Mr. Shen has been a serial entrepreneur since the 1990s, co-founding B&B Media, and founding VFinity among other ventures. Shen’s portfolio of good food and sustainable agriculture holdings includes over 50 investments in 40 companies and continues to grow. His other social entrepreneurship portfolio includes companies such as WeFunder.  His thesis of cultivating tasty, sustainable, healthy, accessible, and affordable food and agriculture businesses is explained in his TEDx Talk in addition to numerous speeches at Fancy Food Show, Esca Bona, Vitagora, Concordia, James Beard Foundation, Food Tank, Seed to Chips, Harvard Business School, BevNet, etc. The companies Shen has founded or co-founded have had numerous financial exits including VFinity, DCF, B&B Media, and GA Media.  Two other financial exits came from his venture investments.  He works with social entrepreneurs to build financially sustainable and impactful businesses.  

Mr. Shen’s work has been profiled by major media around the world in several languages by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC, CNN, BBC, CBS, NHK, TVB, The Guardian, Le Monde, Fortune, among others. He is an alumnus of Peking University, Brandeis University where he did his undergraduate work in botany and genetics, Boston University where he completed his graduate studies, and Harvard University.  He has lectured at over 200 universities, colleges, and conferences, and continues to lecture across the US and globally.

Shen Tong is on Omnicom's sparks&honey Influencer Advisory Board, in addition to serving on boards and advisory boards for the Good Food Institute, Food Tank, and Poets & Writers, and as a member of NEXUS Global Summit. He founded FOOD-X in 2014. He also served as a venture partner of SOSV, a global multi-stage venture capital fund, after acting as general partner.  Shen is a long time social activist beginning with his student protest days at Tiananmen in 1989.  He was actively involved in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement and continues to advocate for other human rights movements and social justice causes.  His book Almost a Revolution has been in print since its first edition in 1990 and continues to be used widely among Western colleges and in high school curriculums.  He is a film buff, avid traveler, foodie, writer and poet, and father of three children living in New York.

Andy has an extensive background working in accelerators, startups, and the digital space. Prior to joining FFC, Andy led the launch of Luminate NY, the world's largest optics, phonics, and imaging accelerator.

Over his nearly six years there, Andy was instrumental in creating the 6-month program from scratch and recruiting six cohorts, of ten companies each, worldwide. Program graduates have gone on to raise tens of millions in follow-on funding. During his tenure as operations director, he was involved in deploying over $16M of capital, securing partnerships with international brands such as Sony and Zeiss, to managing the board, investors, and program sponsors. Previous to Luminate, Andy was the founder of Dogways Inc., a venture-backed mobile app startup; President of Toontrack Music USA, launching the Swedish music software firm in the U.S. and leading it to #1 in the world in sales; XLN Audio of Sweden, leading them to 15x sales growth; Brixy Inc., a 150+ baby store association, launching their digital platform; Brannland Cider of Sweden, launching the brand in the U.S. in 2017, and Andrea Arden, celebrity pet trainer, on numerous digital and business projects.

Andy is also an accomplished musician, having written and produced songs for major label artists worldwide, including a #1 single in 2013 for Hey! Say! JUMP of Japan.

Ninian Sumadia is a leader on social reform and poverty alleviation. She’s the Sectoral Representative of Youth and Students at the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC),Office of the President of the Philippines. She is the youngest and the only woman elected to the Executive Committee of NAPC Basic Sectors.

She was elected twice at the Sectoral Council of NAPC and was appointed in 2015 by the former President Benigno Aquino as the Sectoral Representative of the Youth Sector as the voice of the Filipino youth in fighting poverty.

Ninian is a signatory to the national policy of Magna Carta of the Poor (RA 11291) Implementing Rules and Regulations, an act to uplift the quality life of the Filipinos and provide opportunities for growth and development.

She is one of the National Convenors of the People Power Volunteers for Reform (PPVR), a civil society organization that advocates for reforms and good governance. She is a member of the regional core team of the ASEAN Youth Forum (AYF) and the Philippine delegate to the 25th ASEAN Summit Interface with ASEAN leaders. Ninian is a resource person to hundreds of organizations, communities and universities about her work focusing on youth organizing and mobilizing young people, policy reforms, education and capacitating people to be active citizens and contribute to youth development.

As an environmental advocate, she is part of the Board of Directors of the Advocates for the Environmental and Social Justice (AESJ), an organization at the forefront in campaigning for sustainable development and relocation of Pandacan Oil Depot outside Manila.

