Mellena was the Lead Researcher on Africa at the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship, the world's leading organization on entrepreneurship and education with $2 billion dollars under management. She leveraged her expertise in architecture, mobile financial services and venture capital to advise the senior leadership team on entrepreneurship/innovation in international emerging markets and growth of cities. Mellena completed the National Science Foundation DC I-Corps program and currently serves as the Brand Ambassador for Washington D.C. where she works to foster relationships between the District and global cities. In 2014, she was selected to participate in President Barack Obama's inaugural Africa Business Summit in Washington D.C. and has been featured in Bloomberg Philanthropies, Sky News, and Geektime.

Mellena holds degrees in Architecture from the University of Virginia and an MBA from Darden Graduate School of Business. At Darden, she co-founded CaseSense, a multimedia company which provided audio business education materials to MBA students. She was also a visiting lecturer on mobile innovation in emerging markets at Darden.

Jonathan is an economist with expertise in machine learning, development and international finance and recently a co-awardee of the Big Data Innovation Challenge at the World Bank. He was previously the Managing Director of Research, Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago and an analyst at RCF Economic and Financial Consulting. He also worked with Nobel Laureate John Nash. His work has been featured in Fast Company, Bloomberg, The Economist, and The Atlantic CityLab.

He was a visiting lecturer in the Department of Economics at Wellesley College, and holds degrees from The University of Chicago, The University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, and Boston University.