Disruption Now

Meet Aswad Thomas, the indomitable Alliance for Safety and Justice Vice President. Once on the cusp of a glittering professional basketball career, a devastating gunshot wound forever altered his destiny. Yet, the injustice didn't end there. In his darkest hour, he was wrongfully labeled a criminal by the system that should have protected him. His is a tale of survival, rebirth, resilience, and redemption.

Today, Aswad stands tall, channeling his experiences and passion into transformative change. He's on a relentless mission: to overhaul a flawed system, ensuring no one else suffers the way he did.

Learn about the Alliance For Safety and Justice: https://asj.allianceforsafetyandjustice.org/

As innovations surge forward, so do the questions about A.I.'s inner workings. Our guest on Disruption Now is Javier Viaña Pérez, the co-founder of Rezon.ai and a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research. His Ph.D. research revolved around the conception of novel transparent algorithms that provide accurate predictions and human-understandable justifications of the results.Reason.ai primarily focuses on comprehending the decision-making process of AI systems, providing the much-needed transparency that is currently lacking.

For enthusiasts, skeptics, and everyone in between, this is your gateway to understanding A.I. like never before. Tune in and uncover the story behind the code.

In 2020, over 2 million people were employed by the justice system, with an annual expenditure of a staggering 300 billion dollars in the United States alone. But what has all this investment achieved for victims of crimes? Our guest, Lenore Anderson, is co-founder of the Alliance For Safety and Justice and author of the eye-opening book, "In Their Names: The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration and Victims' Rights."

What You will learn

How the militarization of local policing destroys trust and safety 

How media narratives shape public perception and policy

How victim protection is not a priority.

How you can create change.

Learn from real victims and survivors of the system. 

Learn More about In Their Names by Lenore Anderson

Learn about Alliance For Safety and Justice

Cessiah Lopez is an Affiliate of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

She is a serial entrepreneur & web3 degen with proven experiences in growing small businesses & creating digital products that elevate self-improvement.

Holding an LLM from the University of East Anglia, her thesis focused on the applicability of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) to modern e-commerce. She has since worked as an Operations and Strategist for crypto and web3-based projects and is a recent ex-Founder at Entrepreneur First.

She has a broad range of experiences spanning multiple industries, such as construction, recruitment, law, diplomacy, blockchain, and real estate. 

Her work lies at the intersection of law, web3, and startups, where she emphasizes the importance of social impact and mobility. Now, she is a Crypto Research Fellow for VentureESG, working to make ESG a standard part of due diligence for VCs in the web3 space.

As a polymath, her creative pursuits and innovation-focused approach have extended to her entrepreneurship and current works within web3.
You can check https://czawolf.com/ for more.

Diamond Doll is a highly skilled leader who excels at problem-solving and generating effective solutions. Her experience at Microsoft and Juul Labs demonstrates her commitment to diversity, inclusivity, and social responsibility in the workplace. As the founder of NFT CLT, she has taken her expertise and passion for Web3 education and onboarding to the next level, advising organizations on their transition to this exciting new field. She is a trusted community builder who plans educational events and conferences, hosts Twitter spaces, and moderates panels across the country. Her impressive educational background includes a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California, where she received numerous awards and accolades for her leadership and achievements.

Larry Brinker Jr. is an award-winning entrepreneur, impact investor, and mentor. He serves as Chief Executive Officer and President of Brinker, a group of family-owned and operated commercial construction service companies responsible for over $4 billion in construction projects, which plays a critical role in the transformation and revitalization of Detroit. He also serves as the CEO of the Brinker Family Asset Management Company. Before being named Chief Executive Officer and tasked with leading the executive team and driving the future progress of the Brinker portfolio of construction services companies, Larry Brinker Jr. served as President of Brinker and played a crucial role in the company’s development. On the philanthropic side, Brinker Jr. has established multiple scholarships, including a COVID-19 Legacy Survivor Scholarship fund. A proud alumnus of the University of Michigan, Brinker Jr. received the African American Alumni Council’s “Five Under Ten” award, which recognizes graduates for their professional accomplishments and significant contributions to the community. In the spirit of the Brinker legacy, he co-founded the Minority Business Mentor and Protege Program in 2017, which provides local contractors in Detroit the training, opportunity, and access to more substantial projects often awarded only to larger firms. I'm disrupting the status quo by investing and rebuilding my community and Detroit. I'm challenging the status quo by having the hard conversations that nobody wants to have.

