Julia Hubbel
Award-winning Entrepreneur
Julia Hubbel is an award-winning entrepreneur, international professional speaker, seminar leader and prize-winning journalist specializing in the art of communications and connections.
Julia is a disabled, decorated Vietnam Era veteran who served as a journalist and television producer-director in the Army, and Chief of Military Protocol for the Jimmy Carter Presidential Inaugural in 1977.
In 1983 Julia hitchhiked solo around Australia, New Zealand and the Fiji Islands, learned how to fly ultralights and scuba dived the Great Barrier Reef. An adventure traveler, she has summited Kilimanjaro,completed the Inca Trail, the Everest Base Camp climb all over the age of sixty. She rides horses from Argentina to Iceland, paraglides, river rafts and kayaks from Croatia to the San Juan Islands. She has skydived 130 times and flown base on a twelve man star skydiving formation. She is a bodybuilder and cyclist, and an avid football fan. She admits to failing miserably at inline skating at age 61.
In 1997, Julia created a diverse network of top-level professional women in the Inland Northwest, using her model for establishing relationships. The Hubbel Group became a voice for professional women from all backgrounds and spun off companies, partnerships and lasting friendships. The remarkable story of The Hubbel Group is profiled in the bestselling book Networking Magic.
She has spent three decades in senior corporate and consulting positions in the areas of training and organizational development in America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Her clients include Dell Computer, Southern California Edison, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Intel, Chevron, Hewlett Packard, Bank of America, Delphi, Cisco Systems, Qwest, Exxon, Schering Plough, MassMutual, Sodexo, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, and Tyco International.
Julia is the author of the multiple prizewinning book WordFood: How We Feed or Starve Our Relationships, a radically new look at how we communicate and use words as food for each other. She is also the author of Tackling the Titans, How to Sell to the Fortune 500, a handbook for diverse, women and veteran owned businesses who want to sell to American’s largest corporations. Titans has also won honors for its value to the supplier community.
Julia holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Communications and Public Relations from American University in Washington, DC. She is an ISM Certified Professional in Supplier Diversity.
Diversity Plus Magazine named her one of 2012 Top 25 Most Powerful Women Impacting Diversity.
Currently Julia is working on two more books, WordFood Exchange and a book about her favorite travel stories, including the one about the gaucho who set her underwear on fire.
Ann Mukherjee
President, Global Snacks Group and PepsiCo Global Insights
Ann (Anindita) Mukherjee is president, Global Snacks Group and PepsiCo Global Insights. She is responsible for driving accelerated growth across the global snacks category, as well transforming the PepsiCo insights capability to drive demand driven foresights and predictive analytics to drive marketing and commercial decisions. Finally she is responsible for creating transformative commercial marketing capabilities to develop and prepare PepsiCo’s marketing talent to win in a dynamic and increasingly complex global marketplace.
In its global portfolio of food and beverage brands, PepsiCo has 22 different brands that generate more than $1 billion each in annual retail sales. With net revenues of over $66 billion, PepsiCo’s main businesses also make hundreds of other enjoyable foods and beverages that are respected household names throughout the world.
Ann was formerly senior vice president, chief marketing officer of Frito-Lay North America. An accomplished storyteller and motivational leader, Ann led a commercial marketing team responsible for the growth agenda at Frito-Lay, including Portfolio Brand Strategy, Brand Marketing, Advertising, Customer/Shopper Marketing, Insights, Demand Analytics, Innovation and Marketing Services. She led a team that woke up every day focused on achieving her challenge to lead the company’s growth agenda and “Transform Tomorrow Today.” By perfecting the Art of Disruptive Marketing and the Science of Demand Analytics, Frito-Lay marketing not only wins awards, but has also been a primary growth driver helping Frito-Lay consistently rank #1 or #2 in food and beverage growth.
Ann started her career at PepsiCo in Frito-Lay’s Convenience Foods Division in 2005 where she was responsible for leading marketing, new product innovation, consumer insights, and strategy and for all Quaker branded snacking. She was named Forbes Top 50 Most Influential CMOs in 2014, Ad Age Women to Watch, and Brand Week Marketer of the Year.
