People

CEO of Tesla/SpaceX/xAI and plaintiff suing Altman over OpenAI's for-profit conversion.

CEO of OpenAI, central figure in Musk v. Altman trial with IPO trajectory at stake.

Gavin Baker is the Founder, Managing Partner, and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management, LP, a crossover investment fund with approximately $7 billion in assets under management focused on technology and consumer companies. Before founding Atreides in 2019, he spent nearly two decades at Fidelity Investments managing the Fidelity OTC Portfolio, where he was named Fund Manager of the Year by The Boston Globe in 2014. He is widely recognized for early conviction in companies such as Nvidia and SpaceX, and for influential public commentary on AI infrastructure, semiconductor capacity, and the competitive landscape among frontier AI model developers.

Author and operator-investor writing the VC Corner newsletter, synthesizing growth frameworks for founders.

Anthropic CEO who publicly cautioned against aggressive compute scaling even as Anthropic expanded its Amazon partnership.

CEO of Perplexity, the AI-powered search company.

Entrepreneur and co-host of My First Million podcast, formerly founder of The Hustle.

Rory O'Driscoll is a co-founder and General Partner at Scale Venture Partners, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage enterprise software companies. He has more than 30 years of VC experience and is best known for early investments in SaaS pioneers such as Bill.com, Box, and DocuSign, as well as for recognizing the cloud and AI transitions in enterprise software. He has appeared on the Forbes Midas List and is a prominent voice on enterprise software valuations and the shift from SaaS to AI-enabled business applications.

Founder of SaaStr, prominent SaaS investor and operator; cited as a Replit power user building lean, AI-driven businesses.

Founder and primary author of Stratechery technology analysis newsletter and podcast.

Co-founder and CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook.

Entrepreneur and investor, co-host of My First Million podcast.

Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, the leading GPU and AI chip manufacturer.

Founder and host of the 20VC podcast and venture fund.

Henri Stern is the co-founder and CEO of Privy, a developer-focused authentication and embedded wallet platform that enables applications to integrate crypto functionality without requiring end users to have prior blockchain experience. Privy's SDK allows developers to provision embedded wallets tied to familiar credentials such as email, phone, or social login, bringing mainstream UX standards to Web3 products. Before founding Privy, Stern was a research scientist at Protocol Labs, where he worked on Filecoin under Juan Benet and studied cryptography under Dan Boneh at Stanford. Privy, which was backed by Sequoia Capital and had over 100 million accounts deployed across more than 1,500 customers, was acquired by Stripe.

Independent technology analyst and former a16z partner known for long-form technology strategy presentations.

Tech investor and White House AI adviser warning that Anthropic could build an insurmountable enterprise revenue lead over OpenAI.

Venture capitalist, CEO of Social Capital, and co-host of the All In podcast.

Founder, CEO & CTO of Impulse Space and SpaceX Employee #1, led development of Falcon/Dragon propulsion.

Alex Sacerdote is the founder, CEO, and portfolio manager of Whale Rock Capital Management, a Boston-based technology-focused hedge fund he launched in 2006 after earlier stints at Fidelity Investments, where he ran large-cap and small-cap tech funds. He is best known for an investment framework built around S-curve adoption analysis — identifying technology platform shifts at their inflection points before the market fully prices in the growth trajectory — a thesis he has refined over a 25-year career in TMT investing. Whale Rock manages approximately $17 billion across hedge fund, long-only, and hybrid strategies, with concentrated positions in software, semiconductors, cloud, and AI companies.

Joe Lonsdale is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who serves as co-founder and managing partner of 8VC, an early-stage technology investment firm managing over $6 billion in capital. He is best known as a co-founder of Palantir Technologies, the data analytics company he helped establish in 2004 alongside Peter Thiel, and has since founded more than a dozen companies including Addepar and OpenGov. He also co-founded the Cicero Institute, a public policy organization that has passed legislation across roughly 30 states, and serves as founding chairman of the University of Austin.

Dan Loeb is the founder and chief executive officer of Third Point LLC, a New York-based investment firm he established in 1995. He is best known as a prominent activist investor who takes significant stakes in underperforming companies and advocates for operational and management changes, targeting firms such as Yahoo, Sony, and Disney. Third Point invested in Upstart, the AI-powered lending platform, consistent with Loeb's active interest in artificial intelligence and emerging technology.

Matan Grinberg is the co-founder and CEO of Factory, an AI software automation company that builds task-specific AI agents to handle the full software development lifecycle, from coding and testing to migrations and refactoring. He left a PhD program in theoretical physics at UC Berkeley in 2023 at age 24 to found the company alongside CTO Eno Reyes. Factory raised a $150 million Series C in April 2026 at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Khosla Ventures with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Grinberg is known for his relentless leadership style and for positioning Factory as the command center for enterprise software development powered by AI agents.

Founder of Amazon and Project Prometheus, a physical AI company seeking a $10B raise at a $38B valuation.

Former partner at Founders Fund known for concentrated, founder-quality-driven investments in SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril, and others.

Jackie Reses (full name Jacqueline Reses) is the Chair, CEO, and Co-founder of Lead Bank, a banking-as-a-service platform she built by acquiring a Kansas City community bank in 2022. She is best known for her roles at Yahoo, where she joined the Alibaba board in 2012 and negotiated the deal that protected Yahoo's stake in Alibaba — ultimately worth approximately $40 billion at Alibaba's 2014 IPO — and at Square, where Jack Dorsey recruited her to build Square Capital and secure an Industrial Loan Company charter for Square Financial Services. Earlier in her career she was a partner at Apax Partners and spent seven years at Goldman Sachs in mergers and acquisitions.

Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, now Google DeepMind, pioneer of AI for science.

Co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, known for pioneering wafer-scale computing.

Founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, a technology-focused investment firm.

Prominent AI researcher, former Tesla AI director and OpenAI founding member, known for AI education and projects.

Host of the Uncapped podcast.

Wang Xinyu (王新宇) is a Partner at Meituan Longzhu (美团龙珠), the venture capital arm of Chinese tech company Meituan, where he leads the technology investment team he established in 2021. He previously invested in AI, autonomous driving, and chip companies at GGV Capital and Kunlun Capital before joining Meituan Longzhu. He is known for his early and concentrated bets on embodied intelligence, including lead investments in Unitree Robotics and Moonshot AI, and for his view that Chinese companies are poised to dominate global consumer robotics in a pattern analogous to Japan's consumer electronics rise from the 1960s through the 1980s.

GP of Hanabi Capital, former Index Ventures partner and Cisco executive.

Lead Economist at Ramp with unique access to large-scale business spend data on AI and SaaS adoption.

Founder and CEO of Superhuman; previously founded Reportive (acquired by LinkedIn); game designer on RuneScape.

President & COO of Impulse Space, featured in a companion Sourcery interview.

Co-founder and CEO of Exa, former SpaceX intern, obsessed with search and information quality.

Dara Khosrowshahi is the Chief Executive Officer of Uber Technologies, a position he has held since August 2017. Before joining Uber, he served as CEO of Expedia Group for over a decade, where he grew the company into one of the world's largest online travel platforms. He is best known for stabilizing Uber after a period of significant internal turmoil, steering the company through its 2019 IPO, and leading its expansion into autonomous vehicle partnerships, freight, and food delivery.

Former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, entrepreneur, author, and technology futurist.

Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion Labs, Inc., the company behind Notion, a widely used all-in-one productivity and workspace platform. He co-founded Notion in 2013 alongside Simon Last, and the company has grown to a valuation of approximately ten billion dollars. Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia and is known for building a highly flexible, customizable workspace product that blends notes, databases, and project management tools. He has spoken publicly about Notion's product philosophy, organizational structure, and the evolving role of AI in productivity software.

Author of the Data Driven VC newsletter and GP at Earlybird Venture Capital.

Chad Peets is a veteran enterprise software sales executive, recruiter, and advisor currently serving as Managing Partner at Riverpoint Capital. He spent nearly two decades as founder and CEO of Peets & Associates, a specialized software sales recruitment firm through which he placed over 2,500 sales executives, before serving as Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures from 2018 to 2023, where he led global go-to-market hiring for portfolio companies including Snowflake. He is widely known for his role in building Snowflake's sales organization alongside CRO Chris Degnan, and today advises founders of high-growth AI companies such as Harvey and Factory on sales team construction, recruiting, and sales culture.

CEO of Microsoft who circulated the Toolformer paper company-wide as a landmark AI moment.

Garry Tan is the President and CEO of Y Combinator, the prominent startup accelerator, and a co-host of the Lightcone podcast.

Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), prominent venture capitalist and technology investor.

Prominent tech investor and founder of Founders Fund who led Panthalassa's Series B.

Podcast participant on the Sourcery episode covering the Skydio HQ Tour alongside CEO Adam Bry.

Venture capitalist, angel investor, and co-host of the All In podcast.

George Fraser is the CEO and co-founder of Fivetran, a cloud-based data integration platform he co-founded in 2012 after completing Y Combinator. He holds a Ph.D. in Neurobiology from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in Cognitive Science and Biology from Carnegie Mellon University. Fraser is best known for building Fivetran into a leading ELT (extract-load-transform) platform with over 700 pre-built data connectors and a valuation of approximately $5.6 billion, and in 2026 he led the company's merger with dbt Labs to form a combined data infrastructure company.

Researcher at Our World in Data focused on environmental and public health data.

Tom Freston is a veteran American media executive best known as a co-founder of MTV in 1979 and the longtime President and CEO of MTV Networks, where he oversaw the channel's expansion into a multi-network empire including Nickelodeon, VH1, and Comedy Central. He briefly served as CEO of Viacom in 2006 before being ousted by Sumner Redstone, partly over the failure to acquire MySpace before News Corp did. Today Freston works as a philanthropist and media adviser, with involvement in organizations including ONE.org.

Paul Scherer is the Founder and CEO of Eigen, a San Francisco-based AI startup he founded at 22 after arriving in the United States on an O-1 visa in 2025. Eigen's flagship product, Mutual Friend, is an AI platform designed to facilitate connection and collaboration between real people, positioning AI as a social bridge rather than a personal chatbot or assistant. Scherer, who grew up in a small village near Frankfurt, Germany and taught himself to code after leaving high school, raised a $15 million seed round in April 2026 led by Benchmark Capital, with backing from Ben Silbermann and other angel investors.

Serial entrepreneur who founded Trilogy Software and now backs Alpha School, an AI-powered K-12 education model.

Co-founder and CEO of Harvey AI, former lawyer turned AI entrepreneur.

Co-founder of Anthropic who issued a stark warning about AI timelines.

CFO of OpenAI, formerly CEO of Nextdoor.

Entrepreneur, investor, founder of The Production Board, and co-host of the All In podcast.

Author of the Axios Pro Rata newsletter covering venture capital and deals.

CEO and co-founder of Merge, driving strategic vision around AI infrastructure and enterprise integrations.

Venture investor and co-host of the No Priors AI podcast.

Legendary long-term value investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Co-founder and former CEO of Apple, widely credited with revolutionizing personal computing, music, and mobile technology.

Partner at Slow Ventures focused on AI's second-order effects, healthcare, network effects, and fintech.

Google DeepMind product leader overseeing AI Studio and developer relations.

Pedro Franceschi is a Brazilian entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Brex, a financial technology company that provides corporate cards and expense management software to startups and fast-growing businesses. He co-founded Brex in 2017 with Henrique Dubugras after both dropped out of Stanford, inspired by their own inability to obtain a corporate credit card despite having Y Combinator funding; he became sole CEO in June 2024 when Dubugras transitioned to Board Chair. Before Brex, Franceschi co-founded Pagar.me, a Brazilian payments platform that processed over $1.5 billion in transactions before being acquired by StoneCo in 2016. He is best known for pioneering the startup-focused corporate card model — eliminating personal guarantees and offering significantly higher spending limits — and for building Brex into a company valued at $12.3 billion.

CEO of Mercor who disclosed that AI token spending now exceeds employee salaries at his company.

Co-founder and CEO of Anker Innovation, former Google engineer with a background in machine learning.

Board Partner at a16z, former President of Windows Division at Microsoft, providing historical context on enterprise tech transitions.

He Xiaopeng (何小鹏) is the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of XPeng Inc. (NYSE: XPEV), a Chinese electric vehicle and autonomous driving company headquartered in Guangzhou, China. Before founding XPeng, he co-founded UCWeb, developer of UC Browser, which was acquired by Alibaba Group in 2014 for approximately $1.9 billion. He is best known for steering XPeng's strategic pivot toward end-to-end AI-driven autonomous driving and for championing a 'Physical AI' vision that spans smart EVs, robotaxis, flying cars, and humanoid robots, and in June 2026 he personally assumed the CEO role of XPeng's robotics unit to accelerate mass production of the IRON humanoid robot.

Host of the Invest Like the Best podcast and investor at O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.

Founder and CEO of Ideogram; former Google researcher.

Independent podcast host who has become the go-to media platform for top AI researchers and executives.

Author of The Generalist newsletter and conductor of the Saplings research project on founder childhoods.

Influential PI at Stanford IRIS Lab with foundational contributions to meta-learning, imitation learning, and VLA development.

Senior particle physicist at Fermilab, co-author on the 1995 top quark discovery, and science communicator.

Founder and CEO of Jeeves, ex-engineer with background in AI and prior exit of Power Inbox for $106M.

CEO of Google and Alphabet, architect of the company's 18-month AI restructuring.

DeepSeek founder investing personal capital and prioritizing research over commercialization.

Legendary industrial designer, formerly Chief Design Officer at Apple, collaborating with OpenAI on a new consumer hardware device.

CEO of Coinbase and co-founder of longevity startup NewLimit.

CEO of Alphabet and Google, articulating the rationale for massive AI infrastructure investment.

Jack Dorsey is a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Twitter and Square, currently serving as Head (Principal Executive Officer) of Block, Inc., the payments and financial services company Square rebranded to in December 2021. He is best known for co-creating Twitter and for championing Bitcoin adoption in mainstream commerce, including pioneering Bitcoin trading at Square as a public company in 2017 before any regulatory playbook existed. At Block, he has continued to push Bitcoin integration — enabling Lightning Network payments for merchants via Square terminals — while undertaking significant organizational restructuring in 2026 to flatten management layers and pivot the company toward artificial intelligence and agentic workflows.

Roman Chernin is a co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Nebius, an AI infrastructure company focused on GPU cloud computing for AI workloads. Before Nebius, he spent over a decade at Yandex, where he led the Search platform and served as CEO of the Geoservices business unit. He co-founded Nebius alongside Arkady Volozh in 2023 and is known for driving the company's business strategy as it scaled to serve major AI labs and enterprises globally.

Harvard CS graduate who founded Onion Academy in 2013 after rural education charity work.

Head of Applied Research at Harvey, upcoming guest to discuss the Legal Agent Benchmark.

Veteran venture capitalist and former GP at Benchmark Capital, author of Running Down a Dream.

Author and commentator at Odin on venture fund structure and LP dynamics.

Head of Insights at Carta who shared data on SAFE valuation variance and the 'founder legibility' framing for early-stage pricing.

Co-founder and Co-CEO of Coatue Management, a $55B technology-focused hedge fund.

Product growth expert and host of Lenny's Podcast, a top newsletter and podcast for product managers and founders.

Lewis Hong is the Co-Founder and General Partner of FP Solutions VC, an early-stage venture fund investing in deep tech hardware companies across space, energy, and robotics. He spent approximately seven years at SpaceX, where he held senior operations and launch vehicle leadership roles including lead engineer on the Falcon 9 program. Hong is known for backing founders with engineering pedigrees from SpaceX and Tesla who are building advanced hardware in the United States, and he speaks regularly on deep tech venture investing at conferences such as Deep Tech Week.

Partner at Founders Fund who asked how Singerman's framework applies to evaluating fund managers.

Founder of Oculus VR (sold to Facebook) and Anduril Industries, a defense technology company.

Republican U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania and former hedge fund CEO.

AI researcher and biologist who co-founded Evolutionary Scale and now leads frontier AI science at CZI Biohub.

Substack author publishing data-driven analysis of venture capital fund performance and Zombie VC dynamics.

Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs PBC, a San Francisco-based Earth-imaging company he co-founded in 2010 alongside Chris Boshuizen and Robbie Schingler after working as a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Oxford and is credited with pioneering the commercial small-satellite constellation industry, having built the world's largest fleet of Earth-observation satellites capable of imaging the entire planet's landmass daily. He is widely recognized for making high-cadence satellite imagery commercially accessible and for his advocacy of using space-based data to address climate, agricultural, and geopolitical challenges.

Lead author of the LARA framework for Vision-Language-Action models.

Founder and CEO of Mach Industries, speaking at StrictlyVC LA on defense tech.

Ex-CTO of Meta and founder of Gigascale Capital, a climate-focused VC firm.

CEO of Lovable, quoted by Bloomberg on the company's growth trajectory.

Pioneering AI researcher and founder of World Labs.

Economist and Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind and Professor at University of Chicago, known for the 'relational sector' framework.

CTO and co-founder of Merge, focused on technical and security architecture for AI agent governance.

Co-founder and CEO of Onyx Security, background in Israeli military intelligence with a focus on AI oversight and control.

General Partner at YC and creator of Optimizely; architect of YC's internal AI agent infrastructure.

Yusen Dai (戴雨森) is a Managing Partner at ZhenFund (真格基金), one of China's leading early-stage venture capital firms. He is best known for co-founding Jumei.com, a Chinese beauty e-commerce platform that went public on the NYSE in 2014 at a market capitalization of approximately $3–4 billion, making him one of the youngest founders to achieve a U.S. listing. Prior to ZhenFund, he also held roles at Google and Baidu. At ZhenFund he has backed prominent AI and robotics companies including Moonshot AI, the maker of the Kimi large language model.

Defense and geopolitics expert, guest on Invest Like the Best EP.474.

