Daniel Jalkut is a Mac and iOS indie developer who founded Red Sweater Software in 2002 after seven years engineering Mac OS at Apple. He is best known for MarsEdit, the long-running desktop blog editor he bought from Brent Simmons in 2007, and for FastScripts, a scripting automation utility. For 16 years he co-hosted Core Intuition with Manton Reece, one of the defining podcasts of the indie Apple-developer scene, and he runs the long-form interview show Bitsplitting. He is a fixture of the indie web and micro.blog community, writing about software craft, the business of going it alone, and the texture of a programming life.
Dave DeLong is a software craftsman with fifteen years of building iOS and macOS apps that ship on billions of devices - and, he likes to point out, some that run in outer space. A seven-year Apple veteran who worked on Siri, UIKit, Apple Maps, and Developer Evangelism, he led the WWDC app from 2013 to 2015 and helped ship the first releases of Swift, WatchKit, HomeKit, and HealthKit. He is among the top contributors of all time on Stack Overflow, a fixture of the Swift Evolution process, and the author of widely cited open-source libraries on calendrical math. He blogs at davedelong.com, speaks at conferences worldwide, and is currently building a stealth startup.
Dave Wiskus is the founder and CEO of Nebula, the creator-owned streaming service he launched in 2019 with a group of independent YouTubers, and of Standard, the talent company behind it. Before building a streaming platform pitched as an A24 for online video, he was a respected human interface designer who co-founded Q Branch with John Gruber and Brent Simmons to make the note-taking app Vesper. He also fronts the New York synth-rock band Airplane Mode and co-hosted the podcast Unprofessional.
Dithering is a subscription-only podcast hosted by Ben Thompson, founder of the Stratechery business-strategy newsletter, and John Gruber, the writer behind the Apple-focused blog Daring Fireball. Each episode runs exactly 15 minutes, twice a week, with two of the most influential voices in technology commentary trading takes on Apple, the tech industry, media, and whatever else is on their minds. It is a paid show built on Thompson's own membership infrastructure, included in the Stratechery Plus bundle.
Federico Viticci is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, the Italy-based Apple publication he started in 2009 at age 21. He is best known for his book-length annual iOS and iPadOS reviews, his pioneering, almost evangelical insistence on using the iPad as his primary computer, and his deep work on Apple's Shortcuts automation. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast and several Relay FM shows including Connected, and runs the membership community Club MacStories.
Dr Howard Oakley is the one-man newsroom and software workshop behind The Eclectic Light Company, a blog that pairs deep-dive macOS internals with the history of painting. A retired Royal Navy Surgeon Commander and cold-injury researcher turned indie Mac developer, he writes daily about how macOS actually works and ships more than 40 free utilities such as SilentKnight, Consolation and T2M2 - all without a single line of AI-generated content.
James Thomson is an independent iOS and Mac developer in Glasgow, Scotland, best known for PCalc, the scientific calculator he started in 1992 and has been refining ever since. He runs the two-person studio TLA Systems with his wife, having earlier worked at Apple on the Mac OS X Finder and Dock. A fixture of the Apple developer community, he is also a podcast pundit on Relay FM and The Incomparable, a conference speaker, and a Dungeons & Dragons player who photographs squirrels on the side.
Jason Snell is the founder and editor of Six Colors, the Apple-obsessed publication he launched in 2014 after 17 years at Macworld, where he served as lead editor for over a decade. A relentless podcaster, he hosts Upgrade and co-hosts MacBreak Weekly, runs The Incomparable network of geek-culture shows, and built the annual Six Colors Apple Report Card into a fixture of the Apple commentariat. Snell has covered every major Apple launch since the 1990s, once interviewed Steve Jobs, and turns a spreadsheet of survey scores into some of the most-cited charts in tech.
Jeff Johnson is a longtime independent Mac and iOS developer who runs Lapcat Software and the Underpass App Company. He is best known for StopTheMadness, a Safari extension that wrestles control of the browser back from hostile websites, and for being one of the sharpest public critics of Apple's privacy decisions, including the 2020 'OCSP appocalypse' that revealed macOS was phoning home unencrypted every time you launched an app. A philosophy graduate turned code archaeologist, he writes a widely read blog dissecting Apple's broken promises and has racked up a long list of CVE security credits across macOS, Safari, iOS, and WebKit.
John Gruber is the writer behind Daring Fireball, the long-running Apple-focused weblog he launched in 2002 and turned into a full-time, ad-and-membership-funded one-person media business by 2006. He co-created Markdown with Aaron Swartz in 2004, hosts the popular podcast The Talk Show, and co-hosts Dithering with Ben Thompson. Equal parts UI obsessive and sharp-tongued critic, Gruber has become one of the most influential independent voices covering Apple and Mac culture.