She is a feminist and actively pushing for gender and women empowerment. She is part in leading the youth campaigns and advocacies for Students’ Rights and Welfare, local village youth council (SK) Reform, Reproductive Health Law, Anti-Discrimination for LGBTQIA+ , human rights, environmental and social justice.

Ninian is a Student Ambassador currently taking Bachelor of Business Administration at Nexford University, Washington, DC.

She hails from the family of farmers and advocates for young people to go back in the field of agriculture for food security and sustainable climate solutions. On weekends, she is busy attending to her little farm located at Tanay, Rizal. Philippines.

Cherry-Anne Matriz is a progressive social development professional and an experienced advocacy

campaigner who has worked in the Social Development sector and Social Movements in the

Philippines and Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Her experience revolves around, but

not limited to - learning and training development, project management, political and social

campaigns, community development, civil society organizing and networking, and

international work.

Always striving for excellence and working hard to inspire others are her core values at

work. She is a learning advocate, gender equality campaigner, and local volunteer for

environmental justice advocacies in Manila. Currently, she is taking an open online course

on International Women's Health and Human Rights in Coursera sponsored by Stanford

University.

Evan is a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur and restauranteur who has always had a passion for quality food and hospitality. With over 15 years of restaurant experience, he started his first food business (a sausage cart) as a student at SUNY Binghamton with $800. After its success, he went on to open his own cafe and bar, Café Oasis which served a wide range of local and seasonal beers and snacks. Eventually, his hometown pulled him back in and he opened BKLYN CREPE, where he serves fresh juices, smoothies, crepes, and salads. BKLYN CREPE recently moved to a new larger location in Park Slope where Evan has since expanded his operations to include ice cream with his newest concept called BKLYN CREAM.  He's very excited to be a part of the Food Future team and make a positive impact on our food system. 

Holley Atkinson launched Making Food Work in 2009, emerging as a true leader in food and tech initiatives on a wide range of issues and challenges, with a focus on digital and social media, product development, project management, strategic marketing and advisory services. She is passionate about local food systems, social media, and information technology. Holley co-founded the Food+Tech meetup in early 2010 and also the Slow Money NYC Meetup later that same year. 

Kevin Powell and his wife started a flavored butter company in the NYC metro area. Their biggest client was Yankee Stadium. The business made money, but they wanted a product that was more universal and they needed funding. So, they closed down that business and started a condiments business using vegetables for sweetness and drastically reducing the amount of sugar typically found in those products. Kevin brought on a navy vet he had met at a conference to help run the company full time. Over the next 2.5 years, they took the product national with accounts in WholeFoods, Target, Albertsons, Sam’s Club and Blue Apron. They also cultivated partnerships with regional players like Wegmans, HEB, Roach brothers, Big Y, Fresh Direct, Gourmet Garage and Eataly while raising a little over a million dollars from investors. At the end of 2016, Kevin stepped down as president and away from day-to-day operations to pursue other opportunities

Murphy’s career has taken her all over the world. Kathleen Murphy brings 16 years of on-camera and Executive Producing experience for national networks to her work with authors, athletes, executives, entrepreneurs and CEO’s.

She traveled daily with the Tour de France race through the French countryside creating and reporting daily features and conducting cyclist interviews; lived in the canopy of the rain forest of Costa Rica; explored witchcraft and politics in Cuba; fly-fished the rivers of Montana and lived on a boat in Alaska king salmon waters, adopting a dog sledding team. Her co-hosting with Regis Philbin garnered her the New York Post’s vote to replace Kathie Lee Gifford.

Kathleen Murphy is an Amherst College graduate and has a graduate degree from Harvard University, Radcliffe College. She is a two-time New York City Marathon finisher and has read to the blind as a volunteer for twelve years.

Amy Fuller is a transformational executive, with a long track record reinventing cultures, brands, and businesses. With her expertise as a turnaround expert, she affects scale-level transformations of brands, programs, and organizations.

Amy’s career spans more than 35 years, running global advertising, marketing, and communications programs for the world’s top brands across sectors including consumer goods, financial services, and technology.

She is known for her authentic human leadership and ability to rally highly diverse teams to achieve ambitious business outcomes. Her success is based on her ability to introduce cutting edge techniques and business-driven strategies, connecting marketing and communications work to business imperatives, and achieving measurable results for brands and businesses. Amy has held top management roles at agencies including Ogilvy and VMLY&R. She led global consumer marketing at MasterCard—resulting in its transformation to a public entity—and reinvented Deloitte’s global brand, driving record-breaking business performance.

