Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Vadim Ogievetsky is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database powering data infrastructure at Netflix, Salesforce, Reddit, and 150+ enterprises. One of the original four co-authors of Apache Druid (launched 2011), he also co-created D3.js at Stanford's Visualization Group - the JavaScript charting library that became the foundation of modern data visualization on the web. Before Imply, he was UI Lead at Metamarkets (acquired by Snap). He built Plywood and Pivot, open-source tools for querying and exploring Druid data, and created KoalasToTheMax, a beloved interactive D3 visualization. Imply raised $215M total and reached unicorn status with a $100M Series D in May 2022.
Swizec Teller is a Slovenian-American software engineer, bestselling author, and educator based in San Francisco who has spent 20+ years turning hard-won startup experience into actionable career wisdom. Best known for his Senior Mindset newsletter and books like 'Scaling Fast' and 'Senior Engineer Mindset,' he teaches engineers how to stop writing code and start building leverage. Currently building web UX for gene sequencing at Plasmidsaurus, he's the rare person who codes all day and then writes about coding all evening - and makes that seem entirely reasonable.