Emotion By Design: Longevity Summit
Emotion by Design
Longevity × Technology × Human Experience
Friday, September 25, 2026 | 5:30–10:00 PM
ERIA Marina | San Francisco
What if living longer could also mean living better?
Emotion by Design brings together leaders across longevity, health, AI, technology, investment, creativity, and human experience to explore one central question:
How can what we design help people live longer, healthier, more meaningful lives?
Technology is rapidly expanding what is possible for human longevity. But lifespan alone is not the whole story. Trust, belonging, resilience, connection, curiosity, joy, and emotional well-being shape the quality of the years we live.
Emotion by Design explores what happens when we begin designing for both.
Through conversation, interactive play, somatic experiences, music, movement, and community, the evening moves beyond talking about well-being and invites us to experience it.
This is not a conference. It is an experience.
5:30 PM — Doors Open
Arrival, check-in, drinks, networking.
6:15 PM — Opening Experience
Blendbound Founder and Hosts. Guided Meditation
6:40 PM — Speaker Introductions
Max Gokhman → AJ Thomas → Kayvan Baroumand → Antonio Forenza → broader group conversation.
7:40 PM — Dance Performance
Indulge into the art of dance and music.
8:00 PM onward — The Experience Opens
DJ, Astrapuff, embodiment/interactive experiences, Nisi Wines tasting, Diana’s business experience, drinks, dancing and socializing all become active.
The Opening
Alyssa Anaya — Embodied Meditation & Facilitator
Alyssa Anaya is a meditation guide, and longtime practitioner of embodied spirituality with more than 20 years of experience exploring the relationship between body, emotion, awareness, and human connection.
Her work invites people beyond the thinking mind and into the intelligence of the body—creating grounded, heart-centered experiences where presence, sensation, and emotion become ways of understanding ourselves more deeply.
At Emotion by Design, Alyssa will open the evening with an embodied meditation designed to help us shift from simply thinking about the human experience to actually experiencing it—arriving fully in the body, awakening the senses, and connecting with the aliveness already within us.
The Conversation
Five perspectives come together to explore what helps humans—and the systems around us—thrive longer.
AJ Thomas — Founder & General Partner, Good Trouble Ventures
AJ Thomas is an investor, futurist, executive coach, and former leader at X, the Moonshot Factory, where she led work in global talent and human-experience design around teams building breakthrough technologies. Today, she is Founder & General Partner of Good Trouble Ventures, an early-stage venture firm investing at the intersection of technology, entertainment, creativity, and cultural transformation.
She is also Founder & CEO of The Troublemaker Lab, where she works with founders and leaders on leadership, culture, and personal transformation. Her career has consistently explored the relationship between the technologies we build and the humans building them—making her perspective particularly relevant to a conversation about designing not only for innovation, but for meaningful human lives.
Max Gokhman, CFA — Head of AI & Digital Asset Solutions, Franklin Templeton
Max Gokhman sits at the frontier where artificial intelligence, investment, and the future of financial systems converge. As Head of AI & Digital Asset Solutions at Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions, he leads the development of AI-powered investment capabilities as well as work involving tokenized assets, crypto-native strategies, and the integration of digital assets into traditional portfolios.
Before taking on his current role, Max served as Deputy CIO at Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions, led global investment research, and previously served as President and CIO of AI-driven asset manager AlphaTrAI and Head of Asset Allocation at Pacific Life Fund Advisors. His academic background in both economics and psychology adds another dimension to his work at the intersection of machines, markets, and human decision-making.
At Emotion by Design, Max brings a critical question to the room: as AI becomes increasingly capable of making decisions for us, what should remain distinctly human?
Antonio Forenza, PhD — Founder & CEO, AWEAR
Antonio Forenza is an inventor, deep-tech entrepreneur, and engineer bringing neuroscience out of the laboratory and into everyday life. He is Founder & CEO of AWEAR, a wearable neurotechnology company developing ways for people to access and understand real-world brain data.
