Alexander Leishman is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of River, a Bitcoin-only financial institution built to provide brokerage, custody, and mining services to individuals and institutions. With a background spanning aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, computer science at Stanford, and security engineering at Airbnb, Leishman co-founded River in 2019 after stints at MaiCoin, Deloitte, and Polychain Capital. River has raised over $17.7 million in venture funding and became the first Bitcoin-only exchange to publicly release its financial statements in April 2025. Leishman also serves on the board of Brink, a Bitcoin research and development nonprofit.
Michael Reid is the CEO and Executive Director of Megaport, a global Network-as-a-Service platform operating across roughly 1,000 data centers in 26 countries. A Brisbane-born aerospace engineer turned tech sales leader, Reid spent 15 years at Cisco - most recently as CRO of ThousandEyes, where he grew ARR by 2.4x and scaled the team from 150 to nearly 400 people. Since taking Megaport's helm in May 2023, he has led the company to its first-ever profit after tax (FY24), grown Customer Lifetime Value 50% year-on-year to $2.1 billion, and repositioned Megaport as the backbone for AI-era enterprise connectivity.
Alberto Romero is a Spanish AI analyst, writer, and newsletter author behind The Algorithmic Bridge, a Substack publication with 40,000+ subscribers. A former machine learning engineer turned independent journalist, he brings an unusual fusion of aerospace engineering, cognitive neuroscience, and ML expertise to bear on the most pressing questions in AI - with a commitment to honesty, no ads, and no sponsors. He is also an analyst at CambrianAI Research, focusing on large language models and AI hardware/software.