John Sundell is a Swift and Rust developer, writer and podcaster who runs Swift by Sundell, a weekly publication of articles, tips, podcasts and videos read in well over a hundred countries. A former lead iOS developer at Spotify, he went indie to build apps, games and a stack of widely used open-source developer tools - including the static site generator Publish, the type-safe HTML DSL Plot, the Markdown parser Ink and the syntax highlighter Splash. He is based in Gdansk, Poland.
Jeffrey Whipps is Vice President of Marketing at Google, where he leads the company's global brand studio and holds global responsibility for strategic brand and reputation topics spanning sustainability, digital wellbeing, crisis response, and diversity and inclusion. Before Google, he spent seven years at Apple as Director of Worldwide Advertising, contributing to iconic campaigns including the iPod Silhouettes and Mac vs. PC series. His career spans over two decades at the intersection of technology and storytelling, with earlier roles at Netscape, Shutterfly, Sun Microsystems, and McCann Worldgroup.
Amit Jain is the Co-Founder and CEO of Luma AI, the Palo Alto-based AI company behind Dream Machine - a text-to-video platform with over 25 million users - and Ray 3, the world's first reasoning video model. Before founding Luma AI in 2021, he spent four years at Apple leading development of the Passthrough feature for Apple Vision Pro and integrating the first LiDAR sensors into iPhones. Under his leadership, Luma AI has raised over $1 billion in funding including a $900M Series C led by HUMAIN at a $4 billion valuation, and is building unified multimodal intelligence systems that blur the line between reasoning and reality synthesis.
Amit Sharma founded Narvar in 2013 to fix the most overlooked moment in e-commerce: the anxious gap between clicking 'buy' and the package arriving at the door. Drawing on years spent optimizing supply chains at Williams-Sonoma, Walmart, and Apple, he built a post-purchase experience platform from a bootstrapped garage operation into a market leader serving 650+ retailers - including Sephora, Home Depot, LVMH, and Patagonia - before stepping back from the CEO role in October 2024 to an advisory position.
Erez Cohen is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of August Health, a San Francisco-based healthtech company building the modern EHR platform for senior living communities. A serial founder and former Apple engineering leader, Cohen sold his first company, Mapsense, to Apple for approximately $25-30 million in 2015. He founded August Health in 2020 after meeting physician co-founder Dr. Justin Schram at a San Francisco playground - both pushing their two-year-olds on the swings - and the company has since raised $44 million in total funding, with a $29 million Series B led by Base10 Partners in August 2025.
Reggie Chan is a Hong Kong-based serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Nex (nex.inc), the motion-gaming company behind the Nex Playground console - a $249 camera-based gaming device that outsold Xbox in the US during Black Friday 2025 and hit $150M+ in annual revenue. Before Nex, Chan co-founded EditGrid, an online spreadsheet startup acquired by Apple in 2008, then spent nearly a decade at Apple as a Software Engineering Manager before betting everything on body-motion entertainment. At Nex, his team has built technology that tracks 18 body points per player, enabling real physical movement as the controller - no wires, no wearables, just your body and a TV.
Vipul Ved Prakash is a serial entrepreneur and technologist who co-founded Together AI, an AI acceleration cloud platform valued at $3.3 billion after a $305M Series B in February 2025. Previously, he built Topsy (acquired by Apple for $200M+), co-founded Cloudmark (acquired by Proofpoint), and created Vipul's Razor - one of the internet's first collaborative anti-spam systems. A self-described cypherpunk with a table-tennis past, Prakash has been dismantling bottlenecks - from spam to closed AI - for over two decades.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.
Tyler Mincey is Co-Founder and General Partner at Baukunst, a San Francisco-based pre-seed venture firm that raised a $100 million debut fund in 2022 - the largest debut pre-seed fund ever raised. A Princeton-trained mechanical engineer who helped ship the first iPhone and 150+ million Apple devices, Mincey brings rare hardware-to-venture credibility: he co-founded a car-tech startup (Pearl Automation), pioneered an embedded engineering team inside Bolt VC, and now leads Baukunst's bet that the next generation of breakthrough companies will be built at the intersection of technology and design.
Ian Small is the CEO of Blues, a Boston-based IoT connectivity company backed by $115M in funding including a $25M Sequoia-led round in 2025. A 30-year Silicon Valley veteran who started at Apple in 1989 working on QuickTime VR, Small went on to lead TokBox (Sequoia-backed video communications platform acquired by Telefonica), serve as Global Chief Data Officer at Telefonica overseeing 300M+ customers, and then spent five years as CEO of Evernote transforming the company through a massive technical overhaul before it was acquired by Bending Spoons in 2023. Known as an 'end-to-end operator' with a famous habit of deep customer listening, he joined Blues in June 2025 to lead the company's next phase of growth in making IoT connectivity accessible and affordable for product makers everywhere.
