Cody Ko is a Canadian-American comedian, podcaster, and former software engineer who turned a viral iOS captioning app and a Vine following into one of the most influential creator-led comedy operations of the late 2010s. With Noel Miller he built Tiny Meat Gang, a comedy hip-hop act, podcast, and studio that scaled to hundreds of millions of downloads before he stepped away from TMG Studios in 2024.
Kurtis Conner is a Canadian comedian, YouTuber, and podcaster with over 5.6 million YouTube subscribers and 1.16 billion views. Known for deadpan social commentary, he parlayed a Vine following into a full-time comedy career, releasing multiple stand-up albums, hosting the Very Really Good podcast since 2017, and headlining his Goodfellow World Tour across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe in 2024.
Luke Davidson is a Canadian comedy content creator from Dauphin, Manitoba who turned TikTok sketches into a multi-platform empire. Known for his relatable family-dynamics humor and the signature move of pulling a shirt over his head to play multiple characters, he amassed 15+ million TikTok followers and 17+ million YouTube subscribers before turning 23 - earning YouTube's Diamond Creator Award in 2022. His observational comedy about awkward school moments and everyday family chaos resonates with teenagers and young adults worldwide.
Dana Oshiro is General Partner at Heavybit, San Francisco's specialist fund for developer-first and cloud infrastructure startups. She joined in 2014 as the firm's original Operating Partner and has since helped launch 60+ developer products, led early positioning for companies like Snyk, LaunchDarkly, Netlify, CircleCI, and PagerDuty, and co-founded the DevGuild conference series. Before tech, she worked in public health and political strategy in Canada, including campaigns to establish North America's first safe injection site. Her investment sweet spot is $1.5M at pre-seed to Series A, backing technical founders building category-defining enterprise infrastructure.
Ian Small is the CEO of Blues, a Boston-based IoT connectivity company backed by $115M in funding including a $25M Sequoia-led round in 2025. A 30-year Silicon Valley veteran who started at Apple in 1989 working on QuickTime VR, Small went on to lead TokBox (Sequoia-backed video communications platform acquired by Telefonica), serve as Global Chief Data Officer at Telefonica overseeing 300M+ customers, and then spent five years as CEO of Evernote transforming the company through a massive technical overhaul before it was acquired by Bending Spoons in 2023. Known as an 'end-to-end operator' with a famous habit of deep customer listening, he joined Blues in June 2025 to lead the company's next phase of growth in making IoT connectivity accessible and affordable for product makers everywhere.
Angela Strange is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads investments in fintech infrastructure, insurance, and AI applications in financial services. A mechanical engineer by training and elite marathon runner by heart, she coined the widely-cited thesis 'Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company' - arguing that new financial infrastructure will enable any company to embed financial services the way AWS democratized software. She joined a16z in 2014 after stints at Google (where she launched Chrome for Android and iOS) and travel startup Ruba.com (acquired by Google). She has board seats at companies including Moov, Sardine, Jeeves, Valon, and hyperexponential, and is co-chair of C100, which connects Canadian entrepreneurs with Silicon Valley.
Eric Migicovsky is a Canadian hardware entrepreneur who invented the Pebble smartwatch in 2012, raising $10.26M on Kickstarter in the most-funded campaign of its time. After Pebble's $40M sale to Fitbit in 2016, he served as a Y Combinator partner, then co-founded Beeper — a universal messaging app that sparked a major Apple antitrust investigation before selling to Automattic for $125M in 2024. Now back to his roots, he's reviving the Pebble brand under Core Devices with fully open-source hardware and software.
Andrew Wilkinson is a Canadian entrepreneur, investor, and author who built Tiny - a publicly traded holding company (TSX: TINY) often called 'the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet' - from a one-man design agency he started with $200 at age 20. Having dropped out of university after less than a year, he transformed a $6.50/hour barista gig into a billion-dollar empire of 32+ internet businesses including Dribbble, AeroPress, Letterboxd, and Serato. His 2024 memoir 'Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire' became a USA Today bestseller and candidly explores why wealth didn't bring happiness, his ADHD diagnosis, and his commitment to giving away most of his fortune through the Giving Pledge.
