Food is Health:
Dramatic Advances in Nutritional Science

CEO, iSelect Fund

Carter Williams has spent his entire career working on innovation. First as a young engineer at McDonnell Douglas, next in his leadership roles at Boeing managing R&D and starting Boeing Ventures, and later as a successful entrepreneur and venture investor. Through his career, he has directly managed investments of more than $600 million in early-stage ventures and corporate research, resulting in several billion dollars of new product revenues. As part of Boeing Phantom Works, Carter led Boeing’s technology planning process, involving all aspects of internal and external technology development and manufacturing research. This eventually led to his role in founding and managing Boeing Ventures. After Boeing, he was President of Gridlogix, initially a small struggling four person startup that grew over three years, selling successfully to Johnson Controls in October 2008.

Prior to leading iSelect, Carter served as Senior Managing Director at Progress Partners, an energy and technology investment banking firm, and was a Managing Partner at Open Innovation Ventures and a Director at Clayton Capital Partners. Carter is the past President and Founder of the MIT Corporate Venturing Consortium and Co-founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Society. He has an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Executive Director, Crusonia on the Delta
Executive Producer, Crusonia on the Delta FOOD IS HEALTH Forum

Paul has spent his entire career focused on identifying, analyzing, explaining, investing in and helping build ground-breaking business models whether as a journalist, award-winning equity analyst, director of research, producer, angel investor, teacher or head of a non-profit. Paul conceives and creates high-profile and profitable live content events that identify and define new communities of interest and showcase the wealth of talent and innovation blossoming within them. He has also worked with numerous cities and regions helping them to successfully leverage compelling Live Content events as meaningful drivers of regional economic development.

Prior to helping establish Crusonia on the Delta, a Memphis-based non-profit built on the premise that Food is Health, Paul spent over five years as Executive Director of Development at ForbesLIVE. During his tenure, Paul conceived, launched and built three of Forbes’ most successful Live Content franchises: Reinventing America, Forbes Impact Investing Summit, and most notably, the Forbes AgTech Summit.

Earlier in his career, Paul spent 13 years on Wall Street as an award-winning Equity Analyst and Director of Research and was a Founding Member of Hambrecht & Quist’s seminal Internet Research Group which helped define and finance Internet 1.0. Prior to Wall Street, Paul was a Journalist and helped launched the Internet’s first trade publication: Inter@ctive Week.