Chris Degnan is a go-to-market advisor at ICONIQ Growth and a board member at PointFive, following an eleven-year tenure as Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake, where he joined as employee #13 and the company's first sales hire in 2013. He is best known for building Snowflake's global sales organization from the ground up, scaling revenue from zero to approximately $3.5–4 billion in ARR before retiring from the CRO role in March 2025. He is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished CROs in enterprise software history and remains active as a speaker and advisor on go-to-market strategy.

CEO of Maddox chip startup and former Google TPU architect.

U.S. Treasury Secretary who received Amazon's jailbreak report and was central to the national security response against Anthropic.

Head of Growth at Lovable, architect of the company's growth philosophy and coiner of frameworks like 'Minimum Lovable Product' and 'product-market fit treadmill'.

Masayoshi Son is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Group Corp., the Japanese multinational technology investment holding company he established in 1981. He is best known for building one of the world's largest technology investment portfolios, including an early bet on Alibaba that became one of the most profitable venture investments in history. Son has positioned SoftBank at the forefront of artificial intelligence investing, committing tens of billions of dollars to AI infrastructure and companies including OpenAI, and has pursued major U.S. data center acquisitions as part of that strategy. He operates as the group's primary strategic decision-maker, setting direction on large-scale bets while delegating operational execution.

U.S. independent Senator from Vermont advocating for U.S.-China AI safety collaboration.

UC Berkeley / Amazon FAR researcher and influential figure in robot learning and imitation learning.

Author of the Newcomer newsletter and host/organizer of the Cerebral Valley AI Summit.

Historian at the University of Chicago, science fiction author, and composer with expertise on Renaissance Italy and Machiavelli.

President of SpaceX who publicly floated the idea of a SpaceX-Tesla merger.

Hybrid investor-creator at Lightspeed Venture Partners who runs the Zowie Talks media platform.

Pre-seed & seed investor at Lightspeed; co-host of Lightwork; creator behind Zauey Talks with 350K+ followers.

CEO of Palo Alto Networks, known for articulating the 'profit pools' framework for cybersecurity TAM analysis.

New head of Siri at Apple who presented the first live Siri AI demo at WWDC 2026.

UC Berkeley professor and co-author on QAM, IQL, SERL, RLDG, AWAC — foundational algorithmic work underlying the LWD system.

Host of the Dialectic podcast.

Physician and co-founder of CZI, driving the mission to cure diseases through frontier AI and biology.

Journalist and editor behind the StrictlyVC newsletter covering venture capital and startups.

Founder of Section 32 and former head of Google Ventures, known for early AI investing thesis.

First author of Shield-Loco; researcher at IISc Bangalore focused on real-time planning for legged robots.

General Partner at a16z, former founder and enterprise infrastructure expert.

Founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital, exiting UMG after a failed takeover bid but still netting ~$600M.

Defense technology and supply chain strategy expert focused on U.S.-China competition.

45th and 47th President of the United States, Republican.

Dan Shipper is the co-founder and CEO of Every, an AI-focused media and product company that publishes newsletters and builds AI-native software tools. He writes the "Chain of Thought" column on artificial intelligence and its implications for knowledge workers, and hosts the "AI & I" podcast exploring how notable figures use AI in their work. Shipper co-founded Every from the Superorganizers newsletter, which he launched while studying at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also previously co-founded Firefly, a customer-support software company acquired by Pegasystems in 2014. He is widely known for running Every as a real-world laboratory for AI-native work, with the company building multiple software products using AI-generated code and a small team.

Bosung Kim is a PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, currently serving as a research intern at NVIDIA Research's Learning and Creativity (LACR) team, where he has been based since February 2026. He is advised by Prithviraj Ammanabrolu at UC San Diego's PEARLS Lab. Kim is best known for his work on dense language annotation for robot policy learning, including the DeMiAn (Dense Multi-Aspect Annotation) framework, which improves vision-language-action model performance by enriching existing robot demonstration corpora with structured language annotations without requiring new demonstrations.

Current Governor of California, Democrat, and frequent national political figure.

Maxime Alvarez is a PhD student at the Matsuo-Iwasawa Laboratory, University of Tokyo, supervised by Professor Yutaka Matsuo and mentored by Tatsuya Matsushima, where his research focuses on generalist robotic policies, robot foundation models, and visual-language-action models. He concurrently works as a research engineer at NABLAS and as a robot foundation model engineer at Telexistence. Alvarez is best known as the lead author of the 2025 paper 'When Absolute State Fails: Evaluating Proprioceptive Encodings for Robust Manipulation,' which demonstrated that standard absolute joint-state representations fail critically — including causing dangerous robot movements — and that a simple episode-relative encoding scheme delivers dramatically improved task success in real-robot experiments.

Leading AI researcher, formerly co-lead of Google Gemini, who departed Google for OpenAI

White House AI Adviser departing his role at the end of June 2026, a notable shift in the administration's AI policy infrastructure.

Highly cited computer vision and robotics researcher at UC Berkeley.

Reporter at Newcomer Newsletter who authored the SpaceX IPO analysis.

Co-founder of Simile and former Stanford researcher who pioneered generative agent simulations of human behavior.

Lloyd Blankfein is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the most prominent figures in global finance.

Host/interviewer on the Training Data podcast.

Early Cerebras investor and AI investing veteran, formerly at Baidu US AI Lab investment team.

CEO of Amazon who personally carried concerns about Fable 5's jailbreak vulnerability to senior administration officials.

CEO of Palantir Technologies, known for enterprise AI and data analytics.

Founder of 137 Ventures whose 15-year SpaceX secondary accumulation strategy yielded a ~$20B stake.

Former Google Chief Scientist and leading AI researcher who personally invested in Trajectory's seed round.

Co-founder of Union Square Ventures and previously co-founder of Flatiron Partners; architect of USV's thesis and fund design.

U.S. Senator from Massachusetts known for progressive economic policy proposals.

Zynga founder named as a key tech kingpin in SF's rise alongside Chris Larsen.

Founder of Scale AI, sold to Meta for $14.3B; now Meta's Chief AI Officer and head of Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Convicted founder of FTX whose illicit investment portfolio would be worth $114B today.

Zhengyou Zhang is the Director of Tencent Robotics X and Tencent AI Lab, positions he has held since joining Tencent in 2018 after a two-decade career at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of Paris-Sud and is both an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He is widely recognized for foundational contributions to computer vision, most notably his flexible camera calibration method — commonly called Zhang's method — which was honored with the 2013 Helmholtz Prize from the International Conference on Computer Vision.

Co-founder of Microsoft and philanthropist, known for early programming specialization as a child.

Author of the Sinocism newsletter and co-analyst on Sharp China covering China's geopolitical behavior.

Co-host and contributor at the Stratechery network, author of Sharp Text and Sharp China analyses on Beijing's AI policy.

Lead author of WEAVER, building a research program on learned world models for robot control at Mila.

Co-first author of FRS paper, building research program around controllable and adaptable generalist policies at UC Berkeley RAIL Lab.

Co-first author of FRS paper, working at intersection of generative models and robot policy learning at Stanford IRIS Lab.

Former Google executive and co-founder of Prometheus.

CEO of Cloudflare, praised for candid public letter attributing layoffs to AI productivity.

Legendary venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures forecasting AI-driven end of traditional jobs.

Jason Zins is the Founder and Managing Partner of Nomi Capital, a New York-based investment firm focused on disruptive defense and dual-use technology companies. He founded Nomi Capital in 2024 after approximately nine years at SkyBridge Capital, where he served as Partner and Portfolio Manager and deployed over $450 million across private technology deals in venture, growth equity, crypto, and fintech. Nomi Capital's inaugural vehicle, Nomi Defense Fund I, closed at $50 million in April 2026 and targets growth-stage companies at Series B and beyond across five domains including autonomy, AI, space, and energy.

Barry Ritholtz is the founder and CIO of Ritholtz Wealth Management and a prominent behavioral finance commentator.

General Partner at a16z who led Deel's Series A in 2020 and served as a judge at the Grand Finale of The Pitch.

Venture investor and tech operator, co-host of No Priors podcast.

Partner at a16z, co-host of the AI + a16z podcast.

Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor.

Founder and CEO of Listen Labs, previously built viral consumer app BeFake before pivoting to B2B research infrastructure.

CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, successor to Warren Buffett, executing first major acquisition.

Founder and CEO of Dell Technologies whose net worth rose ~$34B following Dell's earnings and Pentagon contract.

Pablo Palafox is the co-founder and CEO of HappyRobot, an AI company that builds voice-first AI agents for supply chain and logistics operations. He holds a double master's degree in Industrial Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid and Technical University Munich, and left a PhD program in computer vision at TUM in 2023 to co-found HappyRobot alongside his brother Javier (Xavi) Palafox and Luis Paarup. He is known for pioneering AI-powered voice automation in enterprise logistics, with HappyRobot raising $62 million in total funding and counting Kuehne+Nagel among its flagship partners.

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego, where he leads the PEARLS Lab, and concurrently serves as a research scientist at NVIDIA. He received his PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was advised by Mark Riedl, and previously worked at the Allen Institute for AI and MosaicML. He is best known for research at the intersection of language grounding and embodied AI, focusing on language-enabled reinforcement learning and the development of AI agents that interactively align to human preferences in grounded environments. His recent work includes DeMiAn, a framework for dense multi-aspect language annotation of robot demonstrations to improve policy learning without collecting new data.

Federico Cassano is a researcher and Research Lead at Cursor (Anysphere), where he leads development of Composer 2, the company's proprietary agentic coding model. He is best known for architecting a globally distributed reinforcement learning training system built in collaboration with Fireworks AI, which disaggregates training and inference across multiple clusters and syncs weight deltas rather than full model checkpoints. Prior to Cursor, he conducted academic research at Northeastern University's PRL lab under Arjun Guha and held positions at Scale AI, Roblox, and Trail of Bits.

Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author known for the Lean Startup methodology and advocacy for mission-driven corporate governance.

Chief Investment Officer of A16Z Perennial, Andreessen Horowitz's multi-family office.

CEO of Reflection AI, announced the DOE Genesis Mission partnership and advocates for open-weight models in government.

Robotics researcher who conducted this work at Google DeepMind and is now at Nomagic.

Co-founder of Harvey who leads technical architecture including the Spectre agent infrastructure.

U.S. Commerce Secretary who sent the export control letter to Anthropic triggering the model suspension.

Roelof Botha is a partner and advisor at Sequoia Capital, where he served as Managing Partner and Steward from 2022 until late 2025. He joined Sequoia in 2003 after serving as CFO of PayPal, where he guided the company through its 2002 IPO. Botha is best known for leading early-stage investments in companies such as YouTube, Block (formerly Square), and MongoDB, generating over $50 billion in returns for limited partners over his career. He holds board seats at Block, MongoDB, Natera, and several other portfolio companies.

Nominee for Federal Reserve Chair with extensive private tech venture holdings and an AI-optimist macroeconomic thesis.

Brad Smith is Vice Chair and President of Microsoft Corporation, a role he has held since 2015 (elevated to Vice Chair in 2021) after joining the company in 1993. He oversees Microsoft's legal, corporate affairs, and policy functions across more than 50 countries, and is the company's principal voice on issues at the intersection of technology and society, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, and human rights. He is widely known for advocating responsible AI development and for co-authoring the book Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age, which calls for greater accountability in the technology industry. His recent public remarks on AI — including the observation that heavy AI users among younger generations are also among its loudest critics — align directly with the context provided.

Founder of Hampton, a peer community for entrepreneurs, and co-host of My First Million podcast.

Co-founder of Databricks who spoke to Axios about the enterprise AI cost crisis and Unity AI Gateway.

Growth strategist and author of the Growth Unhinged newsletter; published H1 2026 State of GTM Hiring Report.

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe, known for articulating infrastructure-level thinking and incubation logic.

Stanford professor and researcher on venture capital and unicorn companies; author of multi-vintage university unicorn founder rankings.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, co-host of the AI + a16z podcast.

Co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, cited for his management principle of managing work rather than people.

Co-founder of Slack and Flickr, known for pivoting from a failed game (Glitch) to build Slack.

Alastair Seaman is a Partner at Arctos Partners, a sports-focused private equity firm, where he leads the firm's London office and international investment strategy. He was promoted to Partner in August 2025 after nearly five years at the firm, having previously held roles at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, HarbourVest Partners, and EPIC Private Equity. Seaman is best known for building Arctos' non-North American investment presence and for his public commentary on PE firms' deepening role in global sports assets, including how Arctos' acquisition by KKR in early 2025 unlocks governance and relational access for prospective investments such as the Indian Premier League. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge, an MBA from Columbia Business School, and is a CFA charterholder.

Founder of Sabertooth VC and former investor at Playground Global.

Founder and author of Asianometry, covering semiconductor and hardware supply chain topics.

Early-stage investor and co-founder of Long Journey Ventures with early bets on Uber, SpaceX, DeepMind, and Niantic.

Luca Ferrari is the co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, an Italian technology company he co-founded in 2013 that has grown through systematically acquiring and turning around consumer internet brands including Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, and WeTransfer. He is best known for building what he calls 'the perfect operating machine' — a disciplined, execution-focused approach that scales acquired products without relying on luck once product-market fit has been established. Under his leadership, Bending Spoons has reached a reported $20 billion valuation with over $1.3 billion in revenue and is preparing for a US IPO.

Lead author of the WT-UMI paper on tactile-based whole-body manipulation.

Co-equal first author on WEAVER, focused on latent-space methods for robot decision-making at CMU.

Senior author on DSRL paper and key architect of noise-space RL framework that FRS extends, at UC Berkeley RAIL Lab.

CMU / Amazon FAR researcher focused on learning-based control and sim-to-real transfer.

Stanford / Amazon FAR researcher at the intersection of computer animation and robotics.

Lead author of Mana, UC Berkeley / Amazon FAR researcher building scalable dexterous manipulation systems.

Yang Zhilin is the co-founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI startup he founded in March 2023 alongside two Tsinghua University classmates. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and previously conducted research at Google Brain and Facebook AI Research, where he is best known as the first author of XLNet and co-first author of Transformer-XL, two widely cited papers that advanced long-context and language understanding in large language models. Moonshot AI's flagship product is Kimi, a conversational AI assistant, and the company has raised over $2 billion in funding at a valuation exceeding $20 billion.

Rod James is Senior Editor, Private Equity at PitchBook, the financial data and research firm, a role he joined in 2025. He previously spent three years as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal covering private equity and private credit, and before that spent more than five years at Private Equity International leading North American PE market coverage. James is known for his reporting on private equity fundraising trends, deal activity, and market dynamics.

PitchBook Senior Research Analyst covering the big three LLM providers.

Senior author on IMPACT; Harvard researcher combining learned policies with principled control theory.

Equal first author on TacForeSight, affiliated with National University of Singapore.

Co-founder of Kindred Ventures whose 2022 Fund III achieved 5.1x TVPI.

Former OpenAI researcher and founder of Situational Awareness hedge fund; pivoted from AI bull to bearish on AI infrastructure stocks.

Founder of Morgan & Morgan, skeptical of PE economics and hasn't committed to a minority stake deal.

Lead author on SONIC, prior humanoid motion scaling work using MLP controller trained on 100M frames.

Founder and CEO of Layup Parts; former first engineer at Boring Company and ex-Anduril.

CTO of Legora, first-time engineering leader at scale, building one of the fastest-scaling enterprise AI companies.

Senior corresponding author of Shield-Loco; leads contact-conditioned locomotion research at MIRMI, TU Munich.

Mike Wior is the CEO and co-founder of Allen Control Systems, an Austin, Texas-based defense technology company that develops autonomous counter-drone weapon systems. He is best known for leading the development of the Bullfrog, an AI-powered robotic weapon station that combines computer vision, precision robotics, and modular effector support — enabling it to serve as a platform for third-party payloads including lasers and sensors. Under his leadership, Allen Control Systems raised a $200 million Series B at a $2.2 billion post-money valuation, led by Smash Capital, to scale manufacturing and accelerate deployment of the Bullfrog to U.S. and allied military forces.

CEO of IBM and speaker at the Axios AI+ Summit.

Legendary 20th-century mathematician whose 1946 unsolved planar unit distance problem was reportedly solved by an OpenAI model.

Founders Fund partner and Varda Space Industries co-founder who praised SpaceX's S-1 endorsement of orbital manufacturing.

Wharton-educated founder of J.D. Power and Associates who built a $1B+ business from customer survey insights.

Third-generation butcher and CEO who built Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors into a $270M/year business.

Chris Cocks is the Chief Executive Officer of Hasbro, Inc., a position he has held since February 2022. Before becoming CEO, he served for six years as President and Chief Operating Officer of Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro's gaming division, where he is best known for driving consecutive years of growth in Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Prior to joining Hasbro, he held senior marketing roles at Microsoft, including work on major Xbox franchises. He is currently leading Hasbro's push into AI licensing through Sixth Wall, a B2B studio launched in June 2026 to bring AI-enabled versions of Hasbro characters to third-party platforms.

President of China and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party.

YC Partner focused on AI-native services companies and author of the AI operating leverage framework.

Co-founder of Alibaba Group, cited as an example of the Chinese state crushing network power.

Teenage founder who built Cal AI to $20-30M ARR using TikTok and sold it for an estimated $50-100M.

Senior research lead and corresponding author on Humanoid-GPT, affiliated with Tsinghua University and Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute.

First-listed equal-contribution author and likely primary technical architect of Humanoid-GPT.

VP of Nvidia's Cosmos Lab and primary spokesperson for Cosmos 3's technical vision.

Co-author on GuidedVLA, professor at Fudan University.

David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth Fund, focused on later-stage investments in high-growth technology companies. He is known for backing companies such as SpaceX, Cursor, Databricks, Stripe, Figma, and Anduril, and is a frequent commentator on AI investing strategy, venture return thresholds, and the dynamics of late-stage private markets. Before joining a16z, he spent seven years at General Atlantic leading growth investments in companies including Airbnb, Crowdstrike, Slack, and Uber.

