Domestika is a global learning platform for creatives - illustrators, designers, photographers, animators, writers - built around professionally produced video courses and an enormous community of working professionals. Founded in Spain in 2002 as a forum, it became a unicorn in 2022 and now hosts millions of students taking courses in more than 10 languages.
CGP Grey is an Irish-American educational YouTuber and podcaster based in London who has spent more than a decade turning constitutional minutiae, geographic absurdities, and the strange edges of human systems into addictive short animated films. He works alone, never shows his face, draws himself as a stick figure in glasses, and treats production schedules as raw material for podcasts about how creative people get anything done at all.
Philipp Dettmer is the founder, CEO, and head writer of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, the Munich-based animation studio and YouTube channel with over 25 million subscribers and 3.6 billion views. Starting as a university passion project in 2013, Kurzgesagt has grown into a 70-person studio that transforms dense scientific, philosophical, and technological ideas into visually stunning, widely-shared short films. Dettmer is also the author of 'Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive' (2021) and co-creator of the video game Star Birds, launched in early access in September 2025.
Webflow is a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that lets designers, marketers, and developers build production-ready websites without writing code - or with it, if they want. Founded in 2013 after three failed attempts and a near-bankruptcy, the company grew into a $4 billion business serving over 300,000 teams including The New York Times, TED, Dropbox, Dell, Discord, and Monday.com. Its visual editor outputs clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript automatically, while its built-in CMS, hosting, ecommerce, and now AI-powered tools make it a full-stack web platform. In 2025 and 2026, Webflow pushed deeper into enterprise with a next-gen CMS, AI prompt-to-production site building, answer engine optimization (AEO), and the acquisitions of animation library GSAP and AI content platform Vidoso.ai.
Austin Harrison is the co-founder and CEO of Northbeam, a San Francisco-based marketing intelligence platform that uses first-party data and machine learning to give e-commerce and D2C brands an accurate picture of which ads are actually driving revenue. Before pivoting to martech, Harrison built a parallel career in digital entertainment — co-founding an animation company that worked with Hasbro, Disney, and NBC Universal, and earlier running MediaTrip, an online animation channel that earned an Entertainment Weekly Top 10 Internet Phenomenon ranking. At Northbeam, he has led the company to track over $130 billion in ad-attributed revenue across 800+ brands, raised $40 million in total funding, and launched industry-first attribution models developed in partnership with Meta, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Aaron Sisto is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chronicle Studios, a content intelligence platform that uses proprietary agentic AI to help creators launch and scale global IP franchises. A PhD quantum chemist turned deep-tech investor turned entertainment entrepreneur, Sisto blends hard science and pop culture instincts in a company that raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round in 2025 backed by Patron and Point72 Ventures. Previously a partner at First Spark Ventures and Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures, he co-founded Chronicle alongside entertainment veteran Chris deFaria, former president of DreamWorks Animation.
Jhanvi Shriram is the co-founder and CEO of Krikey AI, a San Francisco-based generative AI 3D animation platform that enables anyone to create professional-grade animations in minutes without prior technical experience. A Stanford BA and MBA graduate with an MFA from USC's Peter Stark Producing Program, Jhanvi previously worked at YouTube, JauntVR, and Participant Media before launching Krikey in 2016 with her sister Dr. Ketaki Shriram (CTO). Krikey has raised $22M, counts Reliance Jio, AWS Startups, T-Mobile Accelerator, and Thirty Five Ventures among its investors, and reached over 100,000 creators through integrations with Canva and Adobe Express. A Tribeca Film Festival-premiered documentary producer turned AI entrepreneur, Jhanvi sits at the intersection of creative storytelling and cutting-edge technology.
Gregg Spiridellis is an American media and technology entrepreneur who co-founded JibJab with his brother Evan in a Brooklyn garage in 1999, pioneering viral internet video before it was called that. He followed it up with StoryBots, the 11x Emmy Award-winning educational children's franchise acquired by Netflix in 2019. Now back with Spiridellis Bros. Studios, an AI-powered animation company backed by Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss, and Google's AI Futures Fund, he is betting that generative AI is the biggest creative wave yet.
Julian Shapiro is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, deeptech seed investor, and prolific writer who built a career that spans open-source animation engines, growth marketing agencies, and a Y Combinator-backed startup. He founded Demand Curve, the largest growth marketing education platform for startups, and now runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund writing $500K-$2M checks into robotics, chips, energy, medtech, and biotech. His free handbooks at julian.com - covering writing, startups, fitness, and audio - are read by over a million people annually. He co-hosts the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen and was previously VP of Marketing at Webflow.
Josh W Comeau is a Montreal-based frontend developer, indie course creator, and one of the most beloved CSS and React educators on the internet. After stints at Unsplash, Shopify, Khan Academy, and Gatsby, he left corporate engineering in 2020 to build interactive, deeply original courses that generated over $550,000 in presale revenue. His CSS for JavaScript Developers and The Joy of React courses have taught more than 28,000 developers through a teaching style that blends interactive widgets, mini-games, and the rare gift of building genuine mental models rather than just showing code.
Rauno Freiberg is an Estonian Staff Design Engineer at Vercel who blurs the line between design and engineering with surgical precision. Known for his obsession with invisible details - the micro-interactions, animations, and tactile feedback that make software feel alive - he built cmdk (downloaded millions of times weekly), wrote the seminal 'Invisible Details of Interaction Design' essay, and created Devouring Details, an interactive design education platform. He previously shaped the Arc browser at The Browser Company. His philosophy: code is the material, and mastery of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is the only honest path to great interfaces.