Before turning his attention to brain health, Antonio spent more than two decades developing communications technologies across 3G, 4G, 5G, and emerging networks. He co-founded Artemis Networks, led R&D at Rakuten Symphony, holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, and is an inventor on more than 250 patents issued worldwide. His longstanding interest in neuroscience and mindfulness eventually led him from connecting machines to exploring something even more intimate: understanding the human brain.
Antonio embodies one of the central ideas behind Emotion by Design: technology doesn't only have to measure the world around us—it can help us understand the world within us.
Kayvan Baroumand — Venture, Innovation & the Ecosystems Behind What Gets Built
Kayvan Baroumand is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, and ecosystem builder with more than two decades of experience building and scaling startup and innovation platforms. His career includes senior and founding leadership roles at Plug and Play Tech Center, GSVlabs/OneValley, SignalRank, and ThinkTank VC, connecting founders, investors, corporations, and emerging technologies.
His work sits at the intersection of venture capital, AI, entrepreneurship, and ecosystem design—exploring not only which companies receive investment, but the environments, relationships, and systems that allow new ideas to become real.
At Emotion by Design, Kayvan brings the perspective of someone who has spent his career building the infrastructure around innovation: connecting the people who imagine the future with the capital, community, and opportunities that help them create it.
Carissa Karban — Co-Founder, Astrapuffs
Carissa Karban is a technologist, leadership strategist, coach, and co-founder of Astrapuffs, an emerging game world exploring what happens when humans and AI don't simply interact—but play, grow, and build relationships together.
Astrapuffs describes itself as the first shared world for humans and AI to play together. Its vision combines cozy multiplayer play, quests, puzzles, AI companions, and community, with a larger ambition: creating AI companions that can support human flourishing and eventually move with players across games and platforms.
Carissa brings an unusually human perspective to technology. Her background spans technology, organizational development, leadership, coaching, and community building, with graduate research focused on Jungian individuation as a model for leadership development. Her work repeatedly returns to belonging, growth, connection, and designing environments where people can become more fully themselves.
At Emotion by Design: Guests will step into the world of Astrapuffs and experience how AI, play, and companionship can be designed around connection rather than simply productivity.
PLAY · CONNECT · FLOURISH
Avi Love — Coach, Writer & Strategist
Avi Love is a coach, writer, and strategist whose work explores creativity, love, play, and the conditions that allow people and communities to flourish.
Their approach is rooted in creating ecosystems that can thrive through their own natural intelligence and imagined landscapes that invite people to reconnect with their wisdom, curiosity, and playfulness. Through coaching, Avi invites people to meet themselves—and one another—with love and presence, without trying to control what the moment needs to become.
Their perspective is shaped by an unusually interdisciplinary background. Avi has worked in operational strategy across programs addressing homelessness, harm reduction, restorative justice, and mental health, while their creative training has ranged from Pixar and Disney animators to improvisation at The Groundlings and writing with New York Times essayists.
At Emotion by Design, Avi will bring that philosophy into the room through an interactive experience designed around play, connection, and embodied presence—helping guests move beyond conversation, encounter one another differently, and reconnect with the curiosity and aliveness that emerge when we stop trying to control the experience and allow ourselves to play.
Because designing for a more meaningful human experience isn't only about what we create.
It's also about creating the conditions where people can come alive.
PLAY · CONNECT · COME ALIVE
Nisi Wines — Taste, Craft & the Art of Living Well
Founded in 2024, Nisi Wines began with an unexpected intersection: neuroscience, philosophy, and winemaking. After studying how we think and experience the world, Nisi’s founder entered the wine industry as a vineyard intern and became fascinated by another way of understanding human experience—through land, time, craft, and the senses.
Nisi produces intentionally small quantities of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from Sta. Rita Hills, sourced from organically farmed vineyards. That approach provides a healthy environment for fermentation without additional additives—the wines are simply the product of grapes, yeast converting sugar into alcohol, and carefully managed sulfur for protection. They are unfined, unfiltered, and intentionally lower in alcohol.
At Emotion by Design, Nisi represents Taste within our exploration of longevity.
