Karl Strovink is the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, the Oakland-born specialty roaster now owned by Nestlé. A Berkeley native with an MBA from MIT Sloan, he arrived in 2019 from a twelve-year run at Converse and has spent his tenure pushing Blue Bottle toward oat milk by default, instant espresso, zero-waste cafés, and aggressive expansion across Asia, all while protecting the brand's small-batch identity inside a thirty-billion-dollar coffee parent.
Olaf Carlson-Wee is the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, one of the world's largest crypto-focused investment firms managing billions in assets. A Lutheran minister's son from rural Minnesota who wrote his college thesis on Bitcoin, he was Coinbase's first employee, demanded his salary be paid entirely in cryptocurrency, then left to launch Polychain in 2016 with $8 million that grew to $1 billion in under two years. He is a practicing lucid dreamer, a transhumanist, and the brother of two poets — a fact that tells you nearly everything about the household he grew up in.