HoneyBook is an AI-powered business management platform built for independent service professionals - photographers, event planners, consultants, and creative freelancers. Founded in 2013 in San Francisco with roots in Tel Aviv, the platform combines CRM, contracts, invoicing, payments, scheduling, and workflow automation into a single clientflow hub. With $498M in total funding, a $2.4B valuation, $140M ARR, and more than $12 billion in payments processed, HoneyBook has become the dominant platform for the growing independent economy - helping over 100,000 small business owners run client relationships from first inquiry to final payment without switching between a dozen tools.
Afshan Azhar is the Chief Executive Officer of Mural, a leading visual collaboration platform headquartered in San Francisco, California, with over 900 employees and $193 million in total funding. Based in Islamabad, Pakistan, Azhar leads a company that has become a cornerstone of enterprise collaboration - enabling remote and hybrid teams to brainstorm, map customer journeys, run design sprints, and facilitate workshops through an AI-powered digital canvas. Mural serves thousands of enterprises globally, integrating deeply with Microsoft 365, Slack, and other productivity ecosystems.
Sandeep Panda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a developer-first blogging and community platform that lets software engineers own their content and publish on custom domains. Founded in 2016 alongside Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode has grown to serve 3M+ monthly readers and 10M+ monthly views, backed by Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). A graduate of IIIT Bhubaneswar with a background in web development and technical writing, Sandeep has authored books on AngularJS and HTML5, and is now building Bug0, an AI-native end-to-end testing platform.
Paul McCabe is the CEO of JetBrains Americas, Inc., the North American subsidiary of JetBrains - the Czech developer tools company behind IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Kotlin, and dozens of other IDEs and tools trusted by over 11 million developers worldwide. With a career spanning Logitech, Symantec, Miro Computer Products, and WebGain, McCabe brings over three decades of enterprise software sales and operations experience to one of the most influential developer tooling companies on the planet. He also co-founded Chronon Systems, a Java time-travel debugging startup, and has been steering JetBrains' Americas business since November 2015.
Julia Enthoven is the co-founder and CEO of Kapwing, a San Francisco-based online video editing platform that has grown to 25 million registered users. A Stanford Math & CS graduate and former Google Product Manager, she co-founded Kapwing in 2017 with Eric Lu after they both left Google. Under her leadership, Kapwing evolved from a simple meme maker into a comprehensive AI-powered video editing suite used by creators, brands, and educators worldwide. Named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Tech (2020) and Product Hunt Maker of the Year (2018), she has also launched Tess, an artist-compensating AI image generator, and is an outspoken voice on building ethical AI tools.
Kanav Hasija is Co-Founder and CEO of MeltPlan, an AI-native preconstruction planning platform backed by Bessemer Venture Partners. A serial entrepreneur who co-built Innovaccer into a $3.2B healthcare data unicorn, he now applies the same data-platform playbook to construction — where fragmented planning and late-stage surprises cost billions annually. MeltPlan's tools (Melt Code, Melt Takeoff) bring AI-powered code compliance and quantity estimation to architects, contractors, and owners before the first shovel breaks ground.
Grant Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gamma, the AI-powered presentation and visual storytelling platform that replaced PowerPoint for over 50 million users and reached $100M ARR with just 50 employees. A Stanford-trained engineer who spent nearly a decade in finance before founding Gamma in 2020 from a London lockdown apartment with two co-founders and a newborn at home, Lee has led the company to a $2.1 billion valuation and $68M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in November 2025 - building one of the most capital-efficient AI unicorns of the decade.
Ali Abouelatta is an Egyptian-born product manager turned newsletter writer and founder who built First 1000 - a deep-dive Substack publication dissecting how famous startups acquired their first 1,000 customers - from zero to 90,000+ subscribers in under three years with no prior audience. After a stint at Duolingo where he generated an estimated $50-100M in incremental revenue through monetization experiments, he left in 2025 to build Lazyweb.com, an AI-powered design inspiration library, documenting his own journey to 1,000 paying customers in real time through the very newsletter that made him known.
Nate Kontny is a Chicago-based serial founder, engineer, and writer who went from chemical engineering at UIUC to co-founding two Y Combinator companies (Inkling W06, Cityposh S11), running Highrise as CEO for Jason Fried, writing prolifically across Medium, HuffPost, and Fast Company, and building a suite of solo products - most recently AlliHat, a Safari extension embedding Claude AI directly in the browser. Currently Staff Engineer at Fivetran (post-Census acquisition), he is known for his radical transparency about failure, his 250-words-a-day writing discipline, and a philosophy that shipping imperfect work beats endless polishing.
Simon Hoiberg is a Danish serial entrepreneur, software engineer, and content creator based in Zurich, Switzerland. He left a $300K/year freelancing career to bootstrap a portfolio of SaaS products - including FeedHive (AI social media scheduling), Aidbase (AI customer support), LinkDrip (link attribution), TinyKiwi, and SignupGate - achieving $1M+ combined ARR. He grew his Twitter/X following to 200K+ organically and teaches React Native development through Galaxies.dev, reaching 100,000+ developers. Known for radical transparency about both wins and failures, Simon openly documents his entire entrepreneurial journey.
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.
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.