Brooks Running is a Seattle-based company that designs and sells performance running shoes, apparel, and accessories, and does nothing else. A subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, it narrowed its focus to running in 2001 and turned a near-bankrupt shoe maker into a category leader, closing 2025 with roughly $1.5 billion in revenue and its ninth straight year of growth. Its core franchises - the Ghost, Glycerin, and Adrenaline GTS - anchor the No. 1 position in U.S. specialty running retail, built on cushioning and support technologies like DNA LOFT, BioMoGo DNA, and GuideRails.
Nordstrom is a Seattle-based fashion retailer that began as a single shoe store in 1901 and grew into one of America's best-known department store chains. It sells apparel, shoes, beauty, accessories and home goods across full-line Nordstrom stores, off-price Nordstrom Rack locations, small-format Nordstrom Local service hubs and its digital platforms. Long defined by high-touch customer service and a liberal returns culture, the company returned to family control in May 2025 when the Nordstrom family and Mexican retailer El Puerto de Liverpool took it private in a roughly $6.25 billion deal.
Melanie Allen is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Brooks Running, the Seattle-based, Berkshire Hathaway-owned performance running brand. A first-generation college graduate with a mechanical engineering degree from Michigan State University, she took an unusual route into marketing - from vehicle climate-control systems at Ford, to Pampers R&D and brand work over 14 years at Procter & Gamble, to coffee innovation at Starbucks, and finally to running shoes. Since joining Brooks in 2017 she has led the brand's global marketing, e-commerce, corporate responsibility and emerging business, helping steer the company through eight straight years of growth to roughly $1.3-1.4 billion in annual revenue and campaigns like the Cynthia Erivo 'Shine Under Pressure' partnership under the 'Let's Run There' platform.
Matthew Marx is the co-founder and CEO of Evocalize, a Seattle- and Austin-based collaborative marketing platform that lets franchises, brokerages, lenders and multi-location brands push automated, compliance-friendly digital ad campaigns down to their local partners. A Babson MBA and 20-year marketing-technology operator, he built Evocalize after product leadership stints at Bazaarvoice, Oracle Retail, PA Consulting in London, and the MassPRIM pension fund.
RBC Signals is a Seattle-area space communications company that runs a global Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS) network, moving data between satellites and Earth for commercial, government, and research operators. Built on a sharing-economy model, it stitches together company-owned antennas and unused capacity from partner-owned ground stations into a single on-demand network of more than 80 antennas across 60-plus locations. Alongside downlink and telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) services, the company has expanded into dynamic and fractional spectrum leasing through its STORM platform, giving satellite operators flexible, pay-for-what-you-use access to the ground and spectrum they need.
Anne Murray is the Executive Business Partner in the Office of the CEO at Karat, the Seattle company that runs technical interviews as a service for companies hiring software engineers. She is the person who keeps a fast-moving executive suite running: calendars, communications, relationships, and the thousand small logistics behind a Series C startup. Before Karat she spent years as a senior executive assistant to C-suite leaders at Outreach and Zillow Group, ran her own consulting shop, and worked inside the studio that built Second Life. She is also connected to Karat's Brilliant Black Minds initiative, the company's mission to open access to engineering careers.
Jason Auh is Head of Sales and Customer Success at Sensible, the San Francisco developer platform that turns messy documents into structured, schema-validated data through its SenseML configuration language. A Dartmouth graduate who came up through enterprise sales at NetBase Quid, Jason sits at the seam between the engineering that builds Sensible and the customers who bet their workflows on it - and he writes candidly about where document AI actually breaks in production, not just in the demo.
Benjamin Cook is the founder, CEO and board chairman of Zirconia Inc., a Tukwila, Washington advanced-materials company building water-borne ceramic coatings that chemically bond to concrete and steel at room temperature - effectively turning aging infrastructure into something close to liquid granite. A self-described green technologist with three decades of cleantech ventures behind him, Cook trades on a single conviction: the cheapest and greenest building is the one you never have to tear down. Before Zirconia he founded GeoTree Technologies, an underground-pipe restoration firm sold for a 5x investor return, and earlier still he traded a planned career in pediatric medicine for a life spent removing toxins from the built environment.
Chris DeAppolonio is the CEO of Evil Geniuses, North America's oldest esports organization. A sports-business lifer who wrote his 2008 NYU master's thesis on the coming rise of professional gaming, he spent a decade in traditional sports marketing before crossing into esports as a team president and innovation chief. He now runs EG on a data-first, 'Moneyball' philosophy, pairing proprietary analytics and AI with player development to scout undervalued talent and chase championships.
