Prenda is an Arizona-based education company that gives everyday adults - called guides - the software, curriculum, training, and support to open and run small, tuition-free K-8 microschools of 5 to 10 students out of homes, libraries, and community spaces. Founded by Kelly Smith after he started a learning club around his kitchen table, Prenda partners with state-credentialed institutions and school-choice programs so families pay little or nothing, while students learn at their own pace through a 'connect, conquer, collaborate, create' day built around mastery and student agency.
Mohammed Ali Mukri is an education operator and angel investor who works across the UAE and Pakistan with The Millennium Universal College (TMUC). A self-described people leader who runs on the mantra 'speed beats perfection,' he pairs front-line institution building with early-stage bets in health care, enterprise software, and education.
MAKE UP FOR EVER is a French professional cosmetics brand founded in 1984 by makeup artist Dany Sanz to give artists the high-pigment, high-performance products they couldn't find anywhere else. Acquired by LVMH in 1999, it became known for backstage-grade staples like the HD Skin foundation range, an inclusive shade philosophy, and a worldwide network of MAKE UP FOR EVER Academies that graduate roughly 1,300 students a year. The brand sits at the intersection of professional artistry and consumer beauty, sold largely through Sephora.
Dagogo Altraide is the creator and narrator behind ColdFusion, a YouTube channel with over 5 million subscribers known for deep-dive documentaries on technology, science, and business history. Born in Mumbai to Nigerian parents and raised across multiple countries before settling in Perth, Australia, Altraide built ColdFusion from a 2007 smartphone review channel into one of the internet's most respected educational documentary platforms - all while remaining largely faceless on screen. He is also a published author, music producer (under the alias Burn Water), and co-host of the Through The Web Podcast.
Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.
Chuck Collins (Charles M. Collins) is a Harvard-trained lawyer, MIT city planner, and former real estate developer who spent nearly two decades as President and CEO of YMCA of Greater San Francisco, transforming it into an organization serving more than 42,000 children annually across three Bay Area counties. Born in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1947 and raised as one of the first Black families in Mill Valley, he brings a lifetime of crossing boundaries to his work at the intersection of community, equity, and opportunity. Now a Presidential Fellow at USF's Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service, he continues to shape the region's civic life.
Dr. Geetha Murali is the chief executive officer of Room to Read, the global literacy and girls' education nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. The first non-founder CEO of the organization, she leads a team of roughly 1,200 staff across 29 countries and a network of more than 20,000 partners and volunteers. Under her watch, Room to Read's programs have reached over 60 million children. A PhD in South Asian politics with a master's in biostatistics, she frames her work through a personal lens: her mother was nearly a child bride, and her family's trajectory shifted in a single generation.
John T. Ehrbar is a career YMCA leader who, starting January 26, 2026, takes the helm as President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley after six years running YMCA Buffalo Niagara. He has spent over two decades inside the Y movement, climbing from a high school Leaders Club kid in northeast Ohio to running an 80-million-dollar nonprofit serving 2,300 staff across the Bay Area.
Priscilla Chan is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a pediatrician-turned-philanthropist directing one of the largest private bets on biomedical science. With husband Mark Zuckerberg she has pledged the bulk of their fortune to a mission to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century, increasingly through AI-powered biology and the Biohub network.
Course Hero is an online learning platform that gives students access to crowd-sourced study materials, AI-powered explanations, expert tutors and practice problems. Founded in 2006 at Cornell, it grew into an edtech unicorn and now anchors Learneo, the parent company that also owns QuillBot, CliffsNotes, Symbolab, LitCharts, Scribbr and LanguageTool.
Make: is the media and events company that gave the maker movement its name. Founded in 2005 by Dale Dougherty inside O'Reilly Media, it publishes Make: magazine, runs Maker Faire events around the world, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. After a 2019 shutdown, Dougherty restructured the business as Make: Community LLC and kept it going.
Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKid, a Beijing-based edtech unicorn that connects Chinese children aged 4-12 with North American English teachers through live one-on-one video lessons. A high-school dropout turned billionaire builder, she started tutoring English peers at age 15, co-founded an English academy chain at 17, and by 2020 had grown VIPKid to over 800,000 students, 100,000 teachers, and a $4 billion-plus valuation - backed by Tencent, Sequoia, and the late Kobe Bryant.
