People

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

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

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

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

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

Co-founder and CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook.

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

Qasar Younis is the co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, a company that develops software platforms and simulation tools for autonomous vehicles and physical AI systems. He previously served as COO of Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017, where he helped raise the firm's $700 million Continuity Fund and oversaw investments in companies including OpenAI, Cruise, and Scale AI. Earlier in his career, he co-founded TalkBin, a customer feedback startup acquired by Google in 2011, and worked as an automotive engineer at General Motors and Bosch. He holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Kettering University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Patrick Paul Gelsinger is an American business executive and engineer who served as CEO of Intel from February 2021 to December 2024. He first joined Intel in 1979 at age 18, eventually becoming the company's first chief technology officer and the lead architect of the i486 microprocessor. After departing for leadership roles at EMC and VMware, he returned to Intel to lead a turnaround focused on revitalizing domestic semiconductor manufacturing. As of March 2025, he serves as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo and as a general partner at the venture capital firm Playground Global.

Michael Mignano is a General Partner at Union Square Ventures, where he invests primarily at the seed and Series A stages. He co-founded the podcasting platform Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019, and subsequently led Spotify's podcast and video businesses as Head of Talk. Prior to joining USV in 2026, he was a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he led early investments in companies including Granola, Suno, xAI, and Neuralink.

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

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, which he established in 1975 from his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. He stepped down as CEO in 2017, retired as co-CIO in 2022, and has since served as a mentor to the firm's investment committee while focusing on sharing the management and investment principles he developed over his career. He is best known for pioneering the All Weather risk parity strategy and the Pure Alpha macro investing approach, as well as for his book Principles: Life & Work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rodrigo Liang is the Co-Founder and CEO of SambaNova Systems, a company building full-stack AI infrastructure and computing platforms. He has over 30 years of experience in semiconductor engineering, having previously served as Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation where he led SPARC processor and ASIC development, and earlier held engineering roles at Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Afara Websystems. He holds MS and BS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is best known for pioneering SambaNova's full-stack AI computing approach, including the development of the Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit (RDU) chip.

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

Kareem Amin is the co-founder and CEO of Clay, a go-to-market software company he established in 2017 and is headquartered in New York. Before founding Clay, he worked as a program manager at Microsoft and co-founded Frame, a touch-experience startup acquired by Sailthru. He is best known for building Clay into a widely used platform that helps sales and marketing teams enrich data, automate outreach, and implement growth strategies, with the company serving thousands of customers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Notion.

AI researcher, Chief Scientist at Yuanhuan Intelligence, former MIT PhD student and Stanford postdoc

Travis Kalanick is an American businessman and the co-founder and former CEO of Uber. He currently serves as CEO of Atoms, a Los Angeles-based robotics and industrial automation company that encompasses his earlier ghost kitchen venture CloudKitchens and recently acquired the autonomous vehicle company Pronto. Atoms raised a $1.7 billion funding round in July 2026 led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber. Kalanick is best known for building Uber into a global ride-hailing platform before resigning as CEO in 2017 amid workplace culture controversies.

Shuran Song is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, Computer Science at Stanford University, where she leads the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab (REAL@Stanford). Her research focuses on developing algorithms that enable intelligent systems to learn from interactions with the physical world, with interests spanning computer vision, robotics, and autonomous manipulation. She previously served on the faculty at Columbia University and earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards including the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award in 2025, the NSF Career Award, and a Sloan Foundation fellowship.

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

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

Serial entrepreneur and investor, owner of Dallas Mavericks and Shark Tank investor.

Demis Hassabis is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of Google DeepMind. He is best known for leading the development of AlphaFold, an AI system that solved the 50-year-old grand challenge of protein structure prediction, for which he was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside John M. Jumper. He also co-founded Isomorphic Labs, a drug discovery company, and previously led the creation of AlphaGo, the first program to defeat a world champion at the game of Go. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London and was knighted in 2024 for services to artificial intelligence.

Max Cook is a Sector Head at Coatue, a technology-focused investment firm, where he specializes in AI infrastructure and energy investments. He is best known for his analysis of the AI power supply chain, tracing bottlenecks from semiconductors through data centers, grid equipment, and power generation, with a particular focus on nuclear energy. He was named a 2026 Hedge Fund Rising Star by Institutional Investor.

