single conviction: the data brands need to make better ads already exists in Amazon reviews, Reddit threads and Facebook comments, waiting to be scraped, tagged and turned into creative. His pitch to marketers is blunt: stop brainstorming, start listening to what customers already said.
Andrew Kassian is the CEO of Scalify, an AI-powered advertising platform that helps e-commerce brands plan, launch, optimize, and scale paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok from a single dashboard. Scalify's pitch is blunt: you should not need to become a media buyer to run profitable ads. Its tooling generates ad creative from product images, builds lookalike and interest audiences automatically, applies rule-based optimization that pauses losers and scales winners around the clock, and consolidates cross-platform performance data so founders can make spending decisions without exporting spreadsheets. Based in Miami with company operations tied to London, Kassian sits at the intersection of small e-commerce operators and the increasingly automated, AI-driven future of digital advertising.
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.