PolicyMap is a Philadelphia-based cloud mapping and data analytics platform that lets anyone build custom maps, reports, and dashboards from more than 75,000 curated indicators drawn from 170-plus public and proprietary sources - no GIS expertise required. Spun out of the Reinvestment Fund, it serves banks, universities, hospitals, governments, and nonprofits that need to turn place-based data into decisions about housing, health, lending, and community investment.
J. Eduardo Rame is a Philadelphia cardiologist who treats the sickest hearts in medicine - patients in the final stage of heart failure who depend on pumps, transplants and the chance their own muscle can be coaxed back to life. As the Louis R. Dinon MD Professor and enterprise chief of Advanced Cardiac and Pulmonary Vascular Disease at Jefferson Health, he runs an integrated division built around recovery rather than replacement. Yale-trained in biophysics, Oxford-trained in health economics and Harvard-trained in medicine, he spent a decade founding Penn's mechanical circulatory support program before bringing that work to Jefferson. His research on left ventricular assist devices, including the landmark MOMENTUM 3 trial, has been cited more than 12,000 times.
Patricia "Trish" Henwood, MD, FACEP is an emergency physician who runs quality and safety across an 18-hospital system as Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Jefferson Health in Philadelphia. Before the C-suite, she carried a portable ultrasound probe into an Ebola treatment unit in Liberia and built training programs that put imaging in the hands of clinicians in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and beyond. She founded the nonprofit PURE to bring point-of-care ultrasound to resource-limited settings, published her bedside Ebola work in the New England Journal of Medicine, and now applies the same systems thinking to closing care gaps for vulnerable populations at home.
Justin Bekelman is the co-founder and CEO of Daymark Health, a Philadelphia-based value-based oncology company building a tech-enabled medical group that wraps clinical, mental health, and social support around people facing cancer. A radiation oncologist with roughly 200 published research articles, he spent two decades at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation at the Abramson Cancer Center before leaving to build a company that contracts directly with health plans to take on total cost of care. Daymark launched publicly in 2025 with $11.5M in seed funding and closed a $20M Series A in September 2025.
Gregory M. Kiey is the Area Vice President of Solution Led (Content Supply Chain) at Adobe, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. An award-winning enterprise sales leader with 12+ years of experience spanning SaaS, IT outsourcing, and telecommunications, he spearheads Adobe's Content Supply Chain go-to-market strategy - helping Fortune 500 companies like Delta Air Lines streamline their creative operations at scale. He joined Adobe through its 2020 acquisition of Workfront, where he held an AVP Enterprise Sales role, and has since become a visible advocate for solution-led selling at events like Adobe Summit 2025.
Matt Eanes is the VP and General Manager of Consumer Goods at Adobe, based in the Greater Philadelphia area. A seasoned enterprise software sales leader with over 20 years of experience, he has spent the past decade at Adobe climbing from account executive to leading the consumer goods vertical. Before Adobe, he held senior account roles at Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and HP, building deep expertise in complex enterprise software deals across multiple industries.
Chris Merrick is the Co-Founder and CTO of Omni, a $1.5B-valued AI analytics platform that raised $120M in Series C funding in April 2026. A Princeton physics graduate and longtime Philadelphia resident, Merrick shaped the modern data stack long before Omni existed - he wrote the first lines of code for dbt, co-created the Singer open-source ETL standard at RJMetrics, and led engineering through Stitch's acquisition by Talend. At Omni, he reunited with college friends Colin Zima and Jamie Davidson to build a BI platform that combines governed semantic modeling with the flexibility of ad-hoc SQL analysis, serving customers like BambooHR, Perplexity, and BuzzFeed.
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.
