Eddie Shleyner is a conversion copywriter and the founder of VeryGoodCopy, a newsletter of short 'micro-lessons' on writing, persuasion, and creativity read by millions of people a year. A former Copy Chief at the software-review company G2, he turned a private Google Doc of notes-to-self into one of the most-followed copywriting brands on the internet, a HackerNoon 'Email Newsletter of the Year,' and a 2024 book collecting 207 of his lessons. He works and lives in Chicago.
BrightEdge is an enterprise SEO and content performance platform that turns the chaos of search into a measurable system of record. Founded in 2007 by Jim Yu and Lemuel Park, it built one of the largest proprietary data sets in marketing - billions of pages and keywords - and pairs it with an AI engine (DataMind) to power products like Data Cube, ContentIQ, Autopilot and AI Catalyst. Used by thousands of brands including a majority of the Fortune 100, BrightEdge has pivoted hard into measuring and optimizing for AI-driven search experiences like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Sarah Teltus is VP of Marketing - Content at Google, one of the world's most influential technology companies. Based in San Francisco, California, she operates at the intersection of content strategy and large-scale digital marketing within Google's vast ecosystem. In her role, she oversees content marketing initiatives across Google's portfolio, spanning cloud services, advertising platforms, AI products, and consumer applications. Her position places her at the center of how Google communicates its rapidly evolving suite of AI and cloud products to businesses, developers, and consumers worldwide.
Jim Yu is the founder and CEO of BrightEdge, the enterprise SEO and content performance platform he started at his kitchen table in 2007 after a stint leading product at Salesforce. Two decades in, his thesis hasn't changed - he's just renamed the battlefield. Search became AI search; rankings became citations; BrightEdge stayed the scoreboard.
Jasper is an enterprise AI marketing platform that gives marketing teams a purpose-built workspace with 100+ specialized AI agents, proprietary Brand IQ and Marketing IQ technology layers, and content pipelines designed to produce on-brand content at scale. Founded in 2021 by Dave Rogenmoser, Chris Hull, and JP Morgan, Jasper grew from a simple GPT-3 frontend into a unicorn valued at $1.7 billion, serving over 100,000 customers including nearly 20% of the Fortune 500.
Anibal Morris is a co-founder at Jasper, the AI-powered content platform that became one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history - reaching $1.5 billion valuation in under 18 months. Based in Okatie, South Carolina, Morris is part of the founding team behind one of generative AI's landmark enterprise products, serving marketing teams at companies worldwide with purpose-built AI agents, brand-voice tools, and content automation at scale.
Baker Anthony is a Founder at Jasper, the AI-powered marketing platform that has become one of the most significant generative AI companies for enterprise content creation. Based in Show Low, Arizona, Anthony has been part of building one of the first AI unicorns in the content marketing space - a company that reached $88M in annual revenue and serves nearly 20% of the Fortune 500 with its AI-driven content generation tools.
Chris Hull is Co-Founder of Jasper, the enterprise AI platform for marketing teams that went from zero to $90M ARR in under three years. A serial entrepreneur from Austin, Texas, Hull co-built three companies with the same two partners - Dave Rogenmoser and JP Morgan - cycling through a digital marketing agency, a Y Combinator-backed social proof tool called Proof, and finally Jasper, which became one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies of the AI era, raising $130M and hitting unicorn status in roughly 18 months.
Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.
Cube is an AI-powered marketing automation platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that deploys autonomous AI agents to manage paid ads, SEO, social media, email marketing, and online reputation management from a single dashboard. Founded by IIT and Stanford alumni, the company trains its AI on historical ad-spend data to deliver real-time campaign optimization across Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and more - promising businesses a full marketing team's output without the headcount.
Samantha Lewis is the Head of Marketing at Right Side Capital Management (RSCM), a data-driven pre-seed venture firm in San Francisco that has backed 2,000+ startups since 2012. With 16+ years of content marketing and editorial experience spanning companies like Segment, PagerDuty, ebrary, and Springer Science+Business Media, she brings a rare blend of startup operator savvy and publishing depth to the VC world. Having participated in 30+ startups with 2 IPOs, Lewis shapes how RSCM tells the story of early-stage tech investing to founders, limited partners, and the broader startup ecosystem.