CEO of Monaco and former Chief Revenue Officer at Brex.

Researcher and author at Our World in Data who wrote this data insight on coffee production shifts.

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

Partner at Octave and panelist at the Slow Takeoff conference.

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.

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

Wendi Chen is a computer science Ph.D. student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Shanghai Innovation Institute, where she is a member of the Machine Vision and Intelligence Group supervised by Professor Cewu Lu. Her research focuses on embodied AI and robotic manipulation, with particular emphasis on contact-rich interactions, deformable object manipulation, and force-aware policies. She is a co-author of ImplicitRDP, an end-to-end visual-force diffusion policy, and RoboPocket, a system for robot-free policy iteration using smartphones, as well as Reactive Diffusion Policy, which was a Best Student Paper Finalist at RSS 2025.

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

Co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management and renowned value/credit investor known for his investment memos.

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

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

Lead author of Transformer Transformer paper, researcher in generative hardware design for manipulation

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.

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

Co-founder of DoorDash leading AI and agentic commerce efforts

Hongyu Ding is a researcher affiliated with Xi'an Jiaotong University and Peking University, where he collaborates with advisors including Jian Cheng, Yang Gao, and Jiebo Luo. He is best known as the lead author of Uni-LaViRA, a unified agentic architecture for embodied navigation that leverages pretrained multimodal large language models to perform vision-language navigation, object navigation, embodied question answering, and UAV navigation across heterogeneous robot platforms in a zero-shot manner. His research focuses on embodied AI, navigation foundation models, and deploying multimodal language models on physical robots.

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

Jonathan Ross is the founder of Groq and the inventor of Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). He currently serves as Chief Software Architect at NVIDIA, a position he assumed following a $20 billion partnership deal between NVIDIA and Groq announced in late 2025. He is best known for creating the TPU at Google, which powered DeepMind's AlphaGo, and subsequently founding Groq to develop Language Processing Units (LPUs) designed for fast AI inference. He is also known for his leadership philosophy of intentional leadership, expressed through the phrase "I intend to," which he adopted after missing early opportunities by deferring to team pessimism.

Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a company building orbital data centers to provide AI compute infrastructure in space. He previously co-founded Opontia, a digital brand aggregator, and worked as an associate at McKinsey & Company on satellite projects for national space agencies. He holds an MPA from Harvard University, an MBA from Wharton, and an MA in Applied Mathematics from Columbia University.

Michael E. Hurlston is the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director of Lumentum Holdings Inc., a designer and manufacturer of optical and photonic products, a position he has held since February 2025. He is best known as a veteran technology executive who has led three public companies, having previously served as CEO of Synaptics Incorporated from 2019 to February 2025 and CEO of Finisar Corporation in 2018 and 2019. Prior to his CEO roles, he spent sixteen years at Broadcom Limited in senior leadership positions. He holds advanced degrees in electrical engineering and business administration and serves on the Board of Executive Trustees of the UC Davis Foundation.

Ruben Dominguez is an angel investor, a16z scout, and the writer behind The VC Corner, a Substack newsletter with over 130,000 subscribers covering venture capital, startup fundraising, and growth strategies. He is known for providing founders with investor databases, financial models, and AI-driven go-to-market toolkits, including a free AI Creator Kit and GTM resources built into Notion workspaces. He also publishes a LinkedIn newsletter of the same name focused on actionable insights for startups and entrepreneurship.

Junsung Park is an undergraduate researcher at Seoul National University's Robot Learning Lab, where he works under Professor Songhwai Oh on reinforcement learning and learning-based control for robot autonomy. He is also affiliated with UC San Diego as a research assistant and has prior research experience at Seoul National University's Soft Robotics and Bionics Lab and Robotics Laboratory. His work focuses on building generalizable robot autonomy for robust interaction in dynamic environments, with interests spanning humanoid robots, wearable interfaces, and offline inverse reinforcement learning.

