Sharath Kuruganty is a serial entrepreneur, community builder, and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Holder of an O-1/EB-1A 'Alien of Extraordinary Ability' visa, he has founded and exited two SaaS startups, is the #1 hunter on Product Hunt with 140+ launches, hosts 'The Undefeated Underdogs' podcast, and is currently building GuestLab.ai - an AI-powered research assistant for podcast hosts. Known for his 'build in public' philosophy, he grew from 200 to 22,000+ Twitter followers and advocates that no-code tools are a superpower for aspiring founders.
Sruthi Sivanandan is an Associate at Forum Ventures, the leading pre-seed fund and accelerator for B2B SaaS startups, where she anchors the firm's West Coast community in San Francisco. With a background spanning BlackRock, IBM, and Feedzai, she bridges the worlds of finance, tech, and venture—co-hosting Coffee Club meetups for early-stage founders and funders, contributing research to Forum's investment thesis, and earning a spot on NYC Fintech Women's 2025 Inspiring FinTech Females list as a Network Builder (a title she reportedly finds amusing).
Kat Manalac spent over 11 years at Y Combinator, where she built the Female Founders Conference, ran Startup School, and opened YC's doors to founders worldwide who had never heard of Paul Graham. She left YC in 2024 to join Convective Capital as Partner, where she now builds communities and tells stories at the intersection of technology and wildfire/disaster resilience.
Abadesi Osunsade is a British entrepreneur, author, podcast co-host, and inclusion advocate who founded Hustle Crew in 2016 to advance underrepresented talent in tech. A third-culture kid born in Washington D.C. to a Nigerian father and Filipina mother, she studied Economics & Government at LSE before scaling teams at Groupon, Amazon, and HotelTonight. She co-created Elpha (YC S19), co-hosts the Top 20 Apple Podcasts tech show Techish, scouts for Ada Ventures, and currently serves as Ecosystem Lead at Geovation. Recognised by Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (2019) and the Financial Times' Top 100 Influential Leaders in Tech (2018), she is one of the UK tech ecosystem's most visible champions of equitable hiring and inclusive culture.
Corey Haines is a software developer, community catalyst, and author who quit a dead-end job in 2008 with $2,400 in his pocket, hit the road for 9 months pairing with programmers across the US for room and board, and accidentally invented the Coderetreat movement along the way. He co-created Coderetreat (now run in 100+ countries annually), wrote 'Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design' based on observing thousands of programming pairs, co-founded Hearken (an audience-engagement platform serving 60+ global newsrooms), and has spent two decades championing software fundamentals over hype — all while claiming his only real goal in life is to be happy.
Matt Gray is a Canadian-born serial entrepreneur and founder of Founder OS, a company teaching founders to build personal brands and scalable businesses through organic content and repeatable systems. He previously co-founded Bitmaker (Canada's first major coding bootcamp, acquired in an 8-figure deal) and Herb (world's largest cannabis community, 14M users, $14M revenue). Today he runs a $13M+/year portfolio working ~4 hours a day, has 2.5M+ followers across platforms, and is known as 'The Systems Guy' in the creator economy.
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.
Stephanie Chandler is an American author, entrepreneur, and community builder who traded a Silicon Valley software career for a bookstore, stumbled into publishing, and ended up founding the Nonfiction Authors Association — a membership community helping writers publish, market, and monetize nonfiction books. Author of ten books and founder of Authority Publishing, she runs the annual Nonfiction Writers Conference (since 2010) and advocates openly for suicide loss survivors.
Courtland Allen is the co-founder of Indie Hackers, a community and media platform where entrepreneurs share transparent revenue numbers and business strategies. He built the site in 2016, sold it to Stripe in 2017 — Stripe's first notable acquisition — and bought it back in 2023 on its exact 6th acquisition anniversary. A MIT CS grad who failed six startups before hitting on his seventh, Allen has become one of the internet's most trusted voices on bootstrapping and sustainable entrepreneurship.
Dave Gerhardt is the founder and CEO of Exit Five, the #1 paid community for B2B marketers, with 5,700+ members and $3M+ in annual revenue. A former CMO who rose from PR intern to the CMO chair at Drift and Privy, he turned a decade of B2B marketing experience into a bootstrapped media company built on LinkedIn influence, a 50k+ subscriber newsletter, and a podcast with 348+ episodes. He is the author of Founder Brand (2022) and co-author of Conversational Marketing (2019), and lives in Burlington, Vermont.
Max Altschuler is a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author who built Sales Hacker from a 4-person meetup into a 170,000-subscriber media company, sold it to Outreach, re-bought it back, and then accidentally founded GTMfund - a $76M operator-led VC firm. He wrote three books (including the Wiley bestseller 'Hacking Sales'), invested early in Outreach and Gong, and is now one of the most influential voices in go-to-market strategy and B2B sales.
Nick Eubanks is a serial entrepreneur, digital marketing executive, and distribution-first strategist who has built and sold multiple businesses, scaled agencies to 100+ clients serving the UFC and Nestle, co-founded Traffic Think Tank (acquired by Semrush for $1.8M), and now serves as Global CMO at Digistore24 while operating two investment vehicles. His core thesis - that distribution is the last competitive advantage that survives AI - is reshaping how founders and marketers think about sustainable growth.
