MacCoy Merkley is the Chief Marketing Officer of Portland Leather Goods, the largest leather bag manufacturer in North America. A former wedding photographer, he answered a Craigslist ad for a digital media specialist in 2018 and went on to help scale the company from roughly $3.5M to more than $100M in annual revenue. He is known in direct-to-consumer circles for a product-first, no-nonsense approach to marketing, heavy use of Meta advertising, strategic discounting, and a very active personal presence on LinkedIn and X.
Garth Sheldon-Coulson is the co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa, a Portland, Oregon company building free-floating, wave-powered nodes that generate clean electricity in the open ocean and pair it with onsite AI computing. A Harvard-trained lawyer with an MIT master's and a Bridgewater investing background, he pivoted from finance to spend nearly a decade inventing marine energy hardware. In May 2026 Panthalassa raised a $140M Series B led by Peter Thiel, pushing its valuation near $1 billion, on a bet that the open ocean is one of only three energy sources on Earth with tens of terawatts of untapped capacity.
Walt Weyler is a Portland, Oregon entrepreneur and chemical engineer who turned a career running factories into a second act buying, fixing, and building industrial companies. He is President and CEO of SequenceUSA, a private holding and lending company that backs Pacific Northwest manufacturing and technology firms, and President and Managing Director of Clarus LLC (Clarus Water Solutions), a water-filtration and stormwater venture spun from his work at Crystal Clear Technologies. Before founding his own companies he co-owned Kinetics, a metal-injection-molding shop he grew from a struggling $3M operation to roughly 100 employees and sold to mining giant Phelps Dodge. He sits on the Supply Chain & Logistics Management Advisory Council at Oregon State University's College of Business.
Justin Lehrbaum is an Area Vice President at Adobe leading Customer Experience Orchestration, based in Portland, Oregon. Over 14 years in enterprise B2B sales, he climbed from a sports-industry account executive role to senior VP territory leadership at one of the world's most recognized software companies, spanning Bizible, Marketo, and multiple Adobe business units. A five-time President's Club achiever, he oversees Adobe's data-driven customer journey solutions that help enterprise brands orchestrate personalized experiences at scale.