Alexander Leishman is the Founder, CEO, and CTO of River, a Bitcoin-only financial institution built to provide brokerage, custody, and mining services to individuals and institutions. With a background spanning aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, computer science at Stanford, and security engineering at Airbnb, Leishman co-founded River in 2019 after stints at MaiCoin, Deloitte, and Polychain Capital. River has raised over $17.7 million in venture funding and became the first Bitcoin-only exchange to publicly release its financial statements in April 2025. Leishman also serves on the board of Brink, a Bitcoin research and development nonprofit.
Sue Khim is the CEO and co-founder of Brilliant.org, an interactive STEM learning platform serving over 10 million users in 150+ countries. Born in South Korea and raised in Chicago, she studied mathematics at the University of Chicago before leaving to found Alltuition, a student financial aid startup, in 2009. That team pivoted in 2012 to build Brilliant, which has since raised over $90 million in venture funding and become one of the most widely used platforms for self-paced math and science education. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education and recognized by Apple as an AAPI leader in tech, Khim is focused on replacing rote memorization with genuine conceptual understanding at global scale.
Lex Fridman is a Russian-American computer scientist, AI researcher at MIT, and host of the Lex Fridman Podcast — one of the most-watched long-form interview shows in the world. With a PhD from Drexel University and research spanning autonomous vehicles, deep learning, and human-robot interaction, he interviews everyone from Elon Musk to world leaders to Nobel laureates. A black belt in both jiu-jitsu and judo, he blends intellectual curiosity with martial discipline, and has built a YouTube channel with over 4.8 million subscribers and hundreds of millions of views.
Anandan Chinnalagu is a PhD computer scientist and serial technology entrepreneur leading MindPro Technologies, an AI-focused software development firm headquartered in Karur, Tamil Nadu, India, with personal base in Sunnyvale, California. With over two decades of building enterprise software companies - from founding AC INFOTECH INC in 2003 to steering MindPro's 110-person team - he specializes in machine learning, natural language processing, and Google Cloud AI integrations. His academic research in sentiment analysis has been published in PeerJ Computer Science and IJACSA, while his products span educational platforms, IoT consulting, and notification automation under the CanString brand.
Thanh Tran is Co-CEO of A5 Labs, a Foster City-based AI company building game integrity infrastructure for competitive online gaming. With a PhD in Computer Science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a background scaling Upwork's data science team through its IPO, he now leads a 180-person team applying deep reinforcement learning, blockchain reputation systems, and real-time behavioral analytics to eliminate bots, collusion, and cheating from online poker and beyond.
Dan Preston is the co-founder and CEO of Stand Insurance, a San Francisco-based insurtech company using physics-driven AI and digital property twins to insure climate-impacted homes in wildfire and hurricane zones. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, Preston previously led Metromile as CEO from 2014 to 2022, guiding it through a SPAC IPO on NASDAQ and eventual acquisition by Lemonade. At Stand, he has raised $65 million across two rounds and grown the company to over $1 billion in insured value within its first year, with expansion into Florida's catastrophe market. His vision: insurance as an active driver of community resilience, not just a financial safety net.
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.
Bill Coughran is a Partner and Founder's Coach at Sequoia Capital who spent two decades at Bell Labs - where C, Unix, and C++ were born - before scaling Google's engineering organization from a few hundred to over 10,000 people across four continents. A mathematician by training (Caltech BS/MS, Stanford PhD in Computer Science), he oversaw Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search at Google before joining Sequoia in 2011. He is one of Silicon Valley's most seasoned operator-turned-investors, known for his belief in small teams, deep technical rigor, and the kind of coaching that only someone who has actually built the thing can offer.
Ilya Sutskever is a co-creator of AlexNet, the 2012 deep learning breakthrough that launched the modern AI era, and a co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI. After a dramatic board vote to remove Sam Altman in November 2023, he departed OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) — a $32B company with roughly 50 employees and a single stated mission: build artificial general superintelligence that is provably safe, with no commercial products until that goal is achieved.
Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading the firm's infrastructure practice. A Spanish-born computer scientist and entrepreneur, he pioneered software-defined networking (SDN) by inventing the OpenFlow protocol during his Stanford PhD. He co-founded Nicira Networks, which VMware acquired for $1.26 billion in 2012, where he then scaled the networking and security business to $600 million in annual revenue. An ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award winner, Casado now invests in cutting-edge infrastructure and AI companies, serving on boards of over a dozen startups while shaping the future of enterprise technology and AI regulation policy.
Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
Russ Cox is a Distinguished Engineer at Google and the longtime technical lead of the Go programming language, the open-source language he helped shape for over a decade. Known for foundational work on RE2 (a safe, linear-time regex engine), Plan 9 from User Space, and Go's module system, he bridges deep computer science theory with production-grade engineering. After stepping down as Go tech lead in September 2024, he shifted focus to AI-powered open source tooling - building Gaby and Oscar, agent systems designed to help maintainers with the unglamorous but essential work of keeping software alive.