Gil Akos is the co-founder and CEO of Astra, a payments infrastructure company that lets developers move money bank-to-bank in real time. Trained as an architect with graduate work at Columbia, he taught himself programming, then earned a stack of Udacity nanodegrees in machine learning and AI to build the company he imagined. Under his leadership Astra crossed $1 billion in lifetime payments processed and pushed past a $2 billion annualized run rate, positioning the company as connective tissue for instant payouts across vertical SaaS, marketplaces, and earned wage access.
Tulane University is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana to fight cholera and yellow fever. Now one of 71 members of the Association of American Universities, it enrolls roughly 14,000-15,000 students across schools spanning medicine, public health and tropical medicine, law, architecture, business, science and engineering, social work and liberal arts. Known for a deep service ethic - it became the first major U.S. research university to require public service for graduation after Hurricane Katrina - Tulane pairs high-level research with a distinctive New Orleans culture.
Canoa is a browser-based design platform that gives interior designers and architects one connected workflow to collect inspiration, build data-rich mood boards, lay out furniture to scale, pull real product data, and generate FF&E schedules. Founded in 2019 by Federico Negro out of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Canoa replaces the scattered stack of Revit, AutoCAD, Excel, and PowerPoint with a single AI-assisted canvas, while pushing the furniture industry toward circular, low-carbon practices.
Acelab is a New York-based AEC technology company building an AI-powered Material Hub for the architecture and construction industry. The platform helps architects, designers, and building owners research, compare, specify, and document building products from a database of more than 250,000 products across 10,000+ brands, with native Revit integration and tools that keep a single material selection synced across every project document. Founded in 2019 by Harvard and MIT architecture graduates, Acelab is used by over 20,000 firms, including more than half of the top 100 global architecture practices.
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British philosopher, author, and entrepreneur who has written 15+ books translated into 30+ languages, co-founded The School of Life in 2008, and built a global movement dedicated to making philosophy practically useful for everyday life - covering love, work, anxiety, and what it means to live wisely.
Eight Inc. is a globally recognized strategic design firm founded in 1989 by Tim Kobe. Best known for designing the original Apple Store with Steve Jobs, the firm now operates across San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai, helping brands like Nike, Virgin Atlantic, Citibank, Dolby, McLaren, Lincoln and Nissan turn ideas into human experiences across architecture, retail, products, identity and digital.
Motif is a browser-based, AI-powered design workspace built for architects and the broader AEC industry. Founded by former Autodesk leaders Amar Hanspal and Brian Mathews, it streams live BIM models from Revit and Rhino into a collaborative cloud canvas, layers in architecture-tuned AI rendering, and aims to replace the file-shuffling that defines most building design today.
Amar Hanspal is the co-founder and CEO of Motif, a cloud-native AI-first design collaboration platform challenging Autodesk's Revit dominance in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry. A veteran of three decades in design software, he previously served as Co-CEO of Autodesk - where he helped triple the company's market cap from $8B to $24B - and as founding CEO of robotics startup Bright Machines. With Motif, backed by $46M from CapitalG and Redpoint Ventures and named to Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups list for 2025, Hanspal is building what he describes as 'Figma for architects': a browser-based, real-time collaborative workspace for the world's built environment.
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.
Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster best known for founding Smart Passive Income (SPI), a platform where he openly documents the strategies - and the income numbers behind them - that power his online businesses. Laid off from his architecture job in 2008, he turned an e-book about the LEED exam into a career-defining pivot, eventually building a media company with 60 million+ podcast downloads, multiple Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestselling books, a Kickstarter-funded tripod product, and a Pokémon card YouTube channel that became its own standalone business. His signature move: publishing every dollar earned and spent, monthly, in public.
Michael Feathers is a software consultant, author, and Chief Architect at Globant whose 2004 book 'Working Effectively with Legacy Code' redefined how developers think about untested code - coining the now-universal definition that legacy code is simply code without tests. With over 25 years consulting hundreds of organizations, he pioneered dependency-breaking techniques that gave teams a way into codebases they feared. Today he explores how AI reshapes programming, writes the 'mechanisms' newsletter on Substack, and continues speaking at conferences worldwide.