Matt Riley co-founded Swiftype (YC W12) in 2012, built it into a leading search-as-a-service platform, and sold it to Elastic in 2017. He then spent nearly eight years at Elastic as GVP & GM of Search, overseeing product, engineering, design, and developer relations for one of the world's most widely used search platforms. In late 2025, he returned to Y Combinator as a Visiting Partner - advising the next generation of founders using hard-won lessons from the full founder arc: zero to startup, startup to acquisition, acquisition to enterprise scale.
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Adeo Ressi — full name Adeodato Gregory Ressi di Cervia — is an Italian-American entrepreneur, systems architect, and the man who has been manufacturing founders and venture capitalists at scale for over two decades. Born in New York City in 1972, he co-founded one of the internet's first commercial websites (Total New York, sold to AOL), built and sold methodfive for $88 million, created TheFunded to democratize VC transparency, founded the Founder Institute (7,000+ companies across 250+ cities), launched VC Lab (responsible for ~50% of all new VC firms in 2023), and now leads Decile Group as CEO. He pioneered free legal frameworks used by millions of founders (FAST Agreement, Class F Shares, Convertible Equity). He was Elon Musk's college roommate at Penn, tried and failed to talk him out of SpaceX, and has been publicly wrong about exactly one thing. He calls himself a 'societal engineer.' He means it.