Alex Westner is the co-founder and CEO of Xander, a Raleigh-based startup building AR smart glasses that print live captions of in-person conversations directly into the wearer's field of view. An MIT Media Lab-trained audio engineer who spent nearly two decades shipping sound software (including the Emmy-winning iZotope RX, nicknamed the Photoshop for Sound), Westner now turns his obsession with the cocktail party problem into a self-contained, no-cloud, no-phone device that helps people follow conversations they can no longer fully hear.
Nathan Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Retro, a friends-only photo journal app built on the belief that social media can be better - more intimate, more honest, more for the people you actually care about. A Harvard grad and Dartmouth Tuck MBA, Sharp spent six years at Meta where he helped launch Instagram Stories in 2016 before leaving to build Retro with his co-founder Ryan Olson. Backed by Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, and a constellation of top-tier VCs, Retro hit #1 photo app in Canada and broke into the US top charts in 2025, proving that people still want a social app that actually feels like talking to friends.