Ron Faith is the President and CEO of RBC Signals, a Redmond, Washington company that runs a global ground station network letting satellite operators downlink data on demand instead of building their own dishes. A serial entrepreneur who launched Apple's first standalone internet product in the mid-1990s, ran mobile commerce at Qpass, and led cloud data-protection startup Datacastle to an acquisition by Carbonite, he returned to his aerospace roots in 2019 and took the top job in January 2024. He pairs a Dartmouth engineering-and-philosophy double major with a University of Washington master's spent researching frequency selective surfaces for Boeing.
AltPep is a Seattle biotech company spun out of the University of Washington that is building both diagnostic tests and disease-modifying drugs for amyloid diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Its work is anchored on the alpha-sheet, a non-standard protein structure discovered by founder and CEO Valerie Daggett, which forms in the toxic soluble oligomers that appear at the earliest, pre-symptomatic stages of disease. AltPep's SOBA blood test aims to flag those toxic oligomers years before symptoms, while its SOBIN peptide therapeutics are designed to neutralize them.
Andy Walker is a chemical engineer turned biotech operator who co-founded GentiBio, a Cambridge-based company engineering regulatory T cells (EngTregs) to functionally cure autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. He started as the company's CTO, moved through President and COO, and became President and CEO in 2024. Before GentiBio he ran manufacturing for cell and protein therapeutics at Juno Therapeutics and led Jewel Biotherapeutics. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley and a BS from the University of Washington.
Aran Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Archera, a Bellevue-based startup that helps companies cut cloud bills by guaranteeing deep discounts without locking them into long-term commitments, backed by insurance and reinsurance capacity. A Harvard computer science and math graduate, he first made headlines in 2015 when his Chrome extension Marauder's Map exposed a location-tracking flaw in Facebook Messenger and cost him a Facebook internship. He went on to research privacy at Harvard, build neural-network tools as an AI engineer at AWS, and co-found Archera in 2019 with his brother Nikhil.
Brenda Choy is the CEO of Healthentic, a Seattle health-analytics company that turns dense claims and clinical data into reports health plans can actually act on. She climbed the whole ladder inside one company - senior engineer, senior product manager, director of engineering, managing director, then chief executive - which is rare in an industry that loves to parachute in outside executives. An MIT-trained engineer who started her career writing software at Thomson Reuters, she runs a small team built on a single conviction: the answer is usually already in the data, if someone bothers to make it legible.
Jim Gao is the CEO and co-founder of Phaidra, a Seattle-based AI company building autonomous, self-learning control systems for the world's most complex industrial facilities, from data centers to vaccine plants. A mechanical engineer by training, he spent roughly a decade designing cooling systems for Google's data centers before teaching himself machine learning on nights and weekends. After AlphaGo, he launched DeepMind Energy, where reinforcement learning cut Google's data-center cooling energy by up to 40 percent. In 2019 he and two co-founders spun that idea into Phaidra, which by 2025 had raised over $120 million to make AI factories radically more efficient.
Rick Luebbe is the CEO and co-founder of Group14 Technologies, the Woodinville, Washington company behind SCC55, a silicon-carbon battery material that boosts energy density up to 50% and enables extreme fast charging. A former Army aviation officer who flew scout helicopters in Desert Storm and later commanded an Apache attack company, he traded the cockpit for a Stanford MBA and three startups. After building B2B integrator Hubspan and selling battery-materials pioneer EnerG2 to BASF in 2016, he spun out Group14 in 2015 with co-founder Rick Costantino. The company has raised more than $1 billion, including a $463M Series D, and is building the world's largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials. His mission, stated plainly: electrify everything.

Dawn Klinghoffer is Vice President of HR Business Insights at Microsoft, where she leads people analytics for one of the world's largest technology companies. A mathematics major from Bucknell University who started as an actuary in Hartford, Connecticut, she joined Microsoft's fledgling people analytics team in 2003 and spent over 25 years turning HR data into strategic decisions. Her most recognized contribution: replacing the industry's standard 'employee engagement' metric with 'employee thriving' - a framework adopted by Microsoft in 2022 that has influenced HR practices globally and was published in Harvard Business Review.
Danit Moni is Vice President of Marketing at Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the world's largest and most influential cloud computing platforms. Based in Seattle, Washington, she leads marketing efforts for a platform that powers a significant portion of the internet's infrastructure - from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. Operating at the intersection of enterprise technology and brand storytelling, Moni oversees marketing for a cloud portfolio that spans compute, storage, AI/ML, security, and developer tools used by millions worldwide.
Disha Rustogi is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Twilio, where she leads global Product Marketing and Go-To-Market Enablement teams. With 15+ years of marketing leadership at household-name tech companies — Microsoft, Adobe, Atlassian — she has shaped how enterprise software gets positioned, launched, and sold to the world. Now at Twilio, she is at the forefront of the agentic AI communications era, helping define how companies build intelligent customer experiences using Twilio's platform.
