Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, the pre-seed venture firm she launched in 2017 with two Stanford dorm-mates. A former founder (LaunchBit, acquired by BuySellAds) and 500 Startups Partner, she invests in software startups within 48 hours of a first call, has built a portfolio of 375+ companies including unicorns Gamma, Webflow, and Boom Supersonic, and has made angel investing accessible to over 10,000 applicants across 50+ countries through Angel Squad — all while sporting a Twitter handle (@dunkhippo33) that honors her lifelong collection of stuffed hippos.
George Ten is a copywriter, educator, and strategist known online as @GrammarHippy. He invented the 'CopyThinking' philosophy — the contrarian belief that great copy is 90% strategic thinking and 10% actual writing. With 11 years in marketing, he has helped build 8-figure info-product funnels, sold over 500,000 products online, and spent $10M+ profitably on Facebook ads. He teaches thousands of entrepreneurs on X/Twitter and through his courses and community.
Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copyhackers and the originator of conversion copywriting — a discipline she coined in 2011. Over nearly two decades, she has trained 70,000+ professionals and consulted for brands from bootstrapped startups to Fortune 100 enterprises including AWS, Canva, and Shopify. Her first traditionally published book, The Copyselling System, is set for release in July 2026 via BenBella/Simon & Schuster.
nikhil trivedi is the Director of Web Engineering at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has spent nearly two decades building open-source museum technology while simultaneously championing anti-oppression frameworks in cultural institutions. His tagline - 'Museums. Technology. Social Justice.' - is not a brand, it is a practice: he co-created Visitors of Color, contributed to the MASS Action Toolkit, received a UN Women Gender Equality Award, and built a public data API that connects AIC's collection to historical records of the transatlantic slave trade. A Desi Chicagoan, sitar player, and former high school band member, he codes in PHP by day and runs his own Mastodon instance by night.
Renata George is a venture capital investor, author, educator, and advocate for gender diversity in the investment world. She built and exited a major franchise media network in Eastern Europe before pivoting to VC, raising a U.S.-based fund in 2011, and later joining a Singapore VC firm. She founded Women.VC, a nonprofit advancing women in venture capital and private equity, authored the landmark book 'Women Who Venture', and serves as Program Director of VC Academy. Forbes named her among the top women in VC in 2012 and a leading millennial woman investor in 2015.
Majid Jabrayilov is an indie iOS developer, SwiftUI educator, and app creator based in Baku, Azerbaijan. Known by his handle 'mecid', he runs the popular Swift with Majid blog and SwiftUI Weekly newsletter, sharing weekly insights on SwiftUI, Swift, and Apple frameworks since 2018. He transitioned from corporate iOS development to full-time indie around 2019-2020, building a suite of health-focused apps including CardioBot and NapBot, and has grown a following of nearly 30,000 on Twitter/X while consistently publishing 230+ newsletter issues.
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.
Sean Allen is a self-taught iOS developer, Swift educator, and content creator based in Charlotte, NC, best known for his YouTube channel with 170,000+ subscribers dedicated to iOS and Swift programming. A career changer who wrote his first line of code at ~32 and landed his first iOS job in just 7 months, he turned a bitter string of big-tech interview rejections into a YouTube channel built 'out of spite' - which became one of the most trusted independent iOS education platforms on the internet. Today he runs a three-pillar independent business: content creation, consulting, and indie app development, with his flagship app Creator View giving YouTube creators a business dashboard for channel analytics and income tracking.
Vincent Pradeilles is a French iOS engineer and Swift educator based in Lyon, France. By day he is a Founding Solutions Engineer at Photoroom, the AI-powered photo editing app. By night (and weekends) he runs swiftwithvincent.com — a blog, newsletter, and YouTube channel that distills complex Swift patterns into bite-sized, practical tips. With 26,000+ Twitter followers, ~1,000-starred open source repos, and talks at FrenchKit, dotSwift, try! Swift Tokyo, NSSpain, and iOS Conf SG, he is one of the most recognized French voices in the global Swift community.
Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.
