Curtis Herbert is an independent iOS developer and the solo founder behind Slopes, the Apple Design Award-winning app skiers and snowboarders use to track their days on the mountain. He spent nine years growing it from a $10,600 side project into a million-dollar business, documenting every revenue chart and hard lesson in public through his Slopes Diaries and Slopes Dev newsletter. He runs Breakpoint Studio out of Boulder, Colorado, and treats indie app development like a craft, taking cues from web businesses rather than other apps.
Dan Primack is the business editor at Axios and the voice behind Pro Rata, the daily newsletter and podcast that has become required reading for the venture capital, private equity, and M&A worlds. What began as an email he sent from his own Outlook account now reaches hundreds of thousands of dealmakers. Over two decades he has built and rebuilt the same beat three times, launching peHUB at Thomson Reuters, Term Sheet at Fortune, and Pro Rata at Axios, turning the unglamorous mechanics of who-bought-whom into a daily must-read.
Daniel Jalkut is a Mac and iOS indie developer who founded Red Sweater Software in 2002 after seven years engineering Mac OS at Apple. He is best known for MarsEdit, the long-running desktop blog editor he bought from Brent Simmons in 2007, and for FastScripts, a scripting automation utility. For 16 years he co-hosted Core Intuition with Manton Reece, one of the defining podcasts of the indie Apple-developer scene, and he runs the long-form interview show Bitsplitting. He is a fixture of the indie web and micro.blog community, writing about software craft, the business of going it alone, and the texture of a programming life.
Dave DeLong is a software craftsman with fifteen years of building iOS and macOS apps that ship on billions of devices - and, he likes to point out, some that run in outer space. A seven-year Apple veteran who worked on Siri, UIKit, Apple Maps, and Developer Evangelism, he led the WWDC app from 2013 to 2015 and helped ship the first releases of Swift, WatchKit, HomeKit, and HealthKit. He is among the top contributors of all time on Stack Overflow, a fixture of the Swift Evolution process, and the author of widely cited open-source libraries on calendrical math. He blogs at davedelong.com, speaks at conferences worldwide, and is currently building a stealth startup.
Dave Wiskus is the founder and CEO of Nebula, the creator-owned streaming service he launched in 2019 with a group of independent YouTubers, and of Standard, the talent company behind it. Before building a streaming platform pitched as an A24 for online video, he was a respected human interface designer who co-founded Q Branch with John Gruber and Brent Simmons to make the note-taking app Vesper. He also fronts the New York synth-rock band Airplane Mode and co-hosted the podcast Unprofessional.
David Jaxon writes the Creator Economy Report, a newsletter covering the business of creators and the media industry built around them. Beyond the newsletter and its stated focus on the creator economy and media, no further details about Jaxon could be independently verified through public sources.
David Sacks is a South African-born Silicon Valley operator turned venture capitalist and political power broker. He was PayPal's first product leader and COO, founded and sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion, rescued Zenefits as interim CEO, and co-founded Craft Ventures, which manages billions in assets. He is a co-host of the chart-topping All-In podcast and served as the first White House AI and Crypto Czar in the second Trump administration before stepping aside in March 2026.
Dickie Bush is the co-founder of Ship 30 for 30, the cohort-based course that has taught more than 10,000 people to write short 'atomic essays' online. A former Princeton football center and BlackRock portfolio analyst from Tampa, he started writing online in January 2020, pivoted from a stalling newsletter to Twitter, and built an audience of 400,000+ followers. With business partner Nicolas Cole he turned a daily writing habit into a seven-figure education business, the writing software Typeshare, and the Premium Ghostwriting Academy.
Dithering is a subscription-only podcast hosted by Ben Thompson, founder of the Stratechery business-strategy newsletter, and John Gruber, the writer behind the Apple-focused blog Daring Fireball. Each episode runs exactly 15 minutes, twice a week, with two of the most influential voices in technology commentary trading takes on Apple, the tech industry, media, and whatever else is on their minds. It is a paid show built on Thompson's own membership infrastructure, included in the Stratechery Plus bundle.
Sandeep Patel is the chairman and CEO of Bettani Farms, the Berkeley plant-based cheese company that rebranded from Climax Foods in October 2025 alongside a $6.5 million Series A round led by S2G Investments. A former CFO at Califia Farms, president and CFO at PopSockets, and managing director at Goldman Sachs and Barclays, Patel was a Bettani advisor since 2021 before taking the top job. He is betting the company's proprietary Caseed ingredient - a casein-mimicking protein pulled from regenerative seed crops, free of dairy, soy and nuts - can finally give vegan mozzarella the stretch and melt that pizza demands. His pitch: do for pizza what oat milk did for coffee.
