Chalk Hill Estate Winery serves as backdrop for tales of innovation at Harvest Summit

Business and influential leaders from across the country came to Healdsburg Friday to share tales of innovation and inspiration - from one executive’s project to enable the first childbirth in space to the hip-hop artist who launched a tech company to better communicate with fans.

More than 200 people came to the Harvest Summit at the Chalk Hill Estate Winery to listen to speakers and participate in seminar discussions, ranging from finding effective ways to promote gender parity in society to new technology for scientists to modify gene functions.

Audi, Accenture, Media Farm Partners and other businesses sponsored it. Jessica Kilcullen, a Russian River Valley grape grower who co-founded the event, served as the host.

One of the more interesting speakers was Kees Mulder, CEO of Spacelife Origin, a company that intends to find ways to reproduce humans in space to better colonize other planets. By 2024, the company intends to have a pregnant woman give birth in low-orbit outer space with help of a specialized medical team.

Mulder said that while many entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have invested in rocket technology to make private space exploration more possible, his team was more focused on basic necessities to make colonization succeed, such as the ability to reproduce in space.

“Space is hard,” Mulder said. “As it looks, mission impossible. That’s what brings me on stage.”

He said he would probably not live long enough to see if his company’s effort actually would succeed in colonizing another planet, but “we want to push forward.”

Artist and record producer Ryan Leslie spoke about how he went from graduating from Harvard University at 19 to working in the music industry with Britney Spears and Sean “Diddy” Combs - the latter of whom he said stole his girlfriend, though Leslie said he was able to get a hit single out of the breakup.

As Leslie’s social media profile grew, he looked for a better way to interact with his fans beyond relying on third-party social media platforms. He created the SuperPhone app that connects his fans through their cellphone numbers.

He contends by letting fans also have his cellphone number, his app brings a greater interaction, much better than on an email blast or a LinkedIn account.

For example, he had 35,000 fans sign up to receive his information through Super­Phone and about half of that group bought his album.

Leslie said progress with artificial intelligence programs will allow for automation of all the texts he receives through SuperPhone to make it easier to respond to his fans, filtering out the most important.

“I’m building direct lines of communication to the people who matter most,” Leslie said.

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 707-521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @BillSwindell