Steve Albarran is the co-founder and CEO of Confident Cannabis (now Confident LIMS), the laboratory information management software that quietly runs testing for more than 60% of the legal cannabis industry in the United States. A Mexico City native from a family of business owners, he traded a New York finance career - M&A banking at Lehman Brothers and Sawaya Partners, then his own growth-equity firm Left Lane Capital - for Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he met his co-founding team. Motivated partly by a wish to move money away from Mexican cartels and toward legal, ethical operators, he built the data backbone that lets labs, growers and buyers trust what is in a cannabis product. He is a member of the National Cannabis Laboratory Council.
Ritu Narayan is the founder and CEO of Zūm, the Redwood City company rebuilding the United States' largest mass transit system: the yellow school bus. After 15 years as a product leader at eBay, Yahoo, Oracle and IBM, she left to fix the unreliable rides she was juggling for her own kids. Today Zūm runs electric school bus fleets for more than 4,000 schools, deployed the nation's first all-electric district fleet in Oakland with vehicle-to-grid technology, and has raised about $577 million.