As Accenture’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer over the past four years, Amy was tasked with radically transforming the 2,000-person marketing and the communications team across all markets and disciplines, updating and professionalizing skill sets, introducing disciplined use of data and analytics, and aligning marketing and communications strategy to business strategy.

She also executed the largest company-wide (530,000-person) brand relaunch in Accenture’s history, developed the company’s first defined purpose, and handled three CEO transitions in three years. Amy also ran crisis communications, including the CV-19 global and local response, achieving flawless business continuity.

During Amy’s tenure at Accenture, the business broke all previous records for growth and bookings, while the value of the company brand reached its all-time high, becoming the world’s most valuable IT services brand, according to rankings service Brand Finance. Amy has gained high recognition for her Accenture work, including being named by Forbes as one of the World's 50 Most Influential CMOs, and most recently winning a Stevie Award as Marketing Executive of the Year.

Her board service includes the Ad Council, Junior Achievement USA, and HealthRight International, and she is on the CMO Advisory Board of creative technology platform company Fiverr (NYCE: FVRR). She also serves on the advisory boards of the IS and marketing departments at the Madden School of Business at Lemoyne College, is a frequent keynote speaker at global marketing events including Cannes and a guest lecturer at universities including the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Syracuse University, and Lemoyne College. She is also a new ventures mentor through business accelerator Food Future Co.

Dave Shor is Founder and CEO of Lynq. He is a leader, innovator and strategist with over 15 years of management experience, including 10 years of running a business end-to-end. He is experienced in the successful ideation, growth and evolution of companies, processes and technologies.

He is skilled in -- and passionate about -- mentoring startup founders, ranging from the evolution of strategy and business models to leadership growth and the working through the (often overlooked) emotional and cultural needs of founders and their teams.

Big business expertise with a passion for helping small teams and businesses ignite their commercial presence. From being a veteran of the corporate world, Steve now focuses on working with innovative founders and owners as a mentor, advisor and investor. Steve’s experience spans commercial leadership, business transformation and people strategy, working in C- level roles in Europe and the US. He has led and coached people at every level of their career and has a track record of delivering strategic growth to underperforming teams and business units. The past 25 years have been spent operating in the world of consumer research and trends, working with some of the world’s largest consumer brands and some of the newest entrants, helping them translate consumer attitudes and behaviour into actionable business strategies. Previously Steve was trustee of The Bright Ideas Trust, a UK charity providing support and mentoring to young entrepreneurs from disadvantaged backgrounds. He has also partnered with different incubators and accelerators, along with hosting and judging various start-up events. Most recently he founded the Real Leadership Consultancy with a vision of disrupting the traditional notion of leadership, working with inspirational people who are looking to become tomorrow’s leaders. Steve holds a BA in Business Studies from Bournemouth University and lives in Surrey in England with his wife, son and dog. He is constantly trying to improve his triathlon times…having come to the sport later in life he has competed in more than a dozen events over the last few years.

Dr. Eva Selhub is an internationally recognized resiliency expert, physician, author, executive coach, keynote speaker, and spiritual advisor. With almost three decades of experience, she previously held roles as an Instructor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and as a Clinical Associate at the prestigious Benson Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she also served as Medical Director for six years. Dr. Selhub also served as an adjunct scientist of neuroscience at Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, one of six human nutrition research centers supported by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).  Dr. Selhub now collaborates with clients and organizations, leveraging her expertise to redefine leadership and wellbeing paradigms.

Dr. Selhub possesses a unique talent for distilling complex scientific and spiritual concepts into practical, accessible knowledge. Her transformative energy, intuitive guidance, scientific expertise, and practical mindset inspire profound change and growth in her clients and audiences worldwide. She is the author of six books, including "Burnout for Dummies", "Resilience for Dummies", "Your Health Destiny" "The Stress Management Handbook", and "The Love Response". Additionally, she co-authored "Your Brain on Nature" and has been featured in esteemed publications like The New York Times, authored multiple scientific publications, and has been showcased on national and international media platforms.

Andy has an extensive background working in accelerators, startups, and the digital space. Prior to joining FFC, Andy led the launch of Luminate NY, the world's largest optics, phonics, and imaging accelerator.