Sean Doherty is the co-founder and CEO of GovDash, a New York-based AI platform that helps companies win and run U.S. government contracts. What started as a college friendship and a hangout-scheduling app turned into a Y Combinator (W22) company now serving nearly 200 contractors whose customers booked over $5B in awards in a single year. In January 2026 GovDash raised an oversubscribed $30M Series B, bringing total funding to roughly $40M, as Doherty pushes to automate the entire government-contracting lifecycle from opportunity discovery to post-award delivery.
Shabbir Dahod is the co-founder, President and CEO of TraceLink, the Massachusetts company that built the de-facto industry standard network for tracing pharmaceuticals from factory to patient. He started the company in 2009 out of ideas sparked at MIT, after earlier stints building multimedia and web products at Paul Allen's Asymetrix and Microsoft, and founding the serialization pioneer SupplyScape. Today he is pushing TraceLink's 291,000-entity digital network toward agentic AI and end-to-end supply chain orchestration, work that earned him a 2024 Pros to Know Lifetime Achievement Award.
Adrianne Nickerson is the co-founder and CEO of Oula, a New York maternity company that fuses midwives, OB-GYNs and technology into one hybrid clinic built to give pregnant patients a calmer, more personal, evidence-based birth experience. A Columbia biology grad with a Harvard master's in global health, she decided she could help patients more by not becoming a doctor - and instead builds the systems doctors and midwives work inside. She co-founded Oula in 2019, opened it while pregnant alongside two pregnant co-executives, and has raised tens of millions to expand care that reduces unnecessary C-sections and centers patient voices.
Ahmed Khattak is the founder and CEO of US Mobile, the only American carrier built natively on the public cloud that lets customers ride and switch between all three major networks (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile) on demand. A Pakistani immigrant who landed on an F1 student visa, he spent a decade clawing US Mobile to $100M in annual recurring revenue, then doubled it to $200M in nine months. Before that he co-founded GSM Nation, a $130M unlocked-phone marketplace that taught him how the carriers really make money.
Akili Hinson is the founder and CEO of Juno Medical, a technology-powered family medical practice he opened in Harlem in April 2020 with three patient rooms. A physician trained at Weill Cornell with an MBA from Columbia and a stint at McKinsey, he set out to build modern, family-centered primary care for what he calls 'the 99%' in neighborhoods that big health systems skip. Juno now runs clinics in Harlem, Brooklyn, East Atlanta, and Tulsa's Greenwood District, backed by a $12M Series A led by NEXT VENTURES and Serena Williams' Serena Ventures. He was named a 2024-2025 Obama Foundation USA Leader.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Alastair Wood is the CEO of Raisin US, the American arm of the Berlin-born deposit-marketplace fintech. A lawyer by training who started as the company's General Counsel in 2023, he stepped into the top job in January 2026. His career runs through Big Law (Paul Hastings, Paul Weiss), a chief-of-staff stint inside Citi's global legal team, and early-employee roles at two scrappy fintech startups - retirement platform Kindur and renter-insurance company Rhino - before he landed at Raisin, where he now leads a platform that connects everyday American savers with banks and credit unions chasing deposits.
Albert Malikov is the founder and CEO of Stacks, a London-based startup building agentic AI for enterprise accounting and the month-end financial close. A former Head of International Product at Plaid and a product lead on Uber's Money team, he raised a $23M Series A led by Lightspeed in February 2026, less than a year after emerging from stealth, with customers including Epidemic Sound, Pleo and Bloom & Wild closing their books 50-60% faster.
Alec Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Asimov, a Boston synthetic biology company building computer-aided design tools for living cells. His MIT PhD work in the Voigt Lab produced Cello, a programming language that compiles plain-text logic instructions into thousands of DNA letters. Asimov turned that academic breakthrough into a commercial platform for designing and manufacturing biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DARPA, and a $175M Series B led by CPP Investments.
Alex Atallah is the CEO and co-founder of OpenRouter, the unified API and marketplace that routes developer requests across hundreds of large language models. He previously co-founded OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, where he was CTO before leaving in 2022 to build from zero to one again. A Stanford computer scientist and Palantir alum, he turned a side project that connected browsers to AI models into infrastructure now routing roughly 25 trillion tokens a week, and raised a $113M Series B in 2026.
Alex Fine is the founder and CEO of Fun (fun.xyz), a crypto-fiat payments company that builds the deposit and withdrawal rails behind apps like Polymarket, Lighter, and Aave. Fun processes over $18 billion in annual payment volume and raised a $72 million Series A in early 2026 led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire. A Stanford math and computer-science dropout who shipped his first acquired app at 16, Fine wants Fun to be 'the front door' for a tokenized economy where anyone can buy anything with anything.
