napa-valley
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Treasury Wine Estates
The company behind Penfolds spent a decade buying wine brands. Now it is cutting three quarters of them - and betting the whole business on the bottles people are willing to pay the most for.
Pam Dillon
Pam Dillon is the co-founder and CEO of Preferabli, a sensorial artificial intelligence platform that teaches software to taste. A former senior technology banker at Goldman Sachs turned serial inventor, she and co-founder Andrew Sussman launched the company (originally Wine Ring) over a decade ago on a hunch that smartphones would change how people discover wine. Today Preferabli pairs the world's largest assembled group of Masters of Wine and Master Sommeliers with machine learning built by PhDs in physiology and applied mathematics, cataloging more than 800 sensory characteristics to power personalized recommendations for the wine, beer, and spirits industries. Dillon holds 11 patents in AI, was named by Goldman Sachs among its 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs, and calls this 'the most fascinating work I have ever done.'
Offset
Offset is a Napa Valley company that pairs a direct-to-consumer ecommerce platform built specifically for fine wine with a brand design studio. Formed in 2015 from the merger of Byron Hoffman's design firm Hoffman & Co. and the development shop 750 Group, Offset gives wineries and fine-wine merchants both the software to sell - allocations, clubs, open cart and point of sale - and the identity, packaging, and storytelling to stand out. Clients range from legacy estates like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, and Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant to new producers such as RAEN.
Preferabli
Preferabli is an AI-driven B2B2C product discovery and recommendation software platform for wine, beer, spirits and other sensory consumer products. Formerly Wine Ring, the company pairs proprietary, patented machine-learning models with the world's largest assembled group of Masters of Wine and Master Sommeliers to predict what an individual will actually like - then plugs that prediction into retailers, hotels and merchants across roughly 100 countries.
Byron Hoffman
Byron Hoffman is the Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Offset, a Napa Valley-based company that is simultaneously a premium wine ecommerce platform and a brand design studio. Born and raised in Napa to a family steeped in food and wine culture - his grandfather was a winemaker at Christian Brothers and his grandmother Sally Schmitt was the original founder of The French Laundry - Byron brings both heritage and craft to his work. He co-founded Offset by merging his design studio Hoffman & Co. with Tyson Caly's 750 Group in 2015, having first collaborated on Last Bottle wine in 2011. Today, Offset serves legendary wineries like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Kosta Browne, and Realm Cellars. Beyond wine, Byron spent ten years producing and designing his grandmother's memoir and cookbook 'Six California Kitchens,' which won the 2023 IACP Award for Best American Cookbook and generated coverage in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.
Dino Dina
Dr. Dino Dina is a Genoa-born physician-scientist who spent 15 years building Dynavax Technologies as its President and CEO, shepherding the company through the long road toward HEPLISAV-B, a two-dose hepatitis B vaccine whose CpG 1018 adjuvant technology later became a cornerstone of global COVID-19 vaccine programs. Before Dynavax, he built the Vaccine Group at Chiron Corporation and led Chiron Vaccines to the first-ever approval of an adjuvanted influenza vaccine in Italy. Since retiring in 2013, he has poured equal scientific rigor into his Cimarossa estate on Howell Mountain, Napa Valley - 60 mountain acres of vines and 1,200 olive trees named for the Italian phrase meaning 'red hilltop.'
Tyson Caly
Tyson Caly is Co-CEO and Chief Product Officer of Offset Partners, a Napa-based company he co-founded with Byron Hoffman that is equal parts wine commerce platform and brand studio. Self-taught coder who forewent college, he started in wine web design at 14 after moving from suburban Chicago, built his first wine site at Don Sebastiani & Sons in the early 2000s, and spent 17 years quietly building Offset into the premier DTC ecommerce and brand partner for America's finest wineries - from Kosta Browne and Bryant Estate to Kermit Lynch and Frog's Leap.