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

Melisa Tokmak is the founder and CEO of Netic, a San Francisco-based company building an autonomous AI revenue engine for essential service businesses such as HVAC, plumbing, roofing, and pest control. She holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University and previously led enterprise and government businesses at Scale AI, with prior experience at Instagram and Facebook. Netic uses compound AI systems to handle customer inquiries, scheduling, and pricing across calls, texts, and online channels, and has raised over $40 million in funding since launching in 2024.

Entrepreneur; CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and other ventures

Founder and CEO of Decagon, an AI-native customer support and agent platform.

Lifeng Zhuo is a researcher affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is known as a co-first author of FA-RDP, a frequency-adaptive reactive diffusion policy for contact-rich robotic manipulation. His work focuses on diffusion-based learning policies that balance multimodal trajectory prediction with reactive force-feedback control during contact-rich tasks.

MIT professor and AI safety researcher advocating for cross-ideological cooperation on AI risk.

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

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

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

Dean Ball is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the AI-focused newsletter Hyperdimensional. He previously served as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was the primary staff drafter of America's AI Action Plan. He is best known for his writing and policy work on artificial intelligence governance, emerging technology, and the future of regulation, and currently co-teaches a colloquium on frontier AI governance at Yale Law School.

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

Sam Parr is a media entrepreneur and podcast host who founded The Hustle, a daily business and tech newsletter acquired by HubSpot in 2021. He currently co-hosts the My First Million podcast with Shaan Puri and co-runs Hampton, a private peer community for high-growth founders and CEOs. He is also an active operator across multiple businesses and an investor in startups.

Co-founder of DoorDash leading autonomy and robotics efforts

Yao Song (姚颂) is a Chinese technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Striding AI (正行创新), a physical intelligence systems company focused on robotics. He previously co-founded AI chip company DeePhi Technology (深鉴科技) in 2016, which was acquired by Xilinx in 2018 for approximately $300 million, and later co-founded commercial aerospace company Oriental Space (东方空间). He is a Tsinghua University graduate in electrical engineering and was named to MIT Technology Review China's 35 Innovators Under 35.

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.

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

Ramin Hasani is the co-founder and CEO of Liquid AI, a company building efficient general-purpose foundation models, and a machine learning scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology, where his research on Liquid Neural Networks received international recognition including an HPC Innovation Excellence Award in 2022. He is best known for developing biologically inspired neural network architectures based on differential equations that enable adaptable AI systems with small memory footprints suitable for edge deployment.

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.

CEO and Co-Founder of Replit, former Facebook developer tools engineer, mission-driven founder focused on democratizing software creation.

Governor of New York, signing executive order on data center moratorium

Puhao Li is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Song-Chun Zhu, and a research intern at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI). His research focuses on the intersection of robotic manipulation and 3D computer vision, with particular emphasis on dexterous grasping, bimanual manipulation, and 3D scene understanding. He is known for his work on ManipTrans, a method for transferring human bimanual manipulation skills to dexterous robotic hands, and the DexManipNet dataset, as well as contributions to generalizable dexterous grasping and agent-agnostic manipulation representations.

Matt Weigand is a partner at Accel, a global venture capital firm, where he has worked since 2013. He focuses on enterprise software, financial technology, and security investments, with notable portfolio companies including Snyk, Cognite, Veriff, DriveWealth, Axonius, and Nebius. He represents Accel on the boards of Snyk, Cognite, Veriff, and DriveWealth. Prior to joining Accel, he worked in the technology investment banking group at William Blair.

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

Ryan Beiermeister is a partner at Founders Fund, having joined the venture capital firm in July 2026. She previously served as Vice President of Product Policy at OpenAI, where she was reportedly fired in early 2026 after objecting to a planned ChatGPT "adult mode" feature. Her career spans roughly 14 years across high-stakes technology environments, including product and strategy leadership roles at Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI.

John Kim is Chairman and President of Corporate Development at Lila Sciences, a Cambridge-based technology company building a scientific superintelligence platform. He previously served as Chief Client Officer at General Catalyst and held roles at J.P. Morgan, Court Square Capital Partners, and Kelso & Company. He is best known for having raised over $70 billion across venture capital and private equity over a three-decade career, and is the author of The Tao of Fundraising, published in Spring 2026.

