Andrew Chen is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Games Fund and the Speedrun accelerator program. He is best known for coining the term 'growth hacker' in a 2012 essay that reshaped how Silicon Valley thinks about product distribution, and for his book 'The Cold Start Problem' (2021), a landmark text on how networked products escape the bootstrapping trap. Before a16z, he led Rider Growth at Uber during the company's most explosive era - expanding from dozens to 800 cities and reaching 100 million active riders. A prolific writer with 650+ essays and a Substack newsletter, he is one of the most-read voices on growth, gaming, and consumer startups.
Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.
Peter H. Diamandis is a Greek-American entrepreneur, physician, and futurist who has founded or co-founded 25+ companies and is best known as the creator of the XPRIZE Foundation - which has launched over $600 million in incentive competitions catalyzing $10+ billion in R&D. A data-driven optimist, he co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, runs the Metatrends newsletter (157,000+ subscribers), and is a 4x New York Times bestselling author. His current mission centers on longevity - he launched the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan in 2024 and published the Longevity Guidebook in January 2025.
Peter Yang is a product leader turned creator economy educator, currently a Principal Product Lead at Roblox with a decade of experience shipping features at Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Credit Karma, and Reddit. He runs Behind the Craft, a Substack newsletter and podcast with 148,000+ subscribers focused on practical AI tutorials and interviews with top product and AI leaders. He invented Twitch Raids, launched Reddit Talk, and grew Facebook Live from zero to millions of viewers — and now teaches 100,000+ subscribers how to build products and careers in the AI era.
Rex Woodbury is the founder and managing partner of Daybreak Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, and the creator of Digital Native, a weekly newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers exploring the intersection of technology and culture. A Dartmouth and Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholar, former Goldman Sachs analyst, TPG and Index Ventures partner, Guinness World Record holder, LGBTQ+ advocate, and competitive runner, Woodbury is one of the most distinctive voices in venture capital — blending anthropological observation with market analysis to decode how Gen Z and emerging technology are reshaping commerce, communication, and culture.
Rosie Hoggmascall is a London-based product and growth expert specialising in subscription apps, monetisation, and product-led growth. With a Cambridge education and a career spanning strategic communications to leading consumer tech startups, she is currently Chief Product & Growth Officer at Fyxer AI - an email productivity tool that grew from $1M to $30M ARR in 2025. She also runs 'Growth Dives', a weekly Substack newsletter delivering annotated product teardowns to 2,000+ subscribers with a remarkable 64% average open rate.
Sabrina Ramonov is a Filipina-American AI educator, serial founder, and creator on a mission to teach 10 million people AI for free. A UC Berkeley CS and Physics graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumna (2018), she co-founded and sold Qurious.io (AI speech analytics) to Pegasystems for $10M+ in 2021, then rebuilt from burnout to grow 2M+ followers and 500M+ views in roughly one year — solo, with zero budget, no team, and no paid ads. She runs the Sabrina Ramonov newsletter on Substack (194K+ free subscribers), creates ~250 pieces of content per week, and solo-built Blotato.com, a social media automation SaaS with 1.4M+ website visitors. In March 2026, she launched Women Build AI, a selective free community for women founders building with AI.
Simon Carless is a British-born gaming industry veteran who spent 16 years shaping trade media and the Game Developers Conference at UBM/Informa before going independent in 2020 to found GameDiscoverCo - a newsletter, data platform, and consultancy focused on how players find, buy, and enjoy video games. With 43,000+ subscribers on Substack and enterprise SaaS clients including 90+ publishers and studios, he's become the de facto Bloomberg Terminal of game discovery data for the global indie games ecosystem.
Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, and prolific angel investor best known for founding Behance - the world's leading platform for creative professionals - which he sold to Adobe for ~$150M in 2012. After serving as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer (overseeing growth from $19B to $170B+ market cap), he departed in January 2025 to become a Partner at A24, the acclaimed indie studio, where he is founding A24 Labs. He is the author of two bestsellers - 'Making Ideas Happen' and 'The Messy Middle' - and publishes the 'Implications' newsletter on design, tech, and product strategy. With 282+ angel investments including Uber, Pinterest, Airtable, Notion, and Ramp, Belsky is one of the most active design-focused investors in tech.
Sachin Rekhi is a Silicon Valley product management authority, serial entrepreneur, and the voice behind one of tech's most-read PM newsletters. He co-founded and grew LinkedIn Sales Navigator from $0 to $200M+ ARR, built and sold two companies (Anywhere.FM to imeem; Connected to LinkedIn), and now runs Notejoy with his wife Ada Chen Rekhi while training 10,000+ product managers through his newsletter, courses, and podcast.
