David Siteman Garland (DSG) is a St. Louis-based entrepreneur, author, and online course pioneer who turned a Bar Mitzvah savings account into a multi-million dollar media and education empire. Founder of The Rise To The Top — self-branded as 'The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper' — he has generated $10M+ in online course sales, built an email list of 85,000+ subscribers, and taught 5,000+ students in 100+ countries through his flagship program Create Awesome Online Courses. A Wiley-published author, Inc. 500 honoree (#938, 2017), and co-founder of software companies Course Cats and Nrdly, DSG is also the founder of STL Maccabi Basketball and grandson of cancer research philanthropist Alvin J. Siteman.
Brian Feroldi is a financial educator, author, and investor on a mission to demystify the stock market for everyday people. Formerly a medical device sales rep at Insulet Corporation, he pivoted to writing for The Motley Fool in 2015 and has since authored 3,000+ articles, published the book 'Why Does The Stock Market Go Up?', grown a 655,000+ Twitter following, and built Long-Term Mindset - a financial education company with a 100,000+ subscriber newsletter. His superpower: turning balance sheets into plain English and making Wall Street concepts accessible to anyone.
Kieran Drew is a British writer and online entrepreneur who quit dentistry in 2021 to build a 7-figure business teaching people how to write and grow online. Known for radical financial transparency, his flagship course High Impact Writing and newsletter Digital Freedom, he grew from 0 to $1.5M+ in gross revenue by 2026 while building an audience of 250,000+ on Twitter/X. A survivor of near-fatal spinal surgery and a neurological tumor at 16, Drew turned adversity into creative fuel, building a business rooted in personal freedom, authentic storytelling, and helping others escape their own 'profitable prisons'.
Matt Ragland is a creator-economy builder, founder of HeyCreator, and host of The HeyCreator Show podcast. He went from camp counselor to ConvertKit employee #5, to full-time creator, building a 100,000+ audience across YouTube, newsletters, and social media. Through HeyCreator and Good People Digital, he helps creators turn their expertise into sustainable businesses via courses, communities, and newsletters. Known for radical transparency, outdoor adventures, and a systems-first approach to creative work.
Shreya Shankar is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's EPIC Lab building AI-powered data systems that are reliable and cost-efficient. A Stanford-trained engineer who worked at Google Brain and Meta, she bridges academic research and industry practice through DocETL (an open-source LLM data processing system with 3.5K+ GitHub stars used by 30+ S&P 500 companies), an O'Reilly book on AI evals co-authored with Hamel Husain, and a Maven course that has reached 4,500+ professionals. She is on the CS faculty job market and gave a faculty candidate talk at Carnegie Mellon in March 2026.