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

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

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK, where he has worked since 1988. He is the author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense and is known as a leading thinker in behavioral economics and advertising, advocating that psychological value often exceeds logical value in business and decision-making. He co-founded Ogilvychange, a behavioral science practice within the agency.

DeepSeek founder investing personal capital and prioritizing research over commercialization.

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

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

Aaron D. Ames is the Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, Control and Dynamical Systems, and Aerospace at the California Institute of Technology, where he also serves as director of the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies. His research focuses on robotics, nonlinear control, hybrid systems, and cyber-physical systems, with particular emphasis on bipedal robotic locomotion, prosthetic devices, and safety-critical control of autonomous systems. He leads the Advanced Mechanical Bipedal Experimental Robotics (AMBER) Lab, which designs, builds, and tests bipedal robots and prostheses aimed at achieving human-like walking and translating those capabilities to assistive devices.

Lizhi Yang is a Mechanical Engineering PhD candidate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, where he has been conducting robotics research since 2022. He is best known for his work on safety-critical reinforcement learning, particularly the PAC-MAN framework that combines control barrier functions with RL to enable whole-body safety for humanoid robots in adversarial scenarios such as dodgeball. His research focuses on the intersection of control theory, machine learning, and robotic safety, including perception-aware methods for sim-to-real transfer on physical humanoid platforms like the Unitree G1.

Chuan Wen is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Science at Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Yang Gao, and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's BAIR lab under Prof. Pieter Abbeel. His research focuses on embodied AI and robotic manipulation, and he has published extensively on imitation learning, visual-force policies, and foundation policies for robotic manipulation at top-tier conferences including ICML, ICLR, RSS, and CoRL.

Cewu Lu is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he leads the Machine Vision and Intelligence Group. He is known for his research in embodied intelligence and computer vision, with work published in venues including Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence, and top robotics and AI conferences. He has contributed to open-source projects such as AlphaPose, HAKE, and GraspNet, and has received recognitions including the MIT TR35 China award and the Scientific Exploration Award. He previously served as a research fellow at Stanford University under Prof. Fei-Fei Li and Prof. Leonidas J. Guibas.

Mira Murati is an Albanian-American business executive and the CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, a public benefit corporation she founded in February 2025. She previously served as chief technology officer of OpenAI from May 2022 to September 2024, where she oversaw the development of products including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4. She is best known for leading the technical direction of OpenAI's flagship AI models and subsequently founding Thinking Machines Lab, which released its first model, Inkling, in July 2026.

Adam Neumann is an Israeli-American billionaire businessman and the founder of Flow, a residential real estate startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz that operates properties in Florida and Saudi Arabia. He is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of WeWork, the coworking company he led from 2010 until his resignation in 2019 amid controversy surrounding its failed IPO. He also co-founded the family office 166 2nd Financial Services with his wife Rebekah Neumann in 2019 to manage their personal wealth and investments.

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

Rohan Anil is a co-founder of Core Automation, a lab focused on developing new architectures for continuous learning models. He previously served as a Distinguished Engineer at Google DeepMind, where he co-led the pre-training of Gemini and contributed to PaLM 2, Gemma, and large-scale ML infrastructure. He is known for co-creating the Shampoo optimizer with Vineet Gupta and Tomer Koren, developing the Lingvo framework, and pioneering Wide & Deep learning for recommender systems. Prior to founding Core Automation, he conducted fundamental AI research at Google Brain and Anthropic.

Chris Camillo is an American investor, author, and entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Dumb Money and the founder and former CEO of TickerTags, a social data intelligence company. He is best known for his self-taught investing style called social arbitrage, which involves identifying market opportunities from everyday life and social media trends before Wall Street reacts. He turned an initial $20,000 investment made in 2007 into tens of millions of dollars and was featured in Jack Schwager's book Unknown Market Wizards.

Blake Scholl is the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, a company he established in 2014 to develop supersonic commercial aircraft. He began his career as a software engineer at Amazon and later co-founded the mobile technology startup Kima Labs, which was acquired by Groupon in 2012. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and is a licensed private pilot.

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

CEO of Databricks who met MosaicML's founder at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, leading to the $1.3B acquisition.

PitchBook Senior Research Analyst covering the big three LLM providers.