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Adam Berlew Keeps Coming Back to the Machines
He wrote his first programs as a teenager, then spent 25 years explaining machines to the people who buy them. Now he markets the buildings where the AI boom actually lives.
David Stout
David Stout is the co-founder and CEO of webAI, an Austin-based company building private, on-device artificial intelligence that runs on hardware people already own instead of centralized cloud data centers. Raised on a cattle ranch in northern Michigan, he taught himself to compress large AI models onto phones, laptops and edge hardware, and founded webAI in 2019 with Ethan Baird and Tyler Mauer. The company reached a $2.5 billion valuation in January 2026 on the thesis that the most valuable AI of the future will be sovereign, distributed and local rather than rented from Silicon Valley hyperscalers.
Drew Ladner
Drew Ladner is the founding Chairman and CEO of Pascal Metrics, a Washington, D.C. and Austin-based patient safety company that uses real-time EHR data, clinically validated adverse-event outcomes, and machine learning to catch preventable harm in hospitals before it compounds. Since 2007 he has built Pascal into a U.S.-certified Patient Safety Organization serving hundreds of healthcare systems worldwide, with clients identifying roughly 10x more serious harm than legacy methods. Before healthcare, he was CIO of the U.S. Treasury's $2.6 billion IT organization, a general manager at open-source pioneer JBoss, and an operator across Netscape, AOL Time Warner, and microfinance in East Africa. He holds an MBA from Harvard, an MA in theology from Oxford, and a BSFS from Georgetown.