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.

Jeffrey Morgan is the co-founder and CEO of Ollama, a company that provides tools for running open-source large language models locally and in the cloud. He previously co-founded Kitematic, a Docker desktop product that was acquired by Docker, Inc., where he subsequently worked as a senior engineer and product manager. He is best known for creating Ollama, which is used across a significant portion of Fortune 500 companies, and for his earlier work on Docker Desktop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anish Acharya is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on consumer investing with an emphasis on AI-native products. He joined the firm in 2019 after serving as a product executive at Credit Karma, which acquired his prior company, Snowball. He is known for his thesis on AI-driven consumer applications, including AI companionship, creative tools, and productivity platforms, and has invested in companies such as Deel, Titan, and Mosaic.

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

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

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

Dino Mavrookas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Saronic Technologies, a defense technology company that designs, builds, and deploys autonomous surface vessels for the U.S. Navy and allied forces. He served eleven years as a U.S. Navy SEAL, including five years with the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (SEAL Team Six), before earning an MBA from Wharton and working in private equity at Vista Equity Partners. He founded Saronic in 2022 and is best known for leading the company's efforts to scale production of autonomous maritime drones for national defense.

Aaron Katz is the co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse, Inc., a real-time analytics database company. He previously served as Chief Revenue Officer at Elastic, where he helped lead the open-source company from approximately $15 million to over $500 million in revenue through its IPO, and spent twelve years in senior sales leadership roles at Salesforce. He is best known for commercializing the ClickHouse open-source project, originally developed internally at Yandex, into an independent company serving enterprise customers including Microsoft, Walmart, and Lyft.

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

Allison Ellsworth is the co-founder and chief brand officer of Poppi, a prebiotic soda brand based in Austin, Texas. She co-founded the company with her husband Stephen Ellsworth in 2016, originally under the name Mother Beverage, before rebranding to Poppi after securing investment from Rohan Oza on Shark Tank. She is best known for building Poppi into a widely distributed beverage brand through an early, founder-led social media strategy on TikTok, culminating in the company's acquisition by PepsiCo in 2025 for $1.95 billion.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the co-founder and CTO of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. He is best known as the creator of the Ruby on Rails web application framework, as well as related projects including Hotwire, Kamal, and Omarchy. He is also a co-author of several business books, including REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE.

Peter Beck is the founder and chief executive officer of Rocket Lab, a company he established in 2006. He leads an end-to-end space business that provides launch services, spacecraft design and manufacturing, and satellite components, with two-thirds of revenue coming from its space systems business. He is known for pioneering affordable access to space through the Electron launch vehicle and for pursuing strategic acquisitions to build Rocket Lab into a full-spectrum prime contractor for government and commercial customers.

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

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

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

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

Tony Hawk is an American professional skateboarder and entrepreneur who owns Birdhouse Skateboards. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential skateboarders of all time, having won 73 of 103 professional contests and pioneered modern vertical skateboarding. He is best known for landing the first documented 900 trick at the 1999 X Games and for lending his name to the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video game franchise, published by Activision. He retired from professional competition in 2003 and continues to oversee his business ventures and charitable foundation, The Skatepark Project.

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

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

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

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

White House official scheduled to meet with Anthropic, the CIA, and Commerce Department on Fable export control compliance.

Andrew Ng is the founder of LearnVector, a personalized AI tutoring company launched in 2026 with a $100 million investment from Coursera. He is also the founder of DeepLearning.AI, executive chairman and founder of LandingAI, managing general partner at AI Fund, co-founder and chairman of Coursera, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He is best known for pioneering work in deep learning, including founding the Google Brain project at Google and leading AI research at Baidu, as well as co-founding Coursera, which has grown to over 150 million registered learners.

Andre Retterath is a Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital in Munich, where he leads the firm's AI and infrastructure investment practice. He leads Earlybird's engineering team in building EagleEye, a proprietary AI-powered sourcing and screening platform, and writes the Data-Driven VC newsletter on leveraging data and AI in venture capital. He holds a PhD from the Technical University of Munich focused on machine learning and the value of data in venture capital, and serves on the boards of companies including Aleph Alpha, Energy Robotics, and Ethon.AI.

