trust
(4)
Michael Bontrager and the business of staying put
He built Chatham Financial by helping clients understand what banks knew. Now Michael Bontrager is putting his money, family, and appetite for complicated problems to work in Kennett Square.
Kathy Bloomgarden Bet on China Before It Was Obvious. Now She Is Doing It Again With AI.
The Ruder Finn CEO began in a back-office research role, turned Chinese studies into a three-decade strategic advantage, and still prefers the next question to the comfortable answer.
Joe Gebbia
Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb and a designer-turned-billionaire who helped reshape how humanity thinks about trust between strangers. He graduated from RISD with dual degrees in graphic and industrial design, then turned air mattresses and a breakfast cereal stunt into a $100 billion company. After stepping back from Airbnb in 2022, he founded Samara - a prefab housing company - and in 2025 became America's first Chief Design Officer under the Trump administration, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000+ websites to feel as intuitive as the Apple Store.
Ashley Faus
Ashley Faus is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, a keynote speaker, Stanford instructor, and author of 'Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI' (Kogan Page, 2025). She's best known for the 'Content Playground' framework - rejecting the linear marketing funnel in favor of a non-linear, audience-driven content ecosystem. A former musical theater major turned B2B marketing strategist, she argues that trust is the one thing AI cannot automate, and has built a career proving it.