content-moderation
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Mike Pappas Is Teaching AI to Hear the Argument Between the Words
The Modulate co-founder started with physics, voice changing and a gloriously awkward whiteboard encounter. Now his company listens for the meaning that vanishes when conversation becomes a transcript.
The Lawyer Who Built a 10,000-Person Company Inside a Virtual Bar
Amy Pritchard traded courtrooms for comment sections and built ModSquad - a 10,000-Mod, 90-country moderation network - without raising a cent. She has been running a fully remote company since 2007, a decade before the rest of us learned the word.
Dennis Fong Keeps Building the Missing Layer Around Games
The first professional gamer won a Ferrari, then spent three decades fixing everything around the game - chat, community, highlights and now trust. At GGWP, Dennis "Thresh" Fong is turning competitive instinct into infrastructure for safer online spaces.
Noam Schwartz
Noam Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Alice (formerly ActiveFence), the trust and safety company that quietly built the moderation and adversarial-intelligence pipes behind platforms serving three billion people and seven of the ten largest AI foundation models. He founded the company in 2018 after encountering child sexual abuse material while mapping the internet at his previous startup, and has led it through Series A/B rounds totaling $100M, two acquisitions (Spectrum Labs, Rewire), and a 2026 rebrand to Alice that repositions the company from social-platform moderation to securing generative AI.
Birago Jones
Birago Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Pienso, a no-code AI platform that lets subject-matter experts train, fine-tune and deploy their own machine learning models without writing code. Born out of research he and Karthik Dinakar did at the MIT Media Lab on cyberbullying detection, Pienso is built on a simple conviction: the people who understand the data best, not just the engineers, should build the models. His customers now include the US government and Sky, the UK's largest broadcaster, which used Pienso to process half a million customer calls a day.
Tom Siegel
Tom Siegel is the co-founder and CEO of TrustLab, a San Mateo company building independent technology to detect and measure harmful online content. He spent roughly 15 years at Google, where he founded and scaled the company's first Trust & Safety team into the industry's leading abuse-fighting organization, protecting billions of users. In 2020 he left to build the external referee he felt the internet was missing - a third party that measures disinformation, hate speech, and AI-generated harm without a platform's conflict of interest. TrustLab was chosen by the European Commission to run the first independent measurement of disinformation under its Code of Practice.
Eric Zhang
Eric Zhang is the Chief Executive Officer of Thoth AI, a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company with R&D operations in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Thoth AI powers frontier AI models for some of the world's leading AI labs by providing high-quality training data, RLHF workflows, model evaluation, and multilingual customer experience services across 170+ countries in 200+ languages. Zhang operates at the intersection of AI safety, responsible deployment, and global scale - building the human infrastructure that makes AI smarter, safer, and culturally aware.
Kevin Guo
Kevin Guo is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hive, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company that built what may be the world's largest human-labeled training dataset - over 1 billion labeled items - and deployed those models as cloud APIs used by Reddit, BeReal, and more than 15 of the top social platforms for content moderation. A Stanford triple-degree graduate (biology BA, mathematical/computational sciences BS, computer science MS), Guo co-founded Kiwi - a social Q&A app that grew to 100 million users - before pivoting that team into Hive in 2017. Hive reached unicorn status with a $2 billion valuation after its $85 million Series D in April 2021, and Guo has become one of the most prominent voices on AI-generated content detection and the fight against deepfakes.
Casey Newton & Zoe Schiffer
Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer are two of the most influential tech journalists working today. Newton founded Platformer, a newsletter covering social networks at the intersection of tech and democracy, co-hosts the Hard Fork podcast with the NYT, and broke landmark investigations into Facebook's content moderation crisis. Schiffer co-ran Platformer as managing editor, authored 'Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter' (Penguin Random House, 2024), and now serves as Director of Business & Industry at WIRED. Together they shaped some of the most consequential tech journalism of the 2020s.