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Jeremy Powell Built a Career Making Design Software Get Out of the Way
He joined Vectorworks when product marketing was a department of one. Two decades later, his clearest idea remains disarmingly practical: designers should spend less time negotiating with software and more time designing.
Revanth Bodepudi Wants to Give Hardware a Faster Clock
After years spent studying how materials bend, bond and break, the mechanical engineer is taking on a larger source of friction: the long, fragmented journey from CAD file to finished part.
Maor Farid
Maor Farid is the co-founder and CEO of Leo AI, the first AI copilot purpose-built for mechanical engineers. A former Captain in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence corps and the youngest-ever PhD graduate from the Technion at age 24, he went on to do postdoctoral research at MIT as a Fulbright fellow, studying how to predict catastrophic failures in complex physical systems. He founded Leo AI in 2023 to build what he calls 'the most boring, unsexy AI' - a tool trained on more than a million vetted engineering sources that handles documentation, part searches and calculations so engineers can focus on design. Leo AI raised $9.7M and is used by teams at Toyota, HP, Mobileye, Philips and Scania.
Andrew Anagnost
Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.