SZA (born Solána Imani Rowe) is the St. Louis-raised, New Jersey-grown R&B and neo-soul artist who rewrote Billboard history with SOS - the longest-charting album of the 2020s and the first to break Michael Jackson's Thriller record on the R&B chart. A former elite gymnast and marine biology student, she became Top Dawg Entertainment's first female signee and has accumulated Grammy Awards across multiple ceremonies, culminating in Record of the Year at the 68th Grammys for 'luther' with Kendrick Lamar. Her SOS album spent 100 weeks at No. 1 on the Top R&B Albums chart, and she co-headlined the 2025 Grand National Tour (grossing $358.7M) and the Super Bowl LIX halftime show.
Taylor Alison Swift is the most-streamed artist in Spotify history with 118B+ lifetime streams and the only musician to win the Grammy Album of the Year four times. Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania on December 13, 1989, she parlayed a childhood on a Christmas tree farm and an opera-singer grandmother's DNA into a genre-defying career spanning country, synth-pop, indie folk, and art-rock. Her record-breaking Eras Tour grossed ~$2 billion - the first concert tour in history to cross $1 billion - and her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl broke all-time first-week sales records with 4.002 million units. In 2025, she finally bought back her first six albums' masters for ~$360 million, closed out a long fight with her former label, and got engaged to NFL superstar Travis Kelce. As of 2026, she's a billionaire, a Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, and the IFPI Global Artist of the Year for a record sixth time.
Teddy Swims (born Jaten Collin Dimsdale) is a Georgia-raised soul-pop singer whose tattooed exterior and raw emotional delivery mask a voice that sounds like it was forged in a Pentecostal church and tempered by decades of Marvin Gaye records. After years in Atlanta metalcore bands and a viral YouTube cover career, he signed with Warner Records in 2019 and spent the next few years quietly building toward an explosion - 'Lose Control' (2023) became the #1 song in America for 2024, spent 112 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, earned Diamond certification in four countries, and accumulated 1.7 billion streams. His debut album project 'I've Tried Everything but Therapy' (Parts 1 & 2) earned Grammy nominations and festival headlining slots worldwide, cementing him as one of the defining voices of mid-2020s soul-pop.
Tems (Temilade Openiyi) is a Nigerian singer, songwriter, and producer from Lagos who built a two-Grammy career on a contralto voice she once tried to hide. Self-taught on production via YouTube, she went from quitting a digital marketing job in 2018 to becoming the first African female artist to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first Nigerian female Grammy winner, and a co-owner of an MLS soccer team — all while redefining what Afro-fusion sounds like on a global stage.
Mehdi Hasan is a British-American journalist, broadcaster, and media entrepreneur best known as the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Zeteo - an independent digital news company he launched in 2024 after departing MSNBC. A relentless interviewer and master debater who studied PPE at Oxford, Hasan has built a formidable track record at Al Jazeera, The Intercept, and MSNBC before going independent. His 2023 book 'Win Every Argument' became a New York Times bestseller, and Zeteo has rapidly grown to over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers and 450,000 newsletter subscribers within its first year.
The Marías are a Los Angeles-based indie/alternative band led by Puerto Rican vocalist María Zardoya and drummer-producer Josh Conway, blending psychedelic soul, dream-pop, and bilingual lyricism into a hazy, cinematic sound. From viral Craigslist couch photoshoots to surviving a bandmate breakup, a Bad Bunny co-sign, and a Billie Eilish TikTok that sent 'No One Noticed' to #22 on the Hot 100, the band turned 10 years of underground hustle into a Grammy Best New Artist nomination at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in 2026.
Darwin Salazar is Head of Growth at Monad and the founder of The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP), a weekly newsletter read by Fortune 500 CISOs, vendors, and investors. A practitioner-turned-product-leader, he has worked across cloud security, detection engineering, red teaming, and IoT security at Datadog, Accenture, Ford Motor Company, and Johnson & Johnson. With 20,000+ combined followers and 250,000+ newsletter visits, Darwin bridges the gap between hands-on security work and the business of cybersecurity - making complex industry shifts digestible for the people who build, buy, and fund security products.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor who transformed R&B from the shadows of a Scarborough upbringing into a global phenomenon. With 75+ million records sold, a billion-dollar touring empire, and the most-streamed song in Spotify history, he is redefining what a career exit looks like — retiring the Weeknd persona after his 2025 album and film 'Hurry Up Tomorrow', the closing chapter of a dark pop trilogy, to begin again as Abel Tesfaye.
TSO (Anastasios Tsordas) is Athens-based Greek hyperpop artist, songwriter, and producer whose debut album KINI YI (January 2026) blends Lady Gaga-era hedonism with Orthodox church melodies, heavy autotune, and future-facing club electronics. A prolific behind-the-scenes force — co-writing Marina Satti's genre-crossing POP TOO and tracks for Tamta and Yianna Terzi — TSO is now stepping fully into the spotlight as a next-generation Greek popstar. Dazed Digital named him one of 10 Musicians to Watch in 2026.
