Kevin Maney is a bestselling author, award-winning columnist, and founding partner at Category Design Advisors (CDA).

His critically-acclaimed book, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, introduced business to the idea of category design and has sold more than 250,000 copies worldwide. As a founding partner of CDA, Maney has helped leadership teams at hundreds of companies all over the world focus their strategic thinking through category design.

Maney’s most recent book is his first novel, Red Bottom Line. Set in Moscow in 1991, it’s based on his reporting as a journalist covering the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Maney’s most recent business book is Intended Consequences: How to Build Market-Leading Companies with Responsible Innovation, co-authored with Hemant Taneja, managing director of VC firm General Catalyst. Maney and Taneja also collaborated on UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, out in 2021, and Unscaled: How AI and a New Generation of Upstarts Are Creating the Economy of the Future. They are now at work on a fourth book.

Maney co-authored, with TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadive, The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future...Just Enough. Merging brain science and computer science, it was a 2011 New York Times bestseller, and anticipated much of the conversation we’re now having about artificial intelligence.

Maney also co-wrote Making the World Work Better, which marked IBM’s centennial in 2001. More than 600,000 copies are in print in a dozen languages. His other books include Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't, The Maverick

and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and the Making of IBM and Megamedia Shakeout.

Maney has been a contributor to Newsweek, Fortune, The Atlantic, Fast Company, CNN and ABC News, among other media outlets. He was a contributing editor at Conde Nast Portfolio during its brief run from 2007 to 2009. For 22 years, Maney was a columnist, editor and reporter at USA Today.

He’s appeared frequently on television and radio, including CBS Sunday Morning and NPR, and lectures at conferences and universities, including New York University, UNC in Chapel Hill, and his alma mater, Rutgers.

Kevin lives in New York, and plays music with other New York rockers in a band called Total Blam Blam.

Christopher Lochhead is a 14-time #1 bestselling Amazon author, #1 charting Apple business podcaster, top 5 business newsletter creator, former 3X public tech company CMO, who is best known as a "godfather" of Category Design. 

He coAuthored the first two books on management discipline Category Design, Play Bigger and Niche Down. He's coCreator of mini-book newsletter on Category Design, Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️ and the Category Pirates Series of Amazon books. Recently he CoAuthored #1 bestsellers "The 22 Laws of Category Design" and "Snow Leopard: How Legendary Writers Create A Category Of One".

He's an occasional contributor to Harvard Business Review and is embarrassed about being published in a bunch of (now mostly a joke) legacy analog media outlets.

Christopher Lochhead | Follow Your Different is a leading Real Dialogue Business podcast and Lochhead on Marketing is a Leading Marketing & category design podcast

Lochhead is a dyslexic paperboy from Montreal who got thrown out of school at 18. With few other options, he became an entrepreneur, then three-time Silicon Valley public company CMO (Mercury Interactive, Scient, Vantive) and an investor / advisor to over 50 venture-backed startups. 

The Marketing Journal calls him, “one of the best minds in marketing”, NBA Legend Bill Walton calls him a “quasar” and The Economist calls him, “off putting to some" and some podcast reviewers think he is "over-rated" and "not worth it".

Podcaster Neil Pearlberg calls Follow Your Different, "the worst business podcast" and Podcast Magazine calls Follow Your Different, "the best business podcast".

He believes if you're lucky enough to make it to the top of a mountain, you should throw down a rope. So that's what he's trying to do.

Al Ramadan is a co-founding partner at Play Bigger Advisors. He has been a CEO, entrepreneur, operating executive and sailing technologist.

Al co-founded Quokka Sports, which pioneered data-intensive sports immersion on the Internet and revolutionized the way people experienced sport. He then joined Macromedia -- and Adobe, after Adobe acquired Macromedia -- where he spent almost ten years changing the way people think about great digital experiences on the Web and on then-new mobile devices. At Adobe, Al led teams that created the Rich Internet Applications category and helped develop the discipline of experience design.

Al started his career as a mathematician and software engineer -- an old-school data scientist. He cut his teeth writing Fortran 77 on a VAX 11/780 and still writes the odd piece of Python code. In the '80s he built real time analytics engines for big steel manufacturers and brewing companies. In the early '90s he applied data science to Australia's Americas Cup -- an innovation in sports performance analytics. His work in sailing led directly to the idea for Quokka.

Al loves the outdoors and remote expeditions. He has hiked the John Muir Trail, sailed in the Sydney / Hobart yacht race, surfed Mavericks, lived on remote atolls in the Pacific and Indian oceans and can often be found bombing back country lines around Tahoe on a split board. He is also a mentor, father and favorite uncle to an ever-growing circle of next-generation superstars.

Dave Peterson has been an entrepreneur, chief marketing officer, master of execution, and category designer.

Dave grew up on an Iowa farm and started his career in a marketing agency. He then sold all of his belongings and drove to Silicon Valley to try to succeed in business while carrying few expectations that he would. He landed at CRM software company Vantive, then did a tour of duty as head of communications at Mercury Interactive, and was CMO at Aggregate Knowledge and Coverity. He co-founded -- and eventually mercifully killed -- his own start-up called GiveMeTalk!

Dave (apparently) loves crashing his mountain bike on Northern California trails, avoiding trees on his snowboard, traveling to non-predictable places with his adopted brothers and friends, and learning new things from his daughter every day.