Nate Kontny is a Chicago-based serial founder, engineer, and writer who went from chemical engineering at UIUC to co-founding two Y Combinator companies (Inkling W06, Cityposh S11), running Highrise as CEO for Jason Fried, writing prolifically across Medium, HuffPost, and Fast Company, and building a suite of solo products - most recently AlliHat, a Safari extension embedding Claude AI directly in the browser. Currently Staff Engineer at Fivetran (post-Census acquisition), he is known for his radical transparency about failure, his 250-words-a-day writing discipline, and a philosophy that shipping imperfect work beats endless polishing.
Marc Lou (born Marc Louvion) is a French solopreneur and serial indie hacker who went from being fired by Tai Lopez in 2021 to earning over $1 million a year - solo, from Bali. He built ShipFast, a Next.js boilerplate that made $250K in five months, and TrustMRR, a verified startup revenue database built in a single day that became his top earner. With 14+ products launched, three sold, and a philosophy built on radical transparency and absurd shipping speed, he is one of the most-followed makers in the build-in-public movement.
Simon Hoiberg is a Danish serial entrepreneur, software engineer, and content creator based in Zurich, Switzerland. He left a $300K/year freelancing career to bootstrap a portfolio of SaaS products - including FeedHive (AI social media scheduling), Aidbase (AI customer support), LinkDrip (link attribution), TinyKiwi, and SignupGate - achieving $1M+ combined ARR. He grew his Twitter/X following to 200K+ organically and teaches React Native development through Galaxies.dev, reaching 100,000+ developers. Known for radical transparency about both wins and failures, Simon openly documents his entire entrepreneurial journey.
Natalia Panferova is a Swift developer, author, and co-founder of Nil Coalescing - a technical education company built on the premise that understanding why SwiftUI works the way it does beats memorizing what it does. A former Apple SwiftUI Frameworks Engineer who was recruited after Apple discovered her blog, she personally built APIs (AttributedString, Markdown in Text, sheet detents) now used by millions of iOS developers daily. She publishes books, a blog, and the Nilcoalescing newsletter from a small town in New Zealand's wine country.
Paul Hudson is a British Swift developer, author, and educator based in Bath, England, best known as the creator of Hacking with Swift - the world's largest Swift tutorial site. With over 700,000 unique monthly visitors, 20+ books, and free courses like 100 Days of SwiftUI, he has taught hundreds of thousands of developers how to build iOS apps. A former tech journalist at Future Publishing, he invented FutureFolio for iPad publishing, then pivoted to become the go-to teacher for the Swift community - co-hosting the Swift over Coffee podcast, maintaining popular open-source projects like ControlRoom and Ignite, and raising over $40,000 for Black Girls Code through the Swift for Good charity anthology.
Rex Salisbury is the founder and solo general partner of Cambrian Ventures, a $20M early-stage fintech fund born out of one of the largest fintech founder communities in the US. A former Merrill Lynch banker turned bootcamp-trained software engineer turned a16z partner, Rex built his reputation by running grassroots fintech meetups for years before a single dollar of fund capital. His Cambrian newsletter reaches 20,000 subscribers, his founder-only Slack has 1,100+ members, and his Fund I achieved a ~50% seed-to-Series A graduation rate against a 15.4% industry average. Early backer of Deel, now a $10B+ decacorn.
Scott Vinkle is a Toronto-based Accessibility Specialist at Shopify with over 12 years of experience making digital products usable for everyone. Holding the IAAP CPWA certification - one of the highest credentials in web accessibility - he co-leads Shopify's accessibility guild, contributes to W3C ARIA standards, speaks at international conferences, and publishes practical accessibility guidance through his newsletter, blog, and Medium. He's the rare specialist who bridges the gap between compliance checkbox and genuine inclusive design.
Simon Støvring is a Danish indie iOS developer and principal iOS engineer at Framna, best known for creating Scriptable — the app that lets anyone automate their iPhone with JavaScript. By day he architects mobile apps for a Nordic agency; by night he ships beloved tools like Runestone (a Tree-sitter-powered text editor), Data Jar, and Jayson. His work sits at the intersection of power-user utility and delightful craftsmanship, earning him a loyal following among iOS enthusiasts, automation nerds, and developers worldwide.
Nate Berkopec is the world's foremost Ruby on Rails performance expert, founder of Speedshop consultancy, co-maintainer of the Puma web server, and author of 'The Complete Guide to Rails Performance.' A self-taught programmer who pivoted from a Shark Tank appearance at 19, he now runs a thriving consulting and education business from Tokyo, helping Rails developers squeeze every last millisecond out of their applications.