Douglas Pearce is Corporate Vice President of Product Management for M365 Copilot Growth at Microsoft, where he leads the strategy to bring AI-powered productivity tools to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Based in the Seattle area, he has spent over two decades at Microsoft, previously heading product management for Office Growth and Fundamentals before pivoting to spearhead the company's flagship AI copilot initiative across Microsoft 365.
Erin Russell Wieland is a Program & Communications Lead at Microsoft, serving in the Office of the EVP & CRO for Global Enterprise Sales in Seattle. With over a decade at the intersection of consulting and technology, she built her career from Bridge Partners Consulting - where she rose from Consultant to Manager over seven years - to Microsoft, where she has led readiness, communications, and social strategy for some of the company's largest commercial partner and sales organizations. Her work on the first-ever digital Microsoft Inspire conference earned her a Delivering Success Award, and she has also received the Microsoft Gold Club Award for extraordinary individual performance. She operates at the nerve center of Microsoft's enterprise revenue engine, translating complex organizational priorities into programs and communications that land across thousands of field sellers and partners worldwide.
Jake One (Jacob Brian Dutton, born May 11, 1976) is a Seattle-bred hip-hop producer whose beats have moved from underground cult status to pop-culture ubiquity - he's the man behind John Cena's WWE entrance theme 'The Time Is Now,' the iconic De La Soul / MF DOOM collaboration 'Rock Co.Kane Flow,' and production credits across albums by Drake, J. Cole, The Weeknd, 50 Cent, Freeway, Brother Ali, Travis Scott, and dozens more. Operating under the Snare Jordan brand, he has released solo instrumental albums, collaborated on the funk duo Tuxedo with Mayer Hawthorne (Stones Throw Records), and built a parallel career as a sample-kit and beat-tutorial educator. He remains one of hip-hop's most versatile and quietly prolific producers, still releasing acclaimed work in 2024-2025.
Leah Bibbo is a seasoned technology marketing executive with 20+ years of experience in strategic communications. She spent eight years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), rising to Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications, where she was instrumental in landmark initiatives like the AWS DeepRacer autonomous racing league. Known for her philosophy of embracing uncomfortable opportunities, she has since moved to OpenAI as Vice President of Strategic Pursuits, helping drive enterprise scale and global expansion at one of the world's most consequential AI companies.
Liza Magee is the Chief of Staff for the Consumer Chief Marketing Officer & Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where she sits at the intersection of billion-dollar marketing strategy and cross-functional execution. With a career built at the nexus of tech and consumer behavior, she has led marketing across Microsoft's education division, Bing, MSN, and now the company's global consumer marketing apparatus. Before Microsoft, she honed product instincts at Amazon as a Senior Product Manager in Merchandising. Based in Seattle, Magee is a strategic operator whose career tracks the evolution of digital marketing from keyword portfolios to AI-powered consumer experiences.
Lynne Kjolso is VP of Global Partner and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's retail media strategy and global partner ecosystem. A philosophy PhD turned digital advertising executive, she has spent over 15 years at Microsoft shaping search, retail, and commerce media. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024 and The List 2025, she is a leading voice on retail media standardization, gaming as an advertising frontier, and the intersection of AI and commerce.
Michael Schechter is Corporate Vice President of Search Growth and Experiences at Microsoft, where he has spent over two decades shaping how people discover information on the web. A computer science graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been at the center of Bing's evolution - from leading the captions feature in its early days to orchestrating the AI-powered transformation of Bing with Copilot Search. Known for his candid voice on search industry trends and his willingness to engage publicly on topics like citation transparency and AI reliability, Schechter represents the rare executive who can speak both engineer and user fluently.
Muneeza Zaidi is VP of Product Strategy and Growth at Microsoft, where she leads cloud ecosystem strategy and AI for Security initiatives. With over 12 years spanning Microsoft, AWS, and Splunk, she has shaped product direction at some of tech's most influential companies. A guest lecturer at Stanford's CS229 machine learning course and a vocal advocate for women in technology, she brings a rare blend of financial modeling rigor and ecosystem-scale thinking to her work.
Nancy Lesueur is a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of experience, currently serving as Chief of Staff for the Corporate Vice President of Customer Experience Engineering at Microsoft Security. Based in Sammamish, Washington, she bridges strategic leadership with operational execution at one of the world's most critical security organizations. Her career spans roles in risk intelligence, fraud and abuse prevention, and enterprise program management, with previous positions at FiveBy Solutions and Murphy & Associates. Known for her collaborative leadership style and exceptional listening skills, Nancy is also an advocate for inclusive workplace cultures, having championed Microsoft's Indigenous Employee Resource Group partnerships during a visit to Aotearoa New Zealand.