Joseph Lubin is the co-founder of Ethereum and founder/CEO of ConsenSys, the most influential Ethereum software company in the world. A Princeton-trained engineer who spent years at Goldman Sachs before pivoting through a Jamaican music production detour to become one of crypto's most consequential builders, Lubin methodically constructed the plumbing of the Web3 internet — MetaMask, Infura, Truffle — while most people were still debating whether blockchain was real. As of 2026, he chairs SharpLink Gaming's mission to build the world's largest publicly-traded ETH treasury, and warns loudly about centralized AI's threat to democratic society.
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded Flickr (2004) and Slack (2013) — two landmark products that emerged as accidental pivots from failed multiplayer games. A self-taught coder with a Cambridge philosophy degree, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo for ~$25 million in 2005 and Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. His 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' memo became a canonical document in Silicon Valley product thinking. Since departing Slack in January 2023, he has been active as an angel investor with 32+ portfolio companies.
Steph Smith is a Canadian writer, podcaster, and growth operator who went from chemical engineering to becoming one of tech's most respected content voices. She grew The Hustle's Trends newsletter to 15,000+ paying subscribers (contributing to an 8-figure acquisition), hosted the flagship a16z Podcast at Andreessen Horowitz, sold $250K+ worth of her book 'Doing Content Right', and launched Internet Pipes - a community of 2,700+ people learning to extract business insights from internet data. She's currently at NVIDIA after transitioning from Groq following Nvidia's $20B deal.
Wes Bush is the founder and CEO of ProductLed, the world's leading education company for product-led growth (PLG). Author of two foundational PLG books - 'Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself' (2019) and 'The Product-Led Playbook' (2024) - Bush has helped 400+ SaaS companies collectively generate over $1 billion in self-serve revenue. After being fired from Vidyard for advocating product-led strategies over sales-led ones, he turned that conviction into a global movement, building a 15,000+ member community and coaching SaaS founders to scale from $100K ARR to 8+ figures.
Sophia Stel is a 27-year-old Vancouver-based Canadian alt-pop artist, singer, and self-producer whose music blends dreamy synths, auto-tuned alto vocals, skittering breakbeats, and rave-adjacent textures into something critics call the 'sonic lovechild of Ethel Cain and 070 Shake.' Growing up on Vancouver Island in a large religious household with 10 siblings, she taught herself production on GarageBand before building a makeshift studio in a nightclub basement. After years of bartending to fund her art, she broke through with her 2024 debut EP Object Permanence, scored a viral TikTok moment with 'I'll Take It' (8.6M+ Spotify streams), walked the Ann Demeulemeester SS26 runway, graced the NME cover, and in early 2026 became only the second artist signed to A24 Music - all while recording mostly from home on a 2013 MacBook.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor who transformed R&B from the shadows of a Scarborough upbringing into a global phenomenon. With 75+ million records sold, a billion-dollar touring empire, and the most-streamed song in Spotify history, he is redefining what a career exit looks like — retiring the Weeknd persona after his 2025 album and film 'Hurry Up Tomorrow', the closing chapter of a dark pop trilogy, to begin again as Abel Tesfaye.
Josh W Comeau is a Montreal-based frontend developer, indie course creator, and one of the most beloved CSS and React educators on the internet. After stints at Unsplash, Shopify, Khan Academy, and Gatsby, he left corporate engineering in 2020 to build interactive, deeply original courses that generated over $550,000 in presale revenue. His CSS for JavaScript Developers and The Joy of React courses have taught more than 28,000 developers through a teaching style that blends interactive widgets, mini-games, and the rare gift of building genuine mental models rather than just showing code.