James Hirschfeld is the co-founder and CEO of Paperless Post, the New York company that turned the dread of sending an invitation into an act of design. He started it from a Harvard dorm in 2008 with his older sister Alexa, after his own 21st birthday party left him stuck between expensive paper and lifeless email. More than 175 million people have since sent or received a Paperless Post, across roughly 20 million events. He runs it as a design company that happens to live in a browser.
Adam Morgan is VP of Brand at Twilio, where he led the company's 'Be a Builder' brand refresh in 2024 - repositioning Twilio from a developer platform to a movement for all builders. With 29 years in creativity, strategy, and storytelling, he previously served as Executive Creative Director at Adobe for 8.5 years and Senior Director of Brand + Creative at Splunk/Cisco. He is the author of 'Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business' (Morgan James Publishing), host of the Real Creative Leadership podcast, and was named to AdWeek's Creative 100 in 2020. He holds a Master's in Marketing Strategy from Northwestern University and lives in Lehi, Utah.
Jonathan Johnsongriffin is VP of Global Brand & Creative at Google, where he leads the Global Brand Studio's creative strategy. A veteran of Nike's most iconic campaigns - including 'You Can't Stop Us' and 'Just Do It Crazy Dreams' - he spent nearly five years shaping Nike's global brand narrative before joining Google in January 2023. Co-founder of the Serena Williams Design Crew program, jury member at Cannes Lions 2023 and 2024, and board trustee at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Johnsongriffin blends industrial design roots with cultural storytelling at the intersection of sport, technology, and purpose.
Patricia Smith is listed as a Group Chief Executive Officer associated with Smith, the Asbury Park hospitality collective behind Porta, Pascal & Sabine, Homesick, and Lovesick. Her public footprint is thin; her affiliation places her inside one of New Jersey's most recognizable restaurant groups, an operation that helped re-light Asbury Park's main streets after 2006.
Domestika is a global learning platform for creatives - illustrators, designers, photographers, animators, writers - built around professionally produced video courses and an enormous community of working professionals. Founded in Spain in 2002 as a forum, it became a unicorn in 2022 and now hosts millions of students taking courses in more than 10 languages.
Eight Inc. is a globally recognized strategic design firm founded in 1989 by Tim Kobe. Best known for designing the original Apple Store with Steve Jobs, the firm now operates across San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai, helping brands like Nike, Virgin Atlantic, Citibank, Dolby, McLaren, Lincoln and Nissan turn ideas into human experiences across architecture, retail, products, identity and digital.
Fellow makes design-led gear for people who take their home coffee seriously - the gooseneck Stagg EKG kettle, the Ode and Opus grinders, vacuum-insulated travel mugs, and a roaster-rotating subscription called Fellow Drops. Founded by Jake Miller in 2013 after a Stanford d.school project, it bootstrapped its way from Kickstarter to a $30M Series B in 2022.
Maze is a user research and product testing platform that lets product teams test prototypes, run usability studies, and gather customer insights at speed. Founded in 2018 by Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary, it has grown into an AI-powered research platform used by more than 60,000 product teams - from startups to Atlassian, Braze and Lowe's.
Minted is a San Francisco design marketplace that turns crowdsourced art from independent artists into holiday cards, wedding invitations, wall art, and home decor printed on demand. Founded in 2007 by Mariam Naficy, the company runs continuous design competitions where its community of 15,000+ artists submit work, customers vote, and winning designs are produced and sold worldwide.
Jesse Pickard is the Founder and CEO of The Mind Company (formerly Elevate Labs), the studio behind Elevate (Apple's App of the Year 2014), Balance (Google's App of the Year 2021), and Spark - a portfolio of science-backed mental fitness apps with over 80 million downloads. A designer-turned-entrepreneur, Pickard co-founded language learning startup MindSnacks in 2010 before pivoting to build Elevate in 2014, pioneering the consumer mental fitness category. He is also an Investing Partner at Volo Ventures.
Jake Miller is the founder of Fellow, a San Francisco-based premium coffee gear company known for design-forward products like the Stagg EKG electric kettle, Ode Brew Grinder, and Carter Move Mug. He launched Fellow as a Stanford MBA class project in 2013, weathered 73 investor rejections and a failed first product, before building a nine-figure consumer brand sold in 45+ countries and backed by $42M in funding. Miller's mission is to transform everyday coffee routines into meaningful rituals by bridging the gap between specialty roasters and home baristas.
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.
Zazzle is a Redwood City based online marketplace that lets anyone design and order custom products - from invitations and t-shirts to home decor and corporate gifts - manufactured on demand. Founded in 2005 by Robert, Bobby and Jeff Beaver, it pairs a creator community of independent designers with proprietary on-demand manufacturing.
Soo Kang is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Coffee Meets Bagel, the women-focused dating app she built alongside her sisters Arum and Dawoon. A Korean-American designer by training, Soo immigrated to the US at age 12, studied at Parsons School of Design, and brought creative direction and brand identity to one of the most distinctive dating apps on the market. The company famously turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank - the largest offer in the show's history at the time - and went on to raise $23.2 million in total funding with $36 million in annual revenue.
Gamma is an AI-native platform for creating presentations, documents, and websites by typing a prompt. Founded in 2020 in San Francisco, it reached 70+ million users and $100M ARR by late 2025, profitably, with a small team and a focus on letting non-designers ship polished work fast.
Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion, the all-in-one workspace platform used by over 100 million people worldwide. Born in Ürümqi, China, he studied cognitive science and fine arts at the University of British Columbia before nearly going bankrupt building Notion, retreating to Kyoto for eight months to rebuild the entire codebase from scratch. Today Notion is valued at $11 billion with $600 million in annual revenue, and Zhao still owns roughly 30% of it — an unusually large stake that reflects his insistence on building deliberately, keeping the team small, and refusing to let investors dictate the product's direction.
Kate McAndrew is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Baukunst, a San Francisco-based venture firm managing a $100M inaugural fund that backs creative technologists at the intersection of technology and design. With over a decade of pre-seed investing experience - including nearly eight years at Bolt where she was the first employee and rose to Partner - she has invested in 100+ companies and leads every round she enters, targeting 15%+ ownership at pre-seed. She is also the founder of Women in Hardware, the largest network for technical women in the hardware ecosystem, and co-author of 'The Goddess Guide to Branding.'
Byron Hoffman is the Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Offset, a Napa Valley-based company that is simultaneously a premium wine ecommerce platform and a brand design studio. Born and raised in Napa to a family steeped in food and wine culture - his grandfather was a winemaker at Christian Brothers and his grandmother Sally Schmitt was the original founder of The French Laundry - Byron brings both heritage and craft to his work. He co-founded Offset by merging his design studio Hoffman & Co. with Tyson Caly's 750 Group in 2015, having first collaborated on Last Bottle wine in 2011. Today, Offset serves legendary wineries like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Kosta Browne, and Realm Cellars. Beyond wine, Byron spent ten years producing and designing his grandmother's memoir and cookbook 'Six California Kitchens,' which won the 2023 IACP Award for Best American Cookbook and generated coverage in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.
Rebecca Shostak is the co-founder and CEO of Flodesk, a design-first email marketing platform that reached $36 million in annual recurring revenue without a single dollar of outside funding. A Silicon Valley native who taught herself Photoshop at 10, designed merchandise for Rihanna and Linkin Park, and built a company that Y Combinator rejected - then outgrew - Shostak turned a template shop frustration into a platform serving over 100,000 small businesses worldwide. Now steering Flodesk into AI, she spent five months in Vietnam with her engineering team building proprietary technology and filing seven patents.
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.
Joe Gebbia is the co-founder of Airbnb and a designer-turned-billionaire who helped reshape how humanity thinks about trust between strangers. He graduated from RISD with dual degrees in graphic and industrial design, then turned air mattresses and a breakfast cereal stunt into a $100 billion company. After stepping back from Airbnb in 2022, he founded Samara - a prefab housing company - and in 2025 became America's first Chief Design Officer under the Trump administration, tasked with redesigning the federal government's 27,000+ websites to feel as intuitive as the Apple Store.
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, the Australian graphic design platform that grew from a school yearbook tool built in her mother's living room to a US$42 billion company used by 220 million people across 190 countries. She survived 100+ investor rejections, learned kite-surfing purely to network with Silicon Valley VCs, and wore a $30 engagement ring while becoming one of the wealthiest women in tech - then pledged to give most of it away.
Chris Do is a Vietnamese-American designer, Emmy-winning creative director, and founder of The Futur - an educational platform on a mission to teach 1 billion people how to make a living doing what they love. He fled Vietnam as a toddler on April 30, 1975, built Blind into a $7M+ annual motion design studio serving Nike, Xbox, and Sony, then pivoted at 42 to education - amassing 2.7 million YouTube subscribers, 500K community members across 190 countries, and a $5,000/hour consulting rate. His philosophy: hard truths, gently told.
Brett Williams is the founder and sole operator of Designjoy, a subscription-based design agency generating over $3M/year entirely by himself - no employees, no meetings, no nonsense. Running on under $200/month in tools and billing clients $4,995-$7,995/month, he's built one of the most efficient service businesses on the internet. He's also the creator of Productize Yourself, a course with 8,000+ members teaching others to replicate his model, and is one of the top 200 creators on X/Twitter where he shares his unconventional approach to work, design, and freedom.
Jack Butcher is a British-born graphic designer and entrepreneur who turned a $58 bank balance into a $1M+ annual business by packaging visual thinking into a personal media brand called Visualize Value. A former advertising creative director for Bloomberg and SapientNitro, he left agency life in 2018 to build a one-person empire of minimalist black-and-white visuals that distill complex business and life concepts into a single image. His signature framework, 'Build Once, Sell Twice,' made productizing expertise into digital products a mainstream creator strategy. He extended this philosophy into the NFT space, launching Checks VV (which surpassed Bored Ape Yacht Club in daily trading volume) and Opepen Edition (with $240M+ in total trading volume), earning exhibitions at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Art Basel.
Julie Zhuo is Facebook's first intern turned VP of Product Design, author of the WSJ bestseller 'The Making of a Manager,' and co-founder/CEO of Sundial - an AI-powered analytics platform backed by Sequoia Capital with OpenAI as a client. She spent 14 years at Facebook helping scale it from under 100 employees to over 2 billion users, overseeing the design of News Feed, the Like button, and Reactions. Today she runs a 95,000+ subscriber newsletter called The Looking Glass and is building what she describes as 'the analytics platform for the AI era.'
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.