Because longevity isn’t only a conversation about how long we live. It is also about how we experience the life we have—slowing down, engaging our senses, sharing a meal, being in good company, having meaningful conversation, and creating rituals that bring us into the present.
Nisi invites guests to experience wine with that same intentionality: to slow down, notice, share, and connect with the craftsmanship, place, and people behind what is in the glass.
LONGEVITY · TASTE · PRESENCE · CRAFT
The Imagination Hack — What If a Feeling Had a Color?
Dr. Diana Schaffer is a clinical and health psychologist, life coach, and co-founder of Mindsprings, the company behind Serenity, a personal AI platform exploring how meaningful conversation, emotional growth, practical support, and play can coexist in one evolving experience.
With more than 15 years of experience working with emotional blocks, difficult memories, trauma therapy, and personal growth, Diana brings an understanding of how emotions are not only thought about, but experienced through the body and imagination. Her work with Serenity extends this exploration into AI through personalized characters, or “Sims,” designed to offer different forms of companionship, coaching, and structured support.
At Emotion by Design, Diana invites guests to experience The Imagination Hack: What If a Feeling Had a Color?
Through a brief guided experience adapted from Image Transformation Therapy (ImTT), participants will choose a mild, everyday tension or frustration and explore its felt qualities through color and imagination. Rather than analyzing or sharing the story behind the emotion, guests are invited to notice where and how the feeling exists—and whether its experience changes when they interact with it differently.
The experience offers a playful, embodied question at the heart of Emotion by Design:
What becomes possible when we give an invisible feeling a form we can actually experience?
No personal stories need to be shared, and the exercise is designed for everyday emotional awareness rather than diagnosis or treatment.
Lex crafts immersive, multi-layered soundscapes designed to move both the body and the inner landscape through the art of ecstatic and meditative dance. Weaving subtle minimal techno grooves, deep house rhythms, and evolving atmospheric textures, Lex creates a fluid, organic journey that invites dancers into states of presence, release, and connection.
Dani is a dancer and movement explorer drawn to the intersection of movement, connection, and transformation. Rooted in street dance cultures, especially house, and currently dancing with Be Movement Collective and Embodiment Project/Wishbone, she explores improvisation and the body as pathways to expression, connection, and liberation.
Meet the Hosts
Samah Damanhoori — Founder & CEO, Blendbound Inc
Samah Damanhoori is a founder, storyteller, emotional intelligence coach, and creative strategist exploring how technology can be designed around the emotional experience of being human.
As Founder & CEO of Blendbound, she is building Folded: Inner Journey, an emotional sandbox game that replaces combat-driven progression with curiosity, connection, self-expression, and emotional discovery. Her career spans technology, entertainment, operations, and storytelling, including work with Apple, Meta, HBO, and Genentech.
Alongside her work in technology, Samah supports founders, creatives, students, and high-achieving professionals through emotional intelligence coaching, storytelling workshops, and strategic advisory work at the intersection of product, community, narrative, and human behavior. Samah is an operational advisor at Kayeh AI and Daanx
Her work asks a larger question that sits at the heart of Emotion by Design: if we can intentionally design technology to capture attention, can we also design it to help people feel more connected, understood, and alive?
Natalie Pan — Founder, Funding Breakthrough Lab
Natalie Pan is a founder, coach, technologist, and community builder focused on helping entrepreneurs access the knowledge, relationships, and confidence required to build companies. She founded Funding Breakthrough Lab, a nonprofit pre-accelerator that brings founders together with VCs, bankers, grant writers, mentors, and other experts to help them understand their funding options and build stronger businesses.
Her own journey—from engineering management into startups, coaching, psychology, and founder development—has shaped an approach that sees entrepreneurship as both a business challenge and a deeply human process. At Emotion by Design, Natalie brings the perspective that the people building our future need systems that support the human behind the company.
