Nicole Payseur is a Dallas-based yoga teacher and founder of OM Yoga Diva who traded a litigation career in Brooklyn Housing Court for the mat. A University of Pennsylvania English major and Tulane-trained attorney still licensed in New York, she now teaches private, corporate, and virtual yoga, leads international wellness retreats in Italy and Spain, and coaches entrepreneurs using the same precision she once used to win arguments. She has logged over 1,500 hours of advanced training and more than 3,000 Zoom teaching hours, and dissects a yoga pose the way she once dissected a deposition.
Patrick Cook-Deegan is the founder and CEO of Wayfinder, a K-12 curriculum company that teaches purpose, belonging, and durable skills to more than 1.5 million students across roughly 4,000 schools. A former All-American lacrosse player turned human-rights advocate in Burma, wilderness guide, and Stanford d.school fellow, he built Wayfinder out of five years teaching character development in an Oakland public high school. He named the company after the ancient Polynesian navigators who crossed oceans without instruments - his bet on how to redesign the American high school for the 21st century.
Calm is a San Francisco-based mental wellness company best known for its meditation and sleep app, which pairs guided meditations, celebrity-narrated Sleep Stories, music and soundscapes into a subscription product. Founded in 2012 by Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew, Calm has grown from a simple 'do nothing for two minutes' web experiment into one of the most downloaded wellness apps in the world, expanding into employer benefits (Calm Business) and a clinical mental-health platform (Calm Health) reaching tens of millions of people.
Adriene Mishler is the Austin, Texas-based yoga instructor, actress, and entrepreneur behind Yoga With Adriene, the largest yoga channel on YouTube with over 13.4 million subscribers and 1.7 billion views. Since launching the channel in 2012 with business partner Chris Sharpe, she has democratized yoga through her philosophy of 'Find What Feels Good,' building a global community around accessible, authentic practice. In 2015 she co-founded the FWFG subscription platform, and in 2026 launched Veta, her own yoga gear brand.
Jay Shetty is a British-Indian author, podcast host, and former monk who turned three years of monastic life in India into the world's #1 health and wellness podcast, 'On Purpose,' which has surpassed 1 billion listens. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and TIME100 Creator, he is the author of two bestsellers, Chief Purpose Officer at Calm, and co-founder of multiple ventures including a production company and a talent agency. In May 2026, Netflix and Spotify signed a deal worth up to $100 million to exclusively carry video versions of his podcast.
Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder and CEO of DevRev, an AI-native CRM and support platform valued at $1.15 billion. A serial unicorn builder, he previously co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and led it as CEO through its 2016 Nasdaq IPO, scaling it to an $18+ billion enterprise. Born in Patna, Bihar, India, he arrived in the US in 1997 with $900 borrowed from education trusts, earned his MS at UT Austin, and spent over two decades building distributed systems before founding two generational companies. He sits on Adobe's board and has donated over $20 million to humanitarian causes, including a $10 million gift to UT Austin for personalized medicine research.
Jesse Pickard is the Founder and CEO of The Mind Company (formerly Elevate Labs), the studio behind Elevate (Apple's App of the Year 2014), Balance (Google's App of the Year 2021), and Spark - a portfolio of science-backed mental fitness apps with over 80 million downloads. A designer-turned-entrepreneur, Pickard co-founded language learning startup MindSnacks in 2010 before pivoting to build Elevate in 2014, pioneering the consumer mental fitness category. He is also an Investing Partner at Volo Ventures.
The Mind Company is the San Francisco-based mental fitness studio formerly known as Elevate Labs. It makes science-backed mobile apps - Elevate for cognitive training, Balance for personalized meditation, and the new Spark puzzle app - that have together crossed 80 million downloads and collected Apple's and Google's App of the Year honors.
Cecily Mak is a co-founding general partner of Wisdom Ventures, a San Francisco-based fund backing technology and companies that support mindfulness, human connection, and well-being. A former lawyer and Silicon Valley operator (Rhapsody, Flipboard, ConsenSys, Blockdaemon), she is also the founder of the ClearLife community and author of Undimmed: The Eight Awarenesses for Freedom from Unwanted Habits (Flatiron Books, January 2026).
Breathe For Change is a San Francisco-based education company transforming schools from the inside out by training educators in mindfulness, social-emotional learning, and yoga. Founded in 2015 by Dr. Ilana Nankin and Michael Fenchel, the company has certified over 20,000 educators across all 50 states, creating ripple effects that reach more than 20 million students. Through a suite of programs including a fully accredited Master's degree (with William Jewell College), a Human Intelligence Certification, and the original 200-hour wellness and yoga teacher training, Breathe For Change makes the case that teacher well-being isn't a perk - it's the foundation of student success.
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Dr. Ilana Nankin is the Founder & CEO of Breathe For Change, a San Francisco-based organization that has trained over 15,000 educators in mindfulness, social-emotional learning, and yoga — reaching an estimated 1-5 million students across the United States. A former Pre-K teacher turned Ph.D. researcher turned movement builder, she launched Breathe For Change in 2015 after her own students demanded she formally train them. Her organization runs the world's only 200-hour Mindfulness, SEL & Yoga Teacher Training designed exclusively for educators, a Master's in Human-Centered Education in partnership with William Jewell College, and an expanding professional development platform for schools and districts.
Janet Czifrus (born Zsanett Czifrus) is a Hungarian-born transformative coach, TEDx speaker, yoga and meditation teacher, mindful eating coach, and certified doula with over 14 years of management consulting experience across top-tier firms and multinationals. She bridges rigorous business strategy with holistic personal development, focusing on daring women, female founders, and global citizens navigating reinvention. Operating under her coaching brand Zsanett Czifrus Coaching, she runs the newsletter and podcast 'Less Traveled' and the 'Mindful Entrepreneur' community for female founders building service-based businesses.