crowdsourcing
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Stephen Bailey Built a Marketing Career Around Shoes That Refuse to Blend In
For more than two decades at John Fluevog Shoes, Stephen Bailey has treated marketing less like a megaphone and more like a meeting place - one where customers sketch shoes, staff build trust, and weirdness is useful business discipline.
Joss Leufrancois
Joss Leufrancois is the co-founder and CEO of Visage, an AI-and-human recruitment platform that crowdsources qualified, ready-to-interview candidates for large employers. A French-born entrepreneur who learned recruiting across London, Dubai, and the US, he previously co-founded and ran the recruitment agency Aldelia before selling it, then launched Visage in Dubai in 2015-2016. Today he runs the fully remote company from a ranch near Austin, Texas, blending a global sourcer network with data science to build candidate pipelines in 24-48 hours for clients that have included Tesla, Adecco, GoDaddy, and Virgin.
Michael Mandel
Michael Mandel is the co-founder and CEO of CompStak, a New York-based commercial real estate data platform that crowdsources lease and sale comparables from brokers, appraisers, and researchers, then sells verified analytics to landlords, lenders, and investors. A former Grubb & Ellis broker who got tired of chaotic Monday-morning comp-swaps, he launched CompStak in 2012 with Vadim Belobrovka and has since raised roughly $89M and built a national platform used across every major U.S. market.
Andrew Mao
Andrew Mao is the co-founder and CEO of Parsnip, an AI-powered learning app often called 'Duolingo for cooking' that helps novices build real confidence in the kitchen. A Harvard computer-science PhD and former computational social scientist, he ran the longest iterated prisoner's dilemma experiment ever conducted, built ML systems at neural-interface startup CTRL-labs (acquired by Facebook), and now applies the science of how people learn to the very human problem of figuring out what's for dinner.
Vinesh Jha
Vinesh Jha is the founder and CEO of ExtractAlpha, an independent alternative-data research firm that turns messy datasets into tradable signals for hedge funds and institutional investors. A pure-mathematician-turned-quant, he cut his teeth ranking Wall Street analysts at StarMine, built systematic strategies at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and PDT Partners, then went out on his own in 2013. After ExtractAlpha merged with the crowdsourced-estimates platform Estimize in 2021, he runs both, leading a team spread across Hong Kong, the US, Europe, and Canada with a near-religious insistence on rigorous, point-in-time testing over a good story.
Melissa Kim
Melissa Kim is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minted, the San Francisco-based design marketplace that connects consumers with independent artists for premium stationery, art, and home decor. Hired in 2007 as Director of Finance and Strategy straight out of Stanford Business School, she was later named co-founder by Mariam Naficy in recognition of her foundational role in building the company. Under her leadership as CEO, Minted surpassed $300 million in revenue in 2026, with double-digit year-over-year growth, a wholesale business that grew 31% in 2025, and profitability that doubled - all fueled by a sharp premium-market focus and an owned-channel marketing strategy built on the virality of physical design.
Mark Godley
Mark Godley is the CEO of LeadGenius, a Berkeley-based B2B data intelligence platform that combines AI with human computation to deliver precision contact data for enterprise go-to-market teams. A self-described C-suite startup junkie with 30 years of SaaS expertise, Godley joined LeadGenius in 2017 — first as President, then stepping into the CEO role — and has driven the company's pivot from a service-heavy model to a scalable SaaS platform serving 400+ enterprise customers across 42 countries including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Autodesk. Under his leadership, LeadGenius has distinguished itself as the first crowdsourcing company to set a minimum wage tied to the cost of living in each country of operation, building a global decentralized workforce of data researchers while remaining GDPR and CCPA compliant.
Prayag Narula
Prayag Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marvin (HeyMarvin), an AI-native customer insights platform that centralizes, analyzes, and shares qualitative research data for product and UX teams. A researcher-turned-entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator W2011), which raised over $30 million and grew to hundreds of employees before he stepped down to return to his roots in user-centric design. With a graduate research background spanning UC Berkeley's School of Information and Helsinki's Ubiquitous Interaction Group, Narula built Marvin alongside his brother Chirag Narula in 2020 — this time with AI baked in from the ground up. The platform now serves 4,000+ teams and 13,000+ users, including 10 Fortune 100 companies.