Luis Cuello is the Founder and CEO of Minted Protocol (MintedAssociates Corp), building mUSD - the first exclusive Canton-native institutional stable settlement token. With a background spanning BNP Paribas fund administration and M&A at Johnson & Johnson, Cuello brings traditional finance credibility to one of DeFi's most ambitious institutional plays: a GENIUS Act-aligned stablecoin backed 1:1 by HQLA-equivalent reserves on the Canton Network, the blockchain infrastructure processing $6T+ in monthly settlements for the world's largest financial institutions.
Kevin Hart is a Philadelphia-born comedian, actor, and entrepreneur who turned a rough start - booed off stage as 'Lil Kev' - into a $450 million empire. One of the most followed entertainers on the planet, he has sold out arenas worldwide, headlined Hollywood blockbusters, received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2024, and built a portfolio of businesses including tequila brand Gran Coramino (which crossed $200 million in lifetime retail sales), Fabletics Men, and media company HartBeat. In 2026, he struck a brand partnership with Authentic Brands Group and was the subject of a Netflix live roast featuring The Rock, Katt Williams, and Tom Brady.
Scott Moran is the founder and CEO of Go2, a Philadelphia-based AI-powered remote staffing and workforce management platform. A former touring multi-instrumentalist who recorded with bands including Menomena, Man Man and his own group Sarsaparilla, Scott pivoted from the road to building software that helps workers keep leverage as AI reshapes the economy. He also founded Cowork.ai, a data and AI stack spun out of Go2.
Josh Kopelman is the co-founder and managing partner of First Round Capital, one of the world's most influential seed-stage venture firms, and a serial entrepreneur who sold Half.com to eBay for $300 million in 2000. A Wharton grad who started his first company as a sophomore in 1992, Kopelman has backed over 500 startups including Uber, Square, Warby Parker, and Notion. Known for the legendary Half.com/Halfway-Oregon PR stunt and the 'Penny Gap' essay, he is a consistent Forbes Midas List honoree who describes his career as a deliberate effort to stay permanently in the first 18-24 months of company-building - the phase he loves most.
Will Smith is a Philadelphia-born actor, rapper, and producer who built a $350 million empire spanning music, film, television, and digital media. With over $10 billion in worldwide box office receipts, four Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award for Best Actor (King Richard, 2021), he is one of the most commercially successful entertainers in history. Known as 'The Fresh Prince,' Smith transitioned from teenage rap star to global movie icon before a 2022 Oscars incident with Chris Rock triggered a career reckoning - one he has been navigating with characteristic resilience through his 2025 album comeback, a National Geographic travel series, and an upcoming I Am Legend sequel.
Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine he built from his basement in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania starting in 2008 - while simultaneously being a stay-at-home dad. A former MIT physicist who sold his first social network for $10 million just before Facebook made it obsolete, Weinberg turned DuckDuckGo into a billion-dollar company processing over 100 million searches daily, without tracking a single user. He is also the co-author of 'Super Thinking' and 'Traction', two widely-read books on mental models and startup growth.
Michael Houck is a serial entrepreneur and creator who went from driving for Uber to pay rent, to building a $15M venture-backed startup with a16z, to bootstrapping a $3M/year media and SaaS portfolio — all before 35. He runs Founding Journey, a 236,000-subscriber newsletter on startup building, and Megaphone, a viral content amplification platform, under his holding company Rye Valley LLC. After departing Launch House following a 2022 PR crisis, he rebuilt entirely on his own terms: no investors, no bosses, full ownership.
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.
Brooke Averick (@ladyefron) is the Philadelphia-born preschool teacher turned TikTok royalty with 1M+ followers, 68.4M likes, and zero shame. She went viral in April 2020 reading her childhood diary, quit teaching, launched Brooke & Connor Make a Podcast (named Best Comedy Podcast of 2024 by Adweek with 30M+ YouTube views), started a solo show called Obsessed with Brooke Averick, and is now publishing her debut novel — Phoebe Berman's Gonna Lose It — with Crown/Penguin Random House in May 2026. The internet's favorite oversharer, described as 'the app's Jewish voice of Gen Z' by Hey Alma.