Co-Founder, Braintrust Network

Adam is co-founder of Braintrust, the largest and fastest-growing web3 talent network that matches enterprises with the highly skilled technical and design talent they need. Braintrust’s unique network model allows talent to retain 100% of their market rate while enabling organizations to spin up flexible teams and make their budgets go 2-3x further by cutting out the middlemen. Braintrust has allowed talent to earn over $130m since inception: more at https://info.braintrust.com. Adam is also co-founder of Cambrian Asset Management, a blockchain asset management company. Prior to founding Braintrust, Adam co-founded Doctor on Demand, the popular video telemedicine provider, with daytime talk show personality Dr. Phil. Other notable ventures include DriverSide, a marketplace that connects car owners with mechanics, which was acquired by Advance Auto Parts in September of 2011 and MarketSquare, the first online local shopping destination on the Internet which was acquired by Intuit in September of 2006. Adam is a passionate Angel investor in 120+ companies including LTSE, SuperHuman, Filecoin, Binance, Compound, Automatic, Apero Health, Zenefits, and more.

Former Co-Founder, Driver’s Cooperative

Alissa Orlando is an entrepreneur and employee ownership advocate. Her work to advance gig workers has been featured in several media outlets including The New York Times, Fast Company, Bloomberg, Gizmodo, Curbed, Dollars and Sense, In These Times, Next City, Nasdaq, NPR, NBC News, Crain’s New York, Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, Yahoo! Finance, and The Stanford Daily.

Founder and CEO, Plastiks.IO

Bachelor's degree in Political Science from the State University of New York and Master's degree in Business Administration. In 2005, André co-founded and launched Bestv®, a leader in push VoD and datacasting software for television, and had also founded Visualcom Inc., an e-commerce consulting firm and leading internet provider for businesses in Latin America. An avid entrepreneur, in 2019 Andre founded Nozama, to make it the largest sustainability technology company. Plastiks, its main product, was born at the end of 2021. Plastiks is an NFT marketplace and Web3 ecosystem that merges utility NFTs with plastic recovery data. The mission of the company is to connect People, Organizations and Companies around the world to fight against global plastic pollution, by giving everybody an equal opportunity to take verifiable environmental action. The platform tokenizes the data of recovered plastic and transforms it into “Plastic Recovery Guarantee” (PRG) NFTs from the invoices generated by recovery projects and recyclers around the world. Plastiks connects these recovery projects worldwide with companies and individuals that want to support them and empower their impactful stories.

Partnerships & Community Lead, Protocol Labs Resource Network, Founder

David is Co-founder at Resource Network. Throughout his career, David has focused on utilizing blockchain technology and ecosystem coordination to promote systemic change and socio-economic transformation. He occupied several Chief Executive positions, led successful teams, and served as a consultant to local governments. Prior to his position as Resource CEO, David has founded two other companies, and has focused on leveraging digital technologies in travel, finance, and commerce. In addition, David helped scale a decentralized e-commerce ecosystem to eight-digit revenue. David has applied blockchain and crypto towards real-world business use cases across his entrepreneurial career, since 2015.

Founder, National Center on Employee Ownership

Corey Rosen, Ph.D., is the founder and senior staff member of the NCEO. He co-authored, along with John Case and Martin Staubus, Equity: Why Employee Ownership Is Good for Business (Harvard Business School Press, May 2005). Over the years, he has written, edited, or contributed to dozens of books, articles and research papers on employee ownership. He is generally regarded as the leading expert on employee ownership in the world and has appeared on numerous national radio and television news programs. He serves on a number of ESOP company boards in addition to his duties at the Center. Rosen received his Ph.D. in political science from Cornell University in 1973, after which he taught politics at Ripon College in Wisconsin before being named an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in 1975. He worked on Capitol Hill for the next five years, where he helped initiate and draft legislation on ESOPs and employee ownership. In 1981, he formed the NCEO. In 2009, he won the Txemi Canterra Award for Social Economy, given annually in Spain.