Graham Platner is a Marine veteran and oyster farmer from Sullivan, Maine, who won the Democratic Senate primary in June 2026 and is the party's nominee challenging incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins in the November general election. He served four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before returning to Maine to work in aquaculture. Platner gained national attention during the primary for a campaign ad aired during Boston Red Sox broadcasts that blamed private equity for the team's decline, a claim fact-checkers disputed, noting that private equity holds only an 11% minority stake in Fenway Sports Group with no operational control.

NYC political figure and implied mayoral candidate who announced the Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE).

Yao Mu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he leads research on multimodal embodied intelligence and robot learning. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at The University of Hong Kong and has held visiting positions at ETH Zurich and the National University of Singapore. He is best known for his work on vision-language-action model post-training and dexterous robot manipulation, including co-authorship on BORA, a framework that bridges offline reinforcement learning and online residual adaptation to close the execution gap for high-dimensional dexterous hand policies. He has published over 50 papers in top venues including NeurIPS, ICML, RSS, and IJRR, and serves as an Area Chair for ICLR.

Tao Yu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Hong Kong and Director of XLANG Lab (Executable Language Grounding Lab). His research focuses on grounding language and perception into executable actions for both digital and physical environments, with particular emphasis on embodied AI agents and Vision-Language-Action policies for robotics. He is best known for contributions including FineVLA, a framework for fine-grained instruction alignment in steerable robot policies, and has received the Google Research Scholar Award (2023) and Amazon Research Award (2022).

Sophia Velastegui is the founder and CEO of Velastegui Ventures, an AI advisory firm serving Fortune 500 companies. She previously served as Chief AI Officer at Microsoft, where she led AI integration across products including LinkedIn, Bing, Outlook, and Azure, and has also held senior product leadership roles at Aptiv, Google, and Apple. She is widely recognized as a thought leader on enterprise AI strategy and responsible AI development, and has been named one of the most powerful female engineers in AI by Business Insider. She also serves on the board of directors at BlackLine (NASDAQ: BL) and advises the National Science Foundation on AI policy.

Co-author focused on dexterous manipulation sim-to-real research at UC Berkeley.

Peter Steinberger is an Austrian software entrepreneur and the creator of OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent framework that bridges mobile messaging platforms (WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, and others) to desktop AI agents such as Claude Code. He previously founded PSPDFKit, a PDF management platform deployed on over one billion devices, which was acquired for approximately €100 million in 2023. He built OpenClaw after noticing he could not use Claude Code while away from his desk, and the project became one of the fastest-growing open-source AI repositories, reaching 200,000+ GitHub stars within roughly three months of launch. In February 2026, Steinberger joined OpenAI.

Yue Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and the founding PI of the USC Geometry, Vision, and Learning (GVL) Lab. He earned his PhD from MIT and his research spans 3D computer vision, robot learning, and neural scene representations for embodied intelligence. He is best known for Dynamic Graph CNN, a widely adopted architecture for 3D point cloud processing, and has co-authored work on large-scale humanoid manipulation datasets. He has received the Powell Faculty Research Award and the Toyota Young Faculty Researcher Award.

Dmytro Dzhulgakov is the co-founder and CTO of Fireworks AI, a generative AI infrastructure company focused on fast and efficient model serving. Before co-founding Fireworks AI in 2022, he spent nearly a decade at Meta AI, where he led the AI Frameworks team of more than 400 engineers and was a core contributor to PyTorch. He is also a co-creator of ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange), the cross-platform deep learning model interchange format developed in partnership with Microsoft, Amazon, and others.

Co-founder of Robinhood and high-profile investor in Harmonic, the AI math startup.

Palantir CTO and author of 'Mobilize', focused on defense industrial mobilization.

Principal at Refinery Media contributing pieces on VC fund marketing strategy.

Corresponding author of GTA-VLA and head of the research group at IDEA.

Celebrity entrepreneur and life coach who co-founded AI therapy platform The Path.

Karen LeCraft Henderson is a United States Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where she has served since 1990 following her appointment by President George H.W. Bush. She holds an undergraduate degree from Duke University and a law degree from the University of North Carolina, and previously served as a federal district judge in South Carolina under President Reagan. She is regarded as one of the more conservative voices on the D.C. Circuit and drew significant attention in 2026 for her pointed criticism of the Pentagon's designation of AI company Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk, calling it 'a spectacular overreach by the department' during oral argument in Anthropic v. Hegseth.

Pentagon Under Secretary who authored the memo designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk.

Former Walmart ecommerce president and founder/CEO of Wonder restaurant platform.

Project lead and primary technical architect of GuidedVLA at Fudan University's embodied AI lab.

Siheng Chen is a tenure-track Associate Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of AI and a Principal Investigator at Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and previously worked as an autonomy engineer at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group and as a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Chen is best known for foundational contributions to graph signal processing and graph neural networks, for which he received the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, and more recently for his work on embodied AI including the TAPT framework for aligning Vision-Language-Action models with tool-based task decomposition.

Zixing Lei is a researcher at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) and affiliated with the Zhongguancun Academy, whose work focuses on agentic systems and vision-language-action (VLA) model post-training for embodied robotics. Lei is the lead author of the 2026 paper "Towards Long-horizon Embodied Agents with Tool-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Models" (arXiv:2605.13119), which introduces TAPT (Tool-Aligned Post-Training), a framework that trains specialized VLA tools for bounded subtasks and coordinates them through a high-level vision-language model agent to tackle long-horizon robotic manipulation. The work demonstrates marked improvements on benchmarks including LIBERO-Long and RoboTwin by decoupling high-level temporal planning from local physical execution across a family of tool-specialized VLA models.

Jingbo Wang is a research scientist at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory specializing in embodied AI and humanoid robotics. He completed his PhD at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2023 under Professor Dahua Lin, with research focused on physics-based simulation, embodied learning, and sim-to-real transfer for generalizable humanoid intelligence. He is best known for work including the Behavior Foundation Model (BFM) for humanoid robots and contributions to humanoid-object interaction research, and was recognized with the WAIC 2025 Rising Star Award.

Lead author and primary implementer of the multi-agent drone racing RL system at University of Zurich.

Comedian and host of The Joe Rogan Experience, one of the world's most-listened-to podcasts.

Founder of Capital Factory, an Austin-based venture firm and startup accelerator, who died in a private plane crash

NEC deputy director who pushed to prohibit mandatory government AI licensing.

Boris Cherny is the creator and Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, the AI safety company. He previously spent five years at Meta as a Principal Engineer and is the author of the O'Reilly book Programming TypeScript. He is best known for building Claude Code, an agentic coding environment that allows AI to autonomously generate and edit code across large codebases, and is widely noted for his emphasis on simplicity and minimalism in AI product design.

Co-founder and co-CEO of Poolside who led the company's ideological pivot to open source AI.

Investor at Union Square Ventures who coined the 'rebel alliance' framing for open source AI investment.

CEO installed by Bain Capital at Domino's, credited with international expansion and menu revitalization.

Microsoft Executive Vice President responsible for Copilot, Agents, and Platform.

PitchBook Senior Analyst covering SpaceX and private companies who characterized SpaceX's strategic IPO-driven M&A shift.

Author of The AI Corner newsletter who synthesized Jensen Huang's interview into 10 actionable moves.

CEO of GLAAD, an LGBTQ media advocacy organization.

Partner at Sequoia Capital and Harvey investor.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, author of 'Everything is Recorded Now' on AI recording as workplace default.

Co-founder of Simile and head of the Center for Foundation Models at Stanford; lead author on the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models paper.

Co-founder and CTO of Lattice, praised for exceptional technical execution.

CEO of Luta Security who reviewed Amazon's jailbreak report on Anthropic's Mythos model.

Ripple co-founder and tech entrepreneur named as a key figure shaping SF's development over 30 years.

Co-founder of Google and one of the world's wealthiest individuals, active in California politics.

Co-founder of DeepMind and CEO of Isomorphic Labs, praised for translating AI progress into tangible terms for general audiences.

Financial journalist and author; wrote The Infinity Machine, a biography of Demis Hassabis that became an instant NYT bestseller in March 2026.

CMO at Lightspeed Venture Partners; co-host of Lightwork and architect of the firm's media strategy.

Founder of Turpentine podcast network; now GP at a16z running media and network initiatives.

Former New Mountain Capital president who now leads Thoreau Group.

CEO of Salesforce, referenced for spending $300M on Anthropic for developer tooling.

University of Florida finance professor whose research shows most IPOs underperform the market in the first three years.

Co-author of the PostRound newsletter covering Series A deal activity.

Leading academic researcher in robot learning; co-director of Robot Perception and Learning lab at UT Austin and affiliated with NVIDIA; senior author on GRAIL.

Greg Brockman is a co-founder and President of OpenAI, previously the first CTO of Stripe.

Partner at Sequoia Capital and board member/investor at Kalshi.

Portfolio Management lead at Teachers' Venture Growth (OTPP), navigating single source of truth challenges at institutional scale.

VP Engineering at Earlybird VC who led a ground-up rebuild of the firm's data infrastructure.

CEO of Foresight; former data/infrastructure practitioner at BlackRock, Point72, and Greycroft.

Co-founder of Stripe who also supports the ARC Institute's open source genomics research.

Co-founder of Stripe who also supports the ARC Institute's open source genomics research.

OpenAI engineer and newly appointed head of core products who helped grow Codex and is now overseeing the Codex-ChatGPT super app strategy.

Venture capital analyst who presented data on unicorn-to-decacorn valuation progression rates at the All In Summit.

Banker associated with Citigroup's formation, later CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

CEO of Box, cloud content management company, actively engaging enterprise customers on AI adoption.

Co-founder of Rendezvous Robotics and space architecture researcher.

OpenAI's head of applied research taking a dual role at Thrive Holdings to tighten the feedback loop between real-world AI deployment and model development.

Co-founder of PayPal and founder of Affirm; noted for combining world-class technical and CEO capabilities.

Michael Ewens is the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance at Columbia Business School, where he co-directs the Private Equity Program and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is best known for his research in venture capital and entrepreneurial finance, including the widely cited paper with Matthew Rhodes-Kropf, "Is a VC Partnership Greater than the Sum of Its Partners?", which demonstrates that VC value is concentrated in individual partners rather than firm brand or process. His broader work examines how capital is allocated to high-growth startups, gender dynamics in entrepreneurship, and the structure of private equity markets.

CEO of Once Upon a Farm, scaling the kids' nutrition brand through its NYSE IPO.

U.S. Energy Department Undersecretary and former IBM research division leader, architect of the Genesis Mission science strategy.

Partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril; noted as a standout in the Mafia game.

Researcher at Columbia/Stanford and lead author of the Diffusion Policy paper (RSS 2023), foundational to robot learning with diffusion models.

Co-founder of Gigafund, former Founders Fund partner, SpaceX board member, and major shareholder.

Founder of Valor Equity Partners and SpaceX board member holding 7.3% of Class A SpaceX shares.

Participant on The a16z Show episode on global drug development.

Author of Daring Fireball and co-host of Dithering podcast, discussed Meta Ray-Ban Display with Ben Thompson.

Outgoing CEO of Apple who oversaw an 11x increase in market cap to ~$4 trillion over 15 years.

Co-lead author on the WT-UMI whole-body manipulation research paper.

Co-author on WEAVER, brings expertise in deep RL and rigorous evaluation methodology.

Senior co-author on WEAVER with expertise in imitation learning and robot policy optimization.

NSF CAREER awardee at CMU focused on safe and interactive robot learning.

Co-founder of Diode Computers, an AI-native circuit board design and manufacturing company.

Venture investor and co-founder of Long Journey Ventures; praised for authentic, genuine character.

Former CEO of Amazon Web Services, now leading KKR's Helix Digital Infrastructure.

Tech executive and angel investor known for investments in early-stage technology companies.

Economist and professor known for commentary on economics, culture, and technology.

Founder and CEO of Replit, an online coding platform and AI coding tool company.

Co-founder of Uber; referenced in Cyan Banister's story of her early investment in the company.

Elite competitive programmer from Zhejiang provincial team; now prominent in Chinese AI circles.

Democratic U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania known for working-class appeal and bipartisan stances.

ALS patient who used ElevenLabs' voice restoration technology to deliver the 'Play ball' call at a San Francisco Giants game.

Head of Product Management at Anthropic who articulated the Fable 5 pricing rationale.

CEO of Figma, the collaborative design software company; participant in Founders Fund Mafia show.

General Partner at Benchmark and Stanford classmate of Andrew Feldman who forwarded the Cerebras pitch.

Lead author of IMPACT; Harvard researcher building cerebellum-inspired control architectures for physical AI.

Industrial corresponding author at TARS Robotics leading contact-rich manipulation research.

Senior PI at NUS and co-corresponding author on TacForeSight; prominent in deep learning and physical AI.

Equal first author on TacForeSight with dual industrial-academic affiliation at TARS Robotics and SJTU.

Equal first author on TacForeSight, affiliated with TARS Robotics and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Apple's SVP of Software Engineering who addressed Apple's agentic AI positioning at WWDC.

Former GV partner and co-founder of NewLimit longevity biotech.

Sequoia GP who led the firm's investments across SpaceX, xAI, and X.

Co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, a leading cloud storage company.

Equal first author and corresponding author of MotionWAM; primary architect of the dual-DiT video-motion architecture.

Five-time Swiss national drone racing champion used as human benchmark in RL drone racing experiments.

Partner at Magid and panelist at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Designer and entrepreneur known as the father of the iPod and iPhone, and founder of Nest Labs.

Senior researcher and corresponding author overseeing the LARA research direction.

CMU Mechanical Engineering faculty and co-author of Shield-Loco with cross-institutional appointment at TU Munich's Institute for Advanced Study.

AI policy expert and former OpenAI board member named permanent Executive Director of Georgetown's CSET.

U.S. Democratic Senator from Rhode Island co-introducing the Responsible AI in Defense Act.

U.S. House Representative from Massachusetts and co-author of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act.

U.S. House Representative from California and co-author of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act.

CEO of Microsoft AI and co-signer of the congressional biosecurity letter.

Researcher at Our World in Data who co-built an interactive child mortality visualization.

Former CTO of OpenAI who testified that Sam Altman was not trustworthy.

CMO of Founders Fund and founder of Pirate Wires; creator of the Mafia game show.

Former CEO of Dotmatics (acquired by Siemens for $5.1B) co-founding IO Capital.

Former Insight Partners executive co-founding IO Capital, a new software-focused growth equity firm.

Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technologies, hired as a16z's first Head of Global Affairs.

Lead author of ProGAL-VLA, focusing on grounding and instruction-sensitivity in VLA systems.

Jeff Lawson is the co-founder and former CEO of Twilio, a cloud communications platform he grew from startup to public company.

Co-founder of Y Combinator, essayist, and early-stage startup investor.

Yihao Wu is a robotics researcher with a joint affiliation between Tsinghua University and Tencent Robotics X. He is best known as the lead author of FlowPRO, a reward-free reinforced fine-tuning framework for flow-matching Vision-Language-Action models published in June 2025, which introduces the RPRO (Robotic Flow-matching Proximalized Preference Optimization) algorithm. His research focuses on improving robot manipulation policies through human-guided failure correction without hand-designed reward functions, with demonstrated results on precision bimanual tasks.

Project lead on GRAIL, focused on physics-based character animation and sim-to-real transfer at NVIDIA DAIR Lab.

Co-first author of GRAIL paper, affiliated with NVIDIA and UCLA.

Co-founder of nybl, a physics-informed AI company for critical industries that won Deel's The Pitch Grand Finale.

Co-founder of Zeely AI, an AI marketing intelligence platform that won Deel's The Pitch Grand Finale.

Co-founder and CEO of Deel; MIT alumnus who built Deel from personal founder pain into a $17.3B company.

Media mogul and MGM Resorts board member seeking to acquire MGM Resorts for $18B+.

Author and angel investor who backed Iconic's fundraise.

Executive Chairman of Strategy; architect of the company's Bitcoin accumulation strategy.

Stanford PhD (economics + computer science) and CEO of Endpoint Arena, applying prediction markets to biotech clinical trials.

Co-corresponding author of Humanoid-GPT, bringing Peking University's robotics expertise.

Partner at Sequoia Capital, advisor/board member at Listen Labs.

Ex-Brighton Park Capital executive who raised $215M for the debut fund of Wingman Growth Partners.

Founder of Mirror (acquired by Lululemon) who is now leading Board, a face-to-face game console company.

CEO of Anello Photonics, formerly VP at Intel's Photonics group.

CEO of Monaco and former Chief Revenue Officer at Brex.

CEO of Thea Energy, leading the fusion energy commercialization push.

CEO of OpenRouter and co-founder of OpenSea.

CEO of Cowboy Space and co-founder of Robinhood.

Yuan Meng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University. Her research focuses on multimedia edge intelligence, model compression and quantization, and intelligent operations. She has published recent work on accelerating vision-language-action models and diffusion policies, including co-authoring papers accepted to ICLR 2026 and CVPR 2026.

Zhi Wang is an associate professor and PhD supervisor at the Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. in 2014 from Tsinghua University and his research spans multimedia networks, mobile cloud computing, distributed machine learning systems, and embodied intelligence. He is a recipient of the National Natural Science Award (Second Prize) in 2018 and the Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education (First Prize) in 2017, and serves as an Associate Editor of IEEE TMM. His recent work includes research on accelerating Vision-Language-Action models for real-time robotic applications.

Nico Laqua is the co-founder and CEO of Corgi Insurance, an AI-native, full-stack insurance carrier for startups that was part of Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. He is known for leading a company culture that involves seven-day workweeks and for personally sleeping in the office on a mattress. Under his leadership, Corgi has raised over $100 million and reached a $2.6 billion valuation. He co-founded the company with Emily Yuan, who serves as COO.