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

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

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

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute and the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida's Hamilton School. He serves as the Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal and is the author of several books on American foreign policy and international relations, including Special Providence, God and Gold, and The Arc of a Covenant. He previously served as the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations from 2003 to 2010.

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

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.

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

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

David Mark Rubenstein is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist who co-founded the Carlyle Group in 1987 and serves as its Co-Founder and Co-Chairman. He is the principal owner, Chairman, and CEO of Major League Baseball's Baltimore Orioles, having purchased the team in March 2024. He is best known for building Carlyle into one of the world's largest private equity firms and for his extensive philanthropic work, including serving as Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Gallery of Art.

Bernard Marcus is an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist who co-founded The Home Depot in 1978 and served as its first CEO and chairman until his retirement in 2002. He is best known for building Home Depot into the world's largest home improvement retailer alongside co-founder Arthur Blank and early investor Ken Langone. Marcus is also recognized for his extensive philanthropy through The Marcus Foundation, having donated nearly $2 billion to education, hospitals, and Jewish causes. He passed away on November 4, 2024, at the age of 95.

Vibhav Altekar is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Saronic Technologies, a defense technology company focused on autonomous maritime systems. He leads the company's autonomous capabilities, software systems, and engineering teams spanning perception, navigation, machine learning, and systems integration. Prior to co-founding Saronic in 2022, he was an early engineer at Anduril Industries, where he worked on programs including the Royal Australian Navy's Ghost Shark unmanned submarine. He studied electrical engineering at the University of California, Davis.

Roman Ugarte is a product and growth leader at SpaceXAI, where he helped incubate and build GrokBot, a knowledge-work AI agent. He previously served as Head of Growth at Cursor, scaling the AI coding company from approximately 15 employees to over 800 before its acquisition by SpaceX. He holds a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard University.

Agnes Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 2008 and currently serves as director of undergraduate studies. She specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics, with particular focus on Socratic and Aristotelian thought. She is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming and Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, and writes a monthly public philosophy column for The Point magazine.

Ben Lamm is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotechnology company focused on de-extinction and genetic engineering. He co-founded the company in 2021 with Harvard geneticist George Church to develop technologies for restoring extinct species, including the woolly mammoth, dodo bird, and Tasmanian tiger, using CRISPR and other genetic tools. Lamm previously founded several technology companies, including Chaotic Moon Studios, Conversable, and Hypergiant Industries, each of which was acquired.

Partner at Magid and panelist at the Slow Takeoff conference.

Ken Langone is an American billionaire businessman and financier best known for organizing the financing that enabled Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank to found The Home Depot in 1978. He founded the venture capital firm Invemed Associates in 1974 and earlier built his Wall Street reputation by managing Ross Perot's Electronic Data Systems IPO. He is a prominent philanthropist and a major donor to the Republican Party.

Jacob Coxon is an AI researcher who specializes in model pretraining and mechanistic interpretability. He worked at OpenAI from 2023 to mid-2026 and then briefly at Anthropic as a researcher before resigning in September 2026 over safety concerns about the AI industry's race toward recursive self-improvement. He is best known for co-authoring the GPT-4o system card and for his research on weight-sparse transformers and human-understandable circuits in neural networks.

Co-founder and CEO of Meta, formerly Facebook.

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

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.

Incoming CEO of Apple, inheriting unresolved AI strategy, App Store legal battles, Vision Pro failure, and China exposure from Tim Cook.

Raghu Raghuram is a managing partner and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he serves on the AI Infrastructure and Growth investing teams. He previously spent over two decades at VMware, ultimately serving as CEO and leading the company through its spinout from Dell and its $69 billion acquisition by Broadcom. He is best known for his deep expertise in enterprise infrastructure strategy, having scaled VMware from a startup to a global cloud infrastructure platform with over $13 billion in revenue.

