Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
Laurel Woerner is a venture capital platform strategist, consultant, and founder-success leader who has spent a decade building the connective tissue between investors and founders. After co-creating the community function at Work-Bench Ventures and defining the brand voice at AI scheduling startup x.ai, she became Platform Manager and then Director of Platform at RRE Ventures, where she transformed 25 years of firm relationships into a living, self-organizing network. Through her consultancy LTW Consulting, she has advised firms including Union Square Ventures, Bessemer, and Frontline Ventures on platform excellence. Today she serves in founder-success and platform roles at both Quiet Capital and Infinity Constellation, the self-described first AI holding company, with a mission she keeps simple: get founders from zero to one to one hundred.
Erik Hoel is an American neuroscientist, novelist, and philosopher who turned the hardest problem in science - consciousness - into a literary career. Holding a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under consciousness pioneer Giulio Tononi, Hoel developed 'causal emergence' theory and the 'overfitted brain hypothesis' before trading academic tenure for a Substack with 69,000+ subscribers. His newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective blends rigorous science with razor-sharp cultural commentary, while his books - the debut mystery novel The Revelations (2021) and the nonfiction The World Behind the World (2023) - bring consciousness science to general readers. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he grew up in his mother's independent bookstore in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and was mentored by novelist Andre Dubus III at age 13.