Embracing the Pirate Side - How to Discover Your Authentic Brand

This is not your typical “Five Steps to a Better Brand” presentation. This is the story of how, seven years ago, I embraced my pirate side and discovered an authentic brand for my business. It’s well known that pirates are true entrepreneurs (usually starting from nothing) and excel at branding. So let’s spend some time together, and I’ll share how I guide clients on a journey to discover their own authentic brand treasure.

yconic AI Summit (Second day)

Join us as yconic leads us on the cutting edge of AI innovation from 9:00 to 2:00 on Monday the 21st and Tuesday the 22nd. Speakers and topics to be announce soon!

AI Powered Marketing for Startups

Whether you're launching a startup or growing a small business, AI can become a valuable marketing partner. This one-hour, hands-on workshop teaches entrepreneurs how to leverage generative AI tools for market research, customer insights, competitive analysis, market sizing, persona creation, and content development. Designed for beginners, the session focuses on practical applications that support smarter marketing decisions and faster execution.

Intuition Is Data: Unlocking Your Inner Knowing for Unstoppable Success

What if the most underutilized data point in your business was already inside you? This 60-minute keynote and workshop makes the case that intuition is not a soft skill. It is not a luxury reserved for the spiritually attuned. It is pattern recognition running below your conscious awareness, ancestral and energetic intelligence your body has been processing this whole time, and the real-time signal most founders and investors have been trained to override. That override is costing them time, money, and leading to burn out. I am a Cartier Women's Initiative Fellow, a second-time founder with two patents, and a third-generation Narragansett local who built an investor-backed medical wearable company and then burned out trying to outthink every decision and override my intuition. My biggest pivots did not come from spreadsheets. They came the moment I started treating my internal signals with the same rigor I gave my KPIs. What followed: health stabilized, the business expanded, aligned opportunities appeared. I brought this talk to Cartier Women's Initiative Fellows and other conscious business programs. Now I am bringing it home to Rhode Island. Here is what founders, operators, and investors walk away with: -The science, first. Your gut houses 500 million neurons. It operates as a second nervous system. The vagus nerve is the superhighway connecting body to brain. Intuition is not mystical. It is biological. It is trainable. -A working framework to tell fear from the body's signal. Fear is loud, anxious, and future-focused. Intuition is calm, clear, and rooted in the now. In a startup environment where those two voices compete constantly, knowing the difference is a genuine competitive edge. The I.N.N.E.R. Framework™, a five-step proprietary system developed by Shepherd: Spirit-Led Advisory: Intentional Quiet, Noticing Patterns, Navigating with Trust, Embodiment, and Refinement. A skillset, not a mindset. Trainable like a muscle. Applicable immediately. -A live activation in the room. Attendees do not just hear about intuition. They practice it. Using a guided somatic exercise, they surface an answer they already have but have not acted on. Most people name it the most useful ten minutes of the conference. -Logic built the systems we are trying to change, and you cannot spreadsheet your way to a startup revolution. Rhode Island founders are building the next wave of what is possible. This talk gives them a tool they probably have not thought of as a tool before, and one they will use for the rest of their careers.

How to Mindfully Work With a Consultant

Mindfully Hiring a Consultant is a 90-minute, single-session workshop for founders and organizational leaders who are bringing in outside expertise for the first time, or trying to make those relationships work better than they have in the past. Consultants can be a powerful investment, but most engagements go sideways, not because of the consultant but because the organization wasn't clear on what it actually needed before signing anything. This workshop walks participants through how to identify real needs versus perceived ones, write a statement of work that protects both parties, set expectations from day one, and ensure the deliverables are actually used once the engagement ends.

Marketing Clarity for Founders: What to Do, Track, and Ignore

Marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork, but for most founders, it does. I've designed a practical session to help early-stage founders understand what marketing is actually responsible for, which metrics matter most early on, and how to build a simple operating model they can implement immediately. Here's what I cover: - Why marketing feels confusing - What marketing is responsible for - Key metrics that matter early - How GTM has changed - A simple marketing operating model founders can steal Who this is for: Startup founders, CEOs, early-stage operators, and anyone responsible for growth who wants clarity and traction without the fluff!

From Idea to App: AI-Assisted Development for Non-Technical Entrepreneurs

Turn your app idea into a working prototype, no coding background required. In this 90-minute hands-on workshop, non-technical founders will discover how AI-assisted development (often called "vibe coding") is reshaping what's possible for solo entrepreneurs and small teams. You'll learn what vibe coding is and where it shines (MVPs, prototypes, internal tools, and the emerging "software for one" concept), how to choose between leading platforms like Lovable for web apps and FlutterFlow for mobile, and how Supabase can power your backend with databases, authentication, and file storage. The centerpiece is a live build demo where we take a simple app idea from prompt to deployed URL in real time, covering effective prompt-writing, the iterative refine-and-rebuild process, and basic troubleshooting when things go sideways. You'll leave with a confidence to start prototyping your own ideas the moment you walk out the door.

URI Innovations Showcase

This event will bring together academia with investors and industry partners to showcase startups, founders, researchers and professors at URI who have developed innovative and inspiring work. This will be a great opportunity to connect with the entrepreneurial ecosystem and provide you with a glimpse of current startups developing innovative products, as well as emerging projects that are in their early stages. Our goal is to bring the ecosystem together, light a spark and see what we can inspire when you put entrepreneurial talent and great partners in the room together.

Yconic Hackathon