Amy Charity is a Colorado native, born in Fort Collins and now living in Steamboat Springs. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, Amy began her career in financial services. At the age of 34, she left the financial industry to pursue her passion and a career in professional road cycling. Amy went on to race all over the world at the highest level of the sport. She was a member of the U.S. National Team, holds a national title in the Team Time Trial, and raced in the World Championships.
Charity is the co-founder and owner of SBT GRVL, a world-class gravel race held annually in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and a partner in FNLD GRVL, a new gravel race and experience premiering in Lahti, Finland in June 2023.
Russell Cree is a managing partner at Bell Lap Advisors in Bend, Oregon, an M&A firm that exclusively works in the outdoor recreation and active lifestyle industries. Cree has extensive experience with cycling transactions, successfully completing deals with Specialized, SRAM, and PON Holdings. He recently represented Kona Bikes in their sale to Kent Outdoors and XtraCycle in their sale to Priority Bikes. He is a lifelong cyclist himself, and perhaps one of the only investment bankers to hold a professional racing license from USA Cycling for over a decade in his younger days.
Greg Gausewitz is senior manager of product sustainability at REI, where he guides the company's efforts to ensure the products they sell align with the co-op’s values and advance sustainability and impact goals. Gausewitz has more than a decade of experience in leading sustainability efforts in a variety of capacities, working in supply chain sustainability at Target and in the tech sector prior to his time at REI.
As the founding CEO of RISE, a breakthrough wellness company, Suneel Gupta helped thousands of people build better habits for life and work. Now, as a bestselling author and Harvard Medical School visiting scholar, Gupta has taken his mission one step further, helping people achieve sustainable peak performance by bolstering emotional resilience and engagement. Answering the question, “How can an organization excel on the outside if its people are exhausted on the inside?” Gupta offers leaders and teams a better way to work — one that results in sustainable innovation, productivity, and fulfillment. He arms people with science-based habits that avoid burnout, boost energy, and improve their professional and personal lives.
Under Gupta’s leadership, RISE was named “App of the Year” and partnered with then first-Lady Michelle Obama before being acquired by the NASDAQ-listed company One Medical Group. In 2022, after an acquisition of One Medical Group, RISE is now part of Amazon.
Gupta is currently the host of Business Class, a docuseries created by American Express where he showcases entrepreneurs and business visionaries who embody struggle and resilience. He is joined on the show by guests like Top Chef's Tom Colicchio, former monk Jay Shetty, and Martha Stewart. When a reporter once asked Gupta about his purpose, his response was to “find good people, and inspire them to do what inspires them.”
Matt Heitmann is a data-driven and customer-obsessed commercial executive with 20 years of international experience in brand development, customer-centric growth marketing, e-commerce and re-commerce sales, and operations. He is skilled in customer acquisition, retention, and reactivation practices that accelerate customer lifetime value (LTV).
Heitmann has an exemplary record of repeated successes in scaling growth during critical business periods including start-up, fundraising, and acquisition, and can point to significant growth and capital raising accomplishments: 300% increase in annual revenues, 100% increase in repeat buyer rate, and partial acquisition by TSG Consumer Partners while serving as chief sales and marketing officer at Canyon Bicycles; 20x e-commerce sales growth and more than $50 million in raised capital while CMO at The Pro’s Closet; and 300% topline growth and acquisition by Backcountry.com while director of sales and marketing at Competitive Cyclist.
Previously, Heitmann has worked with BMC Switzerland as global head of marketing, brand, and communications as well as global head of growth marketing. He also served as CMO of USA Cycling and has been a frequent advisor to private equity and management consulting firms.
Between 2008 and 2009, he closely advised a private donor and the City of New York on an indoor velodrome project which resulted in a $40 million grant, the largest private grant ever extended to New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation. In July 2022, Matt joined SIGNA Sports United as CMO of its North American bike division.
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Lisa Picard has more than 30 years of experience developing, leading, and managing complex real estate investments. She is a driving force in progressive thinking and strategies for value in capital-intensive industries. She is keenly focused on technology driving human potential, particularly in this age of rapid change.
Picard joined EQ/Blackstone in late 2016 as COO and quickly became CEO in 2017. She immediately worked to re-shape the organization and office market to have greater relevance to the shifting workforce needs.
Prior to joining EQ, Picard worked as a real estate executive for Skanska, developing office and residential properties while also guiding investments for the company in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. At Canyon Ranch Spa and Resorts, Picard drove the expansion of the experiential hotel brand in developing a multi-towered residential hotel spa destination in Miami, Florida. Her career has touched more than 7 million square feet of ground-up development valued in excess of $6 billion.
Picard holds two master's degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She has lectured at MIT and the University of Washington on visioning, technology, design thinking, mindful leadership, real estate innovation, and understanding risk in changing markets. She also serves on the board of directors of MiiR, a product-to-project B corporation, and Honest Buildings, a prop-tech capital management platform for real estate owners.
Dustin Robertson is an experienced executive with more than two decades of experience in B2C e-commerce and B2B SaaS focused on leveraging digital strategies to create winning brands. Highlights from his career include building backcountry.com, turning around Vegas.com for a successful exit, and subsequently moving into SaaS to build the e-commerce CRM (ECRM) category at Drip.
Robertson has built brands from the ground up and pivoted brands to better align their go-to-market strategy with the needs of their target audience. As a pioneer in digital marketing, he’s been entrenched in data his entire career and has always embraced measurement to guide the revenue-acceleration strategies he implements, resulting in repeatable, measurable, and sustained growth.
From mass-media awareness campaigns to conversion-focused demand marketing, performance measurement is ingrained in everything he does. On a personal level, Robertson is an avid learner and passionate about helping others. During the past twenty years, he’s most grateful for the opportunities he’s had to build and lead amazing teams while honing both his business and leadership skills.
Bonnie Tu has served as chairperson of Giant Group since January 2017. After joining Giant Group in 1978 as general managing assistant, Tu later became the company’s purchasing and finance manager, then finance director. In 1994, she helped take Giant Group public on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. In 1999, she was promoted to the simultaneous roles of executive vice president and chief financial officer, where she single-handedly managed the company’s operational development and global financial strategy.
In 2008, after she was unable to find a bike and gear that fit properly as she prepared to ride the Tour of Taiwan, Tu founded Liv, the only comprehensive cycling brand committed solely to women. Since then, Liv has put 100% of its resources, focus, and commitment toward engineering bikes and gear that optimize the ride experience for women and offering them more product options.
A foreign language graduate of Tamkang University, Tu has dedicated her career to getting more women on bikes and her efforts have been widely recognized — in 2020, Cyclingnews named her one of the 50 most influential people in the cycling industry.
Matt Tucker, director of client development at the NPD Group, empowers brands and retailers to collaborate, better service their customers, respond to trends, and leverage insights to drive growth. He offers industry expertise on retail and consumer trends across sports equipment categories, including cycling, outdoor, team sports, and fitness.
Tucker joined NPD in 2019 following the acquisition of SportsOneSource’s SSI Data sports and outdoor tracking business. He has a B.A. in Communication Studies from West Chester University of Pennsylvania and uses his experience in medical research and data analytics to make a positive impact on the retail and sports industries.