Joe Weil is the CEO of Unplugged, a privacy-first smartphone company that makes the UP Phone - an open-source Android device stripped of Google services, built with a hardware battery disconnect switch, on-device firewall, and a no-surveillance business model. Before leading Unplugged, Weil spent roughly a decade at Apple leading zero-to-one special projects for Apple Services, and before that built Psycho Films LLC, directing music videos for Kendrick Lamar, 21 Savage, A$AP Ferg, and Big Sean. He left Apple, by his account, after watching the company shift into political activism, soft censorship, and deep integration with China.
Gabriel Bayomi Tinoco Kalejaiye is a Brazilian-born engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Openlayer, a San Francisco-based AI governance and observability platform. After earning his MS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and working as a Machine Learning Engineer at Apple - where he contributed to both Siri and the secretive Vision Pro project - he left with two colleagues to solve the problem that haunted every AI team: models that look great in testing but fail in the real world. Openlayer provides enterprises with evaluation, monitoring, and compliance tooling across the full AI lifecycle, from prototype to production. The company raised a $14.5M Series A in May 2025, grew nearly 5x in 2024, and is now a recognized vendor in Gartner's 2026 Market Guide for AI Evaluation and Observability Platforms.
Brijesh Tripathi is the CEO and Co-Founder of FlexAI, a Paris-based AI infrastructure startup that raised $30M in seed funding in April 2024. A veteran of NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, and Intel, he deployed Aurora (one of the world's largest supercomputers) and managed 50,000+ GPUs at Intel before co-founding FlexAI to democratize access to AI compute through a Workload-as-a-Service platform that routes AI workloads across any hardware - cloud or on-prem - without vendor lock-in.
Carra Wu is a Partner on the a16z crypto investment team, where she leads investments in gaming, media, consumer, and infrastructure. She became the youngest check signer in the firm's history at age 23, ascending from intern to deal partner in under a year - a trajectory that started with a six-sentence cold email to Arianna Simpson. A Harvard applied math dropout fluent in three languages, former HoloLens AR/VR engineer at Microsoft, and one-time ballet dancer, Wu brings a builder's instincts to some of crypto's biggest bets, including Axie Infinity, Friends With Benefits, Yield Guild Games, Story Protocol, and CCP Games.
Tommy McGlynn is a Los Angeles-based engineering manager at Meta's Reality Labs, where he leads the AI Character Platform team building AI-powered characters for the mixed-reality metaverse. A self-taught hacker who cracked an ad referral platform at 12, he went on to design scalable server architectures for Apple's TestFlight, speak on stage at WWDC for three consecutive years, and author the Oculus Developer Hub launch. He bridges design thinking and deep engineering - from Flash games and real-time multiplayer systems to VR developer tooling and interactive AI agents.
Kevin McNamara is the Founder and CEO of Parallel Domain, a San Francisco-based synthetic data and simulation platform that has raised $43.9M to power the next generation of AI perception systems. With a rare career arc spanning Pixar's animation pipeline, Microsoft's Xbox game studios, and Apple's secretive autonomous systems group, McNamara distilled a career of building virtual worlds into a platform that lets autonomous vehicle, drone, and robotics companies train their AI on infinite synthetic scenarios - accelerating ML development cycles by over 180x compared to real-world data collection.
Don Valentine was the founder of Sequoia Capital and one of the most consequential venture capitalists in American history. A working-class Bronx kid who paid his Fordham tuition in cash, he parlayed a career in semiconductor sales at Raytheon, Fairchild, and National Semiconductor into a firm that backed Apple, Atari, Cisco, Oracle, Google, and YouTube. His contrarian philosophy - bet on markets, not founders - and his Socratic boardroom style made him one of the architects of modern Silicon Valley. He died in October 2019 at age 87, leaving behind a legacy that shaped the entire venture capital industry.
Andy Grove is the original creator of Apache DataFusion and a PMC member of Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion. With over 30 years of software engineering experience, he specializes in query engines and distributed systems, currently serving as Principal Distributed Database Engineer at Apple. He's the author of 'How Query Engines Work' and creator of sqlparser-rs, one of the leading open-source SQL parsers for Rust. His open-source contributions have shaped the modern data processing ecosystem, with DataFusion powering hundreds of data-centric applications worldwide.
Heidi Roizen is one of Silicon Valley's most iconic figures — a serial entrepreneur who co-founded T/Maker in 1983, led Apple's Worldwide Developer Relations during a pivotal transition, and became a venture capitalist at Threshold Ventures. She is the subject of a landmark Harvard Business School case study on networking and the famous 'Heidi vs. Howard' gender bias experiment. Today she is a Partner at Threshold Ventures, a Stanford lecturer, board director at Planet Labs and Upside Foods, and host of 'The Startup Solution' podcast.