Tim Taylor — Kranz Consulting | Moderator
Tim Taylor is a business and finance leader whose career has moved across accounting, finance, partnerships, entrepreneurship, and high-growth companies. At Kranz Consulting, he works with founders and financial leaders navigating the complexities of growing businesses. His career includes KPMG, Charles Schwab, Wine.com, and finance leadership roles, and he holds an MBA from Wharton.
Tim has also coached CEOs on investor presentations, giving him an unusual ability to translate complex ideas into conversations people can actually engage with. As moderator of Emotion by Design, he brings together perspectives across investment, AI, health, entrepreneurship, and human experience—and pushes the conversation toward what those ideas mean in practice.
Mike Prince — Founder, Third Places AI
Mike Prince is a technologist, community builder, and the founder of Third Places AI, an experiment in using AI to make real-world human connection more intentional.
Rather than leaving networking to chance, Mike is exploring how AI can understand the deeper context behind who people are—their interests, experiences, goals, and potential synergies—and use that understanding to identify the people in a room who may have the most meaningful reasons to meet. He has demonstrated the technology in Bay Area founder and AI communities and is actively testing it at real-world gatherings.
His work extends beyond technology into creating spaces for connection itself. Mike has helped host founder gatherings and “Decelerator” retreats designed to move people away from transactional networking and toward conversation, reflection, well-being, and genuine relationships.
At Emotion by Design, Mike will help turn the audience into part of the experience. Through Third Places AI, he'll help attendees discover meaningful connections within the room—people they might otherwise never know they should meet.
Vera Maslova — Founder, SCIENCEME
Vera Maslova is a cultural entrepreneur and strategic connector whose work bridges science, art, philosophy, business, and community. Through SCIENCEME, she has built an international educational platform connecting audiences with hundreds of experts across science, culture, entrepreneurship, and the arts. Her career includes producing hundreds of events and building partnerships with organizations including the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Mastercard, Nissan, and others.
Vera's work is rooted in the idea that knowledge becomes more powerful when disciplines stop existing in isolation. She brings that philosophy to Emotion by Design: connecting people and ideas that might rarely occupy the same room—and creating the conditions for unexpected conversations to emerge.
George Portillo — Founder, Sushidata
George Portillo is a technical founder, builder, and former Google designer working at the intersection of AI, data, and visual storytelling. As founder of Sushidata, he is building AI-powered infrastructure that turns complex, unstructured information into actionable intelligence. Previously at Google, George worked on conversational experiences using NLP and helped build the cloud.google.com experience. His work explores how technology can transform overwhelming amounts of information into something humans can understand and act on.
Mo Salah — Startup & Community Builder
Mo Salah is an accelerator leader and ecosystem builder with more than a decade of experience bringing founders, technology, capital, and communities together across MENA and the United States. His work has spanned accelerators and global entrepreneurship platforms including Techstars, Seedstars, and Startup Grind San Jose, where he currently serves as Director and Head of Events. Across his work, Mo has focused on creating the communities, relationships, and opportunities that help entrepreneurs turn ideas into companies and impact.
Adel Paakraad — Photographer & Visual Artist
Adel Paakraad is a photographer and multidisciplinary visual artist whose work is rooted in human stories, emotion, and the beauty found in everyday life.
Growing up in a family of artists, Adel began with painting and drawing before discovering photography while attending film school in 2011. Since then, his work has centered on capturing people with a sense of simplicity, intimacy, and humanity—using the stories of those he photographs as inspiration for his art.
At Emotion by Design, Adel will document the people, conversations, performances, movement, and moments of connection that bring the experience to life—helping us preserve not only what happened, but what it felt like to be there.
Volunteer Opportunity
Want to be part of Emotion by Design? We’re looking for volunteers to help us bring the experience to life—connect with our community, support the evening, and help create a space people will remember.
Looking for Sponsorships
We’re inviting brands and organizations that believe in longevity, technology, human connection, wellness, and meaningful experiences to become part of Emotion by Design.
We offer sponsorship packages at different levels, with opportunities for brand visibility, experiential activations, community engagement, and meaningful presence throughout the evening.
Interested in sponsoring or exploring a custom partnership? Reach out to us to receive our sponsorship packages and pricing.