Prior to PepsiCo, Ann worked in Brand Management and Marketing at Kraft and Citibank. She started her career working on new product development for Citibank Diners Club, and then moved to Kraft where she worked for 11 years on several brands including Kraft Mac ‘N Cheese, Kraft Singles, Taco Bell, Minute Rice, Stove Top Stuffing, Velveeta and DiGiorno. Ann was born in Kolkata, India, and is very active with the Indian community in Dallas, currently serving as honorary chair of Chetna, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping South Asian women overcome domestic violence.
Ann is based in Plano, Texas and travels globally to stay close to the markets and consumers she serves. Her husband, Dipu, also works for PepsiCo in Frito-Lay’s Go-To-Market team and both of them are also very busy raising 13-year-old twins. They are passionate about their friends and both love to travel, entertain and cook.
Dan Price
Founder and CEO, Gravity Payments
Founder and CEO, Dan Price, started Gravity Payments from his dorm room after witnessing thousands of hard-working small business owners being overcharged and underserved by their credit card processors. His goal was simple: Level the playing field by making processing and financial services fair for community business owners. Over 12,000 independent businesses across all 50 states trust Gravity to save them millions in fees and hours in frustration by making it easy and simple for them to accept payments.
Dan built Gravity Payments with a values-based philosophy in mind. Rather than confusing community business owners with industry jargon or hidden fees, Gravity practices honesty, transparency and doing business with integrity. These simple values have set Gravity Payments apart from many other processors, making Gravity the most trusted name in the payments industry.
Gravity Payments is headquartered in Seattle, with a dozen field markets from Hawaii to St. Louis. Dan was honored by President Obama with the 2010 SBA National Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and was Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Entrepreneur of 2014”. His most recent bold action raised Gravity’s minimum wage to $70,000 to provide his team a better quality of life and improve on the success of his clients.
David Suzuki
Co-Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, Award-Winning Scientist, Environmentalist and Broadcaster
David Suzuki, Co-Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster. He is renowned for his radio and television programs that explain the complexities of the natural sciences in a compelling, easily understood way.
Dr. Suzuki is a geneticist. He graduated from Amherst College (Massachusetts) in 1958 with an Honours BA in Biology, followed by a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961. He held a research associateship in the Biology Division of Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Lab (1961 – 62), was an Assistant Professor in Genetics at the University of Alberta (1962 – 63), and since then has been a faculty member of the University of British Columbia. He is now Professor Emeritus at UBC.
In 1972, he was awarded the E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship for the outstanding research scientist in Canada under the age of 35 and held it for three years. He has won numerous academic awards and holds 25 honourary degrees in Canada, the U.S. and Australia. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and is a Companion of the Order of Canada. Dr. Suzuki has written 52 books, including 19 for children. His 1976 textbook An Introduction to Genetic Analysis(with A.J.F. Griffiths), remains the most widely used genetics text book in the U.S.and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Greek, Indonesian, Arabic, French and German.
Dr. Suzuki has received consistently high acclaim for his thirty years of award-winning work in broadcasting. In 1974 he developed and hosted the long running popular science program Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio for four years. He has since presented two influential documentary CBC radio series on the environment,It’s a Matter of Survival and From Naked Ape to Superspecies. His national television career began with CBC in 1971 when he wrote and hosted Suzuki on Science. He was host of Science Magazine (1974 – 79) then created and hosted a number of television specials, and in 1979 became the host of the award-winning series, The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. He has won four Gemini Awards as best host of different Canadian television series. His eight part television series, A Planet for the Taking, won an award from the United Nations. His eight partBBC/PBS series, The Secret of Life, was praised internationally, as was his five part series The Brain for the Discovery Channel. On June 10, 2002 he received the John Drainie Award for broadcasting excellence.
Dr. Suzuki is also recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology. He is the recipient of UNESCO’s Kalinga Prize for Science, the United Nations Environment Program Medal, UNEPs Global 500 and in 2009 won the Right Livelihood Award that is considered the Alternative Nobel Prize.