retail-operations
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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.