Bill Gurley is one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists - a 6'9" Texan who played college basketball, led the analyst team on Amazon's IPO, and then bet Benchmark's money on a then-tiny black-car startup called Uber. As a General Partner at Benchmark from 1999, he built a track record that includes Uber, GrubHub, OpenTable, Zillow, Stitch Fix, and Nextdoor. He writes the 'Above the Crowd' blog, has appeared consistently on the Forbes Midas List, and in 2026 published 'Runnin' Down a Dream,' a career guide ten years in the making. After stepping back from active investing, he relocated to Austin, Texas - where his wife Amy always wanted to end up.
Mark Suster is a Managing Partner at Upfront Ventures, the largest early-stage VC firm in Southern California, and the author of the influential blog Both Sides of the Table. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold two companies before switching to investing, Suster brings a rare founder's perspective to venture capital. Known for coining 'fauxmentum,' championing the LA tech ecosystem, and advocating openly about ADHD, he manages hundreds of millions in capital while hosting the Upfront Summit — one of America's premier LP and VC conferences.
Hunter Walk is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a self-funded seed-stage venture capital firm he built with Satya Patel after careers at Linden Lab (Second Life), Google, and YouTube. He also runs Screendoor LP, backing underrepresented emerging venture managers. His 'Bottom Up Economy' thesis targets scrappy teams of 5-50 taking on category incumbents - and his portfolio hits like Chime, Plaid, and Gusto prove the thesis works. A prolific blogger, former TV assistant, and forever a product person at heart.
Dominik Dorfmeister, known online as TkDodo, is an Austrian software engineer, core maintainer of TanStack Query (formerly React Query), and one of the most influential voices in the React ecosystem. Based in Vienna, he works as a Frontend Engineer at Sentry while helping shape how millions of developers approach server state management. His blog at tkdodo.eu - built on the philosophy that 'if I get a question three times, I write the answer down' - has become essential reading for React developers worldwide. With over 3.5 years maintaining TanStack Query (which now appears in nearly 20% of all React applications), conference talks from Berlin to Paris, and a co-created official course at query.gg, Dominik bridges the gap between library internals and everyday developer experience.
Matt Webb is a London-based designer, technologist, and product inventor who has spent 25+ years at the intersection of technology and ideas. Co-founder and former CEO of BERG (whose Little Printer became an IoT icon acquired by MoMA NY), former MD of R/GA's IoT accelerator, and author of the pop-neuroscience classic Mind Hacks, Webb now runs Acts Not Facts and co-founds Inanimate, making playful AI hardware like Poem/1 - a clock that writes a new rhyming poem every minute - while writing his blog Interconnected for over 25 years without stopping.