Chief, Global Economic Monitoring, The United Nations

Dr. Hamid Rashid – Chief, Global Economic Monitoring at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDEA) – is the lead author of the UN flagship report, the World Economic Situation and Prospects, jointly published by UNDESA, UNCTAD, the UN Regional Commissions and UN-WTO. Previously, he served as the Senior Adviser for Macroeconomic Policy in UNDESA, advising finance, central banks and planning authorities in developing countries on fiscal and monetary policy issues. Prior to joining UN/DESA in 2010, Dr. Rashid served as a Senior Adviser in UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy and also as the Director General for Multilateral Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh. Dr. Rashid earned his Ph.D. in economics and finance from Columbia University in New York under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Prof. Joseph Stiglitz.

Co-Founder, Cosmos; CEO, Informal Systems

Ethan is the co-founder of the Cosmos network and serves as the CEO of Informal Systems.

Informal Systems is a member-driven worker’s cooperative building software that enables trustworthy relationships between protocols and people to flourish. Ethan also serves as the President of the Interchain Foundation which funds and coordinates development of public goods in the Cosmos ecosystem. Prior to Informal Systems, Ethan co-founded the Tendermint and Cosmos projects, and served as CTO of Tendermint Inc. Today, dozens of projects are adopting technology conceived in the original Cosmos whitepaper, including the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol – an industry-standard for permissionless communication between sovereign blockchains. Today, the Cosmos ecosystem continues to pioneer technological paradigms for building interoperable application-specific blockchains.

Co-Founder and General Partner, Cerulean Ventures

Mr. Jahed Momand is a Co-Founder and serves as Partner at Cerulean Ventures. Mr. Momand serves as Executive at The Ownership Economy. He served as Venture Partner at Avalanche VC. He also served as Chief Growth Officer, Chief Product Officer and Head, Marketing & Growth at Magalix.

Investment Research, L1 Digital AG

Jake Lynch leads investment research at L1 Digital and contributor of SpearBitDAO and The Boston DAO.

Author, the Profit Paradox

Jan Eeckhout is ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, BSE Research Professor, and Professor of Economics at University College London. He has teaching and research interests in Macroeconomics, with a special emphasis on the labor market. He studies unemployment, labor market risk, skill diversity, inequality in cities, and the macroeconomic implications of market power.

Professor Eeckhout's work has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Political Economy, and has been supported by several government grants, including funding from the National Science Foundation (US) and the European Research Council (Starting and Advanced Grants), as well as private grants. His work has featured in the media, including outlets such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Vox, and Bloomberg. He has advised over 30 PhD students who have placed in academic positions from Yale to Chicago and from Beijing to Canberra, as well as in non-academic positions. In the past, Eeckhout has been a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was for 9 years. He has been the Louis A. Simpson Visiting Professor at Princeton University and has taught at NYU Stern and has been a visiting scholar at MIT. At UPF he has been the chairman of the Department of Economics and Business. He has been editor of the International Economic Review and is currently on the editorial board of the Review of Economic Dynamics and the Journal of Economic Theory, and is past editorial board member of the Journal of the European Economic Association. He is a fellow of the European Economic Association and a member of the Academia Europaea. He was elected to the Econometric Society in 2019.

President, Jason Wiener p.c.

Jason enjoys the challenge of creatively designing legal and business solutions to persistent social and environmental challenges. Jason comes to this work with a wide range of experience as an entrepreneur, litigator, activist, organizer and worker-owner. With more than a dozen years of experience as an attorney – including several years in BigLaw litigation, and as a labor lawyer – Jason’s range of expertise and experience brings an innovative approach to solving client issues. Jason has walked in the shoes of his clients, as a social entrepreneur in his own right, on the board of non-profits, cooperatives and corporations. Jason has served on executive strategy, human resources, finance and other management level teams. Jason has been a thought, do and practice leader in the cooperative, employee ownership, impact finance and capital, and teal lawyering movements. Jason’s client work and public speaking have charted a new and grander course for the potential of democratized economic structures to re-calibrate the hazardous course set by “business as usual. Jason has published more than six scholarly law review articles on international, human rights and renewable energy topics and speaks regularly about worker-owned and cooperative business model, non-extractive finance, the future of work, the contemporary and teal practice of law, distributed solar policy and sharing economy legal issues. Jason is an adjunct professor in Colorado State University’s Global Sustainability and Social Enterprise program, where he teaches an MBA course on business law and ethics. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Colorado Law School’s Entrepreneurial Law Clinic.