Prominent venture capitalist and operator known for his frameworks on talent, company building, and roles at PayPal and Square.

Venture capitalist and technology market analyst at Theory Ventures.

Co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, known for pioneering SaaS CRM and navigating multiple technology transitions.

Javier Palafox is the co-founder and COO of HappyRobot, a San Francisco-based AI company building automation workflows for logistics and supply chain operations. He previously served as CFO of Deoleo, a Spanish consumer packaged goods company and the world's leading olive oil company, where he managed North American operations. He co-founded HappyRobot in 2022 with his brother Pablo Palafox and Luis Paarup after observing the operational impact of poor communication in logistics during his tenure at Deoleo.

Olivia Moore is a partner on the investing team at Andreessen Horowitz, where she focuses on consumer AI applications. She has led investments in companies including HappyRobot, Salient, Toma, Krea, and Scribenote. Prior to joining a16z in June 2021, she was an early-stage investor at CRV and worked on the Alternative Investments team at Goldman Sachs. She holds undergraduate and MBA degrees from Stanford University, where she co-founded Cardinal Ventures, an on-campus startup incubator.

Luis Paarup is the CTO and co-founder of HappyRobot, an AI-native platform for automating operational workflows in supply chain and logistics. He co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2022 alongside Pablo and Javier Palafox after meeting Pablo during their undergraduate studies in robotics and electronics. Paarup, an engineer and former researcher in AI and automation, leads the technical development of HappyRobot's AI agent infrastructure, which powers voice-based and omnichannel communication for freight and logistics companies.

Founder of Neo, a people-first seed fund with early investments in Cursor and Kalshi.

Co-founder of Village Global and commentator on venture capital investments.

Edward Hu is an AI researcher best known as the inventor of LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique for large neural networks, and μP (maximal update parametrization), a method for hyperparameter transfer at scale. He developed these innovations while a researcher at Microsoft and subsequently worked at OpenAI. He completed his Ph.D. under Yoshua Bengio at Mila, focusing on generative models and reasoning.

UC Berkeley professor and CTO of Scaled Cognition focused on AI accuracy and reliability.

Microsoft Corporate VP who articulated the Surface Laptop Ultra's positioning for AI builders.

Jesse Thomason is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he leads the GLAMOR (Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observations, And Robots) Lab. His research focuses on connecting natural language processing to robotics and embodied simulation agents, with emphasis on grounding language in perception, action, and lifelong learning through dialogue. He is known for his work on language-conditioned robot policies, including benchmarking generalization for Vision Language Action models and documenting failures of language generalization under paraphrasing.

Gaurav S. Sukhatme is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he serves as the Inaugural Director of the USC School of Advanced Computing and Executive Vice Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He holds the Donald M. Alstadt Chair in Advanced Computing and directs the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory, which he founded in 2000. He is best known for his extensive research in networked robots, learning robots, and field robotics, and is a Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, and IEEE.

Ishika Singh is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, advised by Professor Jesse Thomason. Her research spans natural language processing, embodied AI, and robotic manipulation, with a focus on how language can be utilized in robot learning. She is best known as co-developer of The Colosseum benchmark for evaluating generalization in robotic manipulation and lead researcher on Colosseum V2, which extends the framework to vision-language-action models. She has also conducted research internships at NVIDIA's robotics research labs and Amazon Frontier AI and Robotics.

Jeremy Morgan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he is affiliated with the Robotic Embedded Systems Lab. His research focuses on robotic manipulation, inverse kinematics, and benchmarking generalization for vision-language-action models. He is a co-author of Colosseum V2, a benchmark for evaluating VLA model generalization, as well as IKFlow and CppFlow, methods for generating diverse inverse kinematics solutions.

Prominent researcher in efficient deep learning and video understanding at Fudan University.

Lead author of VLA-Pro paper, affiliated with Fudan University's School of Computer Science.

Turing Award winner, former Meta AI chief, now executive chairman of AMI Labs with 40+ years in the field.

CEO of Cognition who claims Devin is meant to augment rather than replace programmers.

Bob Pittman is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of iHeartMedia, Inc., a position he has held since 2011. He is best known as the co-founder and programmer who led the team that created MTV, and he previously served as Chief Operating Officer of AOL Time Warner. He is also a founding member of the New York-based private investment firm Pilot Group LLC, which funded companies including DailyCandy, Thrillist, and Zynga. His career in media began in radio at age 15, and he has held CEO roles at Six Flags Theme Parks, Century 21 Real Estate, and MTV Networks.

Doug Herzog is an American television executive who served as president of Viacom's Music and Entertainment Group, overseeing networks including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Spike, TV Land, and Logo. He is best known for developing groundbreaking franchises at MTV such as The Real World, the MTV Video Music Awards, and Unplugged, and later for launching defining Comedy Central programs including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, South Park, The Colbert Report, and Key and Peele. He is set to become chair of Emerson College's Board of Trustees in June 2026, having served on the board since 2010.

Judith Ann McGrath is an American television executive who serves as a board member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation. She is best known as the former Chairwoman and CEO of MTV Networks, a position she held from 2004 until 2011, where she oversaw channels including MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and VH1. McGrath was part of the original launch team for MTV in 1981 and championed landmark programming and pro-social initiatives throughout her three-decade tenure at the network.

Eric Benjamin Seufert is a media strategist, quantitative marketer, and author who runs Mobile Dev Memo, a trade publication covering the digital and mobile advertising economy. He is the founder of Heracles, a strategy consultancy and early-stage venture capital fund focused on the mobile ecosystem, and previously held strategy and marketing roles at Skype, Wooga, and Rovio. He is the author of the book Freemium Economics and is known for his analysis of mobile advertising, freemium monetization, and performance marketing.

CEO of Fireworks AI who publicly announced $800M ARR milestone.

Randi Weingarten is president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a 1.8 million-member labor union representing educators, healthcare professionals, and public employees. She has held this position since 2008, previously serving as president of New York City's United Federation of Teachers. She is best known as a prominent voice in national education policy debates, recently advocating for guardrails on artificial intelligence and digital technology in K-12 classrooms through a 10-point plan introduced in 2026.

Ro Khanna is a Democratic U.S. Representative serving California's 17th congressional district, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, since 2017. He is the vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and co-chaired Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign. Khanna is known for his advocacy on technology policy, antitrust enforcement, and labor rights, and has been a prominent voice calling for AI development that benefits working communities rather than primarily enriching tech companies.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an American politician and activist serving as the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, she was first elected at age 29, making her the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She is known for her progressive policy positions, including the Green New Deal, and has recently focused on the environmental and community impacts of AI data centers, including sponsoring legislation to impose a moratorium on new data center construction.

One of crypto's longest-tenured executives, former CEO of Grayscale, pivoting to AI-focused VC.

Michele Griffin is a General Partner and Chief Operating Officer at Lightning Capital, a Miami-based venture capital firm. She leads the firm's $100 million Venture Fund II, which targets early-stage startups addressing the deployment-phase impacts of artificial intelligence. Prior to joining Lightning Capital, she worked in go-to-market leadership at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and founded Premier GTM, a go-to-market advisory firm that counseled portfolio companies and other venture capital firms.

Reality TV personality running for Los Angeles Mayor as a Republican after losing his home in the LA wildfires.

AI researcher and podcast host known for long-form interviews on science and technology.

Corresponding author and senior research lead on VisualThink-VLA, affiliated with Zhejiang University and Cornell University.

Lead author and primary architect of the VisualThink-VLA system at Zhejiang University.

Wenzhao Lian is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of Artificial Intelligence, where he focuses on intelligent robotics, dexterous manipulation, and machine learning. He previously served as Director of Robot Manipulation at Figure AI, a staff research scientist at Google X (Intrinsic), and a senior researcher at Vicarious AI. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University in 2015 and is recognized for his work on sample-efficient robotic manipulation, including category-level manipulation from single demonstrations and offline-to-online reinforcement learning for dexterous VLA models.

Yifan Han is a master's student at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), affiliated with the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition and supervised by Professor Wenzhao Lian. His research focuses on robot manipulation, dexterous manipulation, and vision-language-action models for real-world robotic systems. He is best known as a co-first author of BORA, an offline-to-online reinforcement learning post-training framework for dexterous VLA models, and DexHiL, a human-in-the-loop post-training framework for dexterous manipulation, both developed in collaboration with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Zhongxi Chen is a researcher affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) who serves as co-first author of BORA, an offline-to-online reinforcement learning framework for real-world dexterous Vision-Language-Action models. He is listed as a researcher at Tencent YouTu Lab and was previously an MS student at Xiamen University, with expertise in diffusion-based models and camouflaged object detection. He is best known for his work on BORA and CamoDiffusion, having published at venues including AAAI, ECCV, and ACM Multimedia.

Qiuyue Wang is a researcher at Alibaba affiliated with the Qwen team, where their work focuses on vision-language modeling and embodied intelligence. They are listed as a contributor to the Qwen-VLA project, a unified vision-language-action foundation model that extends Qwen's multimodal capabilities into robotic manipulation, navigation, and trajectory generation. Their Google Scholar profile, verified with an alibaba-inc.com email, lists publications spanning video understanding, image generation, and embodied AI.

Mi Liangchuan (professionally known as LC Mi) is Vice President at XPeng and head of the company's humanoid robotics division, a role he assumed in September 2023. He previously spent roughly a decade at NVIDIA in autonomous driving and AI engineering, then led autonomous driving efforts at XPeng before transitioning to robotics. He is known for approaching humanoid robots as social and emotional participants in human life rather than purely industrial products, and for applying a deliberately cross-domain perspective—spanning AI research, autonomous driving, and a brief robotics entrepreneurship stint—to the development of XPeng's IRON humanoid robot platform.

Thomas S. (Tad) Smith, Jr. is an American businessman who currently serves as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of The Fine Art Group and as a director of several companies including Lindblad Expeditions. He is best known for serving as President and CEO of Sotheby's from March 2015 to October 2019, during which time he led the auction house's digital transformation and oversaw its $3.7 billion sale to Patrick Drahi. Prior to Sotheby's, he was President and CEO of the Madison Square Garden Company from February 2014 to March 2015. He also serves as an adjunct professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Joe Tsai is a Taiwanese-Canadian billionaire businessman and lawyer who co-founded Alibaba Group in 1999. He currently serves as Chairman of Alibaba Group, having previously held the roles of chief financial officer and executive vice chairman. He is best known for his instrumental role in establishing Alibaba's financial and legal structure, his dealmaking expertise, and his ownership of several professional sports franchises including the Brooklyn Nets.

Robert Goldstein is a Senior Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at BlackRock, where he oversees the firm's day-to-day global business and its operating and technology platforms, including Aladdin. He is a member of BlackRock's Global Executive Committee and co-chair of the Global Operating Committee. Goldstein began his career at BlackRock in 1994 and has been instrumental in developing the firm's risk management platform and client service operation.

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard University, where he also directs the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served as the 71st U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is best known for his decades of influence on U.S. and global economic policy, including his role during the longest sustained period of economic growth in U.S. history and his leadership in addressing major financial crises over the past thirty years.

Laurence D. Fink is the co-founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock, the world's largest money-management firm with more than US$10 trillion in assets under management. He co-founded the firm in 1988 and has led its growth into a global leader in investment management, risk management, and advisory services. He earned his BA and MBA from UCLA and previously served as a Managing Director at The First Boston Corporation.

Gil Elbaz is the Chief AI Officer and co-founder of Onyx Security, an AI control plane company that launched publicly in March 2026 with $40 million in funding from Conviction and Cyberstarts. Before co-founding Onyx, he worked as an AI researcher at NVIDIA, reporting to the company's CTO and leading frontier agentic AI work, with experience in synthetic data. He also served in an IDF AI research unit before transitioning to the private sector.

Shuai Bai is a senior engineer at Alibaba Group and a member of the Qwen Team, where he works on vision-language models. He was one of the lead engineers behind Qwen3-VL and has contributed to the Qwen-VL and Qwen2-VL technical reports. He holds a master's degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and joined Alibaba in 2021. His earlier research includes work on visual object tracking and natural language-based vehicle retrieval.

Growth-stage partner at Khosla Ventures reportedly raising a $500M solo fund focused on growth-stage investing.

Senior leader at Ardian promoted to co-CEO of the global private equity firm.

Leads computational robotics at ETH Zürich, focused on physics-based modeling and simulation.

First author of the CoP sim-to-real tactile manipulation paper, affiliated with ETH Zürich and UC Berkeley.

Head of HR at Trilogy Software in the 1990s, credited with developing the 'high standards, high support' culture framework.

Early ElevenLabs employee who launched Baobab Ventures, a $15M solo GP fund.

Investment leader at AustralianSuper promoted to Chief Investment Officer of one of the world's largest pension funds.

Chief Customer Officer of American Airlines, quoted announcing Starlink partnership.

Co-first author and implementation architect of the Cybo-Waiter humanoid agent framework.

Zhenyu Zhao is a PhD researcher at the University of Southern California, where he works in the Physical Superintelligence Lab under Prof. Yue Wang, focusing on general-purpose intelligence for humanoid robots, including teleoperation, policy learning, and policy evaluation. He is best known as co-first author, alongside Hongyi Jing, of Humanoid Everyday, a large-scale multimodal dataset of 10,300 trajectories across 260 manipulation tasks that also introduces a cloud-based evaluation platform for humanoid policies. The paper received a Best Paper Award at the Embodied AI Workshop at CVPR 2026 and an oral presentation at ICRA 2026. Zhao is committed to open-source research and has also co-authored Psi-Zero, an open foundation model for humanoid loco-manipulation presented at RSS 2026.

Eric Wu is the co-founder and CEO of NavigateAI, a San Francisco startup building AI copilots for field workers in construction and other physical-world industries. He is best known as a co-founder of Opendoor, the real estate technology company he helped build and take public on Nasdaq in 2020, which popularized the iBuying model of making instant cash offers to homesellers. Prior to Opendoor, Wu founded the geodata startup Movity and served as head of geo and social products at Trulia. NavigateAI launched in May 2026 with $25 million in seed funding led by Elad Gil, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Lennar, and Tishman Speyer.

Stanley Druckenmiller is an American billionaire investor and the Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Duquesne Family Office LLC, the private investment vehicle he established in 2010 after converting his hedge fund to a family office managing his personal and family capital. He is best known for his three-decade run at Duquesne Capital Management, where he achieved average annual returns of approximately 30 percent with no losing years, and for his role as lead portfolio manager at George Soros's Quantum Fund from 1988 to 2000. He is widely credited as a primary architect of the 1992 speculative attack on the British pound that earned Soros roughly one billion dollars in a single trade. He remains an active macro trader and is a frequent commentator on markets, monetary policy, artificial intelligence, and the long-term trajectory of the U.S. dollar.

Founding mathematician at Axiom Math who characterized the company's hybrid AI-human proof approach as a new paradigm for academic mathematics.

Johan Lagerlöf is the Managing Partner and Head of Investments at Pophouse Entertainment Group, a Stockholm-based music rights investment firm founded by Conni Jonsson and ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus. He brings roughly 30 years of music industry experience, including co-founding and serving as CEO of X5 Music Group (sold to Warner Music in 2016) and serving as Global Head of Catalogue at Spotify before joining Pophouse. He is best known for leading the close of Pophouse's inaugural fund, which raised over €1.2 billion — one of the largest first-time private equity fund raises in Europe in the past decade — focused on acquiring music catalogues and intellectual property.

Saul Price was the founder of FedMart and Price Club, originator of the fiduciary-to-the-customer retail philosophy that influenced Costco.

Co-author of GTA-VLA at IDEA, previously first author on T-Rex2 and Rex-Omni interactive detection systems.

Lead author of GTA-VLA paper, intern at Futian Laboratory.

AI researcher known for work on robotics and deep RL, guest on Dwarkesh podcast discussing AlphaGo.

Scott Stevenson is the co-founder and CEO of Spellbook, a Canadian legal AI company that builds AI tools for contract drafting and review. He is best known in the AI industry for publicly calling out the widespread practice among AI startups of reporting Contracted ARR (CARR) as actual revenue, inflating apparent figures by as much as three to five times. Spellbook, which Stevenson co-founded with a background in software engineering and SaaS, serves over 4,000 customers across 80 countries and has raised more than $80 million in funding.

Founder of a farming newsletter with 4,000+ attendee conference, whose model was cloned by Shaan Puri for Milk Road.

Former CEO of Twitter and now founder of Parallel, a startup focused on content monetization infrastructure for the agentic web.

Senior figure at Jane Street who argues that trading is 'AGI complete' yet Jane Street is aggressively hiring.

Clément "Clem" Delangue is the co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the open-source machine learning platform headquartered in New York. He co-founded the company in 2016 alongside Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, and has grown it into the central hub for the AI community, hosting over one million models and datasets. Delangue is best known for championing the democratization of AI through open-source infrastructure and the Hugging Face Transformers library, which has become foundational tooling for researchers and developers worldwide.

Moritz Baier-Lentz is a private investor and senior advisor to OpenAI, McKinsey & Company, and TPG, having recently departed Lightspeed Venture Partners where he served as Partner and Head of Gaming and Interactive Media. He built his career at the intersection of gaming and venture capital, previously founding Goldman Sachs' gaming investment banking practice and serving as a partner at BITKRAFT Ventures before joining Lightspeed. He is also a founding member of General Intuition, an AI research lab building world models trained on video game data, which raised a $133.7 million seed round in 2025.

Founder and CEO of the Sexual Violence Prevention Association, commented on enforcement gaps in the Take It Down Act.

General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on AI and infrastructure investing, returning full-time after recovering from appendix cancer.

Benjamin Todd is the co-founder and president of 80,000 Hours, a nonprofit organization he helped establish in 2011 to conduct research on high-impact careers and provide evidence-based career guidance. He served as CEO for the organization's first decade before transitioning to the president role, where he focuses on strategy and research, particularly on careers in the context of artificial intelligence. He is best known for challenging conventional career wisdom — including the advice to "follow your passion" — and for his book 80,000 Hours, whose 2026 revised edition includes new chapters arguing that most standard career advice lacks research backing and fails to account for how AI is transforming the job market.

