TeLisa Daughtry was born and raised in Boston. While pursuing her childhood passions of dance and visual art, she also became a self-taught programmer, graphic designer, marketer and engineer and is now an entrepreneur. She taught herself to code in the late 90s while in high school so that she could put her fine art on a website. She drew immense inspiration from the hard-working women in her family. She has taken her startups through a series of prestigious accelerators, including Founders Institute and Y Combinator. Her recent endeavor, FlyTechnista, is a mobile app that empowers females to connect to curated education, employment and entrepreneurship resources and opportunities in technology. She also backs start-ups as an angel investor.

Michel Zelnick was born in Canada to parents of Ukrainian and Persian descent who migrated from Egypt to Australia before settling in North America. He began a career in finance and migrated to San Diego shortly thereafter. He opted to pursue a law degree after several years. He held several C-Suite positions, yet ultimately chose to earn a degree in psychology and launched a career as a therapist. He now combines all three professional skill sets he has developed and advises companies where partners are experiencing challenges and are exploring a peaceful means to part ways.

Richard Hanbury followed a childhood passion for horses to study Arabic in order to build community with fellow horse-owners worldwide. His pursuit took him to the Middle East where he met with a near death accident. He survived the event with a lifelong spinal cord injury. In grappling with the chronic pain he was experiencing post-incident, he developed a technique to relieve his suffering inspired by the principles of meditation. His approach resolved his pain in its entirety and he has made it his life's purpose to make the treatment more accessible to people. He founded his company Sana.io which makes good on that mission.

Aki Karja was born and raised in Finland, just north of Helsinki. He became very fond of skateboarding at a young age. This passion enabled him to travel the world. He studied finance at NYU and secured a job in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. From there he moved to the prestigious private equity fund Blackstone. After a few other stints in finance he opted to follow another life passion that he developed around art, largely influenced by a number of artist friends in his life, and launched Artfare, a site that matches artists with collectors.

Allie Sharma was born in the US and developed a strong sense for social justice on family trips to India, from where her ancestors hail. She parlayed that early passion into not only becoming a physician, earning her MD at Cornell, but also pursuing graduate work in social policy and planning at the London School of Economics. After her residency in psychiatry at UCSF and Cornell, and working in emergency psychiatry at Columbia University, she joined a Netherlands-based NGO and was placed in Afghanistan and Burundi to integrate mental health into primary care delivery. After returning to the US she worked with marginalized communities in the South Bronx providing psychiatric services. She was also Director of the Mental Health Service Corps, under the Thrive NYC initiative. She has brought her mental health advocacy to two podcasts she has launched, Model Mentality and Coping with COVID-19 by Dr. Allie.

Darin Davidson was born in South Africa, but migrated with his family when young to Canada. He earned a Bachelor's Degree and MD from the University of Ottawa, having decided in high school that medicine would be his calling. Given his passion for sports while growing up, Darin was drawn to orthopedic surgery. He practiced for a number of years and decided to take a break to launch a consulting practice to aid other physicians in grappling with burnout and to aid patients in integrating a more holistic approach to their care. For physicians he advocates adopting a paradigm employed by airline pilots where the amount of time spent flying and amount of off-time is closely regulated.

Karla Morales-Lee's father hails from Nicaragua and was the first Nicaraguan to study at Oxford in the UK. Karla herself was born in the UK where she also grew up. She attended boarding school starting as a young teen when her parents migrated to South Africa. She understood her innate passion for understanding the motivation of people and launched a career in marketing and branding working for a number of leading agencies. She eventually launched her own brand agency called Hunter & Farmer. In addition to now consulting, she actively manages two organizations she brought to fruition recently called New Breed Services, which addresses the changing nature of work and career-building, and Warrior Women Network, a support and networking platform for women driven by making an impact in the world.

Ittai Shapira was born in the US but grew up in Israel. He had the opportunity to perform as a musician for visiting dignitaries to Israel, including Milan Kundera and Edward Teller. At the age of 15 he came back to the US with his family to study at Julliard with a focus on violin. He earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees by the time he was 23. Ittai made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall in the year 2003. He has worked with a favored record label publishing 20+ recordings. Ittai is also a composer of original works and finds it a compelling form of creative expression. Many of his compositions have a literary affiliation, including a work entitled "The Old Man and the Sea" as an homage to Hemingway post the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He has also developed an original work in conjunction with author Salman Rushdie and his novel "Midnight's Children". Ittai is passionate about exploring the therapeutic nature of music and its ability to heal, borne of personal experience, via his non-profit Sound Potential and a collaboration with the Weill School of Medicine at Cornell.

Sohee Jun was born in South Korea and migrated to the US at the age of six with her family. She had a strong passion for reading and a proclivity towards the sciences, opting to study psychology during her undergrad years. After rejecting a career path in medicine she opted to earn a doctorate focusing on industrial organizational psychology, an arena for which she had developed a strong passion. She began working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and also held posts in finance and media, including with Warner Brothers. When she made her personal decision to start her own family, the experience of other women making a similar decision came into sharp focus. Her observations and personal experience became the basis for a book she recently published called MOMMYTRACKED. She also launched her own business and now coaches executives looking to find an integrated balance in their work and life settings.

Preetam Dutta was born in Texas and moved with his family to Connecticut at the age of 10. He grew up playing tennis and the cello. While in high school, he began doing some advanced research within the chemical engineering department at Yale University and ultimately he chose to earn his undergraduate degree there. He opted to pursue a doctorate at Columbia University subsequent to that in Machine Learning and Cybersecurity. He is an entrepreneur who launched a business in the cybersecurity space focused on small and medium-sized businesses called Elpha Secure.