Over his nearly six years there, Andy was instrumental in creating the 6-month program from scratch and recruiting six cohorts, of ten companies each, worldwide. Program graduates have gone on to raise tens of millions in follow-on funding. During his tenure as operations director, he was involved in deploying over $16M of capital, securing partnerships with international brands such as Sony and Zeiss, to managing the board, investors, and program sponsors. Previous to Luminate, Andy was the founder of Dogways Inc., a venture-backed mobile app startup; President of Toontrack Music USA, launching the Swedish music software firm in the U.S. and leading it to #1 in the world in sales; XLN Audio of Sweden, leading them to 15x sales growth; Brixy Inc., a 150+ baby store association, launching their digital platform; Brannland Cider of Sweden, launching the brand in the U.S. in 2017, and Andrea Arden, celebrity pet trainer, on numerous digital and business projects.

Andy is also an accomplished musician, having written and produced songs for major label artists worldwide, including a #1 single in 2013 for Hey! Say! JUMP of Japan.

Mr. Shen has been a serial entrepreneur since the 1990s, co-founding B&B Media, and founding VFinity among other ventures. Shen’s portfolio of good food and sustainable agriculture holdings includes over 50 investments in 40 companies and continues to grow. His other social entrepreneurship portfolio includes companies such as WeFunder.  His thesis of cultivating tasty, sustainable, healthy, accessible, and affordable food and agriculture businesses is explained in his TEDx Talk in addition to numerous speeches at Fancy Food Show, Esca Bona, Vitagora, Concordia, James Beard Foundation, Food Tank, Seed to Chips, Harvard Business School, BevNet, etc. The companies Shen has founded or co-founded have had numerous financial exits including VFinity, DCF, B&B Media, and GA Media.  Two other financial exits came from his venture investments.  He works with social entrepreneurs to build financially sustainable and impactful businesses.  

Mr. Shen’s work has been profiled by major media around the world in several languages by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC, CNN, BBC, CBS, NHK, TVB, The Guardian, Le Monde, Fortune, among others. He is an alumnus of Peking University, Brandeis University where he did his undergraduate work in botany and genetics, Boston University where he completed his graduate studies, and Harvard University.  He has lectured at over 200 universities, colleges, and conferences, and continues to lecture across the US and globally.

Shen Tong is on Omnicom's sparks&honey Influencer Advisory Board, in addition to serving on boards and advisory boards for the Good Food Institute, Food Tank, and Poets & Writers, and as a member of NEXUS Global Summit. He founded FOOD-X in 2014. He also served as a venture partner of SOSV, a global multi-stage venture capital fund, after acting as general partner.  Shen is a long time social activist beginning with his student protest days at Tiananmen in 1989.  He was actively involved in the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement and continues to advocate for other human rights movements and social justice causes.  His book Almost a Revolution has been in print since its first edition in 1990 and continues to be used widely among Western colleges and in high school curriculums.  He is a film buff, avid traveler, foodie, writer and poet, and father of three children living in New York.

Allie Wist is an artist, photo director, and independent researcher whose work is anchored in food culture, food systems, and the environment. She holds a BA from Boston University and an MA in Food Studies from NYU, and she currently teaches food and performance art at NYU. Her work has been featured in Saveur, Roads & Kingdoms, BBC, Promopress's Food Futures: Sensory Explorations in Food Design, and Honolulu Biennial's Visions of the Future exhibition series.

Andrew Levy formerly led marketing, sales, and strategy efforts for many of Twitter's largest advertisers across the company's mobile promotion suite. He oversaw multi-million dollar mobile & social marketing campaigns for the world's leading mobile apps, brands, and agencies, and informed internal mobile product strategy. He was an early employee at TapCommerce (acquired by Twitter for 9-figures), where he helped to build a globally distributed sales force and scale the company's revenue org.

Andrew was a founder of one of the largest entrepreneurial support platforms in New England and has managed or supported efforts at multiple startup accelerators including Betaspring and Techstars. He ran the University of Texas accelerator program and led consulting projects for IP-spinouts at the Austin Technology Incubator, where portfolio companies have raised in excess of $1 billion in investor capital and seen exits to companies like Home Depot, Qualcomm, IBM, Salesforce, etc.

Andrew is an active startup advisor and formerly operated growth consulting firm Redbud Strategies. Before entering the tech world, he was an equities trader for nearly 4 years. He enjoys reading, health & fitness, outdoor sports, hot sauce, and Texas.

Chloe is excited to learn more about smart agriculture and make the world a better place through our food system.