usc-marshall
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Kevin "K.C." Clarke
Kevin "K.C." Clarke is a Los Angeles-based consumer brand marketer who now leads marketing at DITA Eyewear, the Aliso Viejo-headquartered luxury eyewear house whose frames are handmade in Japan. His career reads like a tour of the Southern California brand economy: Hurley and Vans in action sports, adidas and the Anaheim Ducks in sport and sponsorship, ZICO in beverage, then brand marketing leadership at golf-lifestyle label TravisMathew and VP of Marketing at car-care cult brand Chemical Guys. He holds a BS from Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business and an MBA from USC's Marshall School of Business. The through-line is a preference for brands with obsessive fans rather than merely large audiences - surfers, golfers, detailing enthusiasts, and now collectors of titanium and 18k gold optical frames.
TJ Ross
TJ Ross is the co-founder and co-CEO of Splash Sports, a peer-to-peer sports gaming platform he built with Joel Milton by acquiring and merging established brands like RunYourPool and OfficeFootballPool into a single home for survivor pools, pick'em, one & done and tiers contests. The platform now serves more than two million players and 80,000 commissioners. A Bay Area native who grew up with sports at the center of family life, Ross studied finance and entrepreneurship at USC before working in technology investment banking at Raymond James and Houlihan Lokey, founding the maker marketplace 43Layers, and leading strategic partnerships at STRV. He describes his work as building products that gather people around shared passions, and treats community, authenticity and enjoying the journey as the real measures of success.
Wendelin Maners
Wendelin Maners is the President and CEO of CSA Medical, the Lexington, Massachusetts medical-device company behind the RejuvenAir System, a liquid-nitrogen cryospray technology delivered by bronchoscope. A finance-trained dealmaker who spent years buying and licensing emerging technologies for Boston Scientific, Maners moved from the deal table to the operating chair, taking the top job at CSA Medical in December 2019 and steering the company through an oversubscribed $53 million Series D and a fully enrolled pivotal trial on the road to FDA approval.
Steven Sunshine
Steven Sunshine is the CEO of Ticketure, the cloud ticketing platform that runs admissions, memberships and donations for museums, zoos, aquariums, gardens and immersive venues from Meow Wolf to the Philadelphia Zoo. He co-founded TixTrack in 2008 and ran it through acquisition by The Nederlander Organization in 2022; in July 2025 the Ticketure business was spun out as a standalone company backed by Dahlia Equity, with Sunshine at the helm. Before ticketing he spent the late 1990s and early 2000s commercializing the 'electronic nose' as president and CEO of Cyrano Sciences, a Caltech spinout whose handheld Cyranose device used a 32-polymer sensor array to identify smells, later acquired by Smiths Detection.
Gino A. Canori
Gino A. Canori is President and CEO of Related California's market-rate division, overseeing a $10 billion development pipeline of more than 7,000 multifamily and senior housing units and over 5 million square feet of commercial space across California. A 25-year veteran of the firm, he shepherded landmark projects like Frank Gehry's $1 billion The Grand LA and Coterie Cathedral Hill into the skylines of Los Angeles and San Francisco.