Community & Guest List

Kate is the founder and CEO of People First Content. She has a PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Tulsa and has been writing web content for over a decade. She loves working with business owners and company leaders to develop content strategies that will create a lasting impact.

Kari Warberg Block, an unlikely disruptor, challenged an industry that by its very nature is toxic. As the Founder & CEO of EarthKind, Kari discovered that 98% of pest control solutions sold were poison & kill methods – so she set out to invent a better solution: plant-based pest control powered by nature. Kari was the first to develop, manufacture, and commercialize poison-free rodent and insect repellents for farm and home use, with a mission to build a purpose led company to create change through business. Once a mom on food stamps Kari started EarthKind with nothing more than a package of garden seeds and a vision, and has built it into $20 million company. Kari was selected as an Ernst & Young “Entrepreneurial Winning Women,” and has gone from being a part of her local homemakers club to advising the SBA, Congress and the White House on policy that impacts women in business. She has been featured in CNBC, the New York Times, Huffington Post and Forbes.

Katherine McGraw Patterson, known as KP, is a brand and business strategist who works with small businesses and entrepreneurs to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. A fourth-generation entrepreneur, KP started her first business in Hong Kong in 1999. Since then, she's helped businesses here in the US, Canada, and across the world build actionable strategies that results in revenue growth, increased clarity and focus, and greater satisfaction in their operations. KP is the founder of WEBO Network, a professional development and networking group for women entrepreneurs and business owners and is the author of a new book on networking, "Lunching with Lions: Strategist for the Networking-Averse" that helps professionals in all industries identify the right groups and connections to achieve their professional and business goals.

Keri Gans is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Certified Yoga Teacher, and author of The Small Change Diet, a Shape Magazine Advisory Board Member and blogger for US News & World Report. The Keri Report, her own weekly blog and newsletter, helps to convey her no-nonsense and fun approach to living a healthy lifestyle. Gans is a sought-after nutrition expert and has conducted thousands of interviews worldwide. Her expertise has been featured in media outlets such as, Glamour, Shape, Self, Women’s Health, The Dr. Oz Show, ABC News, PIX11 Morning Show, Good Morning America, and FOX Business. She lives in NYC and East Hampton with her husband Bart, and is a huge dog lover, Netflix aficionado and martini enthusiast.

Keshav Pingali is CEO and co-founder of Katana Graph, a high-performance scale-out graph processing, AI and analytics company, which extracts actionable insights from massive unstructured datasets. Keshav holds the W.A."Tex" Moncrief Chair of Computing at the University of Texas at Austin, and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.