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.'
Kevin Rose is a serial tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and wellness advocate who founded Digg in 2004 with $1,200 and turned it into a 38-million-user social news juggernaut. A former Google Ventures partner with early bets on Twitter, Square, Uber, and Slack, he has since pivoted toward deep wellness practices - Zen meditation, intermittent fasting, cold exposure - while building the ZERO and OAK apps. In 2025, he re-acquired Digg alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, relaunching it in January 2026 as an AI-powered Reddit alternative. He publishes a widely-read newsletter at kevinrose.com and hosts The Kevin Rose Show podcast.
Lior Abutbul is an AI practitioner and newsletter writer focused on the frontier of agentic AI systems. Through the Agentic AI Weekly newsletter, Lior breaks down how autonomous AI agents work, where they're headed, and how builders and operators can put them to use today.
Mario Gabriele is the founder and writer of The Generalist, a long-form tech and venture newsletter with 163,000+ subscribers ranked among Substack's top business publications. Raised in England by an Italian father and American mother, he cut a nonlinear path through law, culinary school, fiction writing, and seed-stage VC before going full-time as a solo creator in 2020. His signature style - combining equity research depth with fiction-writer storytelling - earned him citations in the FT, WSJ, and Bloomberg and attracted a loyal paid following. In 2022, he launched Generalist Capital, a $12.25M solo GP fund, and by March 2026 he had joined Hummingbird Ventures as a full Partner.
Nate Benson is an AI news journalist and newsletter creator behind The AI Break, a publication dedicated to making artificial intelligence news accessible, engaging, and jargon-free for a broad audience.
Nathan Lambert is a Senior Research Scientist and Post-Training Lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where he leads open-source language model development on the OLMo and Tulu series. A UC Berkeley PhD, he previously led the RLHF team at Hugging Face, co-building the TRL library and the Zephyr model. He runs Interconnects AI, a Substack newsletter read by tens of thousands covering post-training, open models, and AI policy, and is the author of The RLHF Book (Manning Publications). With roughly 8,000 academic citations and a reputation for demystifying the hardest parts of modern AI, Lambert is one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of open-source AI research and public education.
Noah Smith is an independent economist-turned-writer best known for Noahpinion, one of Substack's largest economics newsletters with over 414,000 subscribers. A former Bloomberg Opinion columnist and ex-finance professor at Stony Brook University, he writes about technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and domestic policy with a techno-optimist, center-left lens. He also co-hosts the 'Econ 102' podcast with Erik Torenberg and is working on an English-language macroeconomics book.
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.
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.
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.
Simon Willison is a British software engineer, open source creator, and AI commentator best known for co-creating the Django web framework and building Datasette, the open-source data exploration tool. He coined the term 'prompt injection' in 2022 and popularized 'AI slop' in 2024 - a word later named Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. Through his prolific blog (active since 2002), newsletter with 54,000+ subscribers, and 100+ open source tools, he is one of the most influential independent voices at the intersection of LLMs and open source software.
Stephanie Palazzolo is an AI reporter at The Information and author of the AI Agenda newsletter, covering artificial intelligence startups, Big Tech, chips, cloud, and policy. A former Morgan Stanley investment banker who pivoted into journalism, she broke major stories on OpenAI, Anthropic, and the broader AI industry, and was part of a SABEW Best in Business award-winning team for coverage of the OpenAI CEO firing in 2023.
Timothy B. Lee is an independent AI journalist and newsletter writer who runs Understanding AI, a Substack newsletter with over 263,000 subscribers that explains how artificial intelligence actually works - minus the hype and minus the doom. Drawing on a rare combination of a computer science master's from Princeton, two decades of tech policy reporting at outlets like Ars Technica, the Washington Post, and Vox, and an instinct for clear, jargon-free prose, Lee has become one of the most-read independent voices in AI journalism. His superpower is translating complex machine learning concepts into accessible explainers that neither oversell nor undersell the technology.
Tomas Pueyo is a Franco-Spanish writer, strategist, and newsletter creator best known for his wildly viral COVID-19 articles that reached 60 million readers in 2020 and for his Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, where he explores tech, geopolitics, AI, and the forces shaping civilization. A Stanford MBA and former Silicon Valley executive (Course Hero VP of Growth, Ankorstore CPO), he voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write full-time - building a 123,000+ subscriber audience without spending a dollar on advertising.
Typeface is an enterprise marketing AI platform that orchestrates specialized AI agents, brand intelligence, and agentic workflows to help Fortune 500 companies produce personalized, on-brand marketing content at scale. Founded in 2022 by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis - before ChatGPT launched - the company became a unicorn within one year of founding, raised $265M, and built the Arc platform: a full-stack marketing operating system spanning brand intelligence (Arc Graph), purpose-built marketing agents (Arc Agents), collaborative workspaces (Arc Spaces), and enterprise-grade custom workflow tooling (Arc Forge).