Kevin Zerber is the Founder and CEO of Treering, the edtech company that turned the school yearbook into a personalized, sustainable, and digitally-native experience. Since co-founding Treering in 2009, Zerber has guided the company from a scrappy startup to a platform serving 15,000+ schools across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - printing over 11 million yearbooks along the way. With $7.6M in funding backed by notable investors including Rich Barton (Expedia, Zillow) and Mike McCue (Flipboard), and recognition on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list, Zerber has carved out a distinctive niche at the intersection of nostalgia, technology, and inclusivity.
Treering is a Redwood City technology company that reinvented the school yearbook. Schools design online; families personalize their own pages; each book is printed on demand. For every yearbook sold, Treering plants a tree with Trees for the Future - over 4 million planted to date. Used by more than 15,000 schools worldwide.
CGP Grey is an Irish-American educational YouTuber and podcaster based in London who has spent more than a decade turning constitutional minutiae, geographic absurdities, and the strange edges of human systems into addictive short animated films. He works alone, never shows his face, draws himself as a stick figure in glasses, and treats production schedules as raw material for podcasts about how creative people get anything done at all.
Ethan Chlebowski is an American cooking educator and YouTuber who teaches home cooks the how and why behind food. After leaving a consulting job at Deloitte, he turned a weekend hobby into a 2M+ subscriber channel and founded Cook Well, a learning-first recipe platform and companion app.
Philipp Dettmer is the founder, CEO, and head writer of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, the Munich-based animation studio and YouTube channel with over 25 million subscribers and 3.6 billion views. Starting as a university passion project in 2013, Kurzgesagt has grown into a 70-person studio that transforms dense scientific, philosophical, and technological ideas into visually stunning, widely-shared short films. Dettmer is also the author of 'Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive' (2021) and co-creator of the video game Star Birds, launched in early access in September 2025.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Mike Boyd is a Scottish YouTube creator behind the channel 'Learn Quick', where he documents learning new skills - from kickflips to lockpicking - in remarkably compressed timeframes. With 2.7+ million subscribers and a philosophy of learning in public, he turned a bored thesis-writer's side project into a sustainable media business, all while making the messy, fumbling process of skill acquisition oddly compelling to watch.
Peter McKinnon is a Toronto-based photographer, cinematographer, and YouTube creator with nearly 6 million subscribers, known for his cinematic visual style and fast-paced, coffee-fueled tutorials. A former magician and Ellusionist Production Manager turned self-taught filmmaker, he built one of YouTube's most distinctive photography channels from a spare bedroom, won the 2019 Shorty Award for Breakout YouTuber of the Year and the 2020 Streamy Award for Cinematography, and had his landscape photography minted on official Canadian currency by the Royal Canadian Mint. Beyond tutorials, he has launched his own multi-tool for photographers, multiple Lightroom preset packs, a signature coffee blend with James Coffee Co., and the 'Pete's Pirate Life' EDC brand.
Derek Muller is a Canadian-Australian physicist turned YouTuber who runs Veritasium, a channel of 20+ million subscribers built on the idea that learning science starts with admitting you got it wrong. His PhD thesis argued that confusion is a feature, not a bug, and he has spent fifteen years engineering that confusion on camera.
Michael David Stevens is the American educator, writer, and performer behind Vsauce, the YouTube channel that turned questions like 'What if the sun disappeared?' and 'What color is a mirror?' into a 24-million-subscriber rabbit hole. He now co-hosts The Rest Is Science with mathematician Hannah Fry, made the streaming series Mind Field, and treats curiosity as a craft.
Prisms (legally Prisms of Reality) is a San Francisco-based education-technology company building the first spatial learning platform for K-12 math and science. Students don VR headsets and walk through problems - tsunamis, viral outbreaks, exponential growth - before ever picking up a pencil. Founded in 2020 by MIT-trained educator Anurupa Ganguly, the company now reaches hundreds of thousands of students across most US states.