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and co-founder of Exploding Topics, two companies he built and sold to Semrush. He invented the Skyscraper Technique, one of SEO's most widely replicated link-building frameworks, and turned a nutrition PhD dropout's basement hustle into a $4M+ exit running a 7-person contractor team. Now based in Berlin, he's a sought-after voice on building media businesses that don't depend on algorithmic luck.
Kyle Lacy is a seasoned B2B SaaS CMO, author, and podcaster based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Best known for scaling Lessonly's marketing team from 8 to 70+ people and delivering 20x revenue growth before its $170M+ acquisition by Seismic, Kyle has held CMO and VP marketing roles at companies including Jellyfish, Seismic, and OpenView Venture Partners. He's authored three books on social media marketing published in 5 languages, hosts the Revenue Diaries podcast, and currently serves as CMO at Docebo, the AI-powered learning management platform.
Joe Pulizzi is the originator of the term 'content marketing' and the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which he built from a cocktail-napkin idea to a $17.6 million exit. Known universally as 'The Godfather of Content Marketing,' he has written nine books, spoken in 20+ countries, and now publishes the Orangeletter newsletter to 50,000+ subscribers while advising creators to own their audiences before AI makes discovery obsolete.
Jay Baer is a 7th-generation entrepreneur, Hall of Fame keynote speaker, and the author of seven business books including the New York Times bestseller Youtility. Founder of Convince & Convert - once home to the world's #1 content marketing blog - he has advised 700+ brands including Nike, Oracle, IBM, and Salesforce. After selling his marketing empire during COVID, he pivoted to become the world's #2 tequila influencer (non-celebrity division), a certified tequila sommelier, and a co-founder of The Tequila Report. He currently keynotes 50-70 times a year in 12+ countries on customer experience, speed, and human connection in the AI era.
Sujan Patel is a serial entrepreneur, growth marketer, and SaaS operator best known as co-founder of Mailshake (a sales engagement platform used by 38,000+ professionals) and managing partner of Ramp Ventures, a B2B SaaS acquisition firm. A college dropout who earned $200K/year through SEO expertise, he has co-founded and scaled multiple companies, co-authored '100 Days of Growth' (50,000+ copies sold), contributed 200+ articles to Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur, and built a portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS businesses acquired through Ramp Ventures.
Neil Patel is a British-American digital marketing entrepreneur who turned a failed teen job board into a global marketing empire. Co-founder of NP Digital (a $100M+ agency), Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and acquirer of Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic, he drives 10M+ monthly visitors to neilpatel.com, has been recognized by Obama, the UN, Forbes, and the WSJ, and prefers flying Southwest economy class despite owning four Beverly Hills homes.
Stephanie Chandler is an American author, entrepreneur, and community builder who traded a Silicon Valley software career for a bookstore, stumbled into publishing, and ended up founding the Nonfiction Authors Association — a membership community helping writers publish, market, and monetize nonfiction books. Author of ten books and founder of Authority Publishing, she runs the annual Nonfiction Writers Conference (since 2010) and advocates openly for suicide loss survivors.
Harry Morton is the founder and CEO of Lower Street, a globally recognised branded podcast agency headquartered in the UK. Since founding Lower Street in 2016, he has grown the company into an award-winning, fully remote team of 30+ creatives producing nearly 10,000 episodes across 140+ podcasts for clients like Fidelity, Pepsi, Adobe, BCG, and Stanford Seed. In 2024 he acquired Pacific Content, one of the most storied names in branded podcasting, cementing Lower Street's position at the top of the industry. He is also the founder of the Brand Podcast Summit and the Singletrack mountain biking retreat for bootstrapped founders.