Sebastian Raschka is a German-born AI/ML researcher, educator, and author who has built one of the most trusted independent voices in the machine learning community. Through his Substack newsletter 'Ahead of AI' (184,000+ subscribers), bestselling books like 'Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)', and 91,000+ starred GitHub repositories, he demystifies cutting-edge AI for practitioners worldwide. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison and a role as Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he now runs RAIR Lab as an independent researcher, writer, and consultant.
Simon Owens is a Washington, DC-based media industry journalist, newsletter writer, and podcast host who runs Simon Owens's Media Newsletter on Substack. Known for deep-dive reporting on how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content, he has interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs and built one of the most-followed independent media newsletters, with 38,000+ Substack followers and 61,000+ LinkedIn followers. His work covers the creator economy, subscription models, local news, and the evolving business of digital publishing.
Ahrefs Blog is one of the most authoritative SEO and content marketing publications on the internet, run by a tight-knit team of practitioners inside Ahrefs - the $100M+ ARR bootstrapped SEO software company. Led by CMO Tim Soulo, the blog pioneered 'product-led content' - a framework where every article must have real search traffic potential AND directly pitch Ahrefs as the solution. With 600,000+ monthly search visits, 284,000 newsletter subscribers, a Domain Rating of 91, and a YouTube channel with 664,000 subscribers, the Ahrefs Blog is both a masterclass in SEO and a primary driver of company growth - all without a single salesperson.
Vanta is the leading automated trust management platform that helps companies earn and prove their security posture. Founded in 2018 by Christina Cacioppo after she experienced the manual nightmare of SOC 2 compliance at Dropbox, Vanta automates compliance across 37+ frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP. With 15,000+ customers, $504M raised, and a $4.15B valuation, Vanta has turned the famously tedious world of security audits into a continuous, automated process - and is now evolving into an agentic AI platform where a 24/7 AI GRC engineer does the heavy lifting.
In this solo lecture, behavioral scientist and human behavior expert Chase Hughes introduces the concept of 'emotional debt' — a neuroscience-backed framework explaining how unprocessed emotions don't disappear but compound in the nervous system like interest on a loan. Drawing on biology (amygdala hypersensitization, the HPA axis, prefrontal cortex degradation), somatic science, and psychology, Hughes argues that what we call 'personality' is often just a collection of unpaid emotional invoices from childhood. He outlines five steps to process emotional debt: see the payments, name your debt-servicing behavior, let the body finish incomplete responses, stop taking on new debt, and get a witness — all united by a single active ingredient: perspective shift.
On the milestone 1,000th episode of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson sits down with actor and author Matthew McConaughey for a wide-ranging philosophical conversation filmed against the virtual backdrop of the Interstellar corn fields in Alberta, Canada. The two explore belief, faith, forgiveness, masculinity, the difference between a nice guy and a good man, the Icarus myth in reverse, and McConaughey's new book 'Points of Prayers.' McConaughey champions the idea of modeling the rise not the result, argues that peace requires rage to reach, and redefines vulnerability as saying your truth in spite of the consequences, especially when they're scary.
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and behavioral economics provocateur, delivers a characteristically contrarian set of predictions for 2026. He argues that AI will initially be weaponized by tech companies and consultants as a cost-reduction tool — what he calls the 'doorman fallacy' — stripping out human value while claiming efficiency wins. Drawing on the Austrian vs. Chicago schools of economics, the history of the electric motor, and a devastating critique of self-checkout tills, Sutherland maps out three phases of AI adoption and ends with a rallying cry to marketers: stop selling what you do, and start selling how you think.
Dean Ball is a leading AI policy scholar, writer, and former White House advisor who shaped America's AI strategy from the inside. As Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, co-host of the AI Summer podcast, and author of the widely-read Hyperdimensional newsletter, he makes the case for market-driven, light-touch governance of frontier AI - arguing that private governance mechanisms, not government mandates, are the right framework for the most transformative technology of our time.
Balaji Srinivasan is a serial founder, investor, and author who holds four Stanford degrees and has co-founded companies sold for nearly half a billion dollars. Former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and first CTO of Coinbase, he is best known for writing The Network State — a WSJ #2 bestselling book advocating technology-enabled sovereign communities — and for building The Network School, a live experiment in startup-society living on a private island near Singapore.