Elizabeth Douglas is the CEO of wikiHow, the world's leading how-to platform visited by more than 150 million people monthly across 230 countries. A Stanford-trained computer scientist and Stanford MBA, she joined wikiHow in 2009 as COO and rose to CEO, overseeing more than 1,500% growth in traffic. Under her leadership, wikiHow has become a trusted, judgment-free resource with 100,000+ guides in English and 300,000+ across 18+ languages, earning a reputation as one of the nicest places on the internet.
Joaquin Olmedo is the co-founder and CEO of Filadd (YC S21), a Córdoba-born edtech platform helping students across Latin America get into — and through — university. What began in 2016 as an online prep course for Argentine university entrance exams has grown into a four-country operation serving over 25,000 students annually, with 90% year-over-year growth and recognition as one of Holon IQ's 100 Leading LatAm EdTechs. An industrial engineer by training, Olmedo applied to Y Combinator on a Mexican investor's offhand suggestion and was accepted — with metrics that caught the partners' attention immediately.
Shrey Sharma is the CEO and co-founder of Cyntexa, one of the fastest-growing Salesforce and ServiceNow consulting firms globally, and founder of S2 Labs, Rajasthan's first Salesforce training institute. Known in the Salesforce ecosystem as 'Salesforce Hulk,' he became the world's youngest Salesforce MVP in 2019 while still in college. Starting from a basement in Jaipur with five friends and minimal capital in 2018, he grew Cyntexa to 400+ employees with 200% year-over-year revenue growth and an estimated annual revenue exceeding $83 million. Through his YouTube channel and S2 Labs, he has trained over 100,000 Salesforce professionals worldwide, and now leads Cyntexa's push into AI agents and Agentforce implementations.
Joshua Levy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Holloway, a San Francisco-based digital publishing platform that produces comprehensive expert-reviewed guides on professional and entrepreneurial topics. A mathematician-turned-engineer, Levy previously served as a founding engineer at BloomReach and held infrastructure roles at Viv Labs (acquired by Samsung) and SRI International where he worked alongside the original Siri team. He is perhaps best known in technical circles as the creator of 'The Art of Command Line' on GitHub - a guide with over 150,000 stars translated into 14 languages and read by more than 2 million people. At Holloway, he has pioneered a new model of expert-driven digital publishing, raising $4.6M in seed funding from NEA, the New York Times Company, and South Park Commons, and co-authoring guides on equity compensation and technical recruiting that have collectively reached millions of readers.
Rupa Chandra Gupta is the cofounder and CEO of Sown To Grow, a K-12 edtech platform that puts students in charge of their own learning through goal-setting, progress tracking, and structured reflection. A former Bain consultant turned school administrator, she co-founded the company in 2015 after witnessing firsthand the gap in tools that gave students genuine ownership over their education. Sown To Grow has raised over $5M in venture funding and serves districts across the United States, with measurable outcomes including record-breaking graduation rates in Stockton Unified School District.
Ajay Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rinse, a tech-enabled clothing care company that has raised over $70 million and operates pickup-and-delivery laundry services across major U.S. cities. A Stanford GSB MBA alum (Class of 2010), he returned to his alma mater as a Lecturer in Management, teaching Startup Garage: Design — an intensive course where student teams build and test real-world business concepts. Before Rinse, Prakash worked at Bain & Company, Berkshire Partners, and briefly interned with Bonobos (where he became an early angel investor). He holds a BA in Economics with High Honors from Dartmouth College and has been featured on NPR's 'How I Built This' with Guy Raz.
Elinor (Wen-Hsin) Huang is the Founder and CEO of MEandMine, a San Jose-based AI-powered mental health platform for K-12 students that uses gamified, neuroscience-backed tools to help children build emotional regulation skills before crises emerge. Motivated by the loss of an MIT classmate to suicide and the 11-year average gap between symptom onset and treatment, she built MEandMine into a certified B Corp with partnerships spanning Google, Stanford Medicine, and the NYC Department of Education, and raised $6.6M in venture funding including a $4.5M round in June 2024.