
The ServiceTrade CMO began in computer science, crossed into product marketing and built a leadership style around evidence, empathy and a willingness to hand over the LEGO tower.

Before co-founding Ringmaster Technologies, Maria Roberti moved through reinsurance, property and healthcare marketing. Her unusual pairing of computer science and business psychology became a practical way to translate complicated systems into companies people can understand.

Before AI became a boardroom reflex, Ahmed Hashim was measuring clicks, building Facebook apps and playing drums in Karachi. Sixteen years into Cygnis, his career reads like a study in rhythm: listen closely, find the signal and build for the next beat.

A teenage classified-ad experiment became a career spent making enormous datasets usable. After Spotfire and Recorded Future, Ahlberg's enduring trick is simple to describe and hard to copy: turn noise into a decision before the moment passes.

He began by translating the unruly dialects of antivirus software. Twenty-four years later, Benny Czarny is still asking an unfashionable question: why let a suspicious file in at all?

The Elevāt co-founder spent years listening to machines and the people who repair them. Now, with a $12 million Series A and Europe in view, he is turning industrial data into something a technician can actually use.

A father-son coding lesson exposed a stubborn flaw in computing: after decades of progress, people still had to think like machines. Gill built Kognitos around the reverse proposition - make the machine learn our language.
Yu-Sung Chang is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Vivity AI, an industrial AI company building software for heavy industries like petrochemicals, shipbuilding and manufacturing. A computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, he spent years at Wolfram Research working on Mathematica's graphics and geometry systems before moving into e-commerce technology leadership as CTO of Korea's SSG.COM and co-founding the healthcare AI startup Huma.AI. In 2022 he founded Vivity AI, which raised roughly $8.4M in a round backed by Hanwha Systems, to close the gap between the physical and digital worlds on the factory floor.
Kris Beevers is the co-founder and CEO of NetBox Labs, the commercial steward of the open-source NetBox platform that has become a default system of record for network and infrastructure teams. An engineer with a Ph.D. in computer science from RPI, he previously co-founded and led NS1, the DNS and application-delivery company acquired by IBM in 2023. NetBox Labs raised a $35M Series B in July 2025, bringing total funding to $55M, and serves tens of thousands of organizations including hyperscalers, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies as AI drives surging demand for infrastructure.
Timothy Cocaro is the founder and CEO of Canibuild, an AI-powered instant site feasibility platform that lets builders and homeowners check in seconds whether a house, granny flat, pool or shed can go on a block of land - collapsing weeks of surveying, drafting and estimating into a single click. A builder by trade with a computer science degree from the University of Sydney, Cocaro spent two decades running RESCON Builders, Australia's largest dedicated granny-flat company, before turning his own construction frustrations into software in 2019. Canibuild raised an AUD 8 million Series A led by EVP in 2022, grew to thousands of daily users across Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and was named #1 in Real Estate at the Google Maps Platform Awards 2025.
Northeastern University is a private research university founded in 1898 in Boston, best known for pioneering large-scale cooperative education (co-op), where students alternate semesters of classroom study with paid, full-time professional work. Under president Joseph E. Aoun, it has grown into a 13-campus global system spanning the U.S., Canada and the U.K., enrolling roughly 38,000 students and earning R1 doctoral research status. Its model fuses experiential learning, industry partnership and applied research in fields from AI to network science.
Anin Sayana is the co-founder and CEO of Quadrant Health, a Y Combinator-backed startup building clinical AI that reads electronic health records and patient messages in real time to flag patient harm before it happens. A Stanford computer science graduate, he first made headlines at 13 as a finalist in the 3M Young Scientist Challenge for a carbon-nanotube system aimed at chemo-resistant cancer stem cells. Today his company partners with health systems like Stanford Health Care and software vendors like medent, and claims an AI that scored 93.23% on the US Medical Licensing Exam.