Sachin Rekhi is a Silicon Valley product management authority, serial entrepreneur, and the voice behind one of tech's most-read PM newsletters. He co-founded and grew LinkedIn Sales Navigator from $0 to $200M+ ARR, built and sold two companies (Anywhere.FM to imeem; Connected to LinkedIn), and now runs Notejoy with his wife Ada Chen Rekhi while training 10,000+ product managers through his newsletter, courses, and podcast.
Sebastian Raschka is a German-born AI/ML researcher, educator, and author who has built one of the most trusted independent voices in the machine learning community. Through his Substack newsletter 'Ahead of AI' (184,000+ subscribers), bestselling books like 'Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)', and 91,000+ starred GitHub repositories, he demystifies cutting-edge AI for practitioners worldwide. After a stint as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison and a role as Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he now runs RAIR Lab as an independent researcher, writer, and consultant.
Sumaira Mirza is the Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy Pakistan, one of the country's most decorated advertising creative leaders with over two decades of experience across WPP and Publicis Groupe networks. Known for campaigns that blend cultural sensitivity with bold social impact — including 'Message in a Mithai Box,' which provided legal support to abused women — she has served on juries at Effie Global Best of the Best, Spikes Asia, AdStars, and Dragons of Asia. In 2024, she became only the second Pakistani ever selected for the Effies Global Best of the Best jury. She is also an adjunct faculty member, a regular contributor to Aurora Magazine, and a participant in Ogilvy's elite APAC 30 for 30 Leadership Program.
Brendan Hufford is a content marketing and SEO strategist who spent a decade as a high school teacher and assistant principal before pivoting to digital marketing. He founded Growth Sprints, an agency helping SaaS companies scale from $10M to $100M ARR, and created 'SEO for the Rest of Us,' a free newsletter with 6,000+ subscribers. Known for practical, no-BS approaches to content strategy and SEO, Brendan has worked with companies like ActiveCampaign and Allstate, built and sold multiple online businesses, and is a sought-after speaker and educator in the B2B marketing space.
Heather Cox Richardson is a Boston College historian who turned American history into a daily newsletter phenomenon. Her Substack 'Letters from an American' has nearly 3 million subscribers, making it one of the most-read independent newsletters in the world. She connects current political events to historical patterns with a clarity that has made her one of America's most influential public intellectuals - all from coastal Maine, where she lives with her lobsterman husband.
Nikhil Krishnan is the founder and 'Thinkboi' behind Out-of-Pocket, a healthcare newsletter and education platform that makes the bewildering business of American healthcare funny, accessible, and actually worth reading. A Brooklyn-based writer, creator, and early-stage investor, Krishnan grew up in a family of physicians and parlayed a career in healthcare research at CB Insights and clinical trial partnerships at TrialSpark into one of the most original media brands in health tech - one that includes a newsletter with 30,000+ subscribers, educational crash courses, a medical bankruptcy card game, a children's book about clinical trials, hackathons, and a scout fund backing early-stage healthcare startups.
Cassidy Williams is a Chicago-based software engineer, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub, and one of the most recognizable voices in the frontend developer community. Known online as @cassidoo, she runs the widely-read weekly newsletter 'rendezvous with cassidoo,' builds mechanical keyboards, mentors early-career engineers, and has spoken everywhere from TED stages to the United Nations. She's a Glamour '35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry' honoree, a LinkedIn Top Professional, and a firm believer that you get a lot by giving.
Chip Huyen is a Vietnamese-American computer scientist, author, and educator who turned a rejection letter from Stanford into a three-year around-the-world journey, two bestselling Vietnamese travel books, and eventually a second application that got her in. She went on to teach at Stanford, build ML infrastructure at NVIDIA and Netflix, co-found Claypot AI, and write two of the most-read technical books on machine learning systems in production - 'Designing Machine Learning Systems' (2022) and 'AI Engineering' (2025). Her newsletter and blog are required reading for anyone building serious AI products.
Derek Fisher is a cybersecurity leader, award-winning author, and university instructor who has spent nearly three decades bridging the worlds of hardware engineering, software development, and application security. As VP of Application Security at Envestnet, he leads product security for a global fintech firm. He wrote the 'Application Security Program Handbook' (Manning Publishing), authored the 'Alicia Connected' children's book series on digital safety, teaches application security at Temple University, and runs the Securely Built newsletter - making complex security concepts accessible to engineers and leaders alike.