Tara McMullin is a writer, podcaster, and business philosopher who helps small business owners build sustainable, humane companies. Formerly known as Tara Gentile, she spent a decade building a formidable reputation before reclaiming her own name in 2018. She is the founder of What Works, a digital platform and podcast downloaded over 2 million times, co-founder of YellowHouse.Media, and author of books including 'What Works' (Wiley). Drawing on feminist theory, critical sociology, and media studies, she challenges conventional business wisdom with intellectual rigor and a sharp editorial voice.
Shaan Puri is an Indian-American entrepreneur, angel investor, and podcast host best known for co-hosting My First Million with Sam Parr - one of the top business podcasts with 25M+ downloads annually. He sold Bebo to Twitch (Amazon) for up to $25M in 2019, launched and sold the Milk Road crypto newsletter in an eight-figure deal in 2023, and built Bums and Roses into a $25M/year baby products brand with his wife. A self-described contrarian on hard work ('hard work is massively overrated'), he now focuses on content creation, early-stage investing, and writing through his Good Friday newsletter and One Hour Books project.
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.
Azalia Mirhoseini is an Iranian-born AI researcher, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence - a frontier AI lab valued at $4 billion that uses AI to design better chips, which in turn train stronger AI. Best known for AlphaChip, the deep reinforcement learning system that now designs Google's TPUs and has compressed chip floorplanning from months to hours, she also co-invented the Mixture-of-Experts architecture underpinning GPT, Claude, and Gemini. With 20,000+ citations and a $335M-funded startup launched in under four months, she is closing the recursive loop between artificial intelligence and the hardware it runs on.
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
Vicki Boykis is a founding ML engineer and one of the most respected voices in applied machine learning. Known for making complex systems legible through rigorous writing and dry wit, she runs the Normcore Tech newsletter, authored a widely-cited deep dive on embeddings, built Viberary (a semantic book recommendation engine), and created Normconf - an unconventional data conference celebrating the unglamorous realities of ML work. She brings an economist's skepticism and a software engineer's discipline to a field that often confuses hype for progress.
Tyler Cipriani is an Engineering Manager for Release Engineering at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he has overseen the weekly deployment of MediaWiki to nearly 1,000 production wikis since 2015. Based in Longmont, Colorado, he is a vocal advocate for open source sustainability, a thoughtful writer on software engineering and management, and an award-winning homebrewer with a liver transplant survivor story that underscores his resilience. His blog at tylercipriani.com spans git internals, code review culture, remote work, and municipal broadband advocacy - all written with rare clarity and personal conviction.
Una Kravets is a Staff Developer Relations Engineer at Google Chrome, leading the UI & Tooling DevRel team. She is one of the most influential voices in modern CSS and web standards, having championed features like container queries, anchor positioning, scroll-driven animations, and customizable select menus. A prolific speaker at 80+ conferences worldwide, co-host of The CSS Podcast, and creator of CSSgram, Una bridges the gap between browser engineering and the developer community with a mission to make the web platform better for everyone.
Vercel is the AI Cloud for frontend developers - a platform that makes deploying web applications as frictionless as a git push. Founded in 2015 as ZEIT by Guillermo Rauch, the Argentine-born dropout who also created Socket.IO and Next.js, Vercel grew from a side-project deployment tool into a $9.3 billion company powering websites for OpenAI, Walmart, Nike, and thousands of startups. Its open-source framework Next.js has logged over 500 million downloads in 12 months alone, and its AI tool v0 lets anyone turn a text prompt into a working web UI. Vercel is the company betting that the next billion developers won't write code at all.
Zapier is the world's leading workflow automation platform, connecting 9,000+ apps so businesses can automate repetitive tasks without writing a single line of code. Founded in 2011 by three University of Missouri graduates, it became a $5 billion company on just $2.68 million in funding - one of the most capital-efficient growth stories in tech. Today, 69% of Fortune 1000 companies use Zapier, which has processed over 81 billion automated tasks and is rapidly evolving into a full AI orchestration platform.
Zephyr Fusion is building the first in-orbit fusion power source - a compact, megawatt-class reactor designed to run in the vacuum of space. Founded by two physicists who met in grad school operating a spherical tokamak, the San Diego-based startup uses a levitated dipole magnetic confinement approach with high-temperature superconductors. Their bet: space makes fusion easier, not harder. With launch costs down 10x and mass-produced HTS tapes providing 10x more field per kilogram, Zephyr Fusion aims to power the industrial revolution that humanity is about to have off-planet.