Blue Bottle Coffee is an Oakland-born specialty roaster and cafe chain that helped define the third-wave coffee movement. Founded in 2002 by clarinetist James Freeman, it built a reputation on freshly roasted single-origin beans, an obsessive 48-hour freshness rule, and a spare, Japanese-influenced cafe aesthetic. It now runs roughly 140 cafes across the US and Asia plus a sizable e-commerce and subscription business, and changed hands in 2026 when Centurium Capital agreed to buy its retail operations from Nestle.
La Clínica de La Raza is one of the largest community-based primary health care providers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Founded in 1971 in Oakland's Fruitvale district by UC Berkeley students and community activists, it is a federally qualified health center (FQHC) delivering culturally appropriate medical, dental, behavioral health, vision, and pharmacy services to roughly 90,000 patients a year across more than 35 sites in Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano Counties - regardless of a patient's ability to pay.
Jamie Almanza is the CEO of Bay Area Community Services (BACS), a 70-year-old Oakland nonprofit she has led since 2010 - scaling it from a small mental-health agency into a 500+ person, $100M+ social impact operation that houses, supports, and prevents homelessness for more than 20,000 Northern Californians a year.
Jane Garcia has run La Clínica de La Raza since 1982, growing a scrappy storefront clinic in Oakland's Fruitvale into a $150M federally qualified health center serving more than 86,000 patients across Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. She walked in as a Berkeley public health intern in 1978 and never left, building a Bay Area institution while suing two federal administrations over immigrant care.
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.
Ken Berrick founded Seneca Family of Agencies in 1985 in Oakland and spent four decades turning a single home for boys into a 1,900-person nonprofit serving children across California and Washington through a model he calls Unconditional Care. Now CEO Emeritus of Seneca and President and CEO of Just Advocates, he keeps arguing the same line: kids aren't failing the system, the system is failing kids.
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant, LCSW, is the CEO of Seneca Family of Agencies, an Oakland-based nonprofit serving more than 18,000 youth and families a year across California and Washington. She started as a counselor in 2001 and has spent more than two decades inside the same organization, climbing from direct service to running it.
Babylist is the operating system for new parenthood — a universal baby registry that grew into an ecommerce destination, a content engine, a healthcare brand, and now a chain of experiential showrooms. Founded in 2011 by ex-Amazon engineer Natalie Gordon, the company hit $750M in 2025 revenue while staying founder-led, profitable, and unapologetically focused on the parent.
LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that lets software teams release, target, and measure code changes behind feature flags. Founded in 2014 in Oakland by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, the company turned the homegrown 'if/else' toggle into an enterprise control plane used by more than 2,000 customers including Atlassian, IBM, Square, NBC, and Ryanair.
Lilac Solutions is an Oakland-based cleantech company commercializing a patented ion-exchange technology that pulls lithium directly out of brine - using ceramic beads instead of evaporation ponds. The process is faster, uses up to 90% less freshwater, and is designed to unlock low-grade brine resources around the world to feed the electric-vehicle battery supply chain.
NUG is a vertically integrated California cannabis company founded in 2014 that operates the state's highest-volume extraction facility, multiple retail dispensaries, and one of California's largest wholesale distribution networks. Known for their premium flower, vapes, and edibles, NUG has pioneered Oakland's first equity-owned consumption lounge and is deeply committed to social equity programs that support entrepreneurs affected by prior cannabis criminalization.
Andy Ruff is the co-founder and Chief Product & Tech officer at Numa, an AI communication platform purpose-built for automotive dealerships. A lifelong product builder who started writing software at 13, Ruff led the 100-person team that created the first Microsoft Outlook for Mac client, then scaled Location Labs to over 3 million monthly subscribers before its $220M acquisition. At Numa, he is building the AI stack that converts missed dealership calls into revenue - helping the $1.2 trillion retail automotive sector catch up to the digital age.
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Dan Adler is the CEO of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform powering search and AI across 54 billion lines of code for companies like Uber, Stripe, and Atlassian. A Rice computer science graduate and Stanford MBA, Adler joined Sourcegraph in 2016 as an early employee - writing infrastructure code, selling the first contracts, and building every major business function from scratch - before being elevated to CEO in December 2025 when co-founder Quinn Slack spun out Amp Inc. He has shepherded the company from zero revenue to $50M ARR and a $2.6B valuation, and believes agentic AI will only amplify the need for enterprise-grade code context.
Diana Frappier is the co-founder of Promise, an Oakland-based AI-powered government payment platform that helps municipalities and utilities distribute relief, recover revenue, and automate eligibility checks at scale. A UC Hastings-trained lawyer turned social entrepreneur, she co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights with Van Jones in 1996, helped launch the first Green Jobs Corps in Oakland, and then pivoted to fintech after years running operations at Green For All and Honor. At Promise, she and CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins have raised over $48M and built a platform that has distributed $150M+ in government relief to hundreds of thousands of residents.
Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform trusted by over 5,500 organizations including 25% of Fortune 500 companies. She helped pioneer the feature flag category in 2014, scaling the company to $100M ARR, raising over $330M in venture capital, and building infrastructure that evaluates 45 trillion feature flags daily. A Harvey Mudd engineering alumna, patent holder, ultramarathoner, and co-host of the 'To Be Continuous' podcast, Harbaugh returned as CEO in 2025 to lead LaunchDarkly into the generative AI era.