Ryan Greenblatt is the chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he focuses on technical AI safety and security work. He is the lead author of the paper "Alignment Faking in Large Language Models," a collaboration with Anthropic that has been described as a landmark empirical result on AI loss-of-control risks. He has also co-authored work on AI control methodologies for improving safety despite intentional subversion, and writes on topics including AI R&D automation and recursive self-improvement scenarios.

Kevin Kelly is a writer, editor, and technology thinker who currently holds the title of Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993 and served as its founding executive editor until 1999. He previously served as editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review and has authored several books on technology and culture, including The Inevitable and What Technology Wants. He is best known for coining the concept of the Technium, his analysis of how technology evolves, and his influential writings on the cultural and societal implications of digital networks and emerging technologies.

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, cyberethnographer, and researcher based in New York. He teaches design and media studies at NYU and is the founder of 13101401 Inc., a design and research studio. His research focuses on digital phenomenology, artificial intelligence, and the cultural implications of being online, and he is the author of A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints.

Matt Mullenweg is an American web developer and entrepreneur who co-founded the open-source publishing software WordPress and founded the company Automattic. He served as CEO of Automattic until September 2026, when the company's board placed him on a paid leave of absence and appointed CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. He remains on the board of directors at Automattic and continues as leader of the WordPress open-source project. He is best known for co-creating WordPress, which powers over 40% of websites on the internet.

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

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

Vic Singh is a General Partner at RRE Ventures and the founding General Partner of Eniac Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm he co-founded in 2008 and scaled to over $600 million in assets under management. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Originalis AI, an operating system platform for private capital markets. A former full-stack software developer and founder of multiple venture-backed startups including Kanvas, which was acquired by AOL, Singh is known for applying a builder-first, engineering-driven approach to venture investing.

Justin Johnson is an American computer scientist and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, currently on partial leave. He is a co-founder of World Labs, a spatial-intelligence company launched in 2024 with Fei-Fei Li that develops AI systems for understanding and generating 3D environments. He is best known for foundational computer-vision research including Visual Genome, DenseCap, perceptual losses for real-time style transfer, and Mesh R-CNN, as well as co-instructing Stanford's widely viewed CS231n course on convolutional neural networks.

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

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

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

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

Rory O'Driscoll is a Partner at Scale Venture Partners, where he has been investing in enterprise software since the mid-1990s. He is best known for early investments in SaaS pioneers including Bill.com, Box, and DocuSign, and currently focuses on business applications enabled by AI across both digital and physical domains. He is a weekly guest on the 20VC podcast, providing commentary on venture capital and technology trends.

Entrepreneur; CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and other ventures

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

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

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

Tobias Lütke is a German-Canadian entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as CEO of Shopify, a publicly traded e-commerce platform headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. He founded the company in 2006 after initially building an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil using the Ruby on Rails framework. He is known for his early advocacy of AI integration in business operations, notably through a 2025 company memo requiring employees to justify why AI could not perform a task before requesting new hires. He also serves on the board of directors of Coinbase.

Miles Grimshaw is a Partner at Thrive Capital, where he partners with founders at the early stages of company building. He has led or been deeply involved in investments including Airtable, Monzo, Benchling, Lattice, Segment, Cursor, Chai Discovery, and Revel, and has served on the boards of numerous portfolio companies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Yale University and previously served as a General Partner at Benchmark before rejoining Thrive Capital in 2024.

Bridgit Mendler is co-founder and CEO of Northwood Space, a company building ground segment infrastructure to connect satellites with Earth. She is a former Disney Channel actress best known for starring in Good Luck Charlie who transitioned into the space industry, founding Northwood in 2023. Under her leadership, Northwood has raised over $136 million in funding and secured a $49.8 million contract with the US Space Force to support the Satellite Control Network.

