Bradford Oberwager is the Executive Chairman of Linden Lab and CEO of Tilia, the fintech arm powering Second Life's virtual economy. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold companies in personalized vitamins, healthy snacks (Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo), and labor technology (Jyve, acquired by Advantage Solutions), Oberwager led the 2020 acquisition of Linden Lab alongside investor Randy Waterfield. Since then he has staked $35 million on securing money transmitter licenses in all U.S. states to enable real-money payouts from Second Life's Linden dollar economy, grown monthly active users to 600,000, and championed a mobile-forward future for the world's original metaverse.
Satoshi Sugie is the Co-founder and CEO of WHILL, a San Mateo-based personal mobility company that has reimagined the electric wheelchair as a design-forward consumer product. Drawing on his automotive design background at Nissan, Sugie co-founded WHILL in 2012 with a mission to redefine how people perceive and use mobility devices. Under his leadership, WHILL has grown to 350 employees, expanded to 30+ countries, raised over $153 million in funding, and deployed nearly one million autonomous rides at airports worldwide including Tokyo's Haneda, Rome Fiumicino, and Narita. Named to Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2017 and recognized by TIME Magazine's 50 Best Inventions, Sugie's approach treats mobility not as a medical necessity but as an aspirational lifestyle product.
Riley Reese is the CEO and co-founder of ARRIS Composites, a Berkeley-based advanced manufacturing company that invented Additive Molding - a patented process combining 3D printing and compression molding to produce continuous carbon-fiber composite parts at commercial scale. A materials scientist who once built biodegradable heart tissue scaffolds at UC Berkeley, Reese pivoted that same obsession with fiber architecture into a $157M-funded company whose technology now shows up in Brooks running shoes, Skydio drones, and bicycle spokes. He previously co-founded AREVO, worked at medical device giant Stryker, and led additive manufacturing programs in Amsterdam at TNO - before returning to Berkeley to tackle what he calls 'a new manufacturing category.'
Ali Abouelatta is an Egyptian-born product manager turned newsletter writer and founder who built First 1000 - a deep-dive Substack publication dissecting how famous startups acquired their first 1,000 customers - from zero to 90,000+ subscribers in under three years with no prior audience. After a stint at Duolingo where he generated an estimated $50-100M in incremental revenue through monetization experiments, he left in 2025 to build Lazyweb.com, an AI-powered design inspiration library, documenting his own journey to 1,000 paying customers in real time through the very newsletter that made him known.
Josh Elman is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped grow Twitter nearly 10x, launched Facebook Connect, and backed foundational consumer products like Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock Partners. Currently Director of Product Management at Apple focused on App Store discovery, he is best known for his 'only metric that matters' framework - the idea that great products are defined by a core action users perform at a predictable frequency, not vanity metrics.