negotiation
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The best creatives I know hate selling.
A manifesto for talented creatives who freeze the moment a client asks 'what do you charge?' Written to promote Natural Born Seller, a full-day sales workshop led by Emmy-winning designer and The Futur founder Chris Do, the piece reframes selling as an act of service rather than manipulation. It walks through the limiting beliefs that keep skilled creatives broke - money shame, conflict avoidance, scope creep, wavering confidence - and answers the three objections most likely to keep a creative agency owner on the fence about attending the August 6, 2026 event in Vancouver.
DraftWise
DraftWise is a New York-based legal AI company that helps lawyers draft, review, and negotiate contracts faster by turning a firm's own precedent, playbooks, and deal history into searchable, actionable intelligence. Working inside Microsoft Word, its platform generates lawyer-quality drafts and redlines grounded in institutional knowledge rather than generic AI output. Founded in 2020 by former Palantir engineers and a practicing corporate lawyer, DraftWise serves top law firms and legal departments across North America, EMEA, and APAC.
Baptiste Bouvier
Baptiste Bouvier is the founder and CEO of Daptic (formerly DiploAI), a New York-based AI startup building regulatory intelligence infrastructure for global manufacturers. The platform monitors more than 10,000 regulatory sources worldwide, flags changes within 24 hours, and helps engineering, product, and compliance teams act on obligations early. Raised between Tokyo, Sydney, London, and Boston by entrepreneur parents, Baptiste studied computer science and political science at MIT and public policy at Oxford, taught negotiation, founded MIT's first entrepreneurship club, and worked at McKinsey before turning regulatory bottlenecks into a company.
Surefire Cyber Inc.
Surefire Cyber is a purpose-built cyber incident response firm that helps insurers, brokers, law firms, and the organizations they cover move from response to resilience. Founded in 2022 by incident response veteran Billy Gouveia and incubated at Forgepoint Capital, the company pairs expert-led responders with an AI-enabled platform that unifies the insurance-driven response lifecycle - from forensic investigation and threat-actor negotiation through restoration, claims coordination, and cyber intelligence - to deliver faster outcomes with consistent quality and transparent, claims-ready reporting.
Edmund Zagorin
Edmund Zagorin is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Arkestro, the AI-powered Predictive Procurement Orchestration platform he co-founded in San Francisco in 2017. Drawing on a philosophy degree, championship-level policy debate experience, and years as a procurement consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Zagorin built Arkestro around a radical premise: that AI, game theory, and behavioral science could predict procurement outcomes before a sourcing cycle begins - cutting sourcing time by 60-90% and delivering average cost savings of 18.8% per million spent. The company has raised $104M in total funding, including a $36M Series B in 2025 led by Altira Group and Aramco Ventures. Away from procurement, he publishes fiction and poetry under the pen name Elizeya Quate.