Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, and prolific angel investor best known for founding Behance - the world's leading platform for creative professionals - which he sold to Adobe for ~$150M in 2012. After serving as Adobe's Chief Product Officer and later Chief Strategy Officer (overseeing growth from $19B to $170B+ market cap), he departed in January 2025 to become a Partner at A24, the acclaimed indie studio, where he is founding A24 Labs. He is the author of two bestsellers - 'Making Ideas Happen' and 'The Messy Middle' - and publishes the 'Implications' newsletter on design, tech, and product strategy. With 282+ angel investments including Uber, Pinterest, Airtable, Notion, and Ramp, Belsky is one of the most active design-focused investors in tech.
Jim Nielsen is a design engineer, writer, and curator with 20+ years at the intersection of design and code on the web. He writes the popular Jim Nielsen's Blog covering web development philosophy, design thinking, and the craft of building for the web. He's the founding engineer at Quadratic, co-creator of The iOS App Icon Book (€136K Kickstarter), and maintains the beloved iOS/macOS/watchOS icon gallery sites. A champion of the open web, HTML-first thinking, and the emerging 'design engineer' role, Nielsen bridges the gap between visual design and front-end engineering with rare fluency.
Lea Verou is a Greek-American web standards leader, MIT researcher, and creator tools advocate whose fingerprints are on the web itself. She has designed web technologies now baked into every major browser, built 30+ open-source projects with nearly 2 billion npm downloads (including PrismJS and Color.js), authored the bestselling CSS Secrets (O'Reilly, 2015), and served as an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group member. A PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL in Human-Computer Interaction and Programming Language Design, she consults for Google, Mozilla, and Stripe, leads the State of HTML survey, and has delivered 100+ conference talks worldwide - always live-coding.
Matt Webb is a London-based designer, technologist, and product inventor who has spent 25+ years at the intersection of technology and ideas. Co-founder and former CEO of BERG (whose Little Printer became an IoT icon acquired by MoMA NY), former MD of R/GA's IoT accelerator, and author of the pop-neuroscience classic Mind Hacks, Webb now runs Acts Not Facts and co-founds Inanimate, making playful AI hardware like Poem/1 - a clock that writes a new rhyming poem every minute - while writing his blog Interconnected for over 25 years without stopping.
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear — a $1.25B unicorn project management tool trusted by 66% of Forbes' top 50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Ramp, and Vercel. A Finnish designer-turned-engineer who grew up questioning why everyday objects look ugly, attended 5,000-person LAN parties as a child, and turned that instinct into one of the most respected product careers in Silicon Valley. After shaping the visual language at Coinbase and Airbnb (Cereal typeface, Design Language System, Lottie, Google Material Design Award), he co-founded Linear in 2019 with two fellow Finns from Helsinki — and built it to 20,000+ customers and $100M+ ARR while staying profitable the entire time. His philosophy: quality is the growth strategy, tools embed opinions so choose accordingly, and the best MVP in a crowded category isn't minimal — it's sharply opinionated for a specific audience.