After 32 years at JPL, Leon Alkalai took his mission-building habits into a venture studio. Now the founder of Sophia Space is working on a different kind of payload: computers that process data in orbit and shed their heat into space.

He learned to notice which tiny delays mattered inside a processor. At The Helper Bees, the Austin engineer applies the same instinct to a messier system: getting everyday support through an insurance claim and into a person’s home.

The AI boom bought more GPUs. Eriko Nurvitadhi is working on the less glamorous problem: keeping those expensive machines fed, connected and busy.

Jon Stokes is a 25-year veteran of online media who co-founded Ars Technica in 1998 with Ken Fisher, helping build it into the internet's premier tech publication before selling it to Condé Nast for $25 million. An engineer turned journalist turned product builder, he holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from LSU alongside two master's degrees from Harvard Divinity School in early Christian history - a combination that explains his unusual range: equally comfortable dissecting CPU microarchitecture, AI policy, Second Amendment law, and New Testament scholarship. Today he's co-founder and CPO of Symbolic AI, runs a Substack newsletter on AI and crypto with 13,000+ subscribers, and serves as a fellow at Open Source Defense.