Alex Sherman is the CEO and co-founder of Bluefish, a New York-based platform that measures and shapes how brands appear in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Amazon's Rufus. A European history major who became one of MediaMath's earliest employees in 2008, he co-founded the retail-media platform PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft in 2019) before launching Bluefish in 2024 to rebuild the marketing stack for the AI internet. In April 2026 Bluefish closed a $43M Series B co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA, bringing total funding to roughly $68M, with around 10% of the Fortune 500 already on the platform.
Alexa Buckley is the co-founder and co-CEO of Margaux, the New York footwear label she started at 22 with her Harvard roommate Sarah Pierson. Margaux fixes a problem most brands ignore - fit - by offering made-to-order shoes in three widths and an extended size run, handmade in Spain and sold direct to consumers. The pitch grew out of the 'shoe shuffle' the two women watched office workers perform: pretty heels in a bag, ugly commuter flats on their feet. Buckley has been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and has built Margaux into a brand that has raised millions across Seed through Series B rounds.
Alexander Patterson is the founder and CEO of BEAT THE BOMB, the immersive social video game where teams in hazmat suits race through networked game rooms and either disarm a bomb or get blasted with paint, slime, or foam. A former tax lawyer turned Tough Mudder marketing chief, he built BEAT THE BOMB into a multi-city experiential entertainment brand that has hosted corporate teams from Google, Citi, Bloomberg, and Amazon, raising $22 million to expand across the United States.
Alfredo Brillembourg is the cofounder and CEO of Meadow, a New York fintech rebuilding how American students pay for college. After a missed tuition deadline locked him out of registration as an undergraduate, he traded a finance track that ran through Goldman Sachs, Bowery Capital, and NEA for the unglamorous plumbing of campus billing. Meadow now serves over 170 colleges and universities, has delivered nearly a million net-price estimates, and raised a $14M Series A led by Matrix Partners in 2025.
Ali Dastjerdi is the co-founder and CEO of Raylu, a New York AI company that turns an investor's thesis into booked founder meetings in minutes instead of weeks. A Harvard machine-learning student turned Insight Partners investor, he started Raylu in 2022 with his freshman-year roommate and a friend they met at AWS. The trio raised a $4M seed and an $8M Series A, and now sell their 'Deal Engineering' platform to 45-plus funds managing over $500 billion. They keep one unopened beer in the office fridge, to be drunk only the day the company dies.
Ambre Soubiran is the CEO and chairman of Kaiko, the independent provider of institutional-grade, regulatory-compliant cryptocurrency market data and indices. After a decade structuring equity derivatives at HSBC in London and Paris, she walked away from traditional finance in 2016 to buy control of Kaiko - then a bright idea with no revenue and no staff - and built it into a global data business with roughly 130 people across New York, London, Paris and Singapore. She has raised over $80M and positions Kaiko as the trusted, neutral source of truth for crypto markets used by exchanges, asset managers and regulators.
Anada Lakra is the co-founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI-powered accent and speech coaching app for non-native English speakers. Born and raised in Albania, she studied English for a decade before arriving at Yale, where being asked to repeat herself sparked the idea that became BoldVoice. After Yale and an MBA from Harvard Business School, with product stints at Peloton and consulting work along the way, she and co-founder Ilya Usorov built a Y Combinator-backed app that pairs Hollywood dialect coaches with real-time AI feedback. BoldVoice has crossed 5 million downloads, serves professionals in 150+ countries, reached $10M+ in ARR with a team of seven, and raised a $21M Series A in January 2026 led by Matrix.
Anda Gansca is the co-founder and CEO of Knotch, the New York content intelligence company she started in 2012 after talking her way out of Transylvania and into Stanford. She built Knotch to tell brands which of their content actually works, then bet the whole company on AI: scrapping a rejected analytics product and relaunching in 2025 as AgentC, an AI-staffed marketing agency that only charges clients when results show up. A Forbes and Inc 30 Under 30 honoree, she raised roughly $48-50M and counts Zillow, Realtor.com, Chime and Zoom among AgentC's early testers.
Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of SimpliFed, an Ithaca, New York company building a maternal health operating system that delivers virtual breastfeeding, infant nutrition and OB support to families in all 50 states at no cost through health plans. A biomedical engineer by training, she co-directed MIT Hacking Medicine, co-founded Smart Scheduling (acquired by athenahealth in 2016), served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in the White House, and ran the VA's Innovators Network before turning her own postpartum struggle into a company that now partners with 300-plus health systems and raised an oversubscribed $10.8M Series A in 2026.