John Burn-Murdoch is the Chief Data Reporter at the Financial Times and a Senior Fellow at the LSE Data Science Institute. He writes the weekly "Data Points" column, which uses statistics and data visualization to examine major social, economic, and demographic issues. He is widely recognized for his work on fertility and population trends, including research identifying declining couple formation — driven in part by smartphones and digital media — as a primary force behind falling birth rates.

Founder and CEO of hedge fund Citadel, one of the most prominent financial figures in the United States.

Jiangmiao Pang is a research scientist at Shanghai AI Laboratory, where he heads the Embodied AI Center in collaboration with Intern Robotics. He is best known for his work on humanoid robotics and embodied AI, including whole-body motion control, robotic manipulation, and simulation systems for embodied agents. He is a co-corresponding author on Imagine2Real and has contributed to widely used open-source computer vision toolkits including MMDetection and MMDetection3D, accumulating over 17,000 citations on Google Scholar.

Jiahe Chen is a first-year PhD student at the OpenRobotLab of Shanghai AI Laboratory, jointly enrolled with the College of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University, advised by Jiangmiao Pang and Dahua Lin. His research focuses on embodied AI, robot learning, and humanoid robot motion generation. He is best known as co-first author of Imagine2Real, a 2026 paper proposing video generation models as synthetic data sources for zero-shot humanoid-object interaction, and previously contributed to GRUtopia, a large-scale simulated robotic environment, and MGF (Mixed Gaussian Flow), accepted at NeurIPS 2024.

Lead author of the Factored Diffusion Policies paper, known for bridging formal verification and ML-based robotics at UIUC.

Director of the Robotics and Perception Group at University of Zurich, leading academic group for high-performance autonomous flight.

Co-author with aerodynamics and RL expertise at University of Zurich's Robotics and Perception Group.

Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan is the Chairman of G42, a UAE-based artificial intelligence holding company, as well as the UAE's National Security Adviser and Deputy Ruler of Abu Dhabi. He is the brother of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and simultaneously chairs Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), MGX, ADQ, and First Abu Dhabi Bank, making him one of the most influential figures in global sovereign capital deployment. He is best known for positioning the UAE as a global AI powerhouse, including orchestrating G42's strategic partnerships with major US technology firms and its billion-dollar bet on Cerebras Systems.

Peng Xiao is the Group CEO of G42, an Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence and cloud computing holding company. He previously served as Senior EVP, CTO, and CIO at MicroStrategy and developed high-frequency trading strategies at Susquehanna International Group before joining G42. He is best known for steering G42's aggressive global AI infrastructure expansion, including a landmark partnership with Cerebras Systems involving over $1.4 billion in purchase commitments and the joint announcement of Condor Galaxy, a planned network of nine interconnected AI supercomputers.

Partner at a16z and podcast host/interviewer.

Brian Halligan is the co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot, a publicly traded CRM and marketing software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is currently a partner and senior advisor at Sequoia Capital, where he coaches startup founders on scaling, and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, where he teaches a course on scaling entrepreneurial ventures. He is best known for coining the term "inbound marketing" and co-authoring the book of the same name with Dharmesh Shah, and he hosts the podcast Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan. He also co-founded Propeller Ventures, a climate tech venture fund focused on ocean innovation investments.

Pravesh Mistry is the Global Head of Sales at Notion, the productivity and collaboration software company, a role he has held since June 2024. He works alongside Erica Anderson, Notion's Chief Revenue Officer, as part of the company's revenue leadership team. Mistry brings enterprise sales depth from prior roles including CRO at Truework, Head of Global Sales at ThousandEyes (Cisco), and VP of Enterprise Sales at Rackspace. He is known as a high-intensity, execution-focused sales leader.

Erica Anderson is the Chief Revenue Officer at Notion, a role she has held since March 2023. Before joining Notion, she spent eight years at GitHub in progressive sales leadership roles, culminating in CRO, where she helped scale the company past $1 billion in ARR and drove go-to-market for GitHub Copilot. She is known as a systems-oriented revenue leader in the enterprise SaaS space and works alongside Pravesh Mistry, Notion's Global Head of Sales.

CEO of Futurum Group who characterized Nvidia's evolution beyond its chip business identity.

Prominent computer vision researcher at Inria/ENS/CNRS, senior author on PointACT.

Co-author of PointACT; involved in real-robot experimental validation.

Lead author of PointACT; researcher at Inria/ENS/CNRS focused on 3D geometry for robot learning.

Former Fidelity portfolio manager who correctly avoided the dot-com bubble but retired before the payoff.

President of M&A at Banyan Software who provided strategic framing on SpaceX's AI acquisition strategy.

Individual in acquisition talks for Olympique Lyonnais alongside Ares Management.

Investor in talks with Ares Management to assume control of French soccer club Olympique Lyonnais.

CEO who now controls Sbarro after the chain's two bankruptcy filings.

Founder of Domino's who sold the company to Bain Capital in 1998 for ~$1B.

New CEO of PayPal driving the shutdown of PayPal Ventures as part of a broader simplification strategy.

Google executive given ownership of centralized AI infrastructure as the second move in Pichai's restructuring sequence.

Editor-in-Chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast; conducted the Pichai interview sourced in this article.

CEO of Condé Nast who publicly directed all business units to plan as if search traffic is zero.

U.S. Executive Director of ControlAI, an AI governance advocacy organization.

Co-founder of Nauk Nauk, an AI video startup targeting the kidult market.

CEO of FAR.AI, an AI safety research firm.

Author of 'Die With Zero,' a book advocating spending and giving while alive.

Personal finance author and educator, credited by Sam Parr for the monthly financial review practice.

ML researcher at Jane Street who described the firm's unusual puzzle-based interview philosophy on the Dwarkesh podcast.

16th-century philosopher executed by the Inquisition, whose fate was determined by loss of patronage rather than the radicalism of his ideas.

15th-century Renaissance philosopher, substantially more theologically radical than Giordano Bruno, who survived Inquisition via Medici patronage.

15th-century radical Platonist philosopher and Medici protégé who survived multiple Inquisition inquiries through patronage.

17th-century English political philosopher, author of Leviathan, whose work inadvertently revived interest in Machiavelli.

Data analyst and author at Our World in Data who authored the NVIDIA revenue growth data insight.

Writer and entrepreneur, top 1% Medium writer, author of essays on productivity and action bias.

Nobel Prize-winning economist known for pioneering agent-based models of residential segregation.

Co-founder of Simile and Stanford professor in human-computer interaction and social computing; Joon Sung Park's PhD advisor.

CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group who leads Yorkville International Capital SPAC.

Co-founder of Oracle and father of David Ellison, a major Trump donor helping finance the WBD takeover.

CEO of Paramount Skydance whose political alignment with Trump is driving opposition to the WBD merger.

Former FTC Chairman under President Obama currently advising Paramount Skydance.

Chief legal officer of Paramount Skydance and former head of DOJ's antitrust division.

Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics studying AI and fintech geopolitics.

Global Head of Macro at Deutsche Bank, quoted on export control implications for U.S. tech.

Founder of Frank convicted of defrauding JPMorgan Chase and now seeking a presidential pardon.

CEO of Block who laid off nearly half the company and initially attributed it to AI before admitting to pandemic overhiring.

25-year-old MIT-trained CEO of Cursor, navigating competitive pressure from Anthropic and a potential $60B SpaceX acquisition.

Founder of LifeArchitect.ai and author of The Memo newsletter, tracking AGI and ASI development.

Creator of PGP encryption software, investigated for releasing it publicly; charges were dropped without prosecution.

University professor and first individual prosecuted under the US deemed export rule, jailed four years for letting foreign students access Air Force research.

CTO and co-founder of Cerebras; previously co-founded SeaMicro.

Prolific Silicon Valley angel investor known for investing in early-stage startups and operating with a pay-it-forward philosophy.

Prominent investor and co-host of the BG2 podcast, cited as an example of independent investor media presence.

Partner at Sequoia Capital, cited as a high-profile guest secured by Sourcery.

Partner at a16z focused on consumer and creative AI investments.

Partner at a16z focused on AI and infrastructure investments.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Core Kairos team member at SenseNova contributing to data engineering and model development.

Participant/author on the Kairos physical AI world model paper.

First named author on the Kairos world model paper, likely lead researcher at SenseTime's SenseNova physical AI division.

Founder of ImageNet and defining figure in vision-based AI, co-author on T-Rex manipulation paper.

Researcher at NVIDIA and Georgia Tech active in robot imitation learning and dataset curation.

Veteran vision and robot learning researcher at UC Berkeley.

Lead author on T-Rex tactile-reactive dexterous manipulation paper from UC Berkeley.

Co-founder and CEO of Baidu; had early AI vision including establishing Baidu US Research Institute.

Key NVIDIA CUDA architect during PhD; later recruited to Baidu US Lab; co-author of Deep Speech 2; brought Dario Amodei to Baidu.

Former Baidu Chief Scientist and head of Baidu US AI Lab; credited with publicly establishing GPUs for AI model training.

Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, co-host of the AI + a16z podcast.

Axios reporter covering the Fox/Roku deal.

Founder of Athena Capital who provided context on SpaceX's valuation and AI-era hype.

Prominent computer scientist who signed the open letter defending Anthropic's Fable model.

Co-founder of Veracode who signed the open letter defending Anthropic's Fable model.

CEO of SocialProof Security who signed the open letter defending Anthropic's Fable model.

Nvidia security researcher who signed the open letter defending Anthropic's Fable model.

CEO of Sophos who signed the open letter defending Anthropic's Fable model.

Former Facebook Chief Security Officer who led the informal cybersecurity coalition defending Anthropic's Fable model.

Co-founder of 137 Ventures who participated in the decision to continue investing in SpaceX during the Starlink fundraising.

Co-author of the PostRound newsletter covering Series A deal activity.

CEO of Folio Photonics, an optical data storage hardware startup.

CEO of Capsa AI, an AI investment support platform for private equity.

CEO of Minerva, a go-to-market customer behavior analytics platform.

CEO of Neion Bio, an egg-based biomanufacturing company.

CEO of Klinic, a healthcare access marketplace startup.

CEO of Aryon Security, a proactive cloud security startup.

CEO of Evotrex, an indoor localization startup from Hungary.

CEO of Sandstone, an AI legal OS startup based in Cape Town.

CEO of Turnout, a consumer advocacy platform.

Portfolio manager at Bullseye American Ingenuity Fund recommending Nvidia as a long-term hold.

Linxi "Jim" Fan is a Director of AI and Distinguished Scientist at NVIDIA, where he co-leads Project GR00T (humanoid robotics) and the GEAR (Generalist Embodied Agent Research) Lab. He holds a Stanford Ph.D. and was OpenAI's first research intern. Fan is best known for his work on embodied AI and physical robotics, including DreamDojo, an open-source interactive world model trained on 44,000 hours of human video that enables robots to learn from synthesized simulation without hand-authored physics engines.

Shan You is a Research Director at SenseTime Research, where he focuses on fundamental algorithms for machine learning and computer vision. He received his Ph.D. from Peking University in 2019, advised by Professor Chao Xu, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Tsinghua University under Professor Changshui Zhang. He is best known for his work on efficient machine learning — including knowledge distillation, neural architecture search, and representation learning — with publications at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICCV, and ECCV, and has a longstanding co-authorship with Chang Xu spanning at least 2017 through 2023.

Physicist and author of 'The Fabric of Reality', known for foundational work in quantum computing and philosophy of science.

Co-founder of The Chainsmokers music act and Mantis VC investment vehicle.

Investor in Factory, described as helpful and generous with her time and network.

Renowned theoretical physicist at Princeton who co-authored a paper with Matan Grinberg when he was an undergraduate.

Individual who pled guilty in 2026 to paying Skid Row residents for votes in the LA mayoral election.

Renowned chef and owner of The French Laundry, hosted the All In Liquidity event speaker dinner.

Boxer, content creator, and investor who attended the All In Liquidity event.

Former British political strategist, Fox News commentator, and California gubernatorial candidate.

Investor and media personality who noted the shift to direct-to-public communications as the new norm in high-stakes AI disputes.

Jimmy Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, is an American YouTube creator and entrepreneur who serves as founder and CEO of Beast Industries. He is best known for high-production-value videos featuring large-scale challenges, giveaways, and philanthropic stunts, making him the most subscribed individual creator on YouTube with over 476 million subscribers on his main channel. He began posting YouTube content at age 13 in 2012 and has since expanded into business ventures including the snack brand Feastables and a reality competition series on Amazon Prime Video.

Geopolitical and institutional macro thinker; founder of Bismarck Analysis.

New York Knicks forward referenced for a pivotal play in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Technology analyst at Creative Strategies covering consumer tech and AI compute infrastructure.

Tech media critic and newsletter writer known for skeptical takes on the AI industry.

Founder of Future Ventures and formerly DFJ; one of the earliest investors in Tesla and SpaceX, never sold a share.

HackerOne CLO and former Obama administration lawyer flagging CAISI's absence from Trump's AI executive order.

OPM Director and former Silicon Valley executive articulating a framework of 'permissioned innovation' for government adoption of AI.

Former Pentagon official and University of Pennsylvania professor providing expert analysis on Trump AI policy risks.

EU tech chief outlining Europe's AI policy posture focused on regulatory stability, sovereign capacity, and data center expansion.

Investment executive promoted to Deputy CIO of Private Markets at CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund.

Former GP at Andreessen Horowitz who published a NYT op-ed criticizing Silicon Valley's anti-regulation political lobbying.

Notable short-seller publicly skeptical of SpaceX's IPO valuation.

Anthropic co-founder and AI interpretability researcher who authored an 80-page 'Constitution' document.

Co-author on the WT-UMI tactile manipulation research paper.

Lead researcher on Ctrl-World, the prior state-of-the-art manipulation world model benchmarked against WEAVER.

Co-founder of Unlimited Industries, an AI-native construction design and engineering firm.

Tulsee Doshi is Senior Director and Head of Product for Gemini and Generative Media Models at Google DeepMind, where she leads the product roadmap and strategy for Google's flagship AI foundation models. She oversees the full Gemini model family — including Nano, Flash, and Pro variants — from research through production deployment across Google's ecosystem. She is best known for her work bringing large-scale multimodal models to real-world users and for her public commentary on the role of user trust in the next phase of AI development.

Legendary AI researcher, co-inventor of the Transformer architecture, returned to Google DeepMind.

Co-founder of Anduril Industries; shared his key lesson from Peter Thiel.

Napoleon Ta is a Partner at Founders Fund, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel. He focuses on AI and insurance investments across pre-seed through Series B stages and is particularly recognized for his rigorous approach to company due diligence and evaluation. Before venture capital, Ta was a professional poker player who applied risk-reward and pattern-recognition thinking to investing; he also played a role in developing Founders Fund's early cryptocurrency thesis.

Co-founder of Napster, first president of Facebook, and co-founder of Founders Fund; introduced Singerman to Founders Fund in 2007.

Former xAI engineer who filed a lawsuit alleging termination for raising AI safety concerns about Grok.

CEO of Opendoor, leading the company's strategic shift toward AI-native operations.

Founder of Ethereum, philosopher-technologist, and prolific blogger known for first-principles thinking on crypto, AI, and civilization.

Partner at a16z focused on defense tech and Pentagon acquisition transformation.

Nobel laureate and inventor of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, partnering with CZI on a CRISPR Cures program at UCSF.

Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania frequently mentioned as a prominent national political figure.

Investor and early Anduril backer who reframed weapons as a deterrence system for Mike Volpi.

Screenwriter and author of 'Adventures in the Screen Trade,' known for the maxim 'No one knows anything.'

Richard Barton is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor.

David Rubenstein is the co-founder of The Carlyle Group and a prominent philanthropist and interviewer.

Jim Simons was a mathematician and founder of Renaissance Technologies, the most successful quantitative hedge fund in history.

CEO of SCAN Health Plan, a not-for-profit Medicare Advantage health plan.

AI developer who publicly warned builders about the financial implications of Anthropic's June 22 pricing cliff.

CEO of Writer, an enterprise AI platform, known for early commentary on AI pricing dynamics tied to IPOs.

CEO of Merit Systems, an agentic commerce platform.

Matthew Rhodes-Kropf is a Senior Lecturer in Finance at MIT Sloan School of Management and Managing Partner at Tectonic Ventures. He is best known for his research on venture capital dynamics, including the widely cited paper "Is a VC Partnership Greater than the Sum of Its Partners?" (co-authored with Michael Ewens, Journal of Finance 2015), which demonstrated that individual VCs' human capital is 2–5 times more important than firm-level organizational capital in explaining investment performance. He has also taught at Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School, and his research spans VC strategy, insider financing, capital market interactions with firm creation, and the cost of experimentation in early-stage investing.

Paul Gompers is the Eugene Holman Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is one of the foremost academic researchers on venture capital, widely known for his extensive collaboration with HBS colleague Josh Lerner, with whom he has co-authored three books and numerous papers on venture capital governance, fundraising, and private equity returns. His work is foundational to the empirical study of how VC markets function, including research examining the relationship between capital inflows and the quality of investment outcomes.

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, where he also heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. He is one of the world's foremost authorities on venture capital and private equity, best known for decades of research conducted with HBS colleague Paul Gompers examining the full venture capital cycle — fundraising, investment, and exits. Lerner also founded the Private Capital Research Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding data access and independent research on private capital markets.

a16z general partner and board member of Flock Safety, focused on defense and public safety technology.

Greg Isenberg is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Late Checkout, a product studio that builds and acquires community-focused internet businesses. He is best known for his frameworks around AI-native company building, including his ACP (Audience, Community, Product) approach, and for advocating that companies should redesign operations around AI agents rather than bolting AI onto legacy workflows. He is also a prolific content creator and podcaster focused on entrepreneurship, community strategy, and the intersection of AI and business-building.