Hamel Husain is a machine learning engineer with 25+ years of experience who built part of the foundation beneath GitHub Copilot - his CodeSearchNet project was early LLM research later used by OpenAI for code understanding. Today he runs Parlance Labs, consults with AI teams across 35+ products, co-authored O'Reilly's 'Evals for AI Engineers', and teaches thousands of engineers how to move beyond vibes and actually measure their AI systems.
Jon Gjengset is a principal engineer at Helsing, Rust systems programming educator, and author of 'Rust for Rustaceans' (No Starch Press). He holds a PhD from MIT CSAIL where he built Noria, a streaming dataflow database system offering up to 20x performance improvements. A prolific live-coder and YouTube educator since 2018, Jon co-founded ReadySet (a $29M-funded database startup), contributed to the Rust ecosystem, and teaches at MIT's Missing Semester. Based in Oslo, Norway, he is one of the most respected voices in the Rust community.
Josh W Comeau is a Montreal-based frontend developer, indie course creator, and one of the most beloved CSS and React educators on the internet. After stints at Unsplash, Shopify, Khan Academy, and Gatsby, he left corporate engineering in 2020 to build interactive, deeply original courses that generated over $550,000 in presale revenue. His CSS for JavaScript Developers and The Joy of React courses have taught more than 28,000 developers through a teaching style that blends interactive widgets, mini-games, and the rare gift of building genuine mental models rather than just showing code.
Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.
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.
Lee Robinson is a developer educator and engineering leader who spent five years at Vercel scaling Next.js to over a million monthly active developers, rising from individual contributor to VP of Developer Experience. He now serves as Head of AI Education at Cursor, teaching developers how to build software with AI-powered tools. Known for creating free courses like Mastering Next.js and React 2025, his newsletter 'Optimism (for the web)' and 234K+ Twitter following reflect his belief that great technology should be easy to understand and interesting to learn.
Maarten Grootendorst is a psychologist-turned-ML engineer at Google DeepMind, best known for creating BERTopic, KeyBERT, and PolyFuzz - open-source NLP tools with over 15 million combined downloads. Co-author of the Amazon #1 bestseller 'Hands-On Large Language Models' (O'Reilly, 2024) with Jay Alammar, he runs the 'Exploring Language Models' newsletter with 2M+ views and has taught 50,000+ students on DeepLearning.AI. His work bridges the worlds of psychology and AI, making complex language model internals accessible through strikingly visual guides.
Rauno Freiberg is an Estonian Staff Design Engineer at Vercel who blurs the line between design and engineering with surgical precision. Known for his obsession with invisible details - the micro-interactions, animations, and tactile feedback that make software feel alive - he built cmdk (downloaded millions of times weekly), wrote the seminal 'Invisible Details of Interaction Design' essay, and created Devouring Details, an interactive design education platform. He previously shaped the Arc browser at The Browser Company. His philosophy: code is the material, and mastery of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is the only honest path to great interfaces.
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.
Taimur Ijlal is a cloud and AI security leader with 20+ years of international experience, currently serving as a Senior Security Consultant at AWS. Known as 'Cloud Security Guy,' he runs a popular Substack newsletter, YouTube channel, and Udemy courses reaching 80,000+ professionals. A CISO of the Year 2019 winner in the UAE, LinkedIn Top Voice in Cybersecurity, and UK Global Talent Visa 'Exceptional Talent' recipient, Taimur has authored multiple books on cybersecurity careers, certifications, and AI governance. He is recognized for making complex cloud and AI security topics accessible through practical, real-world teaching.
Muhammad Umair is a Pakistan-based AI consultant, ML engineer, and PhD researcher who has spent seven-plus years building machine learning systems that actually ship. He leads AI training at atomcamp, has driven AI initiatives for UNDP Pakistan, and has built three AI SaaS products end-to-end. His PhD research at UESTC focuses on multimodal test-time adaptation and low-resource learning - the kind of work that makes AI usable in places where data is scarce and compute is expensive.