Felecia is the CEO of Pharrell William’s Black Ambition Opportunity Fund. Felecia is an innovative
powerhouse, personal transformation speaker, entrepreneur and author, who’s work shapes the way
individuals show up, are valued, and financially benefit from playing full out in the innovation
economy. Companies like, Google, Spotify, Door Dash, Target, Samsung, and Etsy call on Felecia to help them empower their teams and shape their inclusive innovation strategies and empower their team to step into their Zone of Genius. Felecia has been featured on the NBC Today Show, MSNBC, The Cooking Channel, Wall Street Journal, and White House Champion of Change Honoree.

Kofi Ampadu is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads the Talent x Opportunity Initiative (TxO). TxO aims to identify entrepreneurs who have the talent, drive, and ideas to build great businesses, but lack the typical network and resources to do so. Prior to joining a16z, Kofi founded SKU’d Ventures, a venture fund focused on investing in consumer packaged goods companies, and also served as a venture advisor with Yale University’s Tsai Center of Innovative Thinking. Before getting into the world of venture capital and entrepreneurship, he was a strategy consultant and engineer. Kofi earned a BS from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. Kofi was born in Ghana, so in his spare time he stays in tune with how innovation can drastically improve the continent of Africa.

Mandy Bowman is the Founder and CEO of Official Black Wall Street. After studying Entrepreneurship and Global Business Management at Babson College, she set out to empower the Black community through economics and ownership. Since 2014 Mandy has been at the forefront of the #BuyBlack movement, making it easier for others to find and support Black-owned businesses through her digital platform and global Black business directory, Official Black Wall Street. In 2017 Mandy was invited to TEDx Dover, the first TED event held at an HBCU, to give a TED talk on ownership and long-term wealth in the Black community. She was also chosen to present her business pitch to a panel of celebrity entrepreneur judges on BET’s series ‘Queen Boss.’

The highly anticipated app version of Official Black Wall Street launched in October of 2017 and made headlines as the first app to alert users when they are near a Black business. During her professional career, Mandy has worked at Atlantic Records, Complex Magazine, and Essence Magazine in social media and digital marketing. When she isn’t working to fuel Black businesses, she is volunteering as a mentor to inner-city students and creating social strategies for small businesses.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is an American social justice advocate and businesswoman. Phaedra is the founder and CEO of Promise, a payment technology platform that simplifies government debt. Prior to Promise, Phaedra ran revenue and operations at Honor, a home care technology company. Before Honor, Phaedra worked with the musician Prince and led the effort to secure ownership of his masters. She is a labor and community organizer by trade who is committed to making measurable change.

Earlier in her career, Phaedra was the Executive Officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, an organized labor federation representing more than 100 unions and more than 110,000 members in California. She was also Executive Director of Working Partnerships USA, a coalition of community groups, and labor and faith organizations working to address economic disparities in California’s Silicon Valley. She also served as the CEO of the anti-poverty organization Green For All.

Over the course of her career, Phaedra has been recognized for her leadership. She was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, Essence for their 25 Most Influential African Americans, Ebony for their Power 150, The Grio for their 100 History Makers in the Making, Black Enterprise for their 40 Next: Emerging Leaders for Our Future and San Jose Magazine named her one of the 100 most powerful people in Silicon Valley. Phaedra serves on the boards of Honor and Tipping Point.

Arlan Hamilton, founder at Backstage Capital and Runner, is a serial entrepreneur, author and master multi-tasker.

She founded Backstage Capital in 2015 to invest in founders who are people of color, women and/or LGBTQ. Since its founding, Backstage has raised nearly $30 million and invested in 200 startups led by underestimated founders. Arlan is also the founder of Runner, a startup that connects outstanding operations talent with inclusive companies.

Arlan published her book, “It’s About Damn Time,” in 2020, detailing her journey from homelessness to venture capital. Arlan also hosts podcasts “Your First Million” and “Demystifying Faith,” and is the executive producer on “The Valley,” a daily soap opera that is like “General Hospital” but for the tech industry.

Arlan is a big proponent of paying it forward and supporting other underestimated people in the tech industry and beyond. She’s a limited partner in funds at Collab Capital, Ganas Ventures, Lightship Capital, RareBreed Ventures and several others. Meanwhile, Arlan and her mother, Mrs. Earline Butler-Sims, founded a scholarship program for Black students at Oxford University and HBCU Dillard University.

Brenda Darden Wilkerson is a pioneering thought leader and an advocate for access, opportunity, and social justice for underrepresented communities in technology. She currently serves as the President and CEO of AnitaB.org, a global organization that connects, inspires, and strives for greater equality for women technologists in business, academia, and government. Her work includes connecting communities worldwide to enable women and non-binary technologists to advance and succeed in tech as well as the organizations where they learn, work, invest and gain funding to create cultures conducive to mutual success. Having a passion for education equity, she founded the original Computer Science for All program, building computer science classes into the curriculum for every student in the Chicago Public Schools, and served as the inspiration for the Obama administration’s national CS For All initiatives.

Bonin Bough is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Group Black, and co-founder of Lockstep Ventures. His work aims to dramatically transform the face of investment and media ownership through his commitment to diversity and inclusion. Bough is one of the foremost-awarded marketing executives in the industry. As one of the youngest C-suite executives at a Fortune 50 company, he has worked for billion-dollar CPG brands including Mondelez and PepsiCo. He has been responsible for some of the most successful organization transformations and the rapid growth of some of the world’s most-loved billion-dollar brands including Oreo, Cadbury’s, Gatorade and Frito-Lay. He has been inducted into the Advertising Hall of Achievement. He can also be found in lists such as Fortune’s “40 under 40”, Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business, Ebony’s Power 100, and The Internationalist’s Internationalists of the Year. He is also an author and a CNBC television host.

Beatrice Dixon is the CEO, Co-Founder, and Chief Innovation Officer of The Honey Pot Company, the vulva and vaginal wellness brand “made by humans with vaginas, for humans with vaginas.” Beatrice created The Honey Pot Company in 2014 out of great personal need during an eight month battle with bacterial vaginosis. The constant symptoms and fruitless search for solutions led her to formulate what became The Honey Pot Company’s first product, a vulva-safe wash. From that product, Beatrice has grown The Honey Pot Company into a plant-derived feminine hygiene powerhouse, intent on providing humans with vaginas a healthy alternative to feminine care made with powerful and efficacious ingredients.