Ty Myers is an 18-year-old country-soul singer-songwriter from Dripping Springs, Texas, who turned a catastrophic football injury into a music career that has amassed over 1.1 billion global streams. Signed to Columbia Records at 17, his debut album The Select went Gold, spawning the Platinum-certified singles 'Ends of the Earth' and 'Thought It Was Love.' With a sound critics call 'John Mayer's Texas country cousin' — bluesy guitars, soulful vocals, and classic country storytelling — Myers released his second album Heavy on the Soul in March 2026 and is opening for Luke Combs on a 2026 arena tour.
Waylon Wyatt is an 18-year-old country singer-songwriter from Hackett, Arkansas who went viral in August 2023 after posting a TikTok from a construction site wearing his dad's company hat. Named after Waylon Jennings, he signed with Music Soup/Darkroom Records within two weeks of going viral. His debut EP 'Til the Sun Goes Down' amassed 225M+ streams, with 'Arkansas Diamond' earning RIAA Gold. His second EP 'Out of the Blue' (June 2025) - his first recorded with a full studio band - expanded his global reach via tours with Sam Barber and Zach Bryan in the UK. A Vevo 2026 DSCVR Artist to Watch, he is now headlining his own 35-date 'Everywhere Under the Sun' North American tour.
Tyla (born Tyla Laura Seethal, January 30, 2002) is a South African singer-songwriter who made history when her debut single 'Water' became the first-ever Grammy Award-winning Best African Music Performance in 2024. Blending amapiano, pop, and R&B into a genre she calls 'Popiano,' Tyla broke onto the global stage at 21, charting higher on the US Billboard Hot 100 than any African female soloist in history. By 24, she had two Grammy wins, a platinum-certified self-titled debut album, and a highly anticipated second album A*POP on the horizon — cementing her as the defining voice of Africa's pop moment.
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.
Zachary Lane Bryan is an American singer-songwriter and record producer who went from posting iPhone recordings on YouTube while serving as a U.S. Navy Aviation Ordnanceman to breaking U.S. concert attendance records and landing back-to-back Billboard 200 #1 albums. Rooted in Americana, outlaw country, and raw emotional storytelling, Bryan released his sixth studio album With Heaven on Top in January 2026 — debuting 18 songs simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 — and has maintained a consistent Hot 100 presence throughout 2026 with singles 'Plastic Cigarette' (#13) and 'Say Why' (#25). A Grammy winner, a literary patron (he paid $12.1M for Jack Kerouac's On the Road scroll), and an artist who refuses to be called country, Bryan is one of the most commercially and culturally influential musicians of his generation.
Yel (채옐) is a Korean-Singaporean singer-songwriter and bedroom-pop artist based between California and Seoul. Growing up in Singapore before moving to the University of California, Irvine, she began releasing lo-fi R&B sketches on SoundCloud in 2020 and has since built a devoted following through a string of intimate, memory-soaked EPs. Her 2025 breakthrough project Perfect Blue - described by OnesToWatch as 'sticky, sultry' and landing her a spot on their Top 30 Artists to Watch in 2026 - cements her as one of the most exciting emerging voices in love-spell R&B and sultry bedroom-pop.
Turner Novak is the founder and solo General Partner of Banana Capital, a seed-stage venture fund investing in internet-first founders. He grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, in a single-parent household with intermittent internet access, then built a career path from CFA studies and endowment investing to VC entirely through Twitter presence and a viral fantasy portfolio. He hosts The Peel podcast, writes The Split newsletter, and operates from Ann Arbor, Michigan - proving that Midwest contrarianism and relentless online engagement can be a genuine edge in consumer tech investing.
Jeremy Caplan is a journalist, educator, and newsletter creator who built Wonder Tools into one of Substack's most-recommended productivity and AI tools newsletters, with 85,000+ subscribers in 201 countries. He is Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where he also runs the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program. A Princeton and dual-Columbia grad, former Time magazine reporter, and one-time international concertmaster, Caplan has spent over a decade helping journalists and knowledge workers find tools that actually save time.
Vincent Pradeilles is a French iOS engineer and Swift educator based in Lyon, France. By day he is a Founding Solutions Engineer at Photoroom, the AI-powered photo editing app. By night (and weekends) he runs swiftwithvincent.com — a blog, newsletter, and YouTube channel that distills complex Swift patterns into bite-sized, practical tips. With 26,000+ Twitter followers, ~1,000-starred open source repos, and talks at FrenchKit, dotSwift, try! Swift Tokyo, NSSpain, and iOS Conf SG, he is one of the most recognized French voices in the global Swift community.
Tom Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A specialist in Southeast Asian comparative politics, democratic backsliding, and political economy, he is best known for his viral 2017 essay 'Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable,' which warned Americans that authoritarian erosion looks mundane from the inside. Fluent in Indonesian, he has written five books spanning Indonesian and Malaysian politics, COVID-19 partisanship, and global democratic challenges. His Substack newsletter, launched in 2025, continues his two-decade tradition of public-facing analysis at the intersection of academic rigor and accessible political commentary.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and media critic whose decade of reporting on criminal justice, race, and policing in America has made him one of the most consequential voices in modern journalism. Best known for leading the Washington Post's 'Fatal Force' database - the first real-time national tracker of fatal police shootings - Lowery has written two landmark books, built a distinctive independent newsletter, and become an outspoken advocate for objective, truth-centered journalism that refuses false balance. His career spans the Washington Post, CBS News, The Marshall Project, and academia, and his 2016 book 'They Can't Kill Us All' remains essential reading on race, protest, and the limits of American democracy.