Dave Gerhardt is the founder and CEO of Exit Five, the #1 paid community for B2B marketers, with 5,700+ members and $3M+ in annual revenue. A former CMO who rose from PR intern to the CMO chair at Drift and Privy, he turned a decade of B2B marketing experience into a bootstrapped media company built on LinkedIn influence, a 50k+ subscriber newsletter, and a podcast with 348+ episodes. He is the author of Founder Brand (2022) and co-author of Conversational Marketing (2019), and lives in Burlington, Vermont.
Krystal Wu is a Boston-based community and marketing program manager known for building engaged B2B communities at HubSpot, Shopify, and Common Room. She spent nearly five years at HubSpot growing their social media community before moving into senior roles at Shopify and ZoomInfo. At Common Room, she built an events engine from scratch that generated $1M+ in pipeline in a single quarter, earning her a reputation as one of the more results-oriented voices in the community-led growth space.
Ross Hudgens is the founder and CEO of Siege Media, a content-led SEO agency he built from a one-person freelance operation in 2012 into a 100-person, Inc. 5000 honoree (six consecutive years) backed by private equity at an eight-figure valuation. A Chapman University marketing graduate, he cut his teeth as the first employee at Single Grain before going solo after Google's Penguin update reshaped the industry. Today he advises brands like Zapier, Casper, and Airbnb on organic growth, co-created the GrowthComet agency training course, angel-invested in SparkToro, and in 2026 published 'Generative Engine Optimization: The Definitive Guide to AI SEO' with Wiley — cementing his position at the forefront of AI-era search strategy.
Ezra Firestone is a self-taught ecommerce entrepreneur who dropped out of high school, played poker in NYC underground clubs, and went on to build and sell multiple 7-, 8-, and 9-figure brands - most notably BOOM by Cindy Joseph, which crossed $200 million in cumulative revenue. He runs Smart Marketer (his education platform), Zipify Apps (serving 18,000+ Shopify brands with $600M+ in facilitated upsell revenue), and has acquired and turned around brands like oVertone Haircare. His philosophy - 'Serve the World Unselfishly and Profit' - is backed by results, and his operating principles around content-first marketing, brand mission, and sustainable growth have influenced an entire generation of ecommerce operators.
Gaetano DiNardi is a B2B SaaS growth marketing consultant, former music producer, and one of the most distinctive voices in modern SEO. After spending years producing tracks for Fat Joe and Shaggy in NYC studios, he stumbled into SEO through a blog post about getting ghosted by Atlantic Records - and never looked back. He has scaled companies from Nextiva ($70M to $200M+ revenue) to Aura (0 to 1 million monthly visitors in 12 months), and now runs Marketing Advice, a boutique consultancy serving 50+ SaaS clients including Semrush, Gong, and Demandbase.
Jay Acunzo is a business storytelling advisor, author, and keynote speaker who helps experts, entrepreneurs, and executives develop stronger ideas, more resonant stories, and more influential voices. A former Google and HubSpot strategist turned independent creator, he champions intuition over best practices and deep resonance over broad reach. He's the author of 'Break the Wheel,' host of the 'How Stories Happen' podcast, and has spoken in 25 states and 3 countries to audiences from 40 CEOs to 4,000 marketers.
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.
Ross Simmonds is a Halifax-based content marketing strategist, agency founder, and author whose core thesis - create once, distribute forever - has reshaped how B2B brands think about content ROI. As CEO of Foundation Marketing (a ~$3.8M revenue agency serving Canva, Snowflake, and Bitly) and founder of Distribution.ai, he operates at the intersection of data-driven creativity and systematic amplification. Ranked #3 globally by BuzzSumo among content marketers, he has generated over $110M in new business for clients and built a following of 75,000+ newsletter subscribers.
Tom Orbach is an Israeli growth marketer, newsletter creator, and viral-campaign architect best known for building the LinkedIn Viral Post Generator (1.7M users, acquired in one week), leading Wiz's brand from obscurity to a $32B Google acquisition, and publishing the Marketing Ideas newsletter to 85,000+ subscribers. He operates at the intersection of behavioral economics, humor, and B2B marketing - turning 'boring' industries into viral moments.