sony
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Katie Babineau
Katie Babineau is the Chief Marketing Officer of Beyond Yoga, the Culver City premium activewear brand acquired by Levi Strauss & Co. in 2021. She spent roughly fifteen years in consumer technology - Sony Electronics, GoPro, Apple via TBWA\Media Arts Lab, and Snap Inc., where she was Global Head of Marketing - before joining Beyond Yoga as VP of Marketing in 2024 and stepping up to CMO. In 2025 she led the brand's first full reset, a platform called Seek Beyond built around the idea of progress over perfection, with actor and writer Issa Rae as the brand's first celebrity partner writing and performing a spoken-word anthem. She brings a test-and-learn technology mindset to apparel, argues loudly that brand and growth marketing should never be separated, and prefers hyperlocal, in-person community events to another round of picture-perfect ad creative.
Takeshi Homma
Takeshi (Ted) Homma is the founder and CEO of HOMMA Group, a Palo Alto smart-home designer, developer and builder he started in 2016. Descended from a Japanese family with fifteen generations in the building trades, he spent years at Sony and Rakuten before setting out to build what he calls a 'housing version of Tesla' - turnkey homes with proprietary, AI-driven technology woven into modern architecture. HOMMA has delivered pre-configured smart-home communities in Portland and proof-of-concept units in Boston, and partnered with a Mitsubishi Corporation subsidiary to scale the idea.
Sota Watanabe
Sota Watanabe is the founder and CEO of Startale Group, a Singapore-based Web3 infrastructure company backed by Sony and SBI. He is the founder of Astar Network, one of Japan's most recognized Layer-1 blockchains, and a central figure in Japan's push to bring tokenized stocks, JPY stablecoins, and onchain finance into the mainstream.
Allen Tsai
Allen Tsai is an Austin-based serial entrepreneur and engineer who spent roughly two decades shipping connected consumer electronics for Sony, Microsoft Xbox, Panasonic, Sonos, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments before turning his attention to water. After a month spent building water wells in a Nepali village, he founded Pani, the maker of the Pani Source - a tech-enabled water personalization system often described as the 'Keurig for water.' The device filters, remineralizes and customizes tap water with compostable pods, paired with an app that tracks quality and usage. Pani is Tsai's sixth startup.