Linden Lab is the San Francisco company behind Second Life, the user-built virtual world it launched in 2003. More than two decades on, the platform still runs a multimillion-dollar creator economy where residents design avatars, sell virtual goods, host live events and trade in Linden Dollars - a quiet, persistent metaverse that predates the word itself.
VRChat is a free-to-use social virtual reality platform where millions of people gather every month inside worlds built almost entirely by the community. Founded in 2014 by Graham Gaylor and Jesse Joudrey, the company has turned a Reddit-recruited Oculus DK1 experiment into one of the largest user-generated virtual worlds on the internet, with concurrent users routinely topping 100,000 and a creator economy now monetized through a digital currency, subscriptions, and a marketplace.
Jeff (Jiajun) Lu is the founder and CEO of AKOOL, the generative AI video platform that ranked #1 on the Inc. 5000 list in 2025 with 37,364% revenue growth in three years. A PhD computer scientist who worked on Face ID at Apple and video processing at Google Cloud before building AKOOL on just 8 GPUs in 2020, Lu has turned a side project generating $100K into a $40M-revenue company powering AI avatars and real-time video translation for Coca-Cola, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia.
Aigerim Shorman is VP of Product Management for Meta's Horizon product, where she leads the platform connecting billions of people across virtual worlds. Born in Kazakhstan, she bootstrapped her way from community college to USC, taught with Teach For America, worked at UBS, and co-founded Triptrotting - a travel startup that raised $1.8M and grew to 150+ countries - before joining Meta where she built the avatar system used by 3+ billion people. One of the most senior women in Meta's metaverse organization, she's also an angel investor backing early-stage consumer and social startups.