Jerry Braun is the Chairman and CEO of Meriton, a Dallas-based national alliance of commercial HVAC manufacturer representative firms that he has grown into a network of 19 member companies, 44 locations and more than 2,100 employees since 2019. He is also Chairman and CEO of Texas AirSystems, which he has led since 2000. Braun's model buys leading regional HVAC representative firms and keeps their local leadership in place while giving them national scale, a strategy that has multiplied Meriton's revenue and profit more than sixfold in five years.
Justin Yoshimura is the founder, chairman, and CEO of CSC Generation, an AI-native retail holding company that acquires and modernizes established brands such as Sur La Table, Z Gallerie, and One Kings Lane. A high-school dropout who built a million-dollar cell-phone marketplace as a teenager, he went on to found the Y Combinator-backed loyalty platform 500friends (acquired by Merkle in 2014) and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Today he runs CSC Generation as a Constellation Software-style roll-up, buying distressed retailers and rebuilding them on data, automation, and CSC's proprietary Genesis platform.