Wesley Morris is the only writer in history to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism twice - once in 2012 at The Boston Globe and again in 2021 at The New York Times, where he serves as Critic at Large. A Yale-educated Philadelphia native, Morris writes about film, music, race, and American identity with a voice that is simultaneously playful and incisive. He co-hosted the NYT podcast Still Processing for six years, launched Cannonball in June 2025, and runs a Substack newsletter. His work stands at the intersection of entertainment and cultural politics, making him one of the most respected voices in American criticism.
Yashar Ali is an Iranian-American journalist, newsletter publisher, and social media powerhouse who built one of the most influential independent media presences in the US almost entirely through Twitter/X. Known for breaking stories that bigger outlets fear to touch - from Fox News sexual misconduct to Scientology cover-ups - Ali runs The Reset newsletter on Substack with over 61,000 subscribers. Time magazine named him one of the most influential people on the internet in 2019. His career is anything but linear: TV production assistant, personal cook for Kathy Griffin, political operative for Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom, and now independent journalist with a devoted following.
Jamin Ball is a Partner at Altimeter Capital and the author of Clouded Judgement, a weekly Substack newsletter with 87,000+ subscribers that tracks SaaS valuations, cloud earnings, and operating metrics for founders and investors alike. A Stanford-trained engineer who went from tech investment banking (Morgan Stanley, BofA) to venture (Redpoint Ventures) to growth-stage investing at Altimeter, Ball has built board seats at Airbyte, Clickhouse, dbt Labs, LiveKit, and Prisma, and coined the 'Rule of X' framework widely cited across SaaS finance circles. His writing bridges public market data with private company decision-making, and his 2024 essay on VC misaligned incentives prompted Bill Gurley to call it 'potentially the single most important issue for the entire venture capital landscape.'
Jess Ramos is a data analytics educator, LinkedIn Top Voice, and founder of Big Data Energy - a media and education brand with 500,000+ followers across platforms. With an MSBA from the University of Georgia, she turned a corporate analytics career (peaking at $153K at Crunchbase) into a thriving solo business after being laid off in 2023. She runs a Substack newsletter with 45,000+ subscribers, teaches SQL to 50,000+ students via LinkedIn Learning, and has brand partnerships with IBM, AWS, Snowflake, NFL, and Claude (Anthropic). Her origin story - doubling her salary 110% in 11 months - became a viral moment that built her community of data professionals seeking real, human-centric career guidance.
John Cutler is a product thinker, writer, and systems overthinker best known for The Beautiful Mess newsletter (59,000+ subscribers) and the viral concept of the 'feature factory.' A college dropout turned touring musician turned video game creator turned product executive, he has written nearly 1,000 pieces on the messy intersection of product, people, and organizational design. He co-authored Amplitude's North Star Playbook, spent years as a product evangelist coaching teams worldwide, and is now Head of Product at Dotwork — a platform for building product operating systems.
Justin Gage is the founder and writer of Technically, a newsletter that makes software and AI concepts accessible to non-engineers. With 72,000+ subscribers on Substack, he built one of the most respected tech-explainer newsletters from scratch - conceived during a 7-hour Tokyo airport layover - growing it without paid ads through authentic writing and word-of-mouth. By day, he serves as VP of Developer Marketing at Amplify Partners, an early-stage VC firm focused on technical founders.
Kyla Scanlon is an economist, author, and content creator who coined the term 'vibecession' and has built a multi-platform media presence dedicated to making economics accessible. Her debut book 'In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work' (2024) became a New York Times bestseller. She reaches over 1 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Twitter/X, and has been named to Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance. A triple major from Western Kentucky University, she left a career in institutional asset management at Capital Group to pursue financial education full-time.
Kenneth Schlenker is a French-American serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Opal, the #1 screen time and focus app on iOS. He first envisioned a focus app in 2008 while working at Google - it took him 11 years to actually build it. After founding art-tech company ArtList (acquired by artnet), launching Bird's Paris operations, and building a $10M ARR business with just 11 people, he also runs Open Scout, a weekly newsletter covering early-stage startups read by investors at Sequoia, YC, a16z, and Accel.
Matt Ragland is a creator-economy builder, founder of HeyCreator, and host of The HeyCreator Show podcast. He went from camp counselor to ConvertKit employee #5, to full-time creator, building a 100,000+ audience across YouTube, newsletters, and social media. Through HeyCreator and Good People Digital, he helps creators turn their expertise into sustainable businesses via courses, communities, and newsletters. Known for radical transparency, outdoor adventures, and a systems-first approach to creative work.
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.