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.
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.
Byrne Hobart is the founder and author of The Diff, a daily newsletter read by hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and tech founders tracking inflection points in finance and technology. A self-taught investor who landed at SAC Capital without a college degree purely on the strength of his writing, Hobart now co-runs Anomaly, a frontier tech investment firm, and co-authored Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation with Stripe Press. He writes roughly 500,000 words a year and counts 1.5% of the Forbes 400 among his readers.
Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Galaxy Brain, the publication's flagship newsletter on tech, media, and internet culture. A veteran of BuzzFeed News and The New York Times, he has spent over a decade mapping the collision of technology, power, and human behavior - from smartphone location tracking to AI hype cycles to Twitter's moderation failures. Co-author of 'Out of Office' with Anne Helen Petersen, Warzel writes from Lummi Island, Washington, with a voice that is analytical, empathetic, and stubbornly resistant to easy narratives.
Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Eliot Peper is the bestselling author of twelve speculative thrillers — including Ensorcelled, Foundry, Reap3r, and the Analog trilogy — that explore the collision of technology, power, and culture. Based in Pacifica, CA, he serves as Head of Story at Portola, where he builds the lore and personality behind Tolan, an AI companion startup that went from $1M to $4M ARR in four weeks. A former entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm, Latin translator, dengue fever survivor, and avid surfer, Peper writes the books he wants to read — and has earned praise from Seth Godin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, and Tim O'Reilly along the way.
Erik Torenberg is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he joined in April 2025 after a16z acquired his media network Turpentine. A serial founder and investor, he was a first employee at Product Hunt, co-founded Village Global (a $100M VC fund backed by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg), founded On Deck (a fellowship network for founders), and built Turpentine into a leading tech media network before its acquisition. Known for his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity spanning technology, culture, politics, and philosophy, he now leads a16z's media and ecosystem efforts including the New Media Fellowship and the live news venture MTS.
Jon Stokes is a 25-year veteran of online media who co-founded Ars Technica in 1998 with Ken Fisher, helping build it into the internet's premier tech publication before selling it to Condé Nast for $25 million. An engineer turned journalist turned product builder, he holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from LSU alongside two master's degrees from Harvard Divinity School in early Christian history - a combination that explains his unusual range: equally comfortable dissecting CPU microarchitecture, AI policy, Second Amendment law, and New Testament scholarship. Today he's co-founder and CPO of Symbolic AI, runs a Substack newsletter on AI and crypto with 13,000+ subscribers, and serves as a fellow at Open Source Defense.
Marc Andreessen co-invented the Mosaic browser as a $6.85/hour student programmer, then went on to co-found Netscape, help birth the modern internet, and eventually build Andreessen Horowitz into a $42B+ venture capital juggernaut. The man who wrote 'software is eating the world' in 2011 spent the next decade proving himself right by backing Twitter, Facebook, Coinbase, and GitHub. In 2023 he published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and in 2024 pivoted to advising the Trump administration's DOGE initiative - cementing his status as Silicon Valley's most opinionated, polarizing, and consequential voice.
Sarah Tavel is a venture investor and product thinker best known as the first female General Partner at Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious and selective VC firms. Before Benchmark, she led core discovery products at Pinterest during its hypergrowth years, having first backed the company as a VC at Bessemer Venture Partners. She is the creator of widely-cited frameworks including the Hierarchy of Marketplaces, Happy GMV, and the 'Sell Work, Not Software' thesis for AI startups. As of April 2025, she transitioned to Venture Partner at Benchmark, focusing on AI tools at the edge and broader exploratory work.
Syed Amir Jafri is the CEO and co-founder of Eocean, a Pakistan-based CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) company serving 2,000+ enterprises across 180+ countries with SMS, WhatsApp, and Voice APIs. He co-founded Eocean in 2008 with his brother Syed Asif Jafri, bootstrapping the company from a local communications startup into a regional technology leader. He is also co-founder of Kistpay, a fintech platform focused on smartphone financing and digital inclusion in Pakistan. A certified Chief Digital Officer from MIT Sloan Executive Education, Jafri bridges the gap between traditional enterprise communication and emerging AI-driven platforms, with clients including Google, Unilever, HBL, and Careem.
Tanay Jaipuria is a Partner at Wing Venture Capital, a former Meta product leader turned investor and prolific tech analyst. With an MBA from Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar) and a CS degree from Columbia, he bridges operator instinct with investor judgment. He writes Tanay's Newsletter - a weekly Substack with 12,000+ subscribers covering AI economics, enterprise SaaS, and technology business models. With 72,800+ X followers, he's become a trusted voice on the cost of intelligence, AI agent economics, and what makes software businesses defensible in the age of generative AI.