Keynoted by Basketball Hall of Famer and San Diego Sport Innovators (SDSI) Executive Chairman Bill Walton, SDSI will present the first ever panel on April 2, 2019, honoring several of San Diego’s premier Innovators, for a fascinating look into the hurdles and rewards that come along with the disruptive forces of brand creation.

Moderator: Denise Lee Yohn is the go-to expert on brand leadership for national media outlets, an in-demand speaker and consultant, and an influential writer.Denise is the author of the bestselling book What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest (Jossey-Bass), the e-book Extraordinary Experiences: What Great Retail and Restaurant Brands Do, and the new book FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World's Greatest Companies (Nicholas Brealey/Hachette Books).

Confirmed Panelists: Steve Lake - co-founder and president of Sector 9 skateboards. His journey from backyard start-up to an industry leader began while attending SDSU. He is a serial entrepreneur with passion for taking the road less traveled, his determination and adventurous spirit helped establish and build the longboard niche within the skateboard market. Scott Tilton - A born entrepreneur, Scott invested everything as a child into his first passion…competing in sports. Shortly after college in 2001, his former life as an athlete interconnected with a natural business sense and SponsorHouse was born. The original mission was simple…support and connect athletes with sponsors through the ‘Internet’…the first concept of its kind. That vision later evolved into Hookit, which pioneered the sponsorship technology and analytics space (Spontech). Today, Hookit aggregates billions of data points from social and digital platforms and uses machine learning and predictive analytics to provide real-time insights and valuations for brands and properties to quantify and maximize their sponsorships. Beaver Theodosakis - In 1984 Beaver and two friends, Mark and Brian Simo created lifestyle apparel brands Life’s A Beach and Bad Boy Club which achieved a cult-like status with action sports youth. 10 years later they launched Spy Optics. In 1993, he and his wife Pam, started prAna in their Carlsbad garage, an apparel brand catering to active and environmentally conscious consumers. Five years ago, the couple sold prAna to Columbia Sportswear and now Beav spends much of his time mentoring young entrepreneurs. He serves on the board of the Outdoor Foundation—with the sole mission to inspire kids to create a healthy habit of recreating in the outdoors. Mitch Thrower - Founder and Chairman of Events.com, an innovative cloud-based Event Management Platform provider that provides a state of the art mobile-first SaaS application that enables the full event life-cycle, connecting event organizers and event goers. Thrower also serves as Chairman of The La Jolla Foundation, a 501c3 foundation whose primary initiative is Project Active, providing funding, mentoring, encouragement and education to areas of world tension. Specifically — sending sports equipment to children in war zones. Thrower is Co-Founded of active.com (The Active Network, Inc.). He also launched ActiveEurope.com (Active Europe Network) as Co-Founder and CEO. Active went public before selling to Vista for 1.05 billion.

Thank you to our generous event sponsors: