Melanie Kaloski is the Chief Marketing Officer of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF), the nation's largest nonprofit supporting Hispanic American higher education. A brand-builder by training, she spent more than a decade shaping consumer brands at Capital Group's American Funds, Nestle and Beachbody before turning her marketing craft toward mission work - helping Latino students and families find the resources to earn a college degree. She holds a B.A. from Amherst College and an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, and is fluent in French.

Karl Strovink is the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-born specialty roaster now owned by Nestlé. A Berkeley native with an MBA from MIT Sloan, he arrived in 2019 from a twelve-year run at Converse and has spent his tenure pushing Blue Bottle toward oat milk by default, instant espresso, zero-waste cafés, and aggressive expansion across Asia, all while protecting the brand's small-batch identity inside a thirty-billion-dollar coffee parent.