Dickie Bush is the co-founder of Ship 30 for 30, the cohort-based course that has taught more than 10,000 people to write short 'atomic essays' online. A former Princeton football center and BlackRock portfolio analyst from Tampa, he started writing online in January 2020, pivoted from a stalling newsletter to Twitter, and built an audience of 400,000+ followers. With business partner Nicolas Cole he turned a daily writing habit into a seven-figure education business, the writing software Typeshare, and the Premium Ghostwriting Academy.
Tom Callahan is the CEO of Nasdaq Private Market (NPM), the New York firm building the plumbing for trading shares in companies that have not gone public. A 30-year markets veteran who ran a $700 billion cash business at BlackRock and led NYSE Liffe U.S., he took NPM's helm in 2022 and frames the private market as a multi-trillion-dollar asset class 'hiding in plain sight' - one whose infrastructure, he says, resembles the bond market of 1970. He argues tender offers will soon outpace IPOs as the way late-stage companies deliver liquidity.
Bo Lu is the Co-Chief Executive Officer of Clipboard Health, a billion-dollar healthcare staffing marketplace connecting nurses, CNAs, and other healthcare professionals with facilities that need them. Before Clipboard Health, he co-founded FutureAdvisor, a Y Combinator-backed digital wealth management platform that Sequoia Capital invested in and BlackRock acquired for an estimated $150-200 million in 2015. He served as Managing Director at BlackRock before joining Clipboard Health, where he focuses on marketplace design, operational excellence, and building a culture of curiosity and speed. He was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer at Davos in 2015.
Fabian Gerlinghaus is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cellares, a South San Francisco biotech company building the world's first Integrated Development and Manufacturing Organization (IDMO) for cell therapy. An aerospace engineer turned life-science entrepreneur, he co-founded Cellares in 2019 after spotting a critical gap: FDA-approved CAR-T therapies were sitting ready while patients died on waitlists because manufacturing couldn't scale. His Cell Shuttle platform — a fully automated, factory-in-a-box system processing 16 patient batches simultaneously — has attracted $630M in funding, a $380M partnership with Bristol Myers Squibb, and FDA's Advanced Manufacturing Technology designation. TIME magazine named it one of 2025's most important inventions.
Arjun Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Distyl AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $1.8 billion after raising $175M in a September 2025 Series B led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures. Drawing on nearly a decade at Palantir Technologies where he built and led a 30+ person team of Forward Deployed strategists and engineers, Prakash co-founded Distyl to help Fortune 500 companies become genuinely AI-native - not by layering AI onto existing processes, but by rearchitecting how enterprises operate. Distyl claims a 100% production success rate against an industry norm of 95% failure, serves clients across healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, and financial services, and reached profitability in Q3 2024.
Jon Xu is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most influential startup accelerator, having joined full-time in May 2025 after serving as a Visiting Group Partner for the S24 batch. A YC alum himself, he co-founded FutureAdvisor (YC S10) - one of the first robo-advisors - which was acquired by BlackRock in 2015 for an estimated $150-200M. With an MIT Computer Science degree and stints at Microsoft, Canvas Ventures, and as an angel investor, Xu brings rare dual-sided credibility: he has both built a company through YC and now helps shape the next generation of founders from the partner seat.