acquisition
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Michael Witte
Mike Witte is co-founder and CEO of Equal Parts, an Austin-based insurance platform that acquires independent agencies and layers AI automation on top of the humans who already sell the policies. In February 2026 the company closed a $23M Series A led by Inspired Capital, bringing total acquisition capital to $50M. Before Equal Parts, Witte co-founded RigUp (later Workrise) and helped scale it to a reported $3B valuation.
Alex Hormozi
Alex Hormozi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, and author who built and exited seven companies without outside capital before founding Acquisition.com, a holding company with 16+ portfolio businesses generating $200M+ in annual revenue. His $100M book series has sold over 5 million copies, including $100M Money Models which broke the Guinness World Record for fastest-selling non-fiction book in August 2025. He co-runs Acquisition.com with his wife and CEO Leila Hormozi and is a co-owner of Skool.com.
Jeff Wang
Jeff Wang is the CEO of Windsurf, an AI-powered coding assistant that was acquired by Cognition (makers of Devin) in July 2025. Previously Windsurf's Head of Business, Jeff stepped into the CEO role during a chaotic week in which the company's founders departed to Google and a $3B OpenAI acquisition fell through. Working through a single frantic weekend, he negotiated a new deal with Cognition that protected all 250 employees. A former engineer who detoured through Cisco and Salesforce before betting his career on early-stage AI startups, Jeff is also a General Partner at RNR Capital and co-founder of RocketFuel Education.
Matt Cain
Matt Cain is a technology executive who served as Chair, President, and CEO of Couchbase from April 2017 through September 2025, guiding the company from a growth-stage NoSQL database startup through a 2021 NASDAQ IPO and ultimately a $1.5 billion acquisition by Haveli Investments. With an engineering degree from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford, Cain built his career across a decade at Cisco Systems, senior roles at Symantec, and the presidency of Veritas Technologies' worldwide field operations before joining Couchbase. Under his leadership, Couchbase expanded from pure NoSQL into a multi-model developer data platform powering AI-enabled applications for global enterprises.
Matt Riley
Matt Riley co-founded Swiftype (YC W12) in 2012, built it into a leading search-as-a-service platform, and sold it to Elastic in 2017. He then spent nearly eight years at Elastic as GVP & GM of Search, overseeing product, engineering, design, and developer relations for one of the world's most widely used search platforms. In late 2025, he returned to Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner - advising the next generation of founders using hard-won lessons from the full founder arc: zero to startup, startup to acquisition, acquisition to enterprise scale.
Brian Dean
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and co-founder of Exploding Topics, two companies he built and sold to Semrush. He invented the Skyscraper Technique, one of SEO's most widely replicated link-building frameworks, and turned a nutrition PhD dropout's basement hustle into a $4M+ exit running a 7-person contractor team. Now based in Berlin, he's a sought-after voice on building media businesses that don't depend on algorithmic luck.
Brian Balfour
Brian Balfour is the founder and former CEO of Reforge, the professional development platform for experienced product, growth, and marketing practitioners that grew to 100,000+ alumni before being acquired by Miro in March 2026. Now Chief Growth Officer at Miro, he is best known for the Four Fits Framework - the thesis that Product-Market Fit alone cannot drive $100M+ growth, and that market, product, channel, and model must all interlock. A former VP of Growth at HubSpot, serial entrepreneur, and Venture Partner at Long Journey Ventures, Balfour is one of the most influential thinkers in the product-led growth movement.
Basit Abbassi
Basit Abbassi is a Karachi-based marketing and growth leader with 13+ years of experience scaling startups and brands across Pakistan. Known for his bootstrapping ethos and hands-on brand-building, he has contributed to ventures that were acquired by the likes of Careem and the Malak Group. Currently serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Snapp! Box, a Tehran-based logistics platform, he brings a rare blend of service-sector grit and digital strategy to every role.