As the Founder of Kena, Freedom is a strong advocate of decentralized marketplaces powered by AI, where no single entity controls the economics of the marketplace. As a serial entrepreneur with 2 successful startups in the past and after 25 years in high-tech research and Artificial Intelligence, and performing executive roles in multi-billion dollar unicorns, Freedom invested a fortune over the last 3 years to build Kena. Freedom is an avid Guitar player inspired by old-school metal such as Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and the likes. He composes music in Rock, Metal, and Blues genres. He is proud to build and pioneer the first AI-powered, asset-backed, decentralized marketplace in Music at Kena. Freedom believes that the unparalleled crypto-tokenomics of Kena will create a new-age asset that helps creators to gain control and build wealth along with their art!

Mikey Schwartz is a Founding Engineer and a musician with a passion for merging the two disciplines into one. He cites his interest in music artificial intelligence as the reason why he joined the field of AI and data science in the first place. From there, joining Kena was a no-brainer! In addition to working with Kena, Mikey is a multi-instrumentalist, performing and recording largely as a saxophonist. His favorite album is Hiatus Kaiyote's "Choose Your Weapon."

Mike Bostedt is a Founding Engineer at Kena. He started learning piano at a young age and quickly fell in love with playing music scores from his favorite movies. At Kena, he strives to enable musicians worldwide to learn and earn using the Kena Platform. In his free time, Mike enjoys the local music scene. His favorite music venue is The Baked Potato in Studio City.

Hang Black is a seasoned technology leader with expertise in sales, marketing, and engineering. As Vice President of Global Revenue Enablement at Juniper Networks, Hang’s mission is to supercharge the performance of the company’s salesforce and partner communities. With a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, Hang began her career as a process engineer at Advanced Micro Devices and has since added product management, marketing, and sales to her skill set from Cisco Systems, Gigamon, and 8x8. As an entrepreneur, Hang was nicknamed “Black Ops” for the cutting-edge solutions she offered to her clients. A multi-national keynote speaker on sales, leadership, and a passionate advocate for women in the workplace, her Wall Street Journal Bestselling book, Embrace Your Edge, was released in January 2021.

A renowned global investor, David has built a portfolio of startups across the world with many of them focused on social impact, and has served as a board member and advisor. Winner of numerous accolades, he was named among the “Top 10 Investors And Investment Companies To Follow In 2022” in the International Business Times, was awarded Global Impact Champion 2020-2021 by India Needs You (INY), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. He has spoken at many prestigious venues worldwide, including being a panelist at the Nobel Peace Center during Nobel Prize Week, keynoting on impact investing for a United Nations Association (Young Professionals) event, and presenting at the annual global meeting of the independent, international think tank Horasis. More info is on his website DavidHamiltonNichols.com and on social media @davidhnichols.

Niki Gastinel is EPM for Commerce Engineering at Apple. Niki is a tech veteran with 20 years in Silicon Valley building software and big data platforms. She is a community builder, heading CSPA.com, a 501(c)3 for innovation, entrepreneurship, and leadership. She is an innovator, an angel investor, and a mentor at Bay Angels.

Hemant is an experienced sr executive and a leader in software engineering. Hemant brings 30 years of technology leadership in software and loves building products that bring joy to people or make their day-to-day work a little easier. He has enjoyed working in different domains like capital markets, pharmaceutical drug development, advertising, and education.

Quyenzi is a leader in brand and multi-cultural marketing with over 20 years of experience. Quyenzi has held Executive Titles in Advertising, Business Development, and Communications. Her experience began as a Publisher and Experiential Event Producer creating integrated media platforms at indie media companies such as Bluewater Publishing, which led to her being recruited to the Advertising Sales team at media giant, Hearst Corporation. She has led award-winning Marketing and Communications teams for clients including Caesars Entertainment (North America and Canada), Comcast Xfinity, Western Union, Moet Hennessy, The Art Institutes, and more. As the Founder of QR8 Group and a Producer who has pioneered successful media sponsored partnerships, social media creator collaborations, and innovative events (both in real life and on digital platforms) her expertise lies in the ability to ideate strategies and develop approaches that successfully reach both mainstream and multicultural audiences, while being right on target with messaging.