Co-host of the Training Data podcast, interviewer of Demis Hassabis on this episode.

Founder of Thrive Capital, known for building a highly regarded VC brand organically.

Co-author on IMPACT, affiliated with Harvard University.

Co-author on IMPACT, affiliated with Harvard University.

Co-author on IMPACT with dual Harvard-Stanford affiliation.

Host at a16z podcast and partner at Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm.

Economist and professor at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution blog.

Co-founder of Slack and Flickr, referenced by Bill Maris as an example of a founder who glimpsed the future before others.

Co-founder of Android and early Google Ventures partner who helped Bill Maris conceptualize the fund.

Stanford computer scientist, former Stanford president, Turing Award winner, and co-inventor of RISC architecture.

Actress and co-founder of Once Upon a Farm, highlighted around the company's NYSE debut.

Life sciences and public M&A attorney who moved from Paul Weiss to Goodwin as a Boston-based partner.

Newly promoted Partner at Inovia Capital, a Canadian crossover venture firm.

U.S. Senator leading White House negotiations on a package to federally preempt state AI laws.

Former YouTube Head of Global Civics Partnerships who joined Kalshi as its first Head of External Affairs.

Principal analyst at Constellation Research offering analysis on Apple's AI strategy.

Investor famous for 'The Big Short' trade who issued a bearish warning on SpaceX's IPO.

Co-founder of Kindred Ventures who raised $355M across new funds.

Co-corresponding author and academic PI on MotionWAM from HKUST (GZ) and HKUST.

Co-corresponding author and co-advisor on MotionWAM; PI-level researcher at Mondo Robotics.

Equal first author of MotionWAM paper, lead architect of training pipeline and real-world evaluation.

Pioneering machine learning researcher at UT Austin, multiple-term ICML chair, and former PhD advisor of Anker founder Yang Meng.

Co-founder and President of Anker Innovation, former head of Google China advertising sales, responsible for global commercial operations.

Former Credit Suisse CEO joining fintech-focused PE firm Motive Partners as industry partner.

CEO of Cyera and individual investor in the NYC cybersecurity startup.

CEO of Wiz and individual investor in the NYC cybersecurity startup.

Assistant Professor at Cornell University whose research demonstrates how Western-biased AI training data produces inaccurate representations of non-Western cultures.

Senior Fellow at the National Skills Coalition who coined the concept of AI creating an 'invisible drag on productivity' due to hidden literacy gaps.

Co-author of 'Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back,' framing AI data collection as ongoing colonialism.

Assistant Professor at Yale University studying human labor and data production, argues AI data practices mirror colonial extraction.

CEO of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, providing ground-level context on low literacy in workforce pipelines.

Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University studying AI's relationship to workforce literacy.

Arkady Volozh is the founder and CEO of Nebius Group, an AI cloud infrastructure company formed in 2024 from the international assets of Yandex, which he co-founded in 1997 and led through a major NASDAQ IPO in 2011. After Russia's invasion of Ukraine he publicly condemned the war and separated from the Russian operations; the reorganized Nebius has since secured large-scale AI infrastructure partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA. He is widely regarded as the cultural architect of Nebius's execution-first ethos, emphasizing relentless delivery over celebration.

British entrepreneur and venture capitalist, co-founder of Acorn Computer and ARM Holdings.

Max Junestrand is the co-founder and CEO of Legora, an AI-native legal workspace headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. He founded the company in 2023 at age 23 with a background spanning software development, Y Combinator growth roles, McKinsey consulting, and venture capital — but no legal experience. Junestrand is widely recognized for his sales acumen and product vision, having scaled Legora to over 1,000 customers across 40+ markets and a valuation exceeding $5.5 billion, while co-founder Jacob Lauritzen leads the engineering organization.

Senior researcher co-authoring LARA with expertise in embodied AI and 3D scene understanding.

Yi Chen is a researcher jointly affiliated with The University of Hong Kong and ARC Lab at Tencent PCG. He is the lead and corresponding author of Moto (colloquially Moto-GPT), a language-action model that introduces latent motion tokens as a bridging representation for learning robot manipulation from video data without requiring action labels during pre-training. The paper was accepted as an oral presentation at ICCV 2025 and demonstrated that its 98M-parameter GPT backbone outperforms much larger vision-language-action models such as RT-2-X and OpenVLA on the SIMPLER benchmark, making it a prominent pseudo-label baseline in subsequent robot learning research.

Legged robotics researcher at IISc Bangalore co-leading the robotics group with Robert Bosch Center backing.

Co-author of Shield-Loco contributing optimization theory including momentum-augmented update derivation.

NYC tech veteran and entrepreneur, co-founder of Meetup.

Financial journalist at The Wall Street Journal who analyzed Google's equity vs. debt decision.

CSIS analyst providing critical counterpoint to the Genesis Mission's science ambitions, citing structural federal R&D funding gaps.

U.S. Democratic Senator from Delaware co-introducing the Responsible AI in Defense Act.

U.S. Democratic Senator from New York who introduced legislation on autonomous weapons in response to the Pentagon-Anthropic dispute.

U.S. Democratic Senator from Michigan who introduced legislation on autonomous weapons in response to the Pentagon-Anthropic dispute.

Venture investor and partner at M13 Ventures, featured speaker at StrictlyVC LA.

Science fiction writer known for 'Arrival' who argues LLMs are sentence-continuation machines, not moral agents.

Researcher at Princeton University who compiled the LGBTI National Policy Dataset tracking policy dimensions across 197 countries since 1991.

Democracy researcher who co-authored a study on resisting autocratic erosion published in the Journal of Democracy.

Democracy researcher who co-authored a study on 27 cases of democratic erosion since 1999 published in the Journal of Democracy.

Researcher at Our World in Data who co-built an interactive child mortality visualization.

British mathematician and Fields Medal recipient who validated OpenAI's AI-driven mathematical breakthrough.

Hollywood actor, filmmaker, and entrepreneur who co-founded a media production company sold for approximately $100M.

Harvard geneticist previously on the Dwarkesh podcast, known for work on natural selection and human genetics.

Labor and technology policy researcher who wrote an essay on the 'messy middle' scenario of gradual AI-driven automation.

Political scientist who wrote a notable blog post on the politics of AGI, highlighting unemployment as a key political threshold.

Economist at Stanford with a notable result showing the economy's share spent on computing has been declining despite Moore's Law.

Researcher at Cursor who explained the hint-token RL training technique used in Composer 2.5.

Head of Economics at EPOC and Research Scholar at Stanford, known for network-adjusted factor shares framing.

Economist whose paper argues labor share has never actually fallen when accounting methodology is held constant across decades.

Biohacker and participant in the Founders Fund Mafia game show.

Podcaster and professional poker player; participant in the Founders Fund Mafia game show.

Founder of Kernel and Blueprint biohacking ventures; participant in Founders Fund Mafia show.

CEO of Flexport, a logistics and freight tech company; participant in Founders Fund Mafia show.

Founder of Signal, the encrypted messaging platform; standout participant in the Founders Fund Mafia game.

Founder and CEO of Epic Games; cited as an example of relatively sparse biographical documentation.

Turkish-Kurdish founder of Chobani yogurt brand.

Italian luxury fashion entrepreneur and founder of the Brunello Cucinelli brand.

Founder of Toyota's automotive business, pivoted the family loom empire into automobiles.

Founder of Huawei and former Chinese army officer.

American casino and hospitality magnate studied in the Saplings research project.

Japanese entrepreneur and founder of Kyocera, also an ordained Zen Buddhist priest.

American entrepreneur, aviator, and film producer; Texas heir studied in Saplings project.

Italian founder of Luxottica eyewear empire, raised as a Milanese orphan.

Writer whose essay 'Childhoods of exceptional people' catalyzed the Saplings research project.

Legendary concentrated value investor known for holding Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire before voluntarily closing his fund.

Kimi Green (full name Kimberly Green) is the co-founder and operator of Sam's List, a review-based directory and marketplace that connects small business owners with accountants, bookkeepers, and fractional CFOs. She took over day-to-day operations of the platform from entrepreneur Sam Parr, who created it and handed it to her to run and co-own. Green is best known for building out the platform's accountant network, onboarding hundreds of accounting professionals and establishing its client-review model.

Founder and CEO of LMNT, operating multiple businesses with a distinctive sprint/rest management cadence.

Celebrity chef who became a loyal Pat LaFrieda customer and brand ambassador.

Restaurateur behind Union Square Cafe and founder of Shake Shack.

Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, an AI recruiting and workforce platform valued at approximately $10 billion. Mercor automates candidate sourcing, interviewing, and evaluation at scale, having conducted more than five million AI-assisted interviews. Foody is best known for disclosing that Mercor's internal AI agent token spend now exceeds its total employee headcount costs, a claim he made on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings that became widely cited as a leading indicator of how engineering-heavy AI companies are shifting their cost structures.

CEO of Klaviyo, articulated AI strategy around making every user a true marketing expert.

Creator of the LIBERO-Plus benchmark that first formally documented language ignorance in VLA systems.

Senior author and lab PI at UIC working on embodied AI, supported by DARPA JUMP 2.0 and NSF.

Senior author and lab PI at UIC working on embodied AI and perception.

General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, known for crypto investments and the 'idea maze' intellectual framework.

Partner at a16z, podcast host and commentator on enterprise AI adoption.

Co-first author of the GRAIL paper at NVIDIA.

Co-first author of the GRAIL paper at NVIDIA.

Co-first author of the GRAIL paper at NVIDIA.

Leads NVIDIA's Physical AI and embodied intelligence research efforts; senior author on GRAIL.

Creator of FoundationPose and co-author on GRAIL at NVIDIA; his object pose tracker is directly integrated into GRAIL's reconstruction pipeline.

Project lead on GRAIL at NVIDIA DAIR Lab; expert in human pose estimation and 3D human understanding.

Host or producer of The a16z Show podcast.

China strategy expert and author of a book on U.S.-China competition known for allied coalition framing.

Trump administration official with ideas on rebuilding U.S. competitive edge in defense manufacturing.

State Department official running the PAC-Silica allied supply chain initiative.

Co-founder of nybl, a physics-informed AI company for critical industries that won Deel's The Pitch Grand Finale.

Co-founder of Zeely AI, an AI marketing intelligence platform that won Deel's The Pitch Grand Finale.

Co-founder of Zeely AI, an AI marketing intelligence platform that won Deel's The Pitch Grand Finale.

Leader at Lydia, a European fintech company, who served as a regional judge for Deel's The Pitch competition.

Co-founder of Alan, a European health insurance unicorn, who served as a judge in regional rounds of Deel's The Pitch.

Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of Deel who participated as a judge in regional rounds of The Pitch.

CEO of Glean, an enterprise AI search and knowledge management platform.

Former Bloomberg Beta VC who left venture capital to join SpaceX ahead of its IPO.

Co-founder of Anduril who helped Layup Parts' founder think about how to pitch VCs.

CEO of Anduril who mentored Layup Parts' founder on strategy.

Acclaimed film director signed as partner and adviser to Black Forest Labs, using its tools for storyboarding.

Longtime VC and Managing Partner at Vancouver-based Version One Ventures.

Co-founder of Twitter and angel investor backing Board's funding round.

Co-founder of Deel; MIT alumnus who co-built Deel from personal pain around international hiring compliance.

Daniel Ek is the co-founder and CEO of Spotify, the global music streaming platform he launched in 2006. He serves as Chairman of Helsing, a Munich-based AI defense company founded in 2021 that develops battlefield AI software and autonomous combat systems for democratic nations. Ek led Helsing's €100 million Series A in 2021 and its €600 million Series D in 2025 — valuing the company at approximately $12 billion — investing through his firm Prima Materia. He is widely regarded as one of Europe's most influential technology entrepreneurs and a leading backer of European defense-tech amid growing geopolitical pressure on the continent.

Christine Tyler Hill is a crossing guard and illustrator based in Burlington, Vermont, best known as the creator of The Cloud Report, a hand-assembled monthly newsletter zine documenting her observations from her crosswalk post. She launched the publication in late 2024 and grew it to roughly 2,000 paying subscribers at $8 per month, generating approximately $14,000 in monthly revenue. A Wall Street Journal profile published in March 2026 brought her wider recognition as an example of hyper-niche physical media generating meaningful independent income.

President of the UFC who publicly praised Othership on Instagram Live.

Researcher at Simon Fraser University/Berkeley known for TWIST teleoperation system, used as a comparison baseline in Humanoid-GPT.

Huan Ling is an NVIDIA researcher and OmniDreams co-author with expertise in generative models and differentiable simulation.

Haithem Turki is an NVIDIA researcher and OmniDreams co-author known for scalable neural rendering work including EmerNeRF.

Despoina Paschalidou is an NVIDIA researcher and OmniDreams co-author with influential publications on occupancy networks and neural rendering.

Amlan Kar is an NVIDIA research scientist and co-author on OmniDreams with expertise in 3D scene understanding and generative models.

Aarti Basant is a lead author and NVIDIA researcher on the OmniDreams generative world model project for autonomous vehicle simulation.

Zian Wang is a researcher at NVIDIA contributing to generative world models for Physical AI and autonomous vehicle simulation.

CyrilXBT is a pseudonymous AI, tech, and crypto content creator active on X (formerly Twitter), where they have amassed over 159,000 followers under the handle @cyrilXBT. They operate independently as an educator and practitioner, sharing practical insights on AI frameworks, autonomous agent systems, and emerging technologies. They are best known for a comprehensive Hermes Agent setup and deployment masterclass — covering multi-agent orchestration, persistent memory, MCP integration, and scheduler configuration — distributed across YouTube, Udemy, and developer platforms.

CEO of Obsidian who personally shipped the official Claude Skills integration.

President of Princeton's Investment Company (Princo) who authored the statement reversing the fossil fuel divestment pledge.

Managing partner at U&I Ventures leading a debut enterprise infrastructure fund.

CFO of Fireblocks, offering a grounded warning about the instability of long-term AI bets.

Co-founder and CEO of Mill, original iPhone team member, and operator commentator on enterprise AI costs.

CEO of Enter, the Brazilian AI legal platform.

Shane Olaleye is a Senior Managing Director and Head of Corporate Credit Assessment at Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA), where he leads the firm's corporate credit assessment team. He oversees analysis of KBRA's portfolio of more than 2,400 global middle-market sponsor-backed borrowers and has authored research on private credit trends including cash flow metrics and direct lending. He is also known for spearheading the integration of custom GPTs and AI tools into KBRA's analytical workflows through an initiative called "AI Fridays."

Jiajun Fan is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he researches reinforcement learning post-training for generative models, including flow and diffusion models as well as multimodal reasoning large language models. He previously earned a master's degree from Tsinghua University and is known for his work on sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning, including breaking 24 Atari world records, for which he received an ICLR 2023 Oral presentation. His recent research focuses on autonomous RL post-training methods that reduce the need for human supervision, with applications spanning audio LLMs and vision-language-action models.

Kangye Ji is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Tsinghua University, affiliated with the Efficient Deep Learning and Embodiment Group under the supervision of Professor Zhi Wang. His research focuses on efficient Embodied AI, particularly the acceleration of vision-language-action models and diffusion policies for real-time robotic control. He is best known as the lead author of Block-wise Adaptive Caching (BAC) and Sparse ActionGen, two training-free methods for substantially speeding up Diffusion Policy inference in robotic manipulation tasks.

Josh Tobin is a machine learning researcher and engineer who currently serves as a Member of the Technical Staff at OpenAI, where he leads research teams focused on AI agents. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley under Pieter Abbeel and was previously a research scientist at OpenAI, where he pioneered domain randomization, a technique for transferring deep neural networks trained in simulation to the real world for robotic control. He is also a co-founder of the ML infrastructure companies Gantry and Recursive, and co-organizer of the Full Stack Deep Learning training program.

Tony Z. Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics (sunday.ai). He is best known for creating ALOHA, a low-cost open-source bimanual teleoperation system, and the ACT (Action Chunking with Transformers) imitation learning algorithm, both developed during his PhD research at Stanford University under Chelsea Finn. He previously worked as a student researcher at Google DeepMind and interned at Tesla Autopilot and Google X Intrinsic before leaving his Stanford PhD program to found Sunday Robotics.

Zijian Zhu is a researcher affiliated with Synthoid.ai and a co-author of RDGen, a sim-to-real reinforcement learning framework for generating high-quality robot demonstrations to train Vision-Language-Action models. The paper, co-authored with Menglin Zou and others, was published on arXiv in May 2026. He is best known for this work on using RL-generated trajectories as an alternative to human teleoperation for robot policy learning.

Madeline Shi is a senior private equity and private debt reporter at PitchBook, where she covers the private equity industry and alternative investment strategies. She previously reported on distressed credits and restructuring at Debtwire, and on alternative credit at Pageant Media. She holds a master's degree in Business and Economic Reporting from New York University and is based in the Seattle area.

OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer who raised internal alarms about competitive intensity and outlined the consulting partner strategy.

Rosie Bradbury is a Senior Reporter at PitchBook News based in New York, where she covers venture capital, startups, and sector beats including health and biotech, climate tech, and emerging technologies. She joined PitchBook in March 2023 after previously reporting for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Business Insider, and Wired. She is best known at PitchBook for her VC market reporting and healthcare coverage, including lead stories on major biotech deals such as Eli Lilly's $7 billion acquisition of Kelonia Therapeutics. She studied History and Politics at the University of Cambridge.

Seed investor working with Kevin Hartz to rebuild investment processes around AI.

Early-stage investor who backed Airbnb, Eventbrite, and PayPal; rethinking seed investing around AI.

Co-founder of Collide Capital, a VC fund backing underrepresented founders.

Co-founder of Collide Capital, a VC fund backing underrepresented founders.

Commentator at Nucleus Talent tracking emerging VC manager performance.

