Chris Hannah is a UK-based senior software engineer at WorldFirst (Ant Group) who moonlights as an indie app maker. He builds Text Case, a text-transformation utility for iOS, iPadOS and macOS that has grown from 7 to 50-plus formats, plus Text Shot and a Text Case command-line tool. He writes across three blogs and a monthly long-form newsletter about indie tech, productivity, and the craft of working in bursts.
Alex Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist, the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. With Tyler Cowen he co-writes the influential blog Marginal Revolution and co-founded Marginal Revolution University, one of the largest free online libraries of economics education. His work spans patent reform, the economics of innovation, high-skilled immigration, bounty hunters, and voting theory, and he became a prominent public voice during the COVID-19 pandemic advising the US government on incentives to accelerate vaccine production.
Arnold Kling is an American economist, author, and blogger who turned a career spanning the Federal Reserve, Freddie Mac, and a sold-at-the-peak internet startup into one of the most charitable, contrarian voices in online economics. He writes the popular Substack 'In My Tribe,' is best known for 'The Three Languages of Politics,' and built a following by taking the most charitable view of those who disagree with him.
John H. Cochrane is an American economist, the Rose-Marie and Jack Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and author of the field-defining textbook Asset Pricing. A physicist-turned-finance scholar, he champions the fiscal theory of the price level, writes the popular free-market blog and Substack The Grumpy Economist, co-stars on Hoover's GoodFellows broadcast, and flies competition sailplanes in his spare time.
Megan McArdle is a Washington Post opinion columnist who writes at the seam where economics, business and public policy meet. She was blogging as 'Jane Galt' from a desk near Ground Zero before most journalists knew what a blog was, parlaying an English-lit degree and a Chicago MBA into a career that ran through The Economist, The Atlantic, Newsweek/Daily Beast and Bloomberg View. A self-described right-leaning libertarian known for steelmanning the other side, she wrote 'The Up Side of Down,' a book arguing that failing well is the real engine of success. In 2025 she added a contributing-writer role at The Dispatch and turned to podcasting with 'Central Air' and 'Reasonably Optimistic.'
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
Ev Williams is the Nebraska farm boy who accidentally invented blogging, co-founded Twitter, built Medium, and is now trying to make social media actually social again with Mozi. A serial founder who has shaped how the world communicates - and who openly regrets some of what that meant - he remains one of tech's most quietly consequential figures, running Obvious Ventures, a B Corp impact fund with $585M in assets, while incubating his next idea from San Francisco.
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.
Tim Denning is an Australian writer, blogger, and online educator who went from a $32K/year bank call center job to 1 billion+ views across platforms and $6M+ earned through writing. He runs the 'Modern Freedom' Substack newsletter (151,000+ subscribers), teaches writing at Bad-Assery Academy, and publishes 10 articles per week on Medium, LinkedIn, and his personal site - all built on a philosophy of radical vulnerability, strategic imperfection, and the pursuit of time freedom over net worth.
Tomasz Tunguz is the Founder and General Partner of Theory Ventures, a $680M early-stage fund focused on AI, data infrastructure, and Web3. A former Redpoint Ventures partner with 14+ years backing unicorns including Looker ($2.6B to Google) and Kustomer ($1B to Meta), Tunguz is one of Silicon Valley's most widely-read VC voices - his daily blog tomtunguz.com reaches 150,000+ founders and operators with data-driven analysis of SaaS metrics, AI trends, and startup strategy.
Michael Tsai is an indie Mac developer and the one-person operation behind C-Command Software, creator of SpamSieve - the gold-standard Bayesian spam filter for macOS that has been filtering email since 2002. He also runs one of the most respected daily link blogs in the Apple developer community, curating Mac and iOS developer news with original commentary since 2002. His roundups of community reaction to Apple events are so authoritative that Daring Fireball's John Gruber regularly links to them as the definitive overview.
Seth Godin is a marketing legend, author of 29+ bestselling books, and the internet's most consistent blogger - writing every single day since 2006 for over a million daily readers. The man who coined 'permission marketing', sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo! for $29.6 million, and changed how the world thinks about standing out (purple cow, tribes, linchpins), Godin is now focused on helping people 'make a ruckus' through his Akimbo learning platform, daily blog at seths.blog, and the climate action project The Carbon Almanac.
Simon Willison is a British software engineer, open source creator, and AI commentator best known for co-creating the Django web framework and building Datasette, the open-source data exploration tool. He coined the term 'prompt injection' in 2022 and popularized 'AI slop' in 2024 - a word later named Merriam-Webster's 2025 Word of the Year. Through his prolific blog (active since 2002), newsletter with 54,000+ subscribers, and 100+ open source tools, he is one of the most influential independent voices at the intersection of LLMs and open source software.
Ben Carlson is a CFA charterholder, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and one of the most widely-read finance writers in the United States. Through his blog A Wealth of Common Sense, co-hosted podcast Animal Spirits, and six books, Carlson has built a reputation for translating Wall Street complexity into plain-English wisdom that ordinary investors can actually use - advocating for simplicity, patience, and behavioral discipline over market-timing and stock-picking.
Freddie deBoer is an American author, cultural critic, and PhD-wielding contrarian who has spent 17 years making everyone on the internet uncomfortable - including people who agree with him. A self-described Marxist who despises most of the left, his Substack newsletter 'cool but rude' has over 67,000 subscribers hungry for unvarnished takes on education, identity politics, media dysfunction, and mental illness. Author of three books - The Cult of Smart (2020), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), and debut novel The Mind Reels (2025) - deBoer writes with the conviction of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Leandra Medine Cohen is the New York-based fashion writer, cultural commentator, and founder of Man Repeller - the blog that coined a phrase and built a media empire around the radical idea that women dress for themselves. After shutting down Man Repeller in 2020, she re-emerged with The Cereal Aisle, a Substack newsletter now boasting 166,000+ subscribers and a top-5 ranking in Fashion & Beauty. Part sharp wit, part earnest diarist, she writes about getting dressed, motherhood, and everything in between with a voice that is unmistakably her own.
Mark Manson is a three-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, blogger, and podcaster whose books have sold approximately 20 million copies worldwide across 65+ languages. Known for his brutally honest, profanity-laced take on self-help, his breakout book 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' spent over 279 weeks on the NYT bestseller list and was adapted into a documentary by Universal Pictures in 2023. He runs a popular weekly newsletter, an AI-powered coaching app called Purpose, and the podcast 'SOLVED with Mark Manson.'
Michael Lynch is a bootstrapped solo founder who quit Google after seven years to build software and hardware businesses entirely on his own terms. He grew TinyPilot - a KVM-over-IP device built from a $100 Raspberry Pi kit - into a $1M/year business and sold it in 2024 for ~$600K. He writes with radical transparency about money, failure, and the craft of independent software development at mtlynch.io, and is now writing 'Refactoring English', a book on writing for software engineers.
Xe Iaso is a technical educator, open source founder, conference speaker, Twitch streamer, and VTuber based in Ottawa, Canada. The CEO of Techaro and creator of Anubis - the open-source anti-AI-scraper tool now protecting GNOME, FFmpeg, Linux kernel archives, and UNESCO - Xe built a cult following of 400+ blog posts that mix deep systems engineering with irreverent philosophy. Known for pioneering developer relations teams at Tailscale and Fly.io, and for coining their own title 'Archmage of Infrastructure,' Xe is the rare technologist who turned shitposting into a career strategy and made it work.