Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a global entrepreneurial community that has reached more than a million people across 120+ countries, and the co-founder and CEO of Bevy, the enterprise community-events software that grew out of it. A former Electronic Arts game producer, he left in 2009 to build his own products, failed repeatedly, and turned a once-a-month meetup in his garage into a worldwide network and a company serving customers like Google, Salesforce, and Snowflake. He now also hosts Divot, a weekly podcast of long-form conversations with founders, creators, athletes, and visionaries.
Tony Alika Owens is the Chief Executive Officer of Amperity, the AI-powered lakehouse customer data platform, a role he took in November 2024. A veteran enterprise software operator with more than 20 years of experience, he spent a decade at Salesforce running field operations in the Americas as the company grew from $1.4 billion to well over $20 billion in revenue, held a group vice president role at Oracle, and served as president of worldwide field operations at LivePerson. He also sits on several boards and is known for a relentless focus on customer value.
Melbourne O'Banion is the co-founder and CEO of Bestow, a Dallas-based digital life insurance platform that shrunk a four-to-six-week underwriting process into a five-minute checkout. After stints founding Presidio Title and co-founding luxury skincare brand Beauty Bioscience with his wife, he teamed up with Jonathan Abelmann in 2017 to build the first fully digital life insurance carrier, later pivoting into SaaS infrastructure for incumbent carriers. Bestow closed a $120M Series D led by Goldman Sachs and Smith Point Capital in May 2025.
David Brown is the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of ACTIVZ, a West Jordan, Utah direct-selling company he launched in 2017 with longtime partner Ryan Thompson. A self-described 'recovering lawyer' with a J.D. from Cornell and a Japanese degree from BYU, Brown traded corporate law for the nutrition business in 1994 and went on to lead some of the industry's best-known turnarounds - tripling Natural Balance, building Metabolife into the world's largest retail diet brand, and taking LifeVantage from roughly $3 million to more than $200 million. With ACTIVZ he built a multinational from day one, launching in Mexico before the United States and reaching markets across Latin America and Japan.

Ethan Choi is a Partner at Khosla Ventures leading the firm's Growth Fund, where he writes checks between $15M and $70M into cloud infrastructure, SaaS, enterprise, and consumer internet companies from Seed through Series C. Before joining Khosla in 2024, he was a Partner at Accel, where he backed Klaviyo (now NYSE: KVYO), 1Password, and Pismo (acquired by Visa). His investing philosophy pivoted from metrics-first to founder-first — he now spends 90% of his diligence energy on the people rather than the numbers. A former LDS missionary who spent two years in South Korea, Choi is an unusually direct voice on AI's disruption of white-collar work and the coming robotics inflection point.

Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.