Baptiste Bouvier is the founder and CEO of Daptic (formerly DiploAI), a New York-based AI startup building regulatory intelligence infrastructure for global manufacturers. The platform monitors more than 10,000 regulatory sources worldwide, flags changes within 24 hours, and helps engineering, product, and compliance teams act on obligations early. Raised between Tokyo, Sydney, London, and Boston by entrepreneur parents, Baptiste studied computer science and political science at MIT and public policy at Oxford, taught negotiation, founded MIT's first entrepreneurship club, and worked at McKinsey before turning regulatory bottlenecks into a company.
Miriam Haart is the founder and CEO of ActionAI, a Reliable AI company building auditable, accountable infrastructure for mission-critical enterprise workflows. A Stanford computer science graduate who became the department's youngest lecturer at 19, she built her first iOS app at 13 after YouTubing 'how to make an app.' Known to millions from the Netflix series My Unorthodox Life, she has shipped more than ten apps, given a TED talk on independent thinking, and in April 2026 raised a $10 million seed round to fix AI's trust problem.
Sam Scherl is a Founder's Associate in the CEO Office at Nevis, a New York-based AI platform automating administrative work for wealth advisors that has raised $40M from backers including Sequoia. A Harvard computer science graduate, he was a three-time national champion and undefeated First-Team All-American captain of the Harvard men's squash team, then worked in venture capital at Insight Partners before joining Nevis to work alongside its founders on its most strategic bets.
JB Bakst is the founder and CEO of Chief, an AI email agent he pitches as 'the first inbox with good judgment.' A Stanford computer science grad and Manhattan native now based in Los Angeles, he cut his teeth as an early engineer at Airtable - where he obsessed over fun, delightful productivity UX - after starting out building iOS and full-stack at the six-person video-messaging startup Chime. His thesis for Chief: your email is a 12-year record of how you actually make decisions, so software should play those decisions forward rather than dump everything in a feed.
Brilliant.org is an interactive STEM learning platform that teaches math, science, data, and computer science through hands-on problems instead of passive video. Founded in 2012 by Sue Khim, the San Francisco-based company has grown to roughly 10 million learners and operates on a freemium subscription model with 90+ guided courses.
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.
Cal Newport is a Georgetown University computer science professor and bestselling author who has shaped how a generation of knowledge workers thinks about attention. He coined the modern usage of 'deep work,' argued for 'digital minimalism,' and most recently introduced 'slow productivity.' He has never opened a social media account.
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.
Forest Baskett is a Special Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) in Menlo Park, California, where he has been investing in technology companies since 1999. A systems-level computer scientist by training, he co-designed the original Sun workstation with Andy Bechtolsheim, designed the operating system for the Cray-1 supercomputer, founded DEC's Western Research Laboratory, and served as CTO of Silicon Graphics during the formative years of 3D graphics. He earned a BA in Mathematics from Rice University and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, later becoming a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1994. At NEA, he has guided dozens of technology investments to successful IPOs and acquisitions, backing companies across semiconductors, storage, cloud security, robotics, and AI.

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.

Carol Bartz is a trailblazing Silicon Valley executive who became the first woman to run a major technology company when she took the helm of Autodesk in 1992, growing revenue from $285M to $1.5B over 14 years. She later served as CEO of Yahoo from 2009 to 2011, famously emailing all 14,000 employees the night she was fired by phone, telling them she'd been let go. Known for her blunt candor, 'Fail Fast Forward' philosophy, and resilience - she delayed breast cancer surgery by a month to keep a professional commitment - Bartz transformed from a dairy farm girl in Wisconsin to one of the most powerful women in American business.

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.

Konstantine Buhler is a Partner at Sequoia Capital focused on seed and Series A investments in AI, enterprise software, and fintech. An AI engineer turned investor, he brings technical depth from his Stanford CS graduate work and a unique investment philosophy shaped by his grandparents' immigrant journeys. He's a leading voice on the emerging 'agent economy' - a trillion-dollar vision where autonomous AI agents don't just process information but transfer resources, make transactions, and operate their own economic systems. His portfolio includes CaptivateIQ, EDX, Ethos Life, Kumo, and XBOW, with investments guided by the principle of 'virtuous data cycles' where businesses become more valuable as they accumulate customers and data.