Beyond Now Summit LA in 11 Moments
On July 14, 2026, about 600 high school students spent a day on the UCLA campus with more than 70 founders, athletes, executives and creators across six tracks and three venues. Here's how the day went, in order.
1. The run club
The day started with a two-mile run around campus, put on by Jack Nauseef with Skechers and Pop-Up Bagels.
Nauseef's motto is that the day is won in the morning, and that's exactly what these students did — showing up before anything was scheduled, feeding off the energy of a day that hadn't technically begun and feeding straight back into his. Nobody was taking attendance and it counted for nothing. They came anyway.
2. Pop-Up Bagels
Pop-Up Bagels sponsored the run club, and the run finished at their setup.
Students picked up swag and entered to win free shoes, then had breakfast with the speakers who had just run alongside them. Speaker-student connections were formed over bagels, before a single session had started.
3. Kayo Martin takes the stage
Scott Rosenbluth opened the summit in Schoenberg Hall to a full and loud room. There's a particular energy in a room of high schoolers who don't yet know what they're about to sit through — a tension about what the day is going to be.
Then Kayo Martin and Jordan Green sat down for the opening keynote.
Martin is sixteen, the same age as most of the students in the room and younger than plenty of them. He's a boxer, a YouTuber, and an actor currently filming a Netflix series in LA — and he took time out of that shoot to be at Beyond Now.
That's the whole reason he went first. A room of high school students can discount almost any adult on a stage, because every accomplishment up there comes with decades attached that the audience hasn't lived yet. Martin doesn't leave that option open.
4. Breakout Session One
Six rooms opened at once in the UCLA University Club, and students had a genuinely wide set of choices — sports business, creators, founders, finance — with something built for basically every interest in the building.
Start Before You're Ready — Jacqlyn Burnett, Casey Adams, Blake Wynn, Ben Sharf and Jake Karls on not waiting until they were older, more qualified or better prepared. The session kept coming back to the cost of waiting, which is the part nobody warns you about until it's already been paid.
Moving the Chains — Willie McGinest, Austin Ekeler, Griff Pippen, Nonalee Davis, Kelly Salmieri and Stephanie Paul on ownership, equity and building a career that outlasts playing: stop thinking like a player, start thinking like an owner.
The Creator Generation — Colby Hidalgo, Hudson Cryder, Brandon Dwyer, Gibson Ardoline, Brady Shepard and Jacey Adler on posting before you're good at it, building an audience around what you're still working toward, and treating a following like a business rather than a scoreboard.
5. Keynote Two: James Dumoulin
Back in Schoenberg Hall, James Dumoulin presented solo — no moderator, no panel.
Your First Salary Doesn't Matter Nearly As Much As Your First Skill
Dumoulin was working at Chick-fil-A before School of Hard Knocks existed. He posted 400 times to an audience of 50 people, and nothing worked for a long stretch — in public, at volume, with nobody watching. School of Hard Knocks now has north of 22 million followers and Dumoulin is on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
6. Meet & Greet + Food Fest
Sessions stopped and the South Lawn took over for the Food Fest, with Ggiata, Prince Street Pizza, 10/10 Burger and The Boiling Crab all on site.
No sessions, no rooms, just 70 speakers waiting to be approached by students. Austin Ekeler spent it in a circle of students, and so did most of the other speakers. Students said this was the part they'd been most nervous about beforehand, and the part they talked about most on the way home.
7. Breakout Session Two
Students came back in refueled, carrying personalized advice they'd just gotten out of the food fest straight into the next session.
Just Be You — Lexi Hidalgo, with Daniel Dana, Jack Nauseef and Haven Lough, on picking a niche you can sustain for years and showing up through the slow stretch instead of chasing one hit.
8. Breakout Session Three
Students closed out the final breakout on a high.
Stocks, Not Stuff — Casey Adams moderating Peter Tuchman, the Einstein of Wall Street, after four decades on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
His advice, compressed for a room of high schoolers: buy stocks, not stuff. Rather than buying the new iPhone every time one comes out, buy Apple. He also made the point that time is the only real advantage the students in that room have over the adults in it.
Then he refused to leave until every student's question had been answered.
9. The closing keynote
At 4:00 PM, Schoenberg Hall filled one more time for Bronny James and MDMotivator, moderated by Jay Tucker.
The hour went where you'd hope it would. Less about what to do with attention once you have it, and more about carrying it — the pressure, the expectations, and the mental health cost of being looked at constantly. Two people with very different routes to the same problem, talking about it honestly in front of 600 students growing up under a version of the same thing.
10. The incubator fund
Scott Rosenbluth and MDMotivator announced a $150,000 incubator fund, backed by the speakers. The same people who had spent the day on panels put their own money behind students they'd met that morning.
Most conferences end with encouragement. This one ended with real money behind the ideas students had been sketching out all day.
What the fund is built for is the gap between having an idea and having a first version of it — a business or a philanthropic project, either one. That gap is where most student ideas actually die, and almost never for lack of ambition. It's the first inventory order. The prototype. The domain, the equipment, the materials, the cost of running the thing once so you can find out whether it works at all. Nobody needs another round of advice at that stage; they need real cash and permission to spend it.
So a student who walked into Schoenberg Hall that morning with an idea and no way to pay for it walked out with somewhere to take it.
11. The final meet and greet
Programming ended but the building didn't clear out.
Bronny James lined up, and so did every other speaker from the afternoon sessions. If a student wanted five minutes with someone, there was somebody available to give it — no shortage of people to talk to, and no line was long enough to be a reason not to.
That's the part of the day that's hardest to reproduce and easiest to underrate. More than 70 people came to UCLA to talk that day, and the ones students are still bringing up weeks later are the ones they got to talk to directly.
The future worth building doesn't start someday. It starts when you leave the room