Sangram Vajre is the co-founder and CEO of GTM Partners, the only analyst firm exclusively focused on go-to-market strategy for B2B SaaS companies. Before that, he co-founded Terminus (2014), the platform that defined the account-based marketing software category, and served as CMO at Pardot through its $2.5B acquisition by Salesforce. A WSJ and USA Today bestselling author of three books, host of the 900-episode FlipMyFunnel podcast, and curator of the GTMonday newsletter with 175,000+ subscribers, Vajre is one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. An immigrant from Nagpur, India who arrived in the U.S. with $350, he became an American citizen in late 2024 after 22 years in the country.
Scott Leese is a 6x sales leader, 5x founder, 3x author, and one of the most authentic voices in B2B sales. He scaled six consecutive early-stage startups from near-zero to $25M+ ARR, survived nine surgeries and beat opioid addiction, and turned those experiences into a consulting empire, a Costa Rica surf-and-sales retreat, and three bestselling books. Based in Austin, Texas, he now runs Scott Leese Consulting, Surf and Sales, GTM United, Thursday Night Sales, and Milos Ventures - a new venture fund investing in AI, robotics, and cleantech.
nikhil trivedi is the Director of Web Engineering at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has spent nearly two decades building open-source museum technology while simultaneously championing anti-oppression frameworks in cultural institutions. His tagline - 'Museums. Technology. Social Justice.' - is not a brand, it is a practice: he co-created Visitors of Color, contributed to the MASS Action Toolkit, received a UN Women Gender Equality Award, and built a public data API that connects AIC's collection to historical records of the transatlantic slave trade. A Desi Chicagoan, sitar player, and former high school band member, he codes in PHP by day and runs his own Mastodon instance by night.
Pankaj Jain is the Founder and Managing Partner of Saka Ventures, a seed-stage VC fund based in New York City focused on Indian fintech, SaaS, and data-analytics startups targeting large global markets. A pioneer in India's startup ecosystem, he was a Partner at 500 Startups for four years, made early bets on unicorns like Innovaccer (533x) and ShipRocket (240x), co-founded HeadStart Network Foundation, and helped bring Startup Weekend to India before most Silicon Valley investors even knew the subcontinent's startup scene existed.
Nik Milanović is the founder of This Week in Fintech (TWIF), the 200,000+ subscriber global fintech newsletter and community he built from a zero-subscriber internal team email in 2019 and sold to Plaid in March 2026. He is also General Partner of The Fintech Fund, a $10M pre-seed/seed fintech fund backed by 120 operators and founders, and founder of Stablecon, which became the world's leading stablecoin conference within its first year. A Stanford philosophy graduate with deep roots in financial inclusion research, Nik has organized fintech community events in 84 cities across 6 continents and connected tens of thousands of fintech professionals worldwide.
Vin Clancy (born Vincent Dignan) is a British growth hacker, entrepreneur, author, and speaker who went from collecting welfare in Southwest London to building a global brand as one of the world's most recognizable growth marketing experts. He co-founded Planet Ivy (25,000 views in two weeks, $250k seed funding), pivoted to Magnific (accepted into TechStars London), won Best Speech at SXSW V2V, ran a 100-date world speaking tour, co-authored the bestselling growth hacking book 'Secret Sauce' (nearly $250,000 in sales), and built the Traffic & Copy Facebook community to 21,000+ members. He now operates under the GIGA Venture brand and consults with SaaS companies and startups on reducing customer acquisition costs.
Ross Haleliuk is a Ukrainian-born, San Francisco-based cybersecurity entrepreneur, author, angel investor, and operator who built one of the industry's most influential newsletters, 'Venture in Security,' with 21,000+ subscribers. He authored the Amazon bestseller 'Cyber for Builders,' co-founded the world's first angel syndicate exclusively for security practitioners, and currently leads a stealth-mode cybersecurity startup as co-founder and CEO. With a background spanning history studies in Ukraine, product leadership in Canada, and a deep pivot into cybersecurity, he has become a leading voice on building, funding, and growing security companies.
Shawn 'swyx' Wang is a Singapore-born AI engineer, founder, and community builder who pivoted from a $350k/year quantitative finance career to become one of the most influential voices in AI engineering and developer tools. He coined the term 'AI Engineer', co-founded the AI Engineer Summit (now the world's largest technical AI conference for engineers), co-hosts the Latent Space podcast reaching 10M+ readers/listeners, and is the author of the seminal 'Learn in Public' essay that has shaped how millions of developers think about career growth. He is the founder of Smol.ai and a prolific creator with 626+ published essays, talks, and tutorials.
Brussels-based startup PR powerhouse and Ukraine's tech ambassador. Inna is a solo adventurer and community builder who founded the UTEW Tech Tribe (3,300+ members). She specializes in bridging ecosystems, government relations, and helping startups navigate European markets with a focus on Web3 and ROI-driven strategy.