Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Paul Davison is the co-founder and CEO of Clubhouse, the live audio social platform that hit a $4 billion valuation within a year of launch during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer turned serial entrepreneur, Davison previously co-founded Highlight (acquired by Pinterest in 2016) and served briefly as CEO of CoinList. His career has centered on one obsession: giving people better ways to find each other and talk. Clubhouse - which he built with co-founder Rohan Seth - brought the intimacy of voice to the scale of a social network, attracting tens of millions of users and sparking a live-audio wave across the industry.
Zack Hudson is the co-founder of Golden Fandom LLC and one of the organizers behind Golden-Con: Thank You For Being a Fan, the world's first fan convention dedicated entirely to The Golden Girls. A Chicago-based social services professional and self-described hardcore fan, Hudson transformed a pandemic-era bar trivia idea into a sold-out multi-day convention at Navy Pier in 2022 that drew over 3,100 attendees from around the globe. The event grew from a single social media announcement that, in his words, 'just kind of escalated from there.'
Jeremy Schneider is General Partner at Webb Investment Network (WIN), the San Francisco-based single-family investment office founded by Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay. Since joining WIN in 2011, Schneider has helped build a portfolio of 121 companies including unicorns Ironclad, IPOs like Okta, PagerDuty, and AppLovin, and 48 acquisitions. A Dartmouth and Oxford-trained historian turned venture capitalist, Schneider is known for betting on founders over ideas, building WIN's affiliate network of 90+ seasoned operators, and offering hands-on support that one founder described as worthy of a statue.
Leandra Elberger is the Head of Platform at Forum Ventures, New York's leading pre-seed fund and accelerator for B2B SaaS startups. With a career winding through global health, Wall Street, entrepreneurship education, and venture capital, she has built expertise in founder support and community infrastructure. A Tufts grad with an MBA with distinction from Cornell Johnson, she previously served as Studio Director at Cornell Tech and Head of Platform at Atento Capital, and has authored thought pieces on healthcare market opportunities and fintech infrastructure for founders. Her guiding philosophy: a career is a choice that indicates your values.
Laurel Woerner is a venture capital platform strategist, consultant, and founder-success leader who has spent a decade building the connective tissue between investors and founders. After co-creating the community function at Work-Bench Ventures and defining the brand voice at AI scheduling startup x.ai, she became Platform Manager and then Director of Platform at RRE Ventures, where she transformed 25 years of firm relationships into a living, self-organizing network. Through her consultancy LTW Consulting, she has advised firms including Union Square Ventures, Bessemer, and Frontline Ventures on platform excellence. Today she serves in founder-success and platform roles at both Quiet Capital and Infinity Constellation, the self-described first AI holding company, with a mission she keeps simple: get founders from zero to one to one hundred.
Greg Isenberg is the CEO and co-founder of Late Checkout, an 8-figure bootstrapped holding company that builds community-first internet businesses. Known as 'The Community Guy' in startup circles, he has two startup exits under his belt (5by to StumbleUpon, Islands to WeWork), hosts The Startup Ideas Podcast (top 0.1% tech podcast), writes a Substack newsletter with 150K+ subscribers, and has built a 500K+ following on X by giving away startup ideas for free. His ACP Framework (Audience-Community-Product) has become a widely adopted playbook for modern founders.
Karthik Puvvada - universally known as KP - is the Head of Community at Netlify and the de facto face of the Build In Public movement. After waiting 12 years to found his own company due to visa constraints, he built and scaled programs that have helped 500+ founders across 68 countries. He hosts the Build In Public Podcast (top 10% globally), has championed 150+ Product Hunt launches, and evangelizes radical founder transparency as both a philosophy and a growth strategy.
Mark W. Schaefer is a globally recognized marketing strategist, bestselling author of 12 books, keynote speaker, and Rutgers University professor who has spent 30+ years pioneering human-centered marketing. Known for writing the world's first book on influencer marketing and six #1 Amazon marketing bestsellers, he champions the idea that 'the most human company wins' — a philosophy that has taken on new urgency in the AI era. His latest book, Audacious (2025), features the world's first AI-activated augmented reality book cover.
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.
Erik Torenberg is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he joined in April 2025 after a16z acquired his media network Turpentine. A serial founder and investor, he was a first employee at Product Hunt, co-founded Village Global (a $100M VC fund backed by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg), founded On Deck (a fellowship network for founders), and built Turpentine into a leading tech media network before its acquisition. Known for his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity spanning technology, culture, politics, and philosophy, he now leads a16z's media and ecosystem efforts including the New Media Fellowship and the live news venture MTS.