Filmmaker | Kingdom Studios

Along with his brother, Jon began his career as a teenager working for ESPN as a camera operator in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. Jon worked as a sports cameraman and covered University of Alabama games all over the country and also worked with ESPN College Football Primetime, FOX NFL, and the NBA. In 2002, he founded a production company with his brother, Andrew. Their first ventures were commercials, documentaries and music videos. The brothers soon were directing videos and producing concerts and television programs for platinum recording artists such as Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Casting Crowns, Switchfoot, Skillet and others and received eleven GMA Dove Awards nominations and 3 wins for Music Video of the Year.

Alongside their award-winning music videos, Jon and Andrew have also produced and directed several documentaries. These include the multi-award winning 9/11 story, “The Cross and the Towers”.

In 2010, Jon and Andrew began exclusively developing dramatic feature films. Their features have all opened in the top ten box office on opening weekend and they have received the coveted A+ Cinema Score twice. Their features include OCTOBER BABY, MOMS’ NIGHT OUT, WOODLAWN and the 2018 surprise hit I CAN ONLY IMAGINE, which became the #1 independent film of 2018, earning over $83 million at the box office.

In 2019, Jon and Andrew launched Kingdom Studios, alongside their partners Kevin Downes and Tony Young, with a first-look deal with Lionsgate. The first film from that venture is I STILL BELIEVE, a biopic about CCM megastar Jeremy Camp slated for 3/20/20.

Jon serves as Chief Executive Officer at Kingdom Studios as well as writes and co-directs feature films with Andrew. He is also the author of the upcoming book For Love and Honor, which tells the amazing true story of his grandfather Red Erwin, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor in WWII. It is slated for publication in 2020.

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Co-Founder and CEO | CommonGood Capital

Bio:

Prior to co-founding CommonGood Capital, Jeff Shafer served as a Managing Partner and member of the Executive Team at TriLinc Global, a leading retail-focused impact investing fund sponsor.  At TriLinc, Jeff leveraged his relationships, experience and knowledge to help Broker Dealers, Registered Investment Advisors and family offices meet their clients’ financial goals while also connecting their investment capital with their values and passions through Impact Investing.

Before joining TriLinc, Jeff spent nearly 19 years at CNL,  a leading alternative investment asset manager that has formed or acquired companies with more than $34 billion in assets over its 44 year history.  At CNL, Jeff served in multiple senior leadership roles, and in the role of President, Jeff led the strategic direction for capital raising and product development within CNL’s growing multi-product platform for eight years.  During his time,  Jeff and his team raised nearly $9 billion in capital, including $1.5 billion in 2014 alone, which represented CNL’s highest single-year capital raise in the previous 10 years.

Jeff began his financial industry career at Van Kampen American Capital, a division of Morgan Stanley Group. 

Jeff graduated from Wheaton College with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Biblical Studies. He also received a Master of Business Administration from the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College. In addition to his undergraduate and graduate degrees, Jeff holds the Certified Financial Planner and Chartered Financial Consultant designations, as well as FINRA Series 7, 24, 63 and 79 licenses.

Jeff serves on the board of overseers at the Crummer Graduate School of Business, the board of directors of The Geneva School and the advisory board of National Christian Foundation Orlando. He previously served on the board of directors for the Heart of Florida United Way.

Life:

Jeff and his wife of 20 years, Shelly, settled in Winter Park, Florida, where they love doing life together, whether around the dinner table, at the beach or traveling. When not with his wife and two teenage kids, Jeff enjoys reading non-fiction books, cycling, cheering on his beloved Oregon Ducks, and working on house projects.

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Author | Columnist and Regular Contributor at Forbes

Bio:

Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership. Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics. He worked as an auditor and a tax consultant with Arthur Anderson, as Vice President of the Beechwood Company which is the family office associated with Federated Investors, and has consulted in various privatization efforts for Allegheny County, Pa.

He founded the influential economic think tank, the Allegheny Institute, and has lectured extensively at universities, businesses and civic groups. Jerry has been a member of three investment committees, among which is Benchmark Financial, Pittsburgh’s largest financial services firm. Jerry had been a regular commentator on Fox Business News and Fox News. He was formerly a CNBC Contributor, has guest-hosted The Kudlow Report, and has written for CNBC.com, National Review Online and The Wall Street Journal, as well as many other publications. He is the author of The Bush Boom and more recently The Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide, published by HarperCollins.

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Managing Partner | Collab Capital

Jewel Burks Solomon is an advocate for representation and access in the technology industry. As co-founder of Partpic, a startup designed to streamline the purchase of maintenance and repair parts using computer vision, Jewel and her team built groundbreaking technology poised to change the way people everywhere locate products. Partpic raised over $2 million in seed funding from notable investors like AOL co-founder, Steve Case, and Comcast Ventures, and integrated its software into mobile apps/websites of large parts distributors and retailers. Partpic was acquired by Amazon in late 2016 and the technology now powers visual search for replacement parts in the Amazon Mobile Shopping app. 

Jewel is a proud board member at Goodie Nation and the Harvard Debate Council Diversity Project, and spends much of her free time mentoring startup founders and angel investing. 

Jewel has been featured in notable publications such as Forbes, Wired, TechCrunch, Essence, Glamour, and Business Insider. Prior to founding Partpic, Jewel served in management, enterprise sales, and strategic diversity roles at McMaster-Carr Industrial Supply and Google, Inc. Jewel is a native of Nashville TN, and graduate of Howard University. She is a member of the 2019 Class of Henry Crown Fellows within the Aspen Global Leadership Network at the Aspen Institute. She currently resides in Atlanta, GA with her husband, Zekarias.

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Bitcoin advocate, Developer and Author

Previously working as a software developer in a number of industries, Song joined Monetas, a crypto-finance software company, in 2014. After a one-year stint, Song joined Armory Technologies, an open-source bitcoin wallet management platform, to develop a bitcoin wallet intended for enterprise business. He then became the principal architect for Paxos, a New York-based financial institution and stablecoin issuer.

In January 2018 Song joined Blockchain Capital, a company focused on funding projects based on blockchain technology, as a bitcoin fellow. In 2019 he published “Programming Bitcoin,” a book that aims to teach readers the basics of bitcoin. In addition to his book, he runs a for-profit company, Programming Blockchain, that instructs students around the globe on different techniques to develop bitcoin.

In January 2019, Song began lecturing as a professor of two graduate-level courses at the University of Texas at Austin. He also began serving as an expert witness in certain events involving bitcoin.

Song is well known for arguing that blockchains have limited use cases. More specifically, he has argued that the blockchain’s sole use case is for “sound money” – which is how he characterizes bitcoin. He has been a vocal critic of permissioned blockchains, alternative cryptocurrencies and the argument that Ethereum will decentralize the internet.

Song has made several bets about the future of blockchain with Joseph Lubin, an Ethereum co-founder and the founder of ethereum venture studio ConsenSys.

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