Co-Founder and COO, Mintstars

Van Meir is a doctoral student at Harvard Kennedy School studying sex work, labor, & the platform economy, and co-founder of MintStars. MintStars is a content subscription platform that helps creators and models earn more, reduce piracy, and combat burnout using NFTs.Jessica has advocated for marginalized groups her entire life. Currently a PhD student at Harvard and a former Gates Cambridge Scholar, she's spent 7 years researching sex workers' rights. She's also worked for multiple women's rights and trans rights organizations, including a feminist law firm where she worked with survivors of image-based sexual abuse, workplace discrimination, and sex trafficking.

Co-Founder and CEO, Open Collective

Pia Mancini is Democracy activist, open source sustainer, co-founder at Open Collective and Chair of Democracy.Earth Foundation. She worked in politics in Argentina with The Net Party, a party she co-founded and helped develop DemocracyOS, technology for democracy around the world. YCombinator Alum, Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, globe-trotter, now based in NYC.

Founder, Freelancers Union

Sara Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union and the Freelancers Insurance Company. Formerly chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Horowitz is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and has been featured on NPR and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, among other publications. A lifelong mutualist, she lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.

Founder, President - ixo Foundation

Inventor of the ixo protocol for identifying, verifying and valuing impact. Shaun is a clinically experienced physician, international development specialist and visionary leader at the forefront of solving complex social challenges, through systems-thinking and technological innovation He has a passion for designing and building ethical, data-driven technologies and systems that can positively transform human experience and improve well-being for millions of people. Shaun has founded a portfolio of technology-driven startup ventures that have successfully scaled to become leading health service delivery, advisory services and scientific research organisations. At an international level, Shaun has advised and worked for international institutions such as the World Health Organisation, UNAIDS, UNICEF, the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development (where he was a Health Systems Advisor in the Research and Policy Division).He has designed systems innovations and technological solutions for local sustainable socio-economic development, in partnership with large corporations, government agencies and civil society organisations. In 2008, Shaun presented an idea for a decentralised data-driven mechanism to optimise capital allocation for sustainable development projects to optimise outcomes, and give stakeholders an economic stake through a system of credits (which we now call tokens in the Web3 context). This was the genesis for what has since become the ixo Protocol. The nonprofit ixo Foundation was established 2017 to be the custodian of this protocol and to continue proving, improving and promoting new data standards and information technologies that enable sustainable social, environmental and economic development.

Founder and Board Member, Upside Cooperative

Tyler Morrey, a Board Member and the original Founder of Upside.coop, is building a platform to power the ownership economy. His experience as a valuation expert in complex financial instruments and startup consulting led him to see an unmet need in company growth - enabling brands to succeed alongside their customers by mobilizing them with the opportunity to earn ownership in the brand through their engagement.

Partner and Co-Founder, Common Trust

Zoe Schlag is working to build Common Trust, an impact-aligned financing vehicle for Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) conversions. Common Trust has designed a unique set of financing terms that are compatible with long-term employee-ownership and aimed at equitably distributing risk and reward across the range of stakeholders. In addition to financing EOTs, the fund can finance adjacent variations on the EOT, i.e. ECOT, etc. The organization is structured as an LLC and will operate a subsidiary debt fund. Zoe has served on both sides of the table as both investor and operator. She is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Schmidt Futures, and previously served as Managing Director of Techstars Impact, Techstars' first impact fund, which she oversaw to invest in 74 impact companies after leading its formation and launch. Prior, she founded and served as CEO of UnLtd USA, an impact investment organization, which she led to join forces with Techstars in 2017. Over the last decade, Zoe has worked with founders across the US, Latin America, Africa and Asia, on issues ranging from human rights in supply chains to scalable preventive healthcare to criminal justice.