Susan Kare is an American graphic designer and artist who created the iconic icons, typefaces, and visual interface elements for the first Apple Macintosh, including the Chicago font and the Happy Mac startup icon. She currently serves as a design architect at Niantic Labs, having previously held creative roles at NeXT, Pinterest, and her own firm, Susan Kare Design. She is widely recognized as a pioneer of pixel art and graphical user interface design, and was awarded the AIGA Medal in 2018.

Yutao Sun is a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University, advised by Jianyong Wang, and a Pre-Career Scholar at the Shanghai Innovation Institute. He has been a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia since July 2023, mentored by Li Dong. He is best known for co-developing Retentive Network (RetNet), You Only Cache Once (YOCO), and Differential Transformer, with research focusing on efficient attention mechanisms, long-context modeling, and multimodal world models for large language models.

Gur Talpaz is a venture investor and finance professional who currently serves as co-founder and general partner of Cognition Venture Partners, an early-stage fund focused on AI-native cybersecurity startups. He previously co-founded Brightmind Partners, where he led the firm's investment in identity-security startup SGNL, which was acquired by CrowdStrike for $740 million in January 2026. Prior to his venture capital career, he was vice president of corporate development at CrowdStrike and an equity research analyst and managing director at Stifel Financial.

Max Hodak is an American entrepreneur and biomedical engineer who is the founder and CEO of Science Corporation, a company developing neural technologies aimed at restoring vision and cognition. He co-founded Neuralink with Elon Musk in 2016 and served as its president until early 2021, when he left to establish Science Corporation. Science Corporation's PRIMA retinal implant, paired with camera-equipped glasses, has completed pivotal clinical trials showing significant vision improvements in patients with age-related macular degeneration. Prior to Neuralink, he founded Transcriptic, a robotic cloud laboratory for life sciences, in 2012 after graduating from Duke University with a degree in biomedical engineering.

Co-founder and Managing Partner of Tapestry VC

Alex Rampell is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's Apps practice and focuses on investments in financial services and fintech. He is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of TrialPay, a transactional advertising and payments company acquired by Visa in 2015, and as a co-founder of Affirm alongside Max Levchin. Prior to joining a16z in 2015, he also co-founded several other companies including FraudEliminator, Point, TXN, and Yub.

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

Host of the Dialectic podcast.

JD Vance is the Vice President of the United States under President Donald Trump. He was previously a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the author of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He is known for advocating an innovation-driven approach to artificial intelligence policy and pushing back against European AI regulatory frameworks at the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit.

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

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

a16z New Media team member and podcast host for AI + a16z.

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

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

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

Christina Gilbert is a co-founder of OneSchema, a company that provides an embeddable CSV importer for developers to streamline spreadsheet data ingestion. She currently serves as a visiting group partner at Y Combinator and previously worked as a product manager at Google, where she managed the AMD Chromebook product line. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree for Enterprise Technology.

Sofia Puccini is a host and producer of The a16z Show, the podcast produced by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). She is credited as a participant alongside other hosts and guests on multiple episodes of the podcast, which covers topics across technology including AI, energy, genomics, and space. Her role involves facilitating conversations with technologists, investors, and policymakers featured on the show.

Matteo Franceschetti is the co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, a sleep fitness technology company known for its Pod product that combines temperature regulation, biometric monitoring, and adjustable base technology. He has raised over $160 million from investors including Founders Fund and prominent individuals across sports and entertainment. Originally from Ferrara, Italy, and a former lawyer, he transitioned into entrepreneurship and has built Eight Sleep into a company whose products are supported by over 50 clinical studies focused on sleep optimization and recovery.

Ben Horowitz is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Opsware, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007, and held senior product and engineering roles at Netscape and AOL. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. He holds a BA from Columbia University and an MS in computer science from UCLA.

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

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

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.

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

Hamza Shad is an insights manager at Carta, where he analyzes data on the venture capital and startup ecosystem and leads the company's quarterly State of Pre-Seed report on early-stage companies. He previously conducted research on entrepreneurship in emerging markets at Endeavor. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics and political science from the University of Chicago and a master's in international development from the University of Oxford.