
From Michigan lacrosse to Disney Accelerator and Mento, Alex Marcus has kept returning to a practical question: who helps you learn the job after you get it? His answer pairs experienced operators with people learning to lead.
Jared Schwartzentruber is the founder and CEO of Prefix, a New York facility management platform that keeps the ovens, freezers, and HVAC humming for multi-site restaurant and retail chains like Chipotle, Bojangles, and Famous Footwear. A mechanical engineer trained at Purdue and Columbia, he traded bio-inspired robotics and a healthcare startup for the deeply unglamorous world of broken walk-in coolers, wagering that agentic AI plus a real service layer can cut a chain's maintenance costs by more than 15%. In April 2026 Prefix raised a $7.5M seed round to push toward 10,000 locations.

Jack Raines is a writer, investor, and author who turned a $150,000 trading loss into a media career and a Penguin Random House book deal. He writes Young Money, a newsletter with 61,000+ subscribers covering behavioral finance, career philosophy, and what your twenties are actually for. He's now an investment associate at Slow Ventures, where he works on their $63M Creator Fund. Known for viral LinkedIn satire that got him reported to Columbia Business School as the 'Bacon Bandit of Hell's Kitchen,' he combines intellectual rigor with a refusal to take himself too seriously.