Founder of Banana Capital and commentator on venture and technology trends.

Cristina Cordova is the Chief Operating Officer at Linear, where she leads go-to-market and operations functions. She previously served as Head of Platform and Partnerships at Notion and spent over seven years at Stripe as one of its early employees, building the partnerships organization and leading cross-functional business units. She is also an active angel investor and advisor to over 80 startups across SaaS, developer tools, AI, and fintech.

CEO of Diamfab, leading the novel diamond semiconductor materials company out of Grenoble.

CEO of Lucis, leading the biological age measurement platform.

CEO of Saris, building AI negotiation agents for enterprise finance.

CEO of Geordie, leading agent-native security at a $155M valuation.

CEO of Gray Swan, leading the AI model safety company positioned to become the default security layer for AI in production.

CEO of OurSky, leading the company's $90M raise as it repositions space as a software platform.

CEO of Focused Energy, leading the fusion startup through its $240M raise.

CEO of Retro Biosciences, leading the largest longevity biotech raise of the week.

Former co-head of Americas M&A at UBS, now joining BMO as head of U.S. M&A.

Former head coach of the New England Patriots who joined Fifth Down Capital as a managing director.

ESPN MLB insider and reporter who provided primary sourcing for the MLB labor/salary cap debate.

Australian economist and Assistant Minister who argues for pricing AI extinction risk into economic frameworks.

Economist affiliated with the University of Virginia and Anthropic, lead author on AI GDP measurement paper.

Jacob E. Robbins is a technology reporter for PitchBook News based in Seattle, where he covers the intersection of private markets and emerging technologies with a focus on venture capital, startups, and generative AI. He joined PitchBook in 2022 and previously reported on enterprise technology for Business Insider, covering companies such as Intel, Nvidia, and Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. He is known for applying a skeptical lens to AI industry headlines, distilling major deals and trends for a private-market audience. He began his journalism career in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts and later worked at Air Mail as Graydon Carter's assistant.

Kevin Eisele is a managing director in healthcare equity capital markets at William Blair, based in the firm's Chicago office. He specializes in biopharma capital raising and is frequently cited in major financial publications on biotech IPO trends and market dynamics. He joined William Blair's investment banking team in 2011.

Wilbert Pumacay is a computer science researcher specializing in reinforcement learning for robotics. He is a graduate student at Universidad Católica San Pablo in Arequipa, Peru, where he works on robotic manipulation. He is best known as a co-author of The Colosseum, a simulation benchmark for evaluating generalization in robotic manipulation that introduces a systematic perturbation taxonomy including manipulation object and receiver object categories.

Legendary Fairchild Semiconductor veteran and GP Emeritus at Eclipse who originally backed the Cerebras team at SeaMicro.

Dimitri Zabelin is a Senior Investment Research Analyst specializing in AI at PitchBook, where he covers venture capital funding trends across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and life sciences. He is best known for his quantitative research on AI investment flows, including quarterly AI funding reports and analysis of sovereign wealth fund AI allocations, which have been cited in outlets such as BBC News, Reuters, and Forbes. Before joining PitchBook, he founded Pantheon Insights, a geopolitical risk consultancy, and held roles at the World Economic Forum and DailyFX/IG Group, where he applied macroeconomic and geopolitical analysis to capital markets.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was an Austrian composer of the Classical period, widely regarded as one of the greatest musical geniuses in Western history. He composed over 800 works across virtually every genre — symphonies, operas, chamber music, and concertos — producing masterpieces such as Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and his Requiem. Despite his extraordinary creative output, Mozart was chronically impoverished and died at age 35, leaving behind debts and an unfinished Requiem.

Aviation pioneer and co-inventor of the powered airplane alongside his brother Orville Wright.

Early-stage investor known as an early backer of Twitter, Uber, and Instagram; former venture capitalist at Lowercase Capital.

American psychologist and developer of Social Learning Theory, known for his 1954 research on internal locus of control.

Founder and researcher at Our World in Data, known for work on global development and the energy ladder concept.

Securities litigation partner at Ackerman law firm building the theory that AI washing in layoff announcements constitutes securities puffery.

LP at the University of Chicago endowment who spoke at the Slow Takeoff conference.

LP at Granite who spoke on the LP panel at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Co-founder of Homebrew and Screendoor, participated in a fireside chat at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Partner at Compound and panelist at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Partner at Octave and panelist at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Partner at Verdict and emerging manager speaker at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Partner at Nebular and emerging manager speaker at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Partner at TwelveBelow and emerging manager speaker at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Mike Judge is an American actor, animator, writer, producer, and director best known as the creator of the animated television series Beavis and Butt-Head and co-creator of King of the Hill. He studied physics at the University of California, San Diego before pivoting to animation, creating the short film Frog Baseball in 1992, which MTV developed into the full Beavis and Butt-Head series. He also created the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley and wrote and directed the films Office Space and Idiocracy.

Trey Parker is an American animator, writer, director, producer, and voice actor, best known as the co-creator of the animated television series South Park alongside his creative partner Matt Stone. The series has aired on Comedy Central since 1997, with Parker serving as a writer, director, executive producer, and voice actor for characters including Stan Marsh and Eric Cartman. Parker and Stone also co-created the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, which premiered in 2011 and won nine Tony Awards.

Matt Stone is an American animator, writer, producer, and actor who co-created the animated television series South Park with his creative partner Trey Parker. The series has aired on Comedy Central since 1997 and is known for its irreverent, edgy humor. Stone also co-created the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon and has worked on films including South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Team America: World Police.

Jason Hirschhorn is an American media executive and entrepreneur who serves as CEO of REDEF, a digital content curation company. He previously held senior digital leadership roles including Chief Digital Officer of MTV Networks, President of Sling Media, and co-president of MySpace. He is known for his early work in digital music at MTV Networks, where he built the URGE digital music service and debated Steve Jobs on subscription-based music models prior to the launch of iTunes.

Philip Hampson Knight is an American billionaire businessman and the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike, Inc. He co-founded the company as Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 with his former University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman, serving as CEO from 1968 to 1990 and again from 2000 to 2004, and as chairman until his retirement from the board in 2016. He is best known for building Nike from a small partnership into the world's largest athletic footwear and apparel company, and is also the owner of the stop-motion animation studio Laika.

Paul Gardner Allen (1953–2018) was an American businessman, computer programmer, and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft Corporation with Bill Gates in 1975. He left his full-time role at Microsoft in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, retaining his shares and becoming a billionaire when the company went public. Allen founded Vulcan Inc. in 1986 to manage his investments and philanthropic efforts, and established several research institutes including the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He passed away on October 15, 2018, from complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

CEO and co-founder of Shopify, known for maintaining an engineer's mindset while leading a major tech company.

American astronomer whose galaxy rotation measurements in the 1970s provided key evidence for dark matter.

Nobel laureate physicist and former director of Fermilab; author of 'The God Particle'.

19th-century Scottish physicist who unified electricity and magnetism into the theory of electromagnetism.

Former San Francisco Mayor featured in Weber's account of SF political and tech history.

Editor at Large at Newcomer and author of forthcoming book 'City on the Edge' about SF tech history.

Partner at Menlo Ventures providing on-record commentary on inference revenue momentum.

Partner at JME Ventures and author of the Startup Riders newsletter, described as one of Europe's most active Seed/Pre-Seed investors.

Co-founder of Lovable who led the pivotal backend migration from Python to Go and development of AI self-debugging capabilities.

Jay Robert "JB" Pritzker is an American politician, businessman, and philanthropist serving as the 43rd Governor of Illinois, a position he has held since January 2019. A member of the Democratic Party and heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, he was reelected in 2022 and is currently seeking a third term in 2026. During his tenure, he has focused on economic development, fiscal stabilization, infrastructure investment, and progressive social policies including reproductive rights protections and an assault weapons ban.

Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher is the President of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, a position she assumed in July 2022. She previously served in the California State Assembly from 2013 to 2022, representing the 80th district in southern San Diego, where she authored landmark labor legislation including AB 5 on worker classification and paid sick leave. She currently co-chairs the AFL-CIO State Federation AI Task Force and is advocating for state-level guardrails on workplace AI and automation.

Eric Gastfriend is the co-founder and executive director of Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), a nonprofit organization focused on AI policy advocacy. He previously served as CEO and president of DynamiCare Health, a digital health startup recognized by NIH and FDA. He co-founded ARI in late 2023 with former Congressman Brad Carson to advocate for federal AI policies that protect the public while maintaining U.S. competitive advantage in AI development.

Greg Casar is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative for Texas's 35th congressional district since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party and the House progressive group known as the Squad, he assumed office as Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in January 2025. He previously served on the Austin City Council from 2015 to 2022 and is known for his focus on working-class economic issues, labor rights, and affordability.

Partner at Phoenix Court VC championing a structural overhaul of VC firm ownership and governance.

Managing Director at PGIM who provided expert commentary on direct lending market dynamics.

Senior VC analyst at PitchBook who authored the lead VC AUM forecast analysis.

Brandon Cui is an AI and machine learning researcher at NVIDIA whose work focuses on reinforcement learning, large language model training, and multimodal reasoning. He holds BS and MS degrees in computer science from Stanford University and has previously held research positions at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and Databricks Mosaic AI Research. He is known for contributions to multi-agent reinforcement learning, including off-belief learning and k-level reasoning for zero-shot coordination, as well as recent work on introspective training methods for LLMs and dense language annotation for robot policy learning.

Alex Trevithick is a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research, where he works on training and leveraging generative models for 3D and 4D computer vision. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC San Diego under the supervision of Professor Ravi Ramamoorthi, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He is best known for his work on neural radiance fields, single-image view synthesis, and 3D generative models, including papers such as GRF, NerfDiff, and Real-Time Radiance Fields for Single-Image Portrait View Synthesis.

Jaehun Jung is a PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Yejin Choi, and a Student Researcher at NVIDIA Research working on data synthesis and quality estimation for frontier language models. He is known for his research on training and evaluating language models with other models, including work on LLM judges with provable guarantees for human agreement, information-theoretic distillation, and data diversification methods for reasoning. His work has been published at venues including ICLR, NAACL, EMNLP, and COLM.

David Acuna is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research in the Language and Cognition Research Group, where he works with Yejin Choi. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Computer Vision from the University of Toronto, advised by Sanja Fidler, and was the first full-time employee of the NVIDIA Toronto AI Lab. His research spans reasoning models, synthetic data, inference-time scaling, and multimodal representation learning, and he is a recipient of the 2020 Microsoft Ada Lovelace Fellowship.

Ruiyi Wang is a PhD student in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego, where they are advised by Prithviraj Ammanabrolu. Their research focuses on reinforcement learning, large language models, and human-computer interaction. They are known for work on interactive learning of socially intelligent language agents (SOTOPIA) and simulating patients with LLMs for mental health professional training (PATIENT-Ψ).

Yejin Choi is a distinguished scientist of Language and Cognition Research at NVIDIA and the Dieter Schwarz Foundation Professor of Computer Science and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is a MacArthur Fellow (class of 2022) and was named among Time100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023. She is best known for her pioneering research in natural language processing, commonsense reasoning, and aligning large language models with human values and societal norms.

Adam Silver is an American lawyer and sports executive serving as the fifth and current commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA), a position he assumed on February 1, 2014. He joined the NBA in 1992 and previously served as deputy commissioner and chief operating officer under David Stern. Silver is best known for overseeing the league's global expansion, the development of the WNBA and NBA G League, and the establishment of NBA China. He has been recognized as Sports Business Journal's Executive of the Decade and named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People list.

Cameron Winklevoss is an American cryptocurrency investor and co-founder and president of Gemini, a New York-based cryptocurrency exchange he established with his twin brother Tyler in 2014. He is also a co-founder and partner at Winklevoss Capital Management, a private investment firm focused on early-stage technology startups. He is known for co-founding HarvardConnection (later ConnectU) at Harvard University and subsequently suing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over allegations that he stole their idea, as well as for competing as an Olympic rower at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Tyler Winklevoss is an American investor and entrepreneur who serves as Co-Founder and CEO of Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian he established with his twin brother Cameron in 2014. He is also Co-Founder and Principal of Winklevoss Capital Management, a venture capital firm he launched in 2012 that invests in early-stage technology startups. He is best known for co-founding the social networking site ConnectU and subsequently suing Mark Zuckerberg over allegations that he stole their idea to create Facebook, resulting in a $65 million settlement, as well as for competing as an Olympic rower at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. He began investing in bitcoin in 2012 and has since become a prominent figure in the digital asset industry.

Ron Wyden is the senior United States Senator from Oregon, serving in the Senate since 1996 and currently serving as the Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1981 to 1996. He is best known for his advocacy on privacy rights, internet freedom, and limiting government surveillance, as well as his work on health care policy and open government initiatives.

Avishai Abrahami is the co-founder and CEO of Wix.com, a SaaS website building platform he established in 2006 alongside his brother Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan. He has led the company since its founding, guiding it through its growth into a publicly traded enterprise and serving as board chair from 2013 to 2016 before transitioning to honorary chairman. He is best known for building Wix into a leading global website creation platform and, more recently, for steering the company through a major AI-driven restructuring that included laying off approximately 20% of its workforce.

Axios journalist who authored the framing quote on the broader AI implications of the Musk-Altman trial.

CIO of VenCap International who argues power laws have concentrated further with mega-fund growth.

Solo internet entrepreneur famous for rapidly building and shipping multiple revenue-generating products.

Cornell University co-author on VisualThink-VLA with focus on video and multimodal spatial grounding.

Senior faculty co-author on VisualThink-VLA at Zhejiang University, established researcher in multimodal learning.

Senior faculty co-author on VisualThink-VLA at Zhejiang University, researcher in multimodal learning.

Yanming Shao is a robotics researcher affiliated with Shanghai AI Laboratory and ShanghaiTech University, where he is completing his M.S. in 2026. His research focuses on dexterous manipulation, bimanual grasp synthesis, and data generation for embodied agents. He is best known for his work on BimanGrasp, a physics-verified bimanual grasp synthesis method for dexterous robot hands, and SynPolDex, a bi-level policy learning framework for finger coordination.

Xiong-Hui Chen is a researcher affiliated with the Qwen Team at Alibaba, pursuing a PhD at Nanjing University. His research focuses on reinforcement learning for large language models, and he is known for contributions including the AFlow framework for automating agentic workflow generation and work on Qwen-VLA. He has also held algorithm research internships at Meituan and Didi Chuxing.

Jinhui Ye is a researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he is an incoming PhD student supervised by Prof. Jiaya Jia. He has interned at Shanghai AI Lab under Dr. Yilun Chen, focusing on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics. He is known for his work on spatially guided training for VLA models, sign language translation, and long-form video understanding.

Jian Guan is a researcher at the Alibaba Qwen Team, based in Beijing, China. He earned his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University in 2024 under the supervision of Minlie Huang, and previously worked as a researcher at Ant Group from July 2024 to January 2026. His research spans advanced reasoning in large language models, personalized alignment, natural language generation, and efficient foundation models, with recent work on vision-language-action models including Qwen-VLA.

Mingsheng Li is an AI researcher on the Qwen Team at Alibaba Group, where he works on large vision-language models, multi-agent systems, generative AI, and embodied AI. He is a co-first author of Qwen-VLA, a unified vision-language-action model for robotic manipulation and navigation. He graduated from Fudan University under the supervision of Professor Tao Chen and has collaborated with researchers at Tencent, Shanghai AI Lab, and A*STAR.

Eric Dobkin is the Chairman of Whistler Capital Partners and a former senior figure at Goldman Sachs, where he worked for 49 years as a Partner and the Founder and Global Head of Equity Capital Markets. He is best known for founding Wall Street's first equity capital markets unit at Goldman Sachs in 1985 and for pioneering the modern institutional IPO model, earning him the designation from the New York Times as the father of the modern-day initial public offering of stock. He previously served as a Senior Advisor to Starr Investment Holdings and remains active as an angel investor and board member.

Homam Maalouf is the co-founder and Chief Product & Data Science Officer at Lead Bank, an FDIC-insured banking-as-a-service platform based in Kansas City. He spent over six years at Block, Inc. (formerly Square), where he led product management, data science, and credit functions for Square Capital, the company's small-business lending division. He co-founded Lead Bank alongside former Square colleagues including CEO Jackie Reses, applying his expertise in machine learning and algorithmic lending to help transform a century-old community bank into a modern fintech platform.

Eric Glyman is the co-founder and CEO of Ramp, a finance automation platform that provides corporate cards, expense management, and bill payment software. He previously co-founded Paribus, a price-tracking app that was acquired by Capital One in 2016. He graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Economics and East Asian Studies.

Zeb Evans is the founder and CEO of ClickUp, the all-in-one productivity platform he launched in 2017 and has grown to a $4 billion valuation with $535 million in total funding. He is best known for his hands-on product leadership and aggressive growth strategy, and recently drew wide attention for publicly owning a decision to lay off 22% of ClickUp's workforce as part of a shift to an AI-first "100x org" model in which AI agents outnumber employees three to one. The restructuring concentrated compensation into remaining high performers, with salary bands reaching $1 million, a transparency Evans explicitly claimed responsibility for rather than attributing to market conditions.

Li Bin, also known as William Li, is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of NIO Inc., a Chinese electric vehicle company headquartered in Shanghai. He co-founded NIO in November 2014 and has led the company through its public listing on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018. He is a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Bitauto Holdings Limited in 2000 and has co-founded and invested in over 40 companies in the internet and automotive industries. He received his bachelor's degree in sociology from Peking University.

Yu Kai is the founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, a Beijing-based company that develops software and hardware for assisted and autonomous driving systems in passenger vehicles. He previously led research and development at Baidu, where he launched the company's autonomous driving project in 2013 and directed the Institute of Deep Learning. He holds a doctorate in computer science from the University of Munich and has published approximately 100 academic papers with over 17,000 citations. Horizon Robotics, which counts Volkswagen, BYD, and Hyundai among its customers, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in October 2024.

