KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
Shark Tank Success Stories: Behind the Pitch — A Candid Conversation With Successful Founders

Nicole Denise Phillip is a Brand Intelligence Strategist and founder of CoAgency, where she helps coaches, consultants, and online service experts turn clarity into consistent conversion. Through her Intelligence Pillars framework — Business Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, Capital Intelligence, and Well-Being Intelligence — Nicole equips leaders to scale without burnout by aligning their messaging, automation, systems, and capacity. With over a decade of experience in brand positioning, business development, and strategic advisory, Nicole is known for helping high-capacity entrepreneurs eliminate confusion, install intelligent systems, and build businesses that support their life instead of competing with it. Her work bridges the gap between calling and conversion, strategy and sustainability, visibility and profitability. When Nicole speaks, audiences leave with clarity, conviction, and a framework they can immediately implement.

Dr. Juan Salinas is the founder and CEO of Perfect Life Nutrition Inc, the manufacturer of P-nuff Crunch Snacks, a Navy Bean and Peanut-based protein puff snack. A native of Honduras and now a resident of New Jersey, he holds a Masters and PhD in Food Science from Rutgers University, a Diploma in Sports Nutrition from the International Olympic Committee and is Certified IBS diet nutritionist from the Monash Institute. He started the company after spending over 20 years working as a snack innovator and product developer for several of the largest CPG food companies in the US. Combined with his passion for health and fitness, and experience as a professional natural bodybuilder and amateur endurance athlete, he is on a quest to create snacks that are not only delicious but also nutritious. Dr. Juan was the 1st place winner of the 2018 Rutgers Business School Annual Business Plan Competition and he was featured on ABC Shark Tank where he obtained investment from Mark Cuban. He has been a guest in numerous podcasts, a regular lecturer in entrepreneurship, and his products have been featured on Telemundo, NBC, the TODAY SHOW, and FOX network TV. Dr Juan has also launched his own Fitness & Diet program which compiles all the practical and academic, nutrition and exercise learnings from his past 30 years.

Vladislav (Vlad) Smolyanskyy is a Ukrainian-born entrepreneur, Shark Tank veteran, and AI innovator whose journey took him from a teenage immigrant in Brooklyn with no contacts or capital to pitching his business on national television. At 18 he co-founded Pinblock: a modular STEM construction toy built around a patented pin-based system designed to spark open-ended creativity, spatial thinking, and hands-on building in a screen-dominated world. He took that vision to ABC’s Shark Tank Season 8, stepping into one of the toughest consumer categories with over $160,000 in sales already under his belt, and showed the world what it means to pitch under pressure, defend your vision, and keep moving when the path gets hard. Today, Vlad builds at the intersection of entrepreneurship and applied AI. What sets him apart is simple: he learned every skill by hand before AI existed, and now he’s teaching AI to do all of it for him. That shift unlocked everything. He’s relaunching Pinblock with an AI twist (Pinblock IO), developing an AI replica of himself capable of launching and growing brands, and helping everyone (from bootstrapped businesses to Buddhist temples) rapid-prototype AI in their own operations. As someone who built everything from scratch before AI existed and is now automating it all, Vlad delivers rare, battle-tested insight into what’s actually possible for launching or scaling businesses in 2026.