retail-operations
(11)
Dibyendu Panda and the hundred-store education
A small retail team became a hundred-store network. Now Wooden Street’s Chief Business Officer brings two decades across electronics, luggage, jewellery and furniture to the business of helping customers choose.
Eric Marston Built for the Long Straight
He spent years engineering the invisible machinery behind a box of clothes. Then the Ohio farm boy who once lived on ramen drove a Ferrari championship all the way to Imola.
Brian Gonsalves Built the Amazon Middleman. Now He Wants Brands to Own the Sale.
After two decades inside internet retail, the Netrush co-founder has reached a curious conclusion: the machinery matters, but ownership matters more.
Fabricio Miranda Has Spent 20 Years Learning What Inventory Knows
Before building Flieber, Fabricio Miranda ran water-treatment operations, a hedge fund and an Amazon business. Each turn taught him the same lesson: growth looks glamorous from the front and behaves like an operations problem backstage.
Tanbir Grover Built the Digital Aisle Without Abandoning the Store
Across Sears, Hudson’s Bay, Lowe’s Canada and Pet Valu, Tanbir Grover learned that digital retail works best when the people running the stores can see themselves in the plan.
Jiachun Li Built a Boba Shop Like an Engineer - Then Added a Bunny
She left mechanical engineering for milk tea, turned store operations into a systems problem, and learned that the smallest object in the cup could carry the biggest part of the brand.
Ray Harrison
After three decades in retail, Ray Harrison still begins with the same question: what will make the next stop easier, friendlier and worth repeating? His route from store director to Yesway's senior team explains why the answer lives in both the data and the aisle.
Donny Salazar
Donny Salazar is the founder and CEO of MasonHub, a software-led fulfillment and logistics company he started in 2018 to give fast-scaling beauty, wellness, and fashion brands the kind of order management and warehousing technology he wished he had earlier in his career. Before MasonHub he spent roughly two decades inside high-growth retail operations - COO of sneaker marketplace Flight Club, SVP of Operations at jewelry brand Chloe+Isabel, and a four-year run at Gilt Groupe where his supply-chain team helped scale revenue from $10M to over $500M. A Stanford MBA who once ran marketing at Revlon, Salazar built MasonHub around a headless, API-driven architecture and a bicoastal warehouse footprint, raising seed funding led by Canvas Ventures.
Max Sim
Max Jai Sim is the co-founder and CEO of Meadow AI, a Seattle startup that uses multimodal AI - computer vision, natural language, and operational data - to give restaurants and retailers real-time visibility into their physical locations and to automate the manual 'secret shopper' audits chains still run by hand. A Harvard-trained applied physicist, he previously co-founded the home-closing startup Modus, acquired by Compass in 2020, and earlier worked at T-Mobile and the lunch-delivery startup Peach. Meadow emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $6M raised, including a $4.5M seed round, and more than $2.5M in contracted annual recurring revenue.
Jeremy Baker
Jeremy Baker is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zipline, the enterprise SaaS platform that connects corporate retail strategy to the frontline store employees executing it. A self-taught developer who skipped university to build a web design company at 16, he previously co-founded MightyHive (acquired by S4 Capital for $150M) and spent five years as a Senior Prototyper at Yahoo. Based in West Vancouver, BC, he built Zipline alongside CEO Melissa Wong to serve over 170,000 retail employees across brands like Gap, LUSH, Sephora, and LEGO.
Melissa Wong
Melissa Wong is the CEO and co-founder of Zipline, the operations platform that fixes the broken communication chain between retail headquarters and store floors. Before building the product, she lived the problem — spending over a decade at Gap and Old Navy trying to get stores to actually execute corporate strategy. She started Zipline in 2014, raised $39.6 million, grew the customer base to 150+ brands including Sephora, American Eagle, and 7-Eleven, and co-authored 'Stores Don't Suck: The 5 Principles of Amazing Retail Execution.' In 2026 she was named to Inc.'s Female Founders 500 and won RetailTech Company CEO of the Year.