• Mark is the CEO, co-founder, and chairman of Direct Digital Holdings, a Houston-based and founded adtech company that brings state-of-the-art buy-side and sell-side advertising platforms for clients (specializing in middle-sized markets) under one umbrella. Mark can speak to Direct Digital Holdings’ (DDH) success story and how he and the company are disrupting the adtech industry for companies in these markets, and how DDH is pioneering the space as a smaller but fast-growing player that also focuses on serving under-represented constituencies (gender, race, sexual orientation) and those often overlooked or marginalized in the ad space. Additionally, DDH is seeing record growth despite the market’s downward trends, which Mark can discuss alongside upcoming trends/shifts he expects for 2023 in the context of the national and local economy.

Tyra joined the Ohio Justice & Policy Center team as a paralegal in Jan. 2018. After several months of successful outreach on OJPC’s behalf, Tyra’s role adapted to better describe her gifts and passion: She became OJPC’s first Community Outreach Strategy Specialist.

Before joining OJPC, Tyra spent 23 years incarcerated for murder and robbery, crimes she did not commit.

Tyra used her time in prison constructively to educate herself.  A sixth grade dropout, Tyra eventually earn her GED, obtained a steam engineer’s license, became a certified tutor and completed a paralegal training program.

On Christmas Day, 2017, Tyra was released from prison. She joined the OJPC staff full-time only weeks later.

In her role, Tyra advocates on behalf of OJPC and does outreach work to educate children about the importance of staying in school and avoiding drug use. Tyra also hopes to create a program to provide support to people returning to the community after incarceration.

Dr. Topeka K. Sam spent time in federal prison and, upon her release, vowed to fight on behalf of the women she left behind. Topeka founded The Ladies of Hope Ministries, whose EPIC Vision is to End Poverty and Incarceration of women and girls globally. She was among the first to publicly highlight Ms. Alice Marie Johnson’s story and fight for her freedom, first during the Obama Administration’s historic clemency effort and then again during the Trump Administration’s tenure. President Trump commuted Ms. Alice’s sentence in 2018. Erin Haney, Policy Director at REFORM Alliance and Senior Counsel at #cut50 

MNTN (pronounced Mountain) built the first-of-its-kind, self-serve software for buying connected TV that puts performance first. The MNTN platform makes it easy for brands to buy connected TV ads across the top 150 streaming networks like Discovery+, ESPN, CNN, Hulu, PlutoTV and more. Intuitive Self-Service Platform: MNTN’s platform makes it easy to buy, manage, optimize and measure your CTV campaigns. Simply select your target, input your KPI goals, upload your creative and watch our AI-driven automated technology deliver unprecedented results in real time. Premium Inventory: MNTN gives brands access to premium inventory across the top 150 streaming networks like Discovery+, CNN, ESPN, Hulu, PlutoTV and more. Every ad is non-skippable and delivered exclusively on the TV. MNTN acquired Maximum Effort Marketing (Ryan Reynold’s creative marketing agency) in June 2021. MNTN is ad tech’s fastest-growing performance TV platform, and Maximum Effort, is one of the rising stars of the creative world. MNTN believes that the meteoric rise of Connected TV presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring media and creative closer together. The demand for easy-to-use tech and superb, fast-turn creative is certain to climb thanks to an increase in inventory and advertisers new to TV – many of whom can’t afford upfronts. Independently, MNTN and Maximum Effort Marketing have embraced and excelled because of their commitment to simplicity and speed. Together, the opportunities are endless. MNTN’s proprietary technology delivers unprecedented return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) for performance marketers and is bringing scores of new advertisers to television, with over 60% of our clients never having run a TV ad before. MNTN launched Creative-as-a-Subscription model (CaaS) in December 2021 - a simpler way for brands to unite the creative development and media buying process together. MNTN’s self-service platform has transformed connected TV advertising by making it as simple and accessible as paid search and social – empowering marketers to launch and measure campaigns that focus on driving performance. With the introduction of CaaS, MNTN is removing traditional barriers to TV creative, giving marketers easy access to produce great TV creative without investing in anything but their media goals. MNTN acquired QuickFrame, a leading original video creation platform in January 2022. Now branded QuickFrame by MNTN, the company has a network of thousands of creators, streamlining the process of producing video ads for over 1,000 clients across 20 verticals. MNTN announced that it raised $119 million in Series D financing in February 2022. Created some of the most talked about ads of the year: Steve-O's Hot Sauce Ad About Mark Douglas, President & CEO: Mark oversees the direction of MNTN with his 20 years of product development experience gained through repeated success in helping fast-growth companies transition into emerging markets. He started at Oracle. Shortly after, Mark founded a series of successful startups resulting in IPOs and acquisitions. He was the VP of Technology at eHarmony where he built personality-matching technology. More recently, Mark built new technology for Rubicon Project as the VP of Engineering.