Ranga is an experienced product leader with a growth mindset. He has worked at public and high-growth private companies to bring valuable products such as 4G LTE chipsets, mobile advertising solutions, and data applications to the marketplace.

Keith is a Founder and Managing Partner of Guardian Insight Group, a Technology Risk advisory firm. His clients include Fortune 500 public and private companies and NGOs. Previously, Keith was the Managing Director/Head of Third-Party Risk Management for the Mitsubishi Financial Group (MUFG) and was responsible for ensuring that the Bank had the proper framework, policies, and controls to meet regulatory standards for effective oversight of third parties/vendors. Prior to that Keith held senior leadership roles in M&A Integration, strategic alliances, and vendor management for Cisco, Intuit & Hewlett Packard enterprises. Keith is also the creator and Host of the “Silicon Valley Insider” Radio show and Podcast on 1220AM KDOW Silicon Valley/San Francisco. Keith is an adviser to Fortune 1000 companies, accelerators and startups in emerging technology such as fintech, insurtech, blockchain, IoT, artificial intelligence, UAV/UAS and cyber security. His passion is to be a bridge for companies navigating digital transformation between legacy and new technology.

Jørn Lyseggen is a Norwegian serial entrepreneur, patent inventor, and the founder and Executive Chairman of Meltwater and the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST). In 2016, Lyseggen received The Europa Hall of Fame Award at Europas Awards 2016. In 2017, Lyseggen released the book Outside Insight: Navigating a World Drowning in Data, which is aimed at helping business leaders learn how to implement data-led decisions. In 2019, Lyseggen launched SHACK15, a global community that supports the next generation of entrepreneurs, in San Francisco. SHACK15 is located in San Francisco's iconic Ferry Building with a network of partners and entrepreneurship hubs around the world. In 2021, Lyseggen was named #5 on Digest Africa’s “Top 50 Most Influential People in the African Startup Ecosystem” list for his leadership, mentorship and investment into MEST.

Ganesh is an experienced serial Entrepreneur. He built and sold Opex Analytics, an Enterprise AI firm. Opex is now a part of Coupa Software. He built an Enterprise AI firm that helped some marquee brands (NIKE, McDonald, Unilever, Nordstrom, etc.) build custom AI solutions for some of their hardest operational problems. He has led worldwide sales leadership at IBM providing sales engineering leadership for IBM's ILOG Optimization brand.

David is a founder, product manager and early-stage technology investor with a background in venture capital and law. He has built a career at the intersection of technology and capital formation - from early days at AngelList, to helping scale 500 Startups around the world, leading international products at Carta, and back to AngelList spin-outs CoinList and Republic. David is a community builder and gets a kick out of creating value through making connections. He currently scales as CEO of On Deck (beondeck.com) — "the first place the best people look when thinking about starting or joining a new venture". David is also an angel investor and Network Leader (investor) at Village Global, a $100m early-stage venture capital fund, backed by some of the world's best entrepreneurs.

Rakesh is an experienced technology leader with more than 17 years of experience building engineering and product teams, and high-scale products that impact millions of users (Uber, InMobi). He has worked in both startups and large companies, and been a part of end-to-end organizational development from bootstrapping, raising capital, building teams, developing products, and M&As. Experienced in consumer products, ads, payments, distributed systems, and growing high-performance teams and leaders across distributed sites.

Shiven is a seasoned business development executive with 15 years of experience and has scaled businesses in the domain of Mobile and AdTech. He is also an early-stage investor in several impact-focused startups and believes in strategic early investments at the inception stage. He serves as the Business Development Executive at Amazon in the Publisher Services business.

Pratik is a product lead at Lyft (Ex-Airbnb Growth lead) with about 10 years of product experience in marketplaces. He invests in and advises other marketplaces, and consumer & B2B SaaS companies. Pratik is an active part of the Airbnb angel syndicate, Hustle fund angel squad, and also run product leadership fireside chats at Lyft, where they bring in external product & growth speakers across the industry.

Kieran brings 20 years in program & project management delivering business & technology change at scale. He is experienced in National, European & Global arenas. He has managed large scale M&As with 30+ mergers, acquisitions, and divestment integration deliveries covering TOM, services, systems & staff, and helped management of portfolio, program & projects with values to $100 million.