Nikhil Reddy is the co-founder and CEO of Kaizen, a New York based civic technology company building modern, people-first software for America's public services. After stints engineering at Tesla, Anduril, and Archive Resale and a degree from UC Berkeley, he set out to replace the clunky legacy systems behind recreation sign-ups, permits, transit fares, DMVs, and licensing. Kaizen's platform now reaches more than 30 million residents across 17 states and 50-plus agencies, and has raised over $35 million from NEA, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice, and others. Outside the company he runs a YouTube channel with 36,000+ subscribers about life, technology, and ideas.
Zack Eakin is the co-founder and CEO of Layup Parts, a Huntington Beach startup that wants to make ordering custom carbon-fiber and fiberglass parts as easy as ordering from Amazon. A composites engineer who started in IndyCar bodywork at Chip Ganassi Racing, became the first engineer at Elon Musk's The Boring Company, and led mechanical engineering on Anduril's Roadrunner drone, Eakin launched Layup in 2024 to attack a problem he kept hitting himself: composite parts that take weeks and cost a fortune. With software-driven manufacturing and standardized stock materials, Layup compresses some jobs from weeks to hours. In June 2026 the company raised a $42 million Series A led by Marlinspike, on top of a $9 million seed from Founders Fund.
Kyle Harrison is a General Partner at Contrary, the talent- and research-driven venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He joined in 2022 to co-found the firm's later-stage investment practice, bringing nearly a decade of experience from Index Ventures, Coatue Management, and TCV, where he backed companies including Ramp, Pave, Anduril, GitLab, Databricks, Snowflake, Figma, and Robinhood. Beyond deploying capital, Harrison built Contrary Research - one of the largest private market research platforms in the world, with 100,000+ subscribers and 500+ published reports. He also publishes the Investing 101 newsletter on Substack (26,000+ subscribers) and co-authored 'The Anduril Thesis,' a 300-page deep dive that took two years and 500+ sources to produce. Married to Camden, father of four, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Daniel Bessonov is the co-founder and CEO of Avora, a Y Combinator- and CRV-backed AI platform that deploys intelligent agents for dental operations - automating clinical documentation, coaching providers on case acceptance, and following up with patients. Before Avora, he architected core payment features at Ramp, built UAV encryption at Anduril, and led product intelligence at Wispr AI. A Penn M&T graduate (CS + Finance), he became a Top 25 App Store developer at age 14 and has spent the decade since compressing complex AI problems into products clinicians actually use.
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of technology and venture capital. A Stanford philosophy graduate and law school alumnus, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, pioneering online digital payments before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He then made what became arguably the greatest angel investment in tech history — a $500,000 bet on a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in 2004 that ultimately returned over $1 billion. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies (now valued at over $400 billion), and in 2005 he launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm managing approximately $17 billion that was among the first institutional investors in SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, and Spotify. Thiel's 2014 book Zero to One became a defining text on startup theory, articulating his core belief that genuine innovation is far more valuable than incremental improvement. A self-described libertarian, Thiel surprised Silicon Valley when he endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is also known for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media after the outlet outed him as gay. Through the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $250,000 to young people who skip or defer college, he has championed entrepreneurship over credentialism — producing billionaire alumni including Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Figma's Dylan Field. As of December 2025, Thiel's net worth is estimated at $27.5 billion.
Brian Singerman spent 16 years as a General Partner at Founders Fund - Peter Thiel's celebrated contrarian VC firm - backing SpaceX, Anduril, OpenAI, Stripe, and Scale AI before the world knew what they would become. He founded iGoogle at Google in 2005, built one of the first YC-focused investment vehicles (XGYC), and developed a reputation as one of the most conviction-driven investors of his generation. In late 2024, he transitioned to Partner Emeritus at Founders Fund, then co-founded GPx - a $500M debut fund with a structural twist on the VC model - with Lee Linden, backed significantly by Peter Thiel.
Katherine Boyle is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads the American Dynamism practice - a $1.1B+ fund focused on startups that serve the national interest. A former Washington Post journalist turned VC, she champions defense tech, manufacturing, aerospace, and critical infrastructure companies. She sits on the boards of Anduril Industries and The Free Press, and is widely regarded as one of tech's most important bridges between Silicon Valley and Washington.
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a strategic communications firm that bets on founder-led narratives over legacy PR playbooks. A former VP of Communications at Substack and EVP/CCO at Activision Blizzard, she now sits on Shopify's board of directors and manages a $40 million VC fund. Known for her newsletter 'Flack' (also called 'Res Ipsa') on Substack, she is one of the most incisive voices arguing that the future of tech PR is direct-to-audience, not media-mediated. Her clients have included Anduril, Cognition AI, Coinbase, and Ramp.