Eric Faurot is the long-serving CEO of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), a B2B media company headquartered in Oakland, California that runs flagship sustainability conferences including VERGE, BLOOM, GreenFin, and Circularity. Over 14 years at the helm, he built GreenBiz into a leading platform for sustainability professionals - combining editorial media, peer networks, and live events - before transitioning to a Growth Leader role in July 2024 when Hana Kajimura succeeded him as CEO. His career traces an arc from tech media event production (COMDEX, INTEROP, Black Hat) to climate and sustainability, making him a rare figure who bridged Silicon Valley-era conference culture with the emerging sustainability economy.
Garrett Dodge is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rockbot, the business media platform that powers music, TV, digital signage, and advertising for nearly 50,000 brick-and-mortar locations across North America. Founded in 2010, Rockbot has grown into a $9.2M revenue company serving major brands including Planet Fitness, Walmart, Shake Shack, and JetBlue, backed by Google Ventures, Universal Music Group, and others. Dodge holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an MBA from MIT Sloan, and previously helped build Caesars Entertainment's Innovation Team before channeling that experience into reimagining how physical spaces use media to engage customers.
Krzysztof Marzec is Co-Founder of Trove, the branded recommerce platform powering more than 75% of the U.S. branded resale market. Originally founded as Yerdle in 2012 and rebranded to Trove in 2016, the company has raised over $153 million in funding and serves clients including Patagonia, Levi's, Lululemon, Canada Goose, and Carhartt. With a background spanning commodity futures trading at Geneva Trading USA and early-career roles at Northern Trust and Morningstar, Marzec brings a rare blend of financial markets discipline and entrepreneurial technology vision to the fast-growing recommerce sector.
Nick Talken is the Co-Founder and CEO of Albert Invent, an Oakland-based AI platform that is transforming how chemists and materials scientists do research and development. A chemical engineer by training who learned to code, Talken spent years inside Henkel's global R&D organization before spinning out Albert Invent in 2022 with a team of co-founders who built the product from within. The company's platform - used by over 3,000 scientists across 142+ labs in 30+ countries at companies like Kenvue, Henkel, and Chemours - has raised over $52 million from top-tier investors including Coatue, Index Ventures, TCV, and J.P. Morgan Private Capital.
Nico S. Enea is a co-founder, board member, and distribution lead at NUG, Inc., a state-licensed, vertically-integrated California cannabis company he helped build from the ground up starting in 2014. Operating out of Alameda and Oakland, NUG has grown into one of California's most recognized cannabis brands, represented in over 80% of the state's dispensaries, with $28M+ in annual revenue, 150 employees, and a $15M Series A round under its belt. Enea also serves as Founder and CFO of Bloom Innovations Holdings LLC, a cannabis holding company managing diverse assets including property, IP, patents, and securities.
Pete May is President and Co-Founder of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), the leading media, events, and peer-network platform for corporate sustainability professionals. In 2006, he and Joel Makower purchased GreenBiz.com and built it from a niche newsletter into a global sustainability intelligence brand with flagship conferences, digital media, and professional communities. Drawing on over two decades of B2B publishing leadership at Primedia, CMP, and Miller Freeman, May brought seasoned media-industry discipline to a space that desperately needed it — transforming green business from fringe conversation to boardroom imperative.
Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the co-founder and CEO of Promise, an Oakland-based govtech company valued at $520 million that helps municipalities and utilities offer zero-interest payment plans to struggling residents. A former union organizer turned labor federation executive turned music manager for Prince, she now runs a platform that has reached 5 million+ households across 20+ states, proving that treating people with dignity is not just ethical — it is a business model. Named #247 on the Forbes Self-Made 250, she built Promise from a YC Winter 2018 bet to a $23 million-funded company generating $33M+ in annual revenue.
Promise is an Oakland-based govtech company that modernizes how government agencies and utilities collect payments and distribute benefits. Founded in 2017 by Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and Diana Frappier, it offers flexible, interest-free repayment plans, AI-powered fraud detection, automated benefits distribution, and income verification - all designed to make public systems work better for both agencies and the residents they serve.
Rockbot is an Oakland-based B2B media platform that powers the music, TV, digital signage, and on-premise advertising playing inside more than 50,000 business locations - from gyms and bars to national retail chains. Founded in 2010 as a social jukebox app, it has grown into a multi-product media operating system for brick-and-mortar venues.
Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group) is an Oakland-based media, events and peer-network company that has spent more than 25 years helping sustainability professionals turn climate ambition into corporate action. Its newsletters, research, and flagship events - GreenBiz, VERGE, Circularity, GreenFin and Bloom - convene the executives, investors and policymakers building the clean economy.
Akash Systems is a San Francisco deep-tech company building chips and systems cooled by lab-grown diamond. Its patented GaN-on-Diamond technology pulls heat away from transistors at the nanometer scale, powering everything from CubeSat radios that beam data at 5 Gbps to AI servers that run cooler at higher density. Backed by Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and the U.S. CHIPS Act, the company is building a 40,000 sq ft diamond-semiconductor fab in West Oakland.
Promaxo builds the world's first single-sided, in-office MRI platform - a compact magnet, AI, and robotics stack that lets urologists run image-guided prostate biopsies and focal treatments in their own clinic, without a hospital scanner suite.
James Wang is the General Partner of Creative Ventures, a San Francisco-based deep tech venture capital firm managing a $50M fund focused on AI, robotics, hardware, industrial automation, healthcare, agriculture, energy, and climate. With a background spanning Bridgewater Associates, Google X (Makani), co-founding the femtech startup Lioness Health, and a career in West African microfinance, Wang brings a rare combination of finance, engineering, and social-impact instincts to early-stage investing. He is also the author of 'What You Need to Know About AI' (2025) and publishes the 'Weighty Thoughts' Substack to over 3,000 subscribers.
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.