elixir
(5)
Charlie Holtz and the art of making work play
Before Conductor, Charlie Holtz built a corporate social network with a sense of humor and gave his webcam a wildlife narrator. Now he is working on a different kind of ensemble: teams of AI programmers, with a human holding the baton.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy Built the Room Before the Party Arrived
Before Discord connected millions of players, its CTO was a teenager wiring together forums, voice chat and friendships for a Final Fantasy XI guild. The scale changed. The problem did not.
Erlang Solutions sells the art of staying online
A chat server, a streaming migration and a very long memory for failure: inside the consultancy turning Erlang’s telecom inheritance into working software.
Sam Seely
Sam Seely is the co-founder and CEO of Knock, a New York-based notification infrastructure company that turned the tedious plumbing of transactional email, push, SMS and in-app messages into an API and workflow engine used by Vercel, Amplitude and others. He and CTO Chris Bell, who met at Frame.io, launched Knock in 2021 and raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures in February 2024, bringing total funding to $18M.
Sam Corcos
Sam Corcos is a four-time founder and the co-founder and former CEO of Levels Health, a $300M metabolic health company that pairs continuous glucose monitors with a software layer to help people understand how food affects their blood sugar. He co-founded CarDash (Y Combinator S17, acquired 2020), Sightline Maps, and LearnPhoenix before building Levels into a category-defining health company with $67M raised from a16z and a community of 1,400+ member-investors. In 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and was appointed U.S. Treasury Chief Information Officer. He is also known for extreme minimalism (one pair of pants, one backpack), tracking time in 15-minute increments, and hosting 100+ intellectual salon dinners in New York and San Francisco.