Jacob Reses is an American political advisor who serves as Chief of Staff to Vice President JD Vance, a role he assumed on January 20, 2025. He previously held the same position as chief of staff during Vance's tenure in the U.S. Senate. Reses holds a JD from Stanford Law School and a BA from Princeton University, and earlier in his career worked as a senior policy advisor to Senator Josh Hawley and at Heritage Action for America.

Homam Maalouf is the Co-founder and Chief Product & Data Science Officer at Lead Bank. He previously spent over six years at Block, Inc. (formerly Square, Inc.), where he led Product Management, Data Science, and Credit functions for Square Capital and served as Chief Credit Officer for Square Financial Services, spearheading the company's bank license application process. Earlier in his career, he worked at Yahoo! Inc. and in strategy consulting at Booz Allen Hamilton / Booz & Company. He holds degrees from the American University of Beirut, Cornell University, and Harvard Business School.

Matt Eng serves as Chief Financial Officer at Groq, an AI inference and semiconductor company. He currently leads the financial operations of Groq 2.0 alongside interim CEO Adam Winter, following a $20 billion licensing deal with Nvidia and the departure of much of the company's senior team. Eng previously held the role of Vice President of Finance at Groq before stepping into the CFO position.

Adam Winter is the interim CEO of Groq, where he previously served as Vice President and General Manager for EMEA. In his EMEA role, he led Groq's expansion into Saudi Arabia, securing contracts for a large AI infrastructure cluster in the region. He assumed the interim CEO position following Groq's December 2025 licensing deal with Nvidia, which saw founder Jonathan Ross and senior hardware staff depart for the chip giant. Winter now leads Groq's pivot from chip designer to AI inference neocloud provider alongside CFO Matt Eng.

Early-stage investor and long-term supporter of Onion Academy across multiple funding rounds, formerly at IDG.

Founder of Morningside who provided the first investment in Onion Academy through a family foundation.

General Partner at a16z focused on fintech investments.

Joshua Pantony is the co-founder and CEO of Boosted.ai, a Toronto-based company that provides AI and machine learning tools for institutional investors. He previously co-founded Maluuba, a deep learning NLP company acquired by Microsoft, and worked as a Principal Machine Learning Engineer at Bloomberg. He holds a B.S. from the University of Waterloo and serves on the board of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii).

Solo founder of Micro One, Josh Browder's highest-multiple investment

Mattias Westman is a founding partner of Prosperity Capital Management, a hedge fund he established in 1996 that follows a long-only investment strategy focused on Russian and Former Soviet Union equities. He is also an active angel investor with a portfolio concentrated in life sciences and high-tech companies, including ClearNote Health, CardioRisk Laboratories, IgGenix, and Bluestar Genomics. He holds a master's degree from the Stockholm School of Economics and is based in Europe, sharing his time across London and Milan.

Roald Hunvik is a partner at Omni Partners, a London-based lower mid-market private equity firm, where he leads the firm's Nordic investment strategy from Oslo. He joined Omni Partners in 2026 from Monterro, a Nordic B2B software investor, where he served as partner and Country Manager for Norway after previously spending thirteen years in corporate finance at Alpha Corporate Finance. He holds an M.S. from Bayes Business School and began his career as a lieutenant in the Norwegian Armed Forces.

Xuhong Huang is an incoming PhD student at XLANG Lab, University of Hong Kong, advised by Professor Tao Yu, and an undergraduate student at Nanjing University. He is a research intern at the Qwen Team, Alibaba Group, where he is a core contributor to Qwen-VLA and works on Vision-Language-Action models. His research focuses on spatial intelligence, embodied agents, and multimodal learning. He is a co-first author on FineVLA, contributing to data pipeline, benchmark construction, policy training, and real-world evaluation.

Co-founder and partner at Index Ventures, scheduled for a fireside chat at StrictlyVC's Athens event.

Head of Britain's GCHQ intelligence and cyber agency warning of a narrowing window for Western allies to maintain security advantages.

Unnamed Google software engineer charged with fraud and money laundering for allegedly using nonpublic search data to bet on Polymarket.

Former CEO of Google and noted technology investor and commentator.

CEO of CloudBees who described the AI competitive landscape as 'winner-take-all mode' across every layer of the tech stack.

Co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, former dishwasher in his mother's Chinese restaurant, Stanford graduate and Y Combinator alum.

Pete Koomen is a General Partner at Y Combinator and the co-founder of Optimizely, the A/B testing platform he built into a leading product experimentation company before its acquisition. At YC, he has become a prominent voice on applying AI to institutional workflows, and is best known for developing an AI skill that distills partner office-hours transcripts into concise two-sentence company descriptions — a skill that now outperforms him on the task he designed it to do. His work on that skill, including its recursive self-improvement loop, has been cited as an early concrete example of encoding human expertise directly into reusable AI agents.

Boris Sofman is the co-founder and CEO of Bedrock Robotics, an AI-powered construction automation company based in San Francisco. He previously served as a senior executive at Waymo, leading autonomous trucking and core technologies for its robotaxi network, before co-founding Bedrock in 2024 alongside other Waymo veterans. At Bedrock Robotics, Sofman is leading development of AI operating systems that retrofit existing heavy construction equipment — excavators, bulldozers, and loaders — to operate autonomously, targeting excavation work that represents roughly 25% of U.S. construction spend. The company raised $350 million in total funding through early 2026 and completed a large-scale autonomous excavation deployment on a 130-acre manufacturing site in late 2025.

Dino Mavrookas is the co-founder and CEO of Saronic Technologies, an Austin-based defense startup focused on autonomous surface vessels. He served eleven years as a U.S. Navy SEAL, completing eight combat deployments, before transitioning to private equity technology investing. He is best known for leading Saronic's effort to build and deploy autonomous warships at a pace not seen since World War II, having raised over $650 million in venture funding including a $600 million Series C.

Sarah Tavel is a venture partner at Benchmark, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, where she served as the firm's first female general partner from 2017 until transitioning to venture partner status in April 2025 to focus on AI tools. She led Benchmark's investment in Eigen, an AI startup building a personal relationship-intelligence application, and is known for her contrarian, thesis-driven approach to consumer and enterprise software investing. Tavel is also a co-founder of All Raise, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the success of women in venture capital and startups.

Co-founder of Alpha School in Austin along with Brian; Joe Liemandt's wife.

Professor and researcher who wrote 'The Mentor Mindset', focused on adolescent development ages 10–25.

Former Premier of China who personally initiated the national-scale government guidance fund buildout in 2015.

VC LP observer cited for data on large endowment SpaceX concentration and secondary market discounts.

Founder of Cendana Capital, credited with pioneering the dedicated emerging manager FoF category in 2010.

Former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command joining Carlyle Group as operating executive, signaling defense/national security focus in PE.

CEO of AngelList and angel investor who backed Iconic's fundraise.

British businessman who consolidated Velcro Cos. stock and placed it under his philanthropic foundation.

Artist and cultural commentator quoted on the democratizing power of scale via the Coca-Cola analogy.

Co-corresponding author and academic PI for the Cybo-Waiter humanoid agent project.

Co-corresponding author and senior researcher/co-PI on the Cybo-Waiter humanoid agent project.

Haoqi Yuan is a researcher affiliated with Peking University and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), working in the area of embodied AI and humanoid robotics. He is the lead author of Being-0 (arXiv 2503.12533), a humanoid robotic agent framework that combines vision-language models with a hierarchical architecture comprising a high-level foundation model, a lightweight connector VLM, and a modular skill library for locomotion and dexterous manipulation. The Being-0 system, developed in collaboration with co-authors from Peking University, BAAI, and BeingBeyond, is designed to enable full-sized humanoid robots with multi-fingered hands to solve complex tasks through learned intermediate decision layers. Yuan et al. represent a leading academic-industry group advancing hierarchical agent stacks for general-purpose humanoid control.

Co-first author responsible for the grounding pipeline in the Cybo-Waiter framework.

Co-author on the Cybo-Waiter humanoid robotics paper.

Founder of Wischoff VC offering practitioner views on seed fund viability and portfolio construction.

Prominent investor at Kleiner Perkins who participated in Panthalassa's $140M raise.

Co-founder of OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a leading AI researcher.

Security researcher and tech commentator who flagged the Claude Code /workflows feature and its enterprise implications.

Head of Industries at Anthropic who detailed the company's commercial sales rebuild at SaaStr.

Creator of the Pyramid Principle, a structured communication framework developed at McKinsey in the 1970s.

Iranian revolutionary intellectual whose works fused Marxism and Islamic martyrdom into Red Shia ideology.

Historian at Stanford known for work on the Soviet Union and historical parallels to modern autocracies.

Former Australian Prime Minister, Mandarin speaker, and leading Xi Jinping watcher.

Scholar on Iranian politics and the IRGC; expert on Iranian regime corruption and asset exfiltration.

Researcher and author at Our World in Data who wrote this data insight on coffee production shifts.

Scott Phoenix is the co-founder of Vicarious, an AI robotics lab, and was an early adopter of the Public Benefit Corporation structure for AI safety reasons.

Daniela Amodei is the President and co-founder of Anthropic, focused on business operations and scaling the company.

Edwin Land was the founder and visionary leader of Polaroid, renowned for his innovations in instant photography.

Early institutional LP in Union Square Ventures Fund I; cited as one of the first backers of USV.

Podcast host and financial commentator on The a16z Show.

Co-corresponding author of GTA-VLA from Harbin Institute of Technology.

Equal co-first author of GTA-VLA at Futian Laboratory.

Nityesh Agarwal is an applied AI engineer at Every, an AI-first media and consulting company. He is best known for co-building Claudie, an internal Slack-based AI project manager agent, which he developed in two weeks using Claude Code alongside Every's Head of Consulting. His work at Every centers on translating the company's client and research insights into scalable AI systems, and he has become a prominent example of the emerging 'forward-deployed engineer' archetype — spending more time directing and evaluating AI agents than writing traditional code.

Marcus Moretti is a product manager at Every, the AI writing company, where he leads Spiral, an AI-powered writing assistant. Before joining Every, he served as a senior product leader at Axios HQ, where he helped grow the company's SaaS writing platform to tens of millions in ARR. He is known for operating as a largely solo product practitioner — handling code, customer support, marketing, and roadmap — and has written extensively about how AI tools like Claude Code have enabled him to ship at a pace unusual for non-engineers.

Leader at Exowat, an A16Z-backed renewable energy company serving data centers.

Vice Chairman of insurance operations at Berkshire Hathaway, known for his disciplined underwriting and deal-making philosophy.

MIT-trained mathematician, author of Beat the Dealer, and founder of Princeton Newport Partners who achieved 25-30% annual returns with no down years.

Value investor and fund manager known for cloning Buffett's approach and running Pabrai Investment Funds.

WeWork co-founder used as benchmark comparison for grandiose founder vision-selling.

Global editorial director of WIRED and host of the Uncanny Valley podcast, discussed tech's war on media.

Managing director at Madrona Ventures, former Microsoft executive, passed away unexpectedly at 59.

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who questioned the stability of AI usage policies in the Anthropic-Pentagon case.

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge who called the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic a 'spectacular overreach.'

Departing SEC Commissioner known as 'Crypto Mom' for her pro-crypto advocacy at the agency.

Former U.S. Army Secretary joining Capitol Meridian Partners as an operating partner.

Former head of Red Bull Formula One team now advising Oakley Capital on sports investments.

Axios reporter covering AI regulation and policy.

Axios reporter covering AI regulation and policy.

Axios reporter covering AI regulation and policy.

Researcher at OpenDriveLab/HKU, first author of UniVLA and contributing author on GuidedVLA.

Researcher at OpenDriveLab/HKU contributing to GuidedVLA, primarily known for autonomous driving work including UniAD.

SJTU professor and correspondence author on GuidedVLA, known for graph learning and autonomous driving research.

Senior PI at Fudan TEAI and correspondence author on GuidedVLA, focused on multimodal embodied AI.

Co-project lead on GuidedVLA from SJTU, contributing object head and depth head design.

Changxing Liu is a PhD student in the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he is advised by Siheng Chen. His research focuses on deep learning and cooperative perception, with recent work on LLM-based negotiation for cooperative autonomous driving and collaborative perception systems. He has also contributed to projects on editable driving scene simulation using collaborative LLM agents.

Weixin Li is an Associate Professor and Ph.D. advisor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, where she is a faculty member in the Laboratory of Intelligent Recognition and Image Processing (IRIP). She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA in 2017 under the supervision of Professor Song-Chun Zhu. Her research focuses on computer vision, pattern recognition, and multimodal learning, with work published in venues including CVPR, AAAI, IEEE TIP, and IEEE TMM. She was named a Beijing Science and Technology Nova in 2023 and leads projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Science and Technology's AI 2030 initiative.

Journalist and StrictlyVC contributor who authored the SpaceX IPO ownership and governance analysis.

Charlie Giattino is the Communications and Outreach Manager at Our World in Data, a nonprofit research organization that publishes data and research on global development. He holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Duke University and joined Our World in Data in 2020, initially as a researcher before transitioning into communications and outreach. He is known for promoting and contextualizing data-driven research on major demographic and societal trends, including fertility rates and the role of technology in shaping human behavior.

Pablo Rosado is Principal Data Scientist at Our World in Data, where he has worked since 2022. He holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and Data Analysis from the Max Planck Society and has over a decade of experience applying machine learning and data science across academia, industry, and the public sector. He is also a board member and secretary of the Welfare Footprint Institute and is active in the Effective Altruism community as an organizer of EA Barcelona.

Tuna Acisu is a Data Scientist at Our World in Data, where she joined in 2024 as part of the data team. She holds an M.Sc. in Data Science from the Technical University of Munich and previously worked on machine learning for epigenetics and in management consulting. At Our World in Data, she works on topics including migration, time use, water, hygiene and sanitation, and medicine and biotechnology, and has contributed to research on childhood stunting and its historical decline.

Daniel Bachler is a software engineer and Head of Engineering at Our World in Data, an organization that develops tools for exploring data on long-term trends in human development. He joined the organization in 2021 and previously served as CTO at Edelweiss Connect, where he worked on toxicological data management and visualization. He is known for co-building a population simulation tool at Our World in Data alongside Sophia Mersmann, which allows users to adjust demographic assumptions and explore population projections for countries worldwide.

Zirui Wang is a PhD student in the College of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University, where he has been enrolled since 2022. He also serves as an intern at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with research expertise in reinforcement learning and robotic learning. He is best known for his work on humanoid robot locomotion, including contributions to hybrid internal models, perceptive internal models, and whole-body motion tracking for humanoid robots.

Xiaowei Zhou is a Professor in the College of Computer Science and Technology at Zhejiang University, where he is also affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG. His research focuses on 3D computer vision, including 3D reconstruction, human pose estimation, motion capture, and scene understanding, with applications in mixed reality and robotics. He is known for work on human motion recovery methods such as GVHMR (World-Grounded Human Motion Recovery via Gravity-View Coordinates) and other open-source projects in 3D pose estimation and scene reconstruction.

Tianfan Xue is a Vice Chancellor Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a position he has held since November 2022. He previously worked as a researcher at Google Research from 2017 to 2022 and earned his Ph.D. from MIT CSAIL under the supervision of William T. Freeman. His research focuses on computational photography, computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning, and he has contributed to projects including Imagine2Real.

Researcher formerly at ETH Zurich and now at Google DeepMind, known for champion-level autonomous drone racing work published in Nature 2023.

Co-author on the Factored Diffusion Policies paper at UIUC.

Co-author on the Factored Diffusion Policies paper at UIUC.

Co-author on the Factored Diffusion Policies paper at UIUC.

Gene Amdahl was an American computer architect and entrepreneur best known for his foundational work on IBM mainframe computers, including the IBM 704 and System/360, and for formulating Amdahl's law, which describes a fundamental limitation of parallel computing. He founded Amdahl Corporation in 1970 to build IBM-compatible mainframes and later founded several other ventures including Trilogy Systems, where he attempted to develop a wafer-scale microprocessor. He passed away on November 10, 2015, in Palo Alto, California.

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist who serves as an adjunct professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is best known for pioneering object-oriented programming and leading the development of the Smalltalk programming language at Xerox PARC, where he also conceived the Dynabook concept and designed the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface. He received the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2003 and the Kyoto Prize for his fundamental contributions to personal computing. He previously served as president of Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to children's education and advanced software development, until its closure in 2018.

Douglas Carl Engelbart (1925–2013) was an engineer and inventor who directed the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute, where he developed the oN-Line System (NLS) and demonstrated the computer mouse, hypertext, and collaborative computing in his 1968 "Mother of All Demos." He later founded the Bootstrap Institute, now the Doug Engelbart Institute, with his daughter Christina. He received the National Medal of Technology and the ACM A.M. Turing Award among numerous other honors.

Ray Ozzie is an American software entrepreneur best known for creating Lotus Notes and for serving as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft from 2005 to 2010, succeeding Bill Gates. He currently serves on the board of directors of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and is the founder and CEO of Blues Wireless, a company focused on IoT communications. He has founded multiple companies including Iris Associates, Groove Networks, and Talko, and is widely recognized as a pioneer in computer-supported cooperative work and social productivity software.

Entrepreneur and marketer who applied the Karpathy Loop to marketing experiments, scaling from ~30 to 36,500 iterations per year.

First growth marketer at Dropbox and Eventbrite; coined 'growth hacking'; originator of the 'how disappointed would you be' PMF survey question.

Former advisor to President Trump; linked to Gillon Capital family office pursuing Sherritt International.

Investor who controls Lupa Systems; acquiring New York magazine and podcast network from Vox Media.

Founder of Convective Capital, a VC firm focused on wildfire technology startups.

Analyst at Freedom Capital Markets commenting on Nvidia's strategic business restructuring.

Former portfolio manager and forthcoming author warning retail investors against buying AI IPOs.