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The Austrians Who Wrote the Rulebook for How the Internet Plays Video
Stefan Lederer and his co-founders helped write MPEG-DASH during their PhDs. Then they built a company on top of it - and won an Emmy for the encoding tech that keeps modern streaming from choking.
Karen Gondoly
Karen Gondoly is the CEO of Leostream Corporation, the Boston-area company whose vendor-neutral connection broker and gateway software quietly runs the remote desktops of Hollywood studios, oil rigs, trading floors, and government agencies. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer who once left tech to become a head pastry chef, she answered a Craigslist ad for a technical writing gig, was offered a product manager role instead, and rose to run the company by 2016. Under her leadership Leostream won a 2022 Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy and stayed cash-flow positive without new funding since 2008.
Sebastien Deguy
Sebastien Deguy is the founder of Allegorithmic, the company behind the Substance 3D texturing suite that became an industry standard across games, film, and design. After Adobe acquired Allegorithmic in 2019 he served as VP of 3D & Immersive, won a Sci-Tech Academy Award (2023) and an Emmy (2024), then left in 2025 to build content instead of tools. He now runs Sans Strings Studio in San Francisco, a digital-puppetry company chasing 'animation with a soul' through a real-time performance pipeline. He is also an electronic musician under the alias Matterflow and the author of a book on Allegorithmic's history.
Dan Albritton
Dan Albritton is the CEO and co-founder of Megaphone TV, the company he calls the world's first Participation Entertainment Studio. Trained as a biomedical engineer at Columbia and as an interaction designer at NYU's ITP, he works in the seam between television production and game design - building the live polls, trivia, contests, and interactive on-air graphics that let viewers tap their phones and steer a broadcast in real time. Before Megaphone he co-founded iminlikewithyou, the studio that became OMGPOP and was later acquired by Zynga. Megaphone TV has earned an Emmy Award and multiple nominations, and its software appears in 24 of the top 25 US broadcast markets and on streamers worldwide.
Paul Slavin
Paul Slavin is the CEO of Skillshare, the New York online-learning marketplace, a role he stepped into in August 2025. He arrived by an unusual route: 33 years at ABC News, where he ran worldwide newsgathering, executive-produced World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and collected a dozen Emmys and a Peabody before pivoting fully into digital. He went on to lead web video at Everyday Health, run the digital book publisher Open Road Integrated Media to profitability, advise on media M&A at Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, and now steers a 30,000-class platform for creative learners and teachers worldwide.
Howard Husock
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies housing, municipal government, civil society, and philanthropy. A former Emmy-winning WGBH documentary filmmaker who later taught case studies at Harvard's Kennedy School and ran research at the Manhattan Institute, he has spent four decades arguing that American housing policy keeps making the same trillion-dollar mistake. His 2025 book The Projects rereads the history of public housing as a story of demolished communities, not just demolished buildings.
Peter Thompson
Peter Thompson is the Cofounder and CEO of LucidLink, a San Francisco-based cloud-native file streaming platform that turns object storage into a native file system accessible from anywhere in real time. A Minnesota farm kid who spent 15 years navigating storage markets across Asia and the Americas at DataCore Software before returning to Stanford's GSB at age 48, Thompson teamed up with engineer George Dochev in 2016 to build what users still describe as 'magic.' LucidLink has since raised $120.6M in total funding including a $75M Series C led by Brighton Park Capital in 2023, grown ARR nearly 5x in two years, counts Warner Bros., Paramount, Adobe, and Shopify among its customers, and earned an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award from the Television Academy.
Lawrence Kaplan
Lawrence 'Larry' Kaplan is the President and CEO of SDVI Corporation, the Emmy Award-winning cloud-native media supply chain platform company he co-founded in 2013. A broadcast industry veteran with over 40 years of experience, Kaplan previously founded Omneon Video Networks — the dominant provider of broadcast video servers — which was acquired by Harmonic Inc. for $307 million in 2010. Before that, he spent 18 years at Tektronix and led Sony's broadcast division. At SDVI, Kaplan has built the flagship Rally platform, which powers the media supply chains of Fox, Sky, Warner Bros. Discovery, A+E Networks, Comcast, and other leading media organizations worldwide.
Mark Atkinson
Mark Atkinson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mursion, an AI-powered immersive learning platform that blends live human performers with artificial intelligence to create realistic practice simulations for professional development. An Emmy Award-winning television producer turned serial edtech entrepreneur, Atkinson has spent over two decades building technology ventures at the intersection of human capital development and innovation. Before Mursion, he co-founded Teachscape, a pioneering video-based teacher observation platform that became central to the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project. Under his leadership, Mursion has grown to serve more than a third of Fortune 100 companies, delivering 18 million-plus minutes of simulation-based training across healthcare, education, corporate, and hospitality sectors.
Gregg Spiridellis
Gregg Spiridellis is an American media and technology entrepreneur who co-founded JibJab with his brother Evan in a Brooklyn garage in 1999, pioneering viral internet video before it was called that. He followed it up with StoryBots, the 11x Emmy Award-winning educational children's franchise acquired by Netflix in 2019. Now back with Spiridellis Bros. Studios, an AI-powered animation company backed by Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss, and Google's AI Futures Fund, he is betting that generative AI is the biggest creative wave yet.
Chad Hurley
Chad Meredith Hurley (born January 24, 1977, Reading, PA) is an American entrepreneur and tech visionary best known as the co-founder and first CEO of YouTube, which he built alongside Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005 and sold to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion - just 18 months after launch. Armed with a Fine Arts degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania rather than a computer science background, Hurley's design instincts shaped YouTube's iconic UI and pioneered the embeddable video player that fueled viral growth; he had previously designed the original PayPal logo during his job interview. After stepping down from YouTube in 2010, he co-founded AVOS Systems and MixBit, launched the sports gaming platform GreenPark Sports (which raised $53M+), and in 2023 founded EyeTell, an AI-powered video script generation startup. He holds minority ownership stakes in the Golden State Warriors (NBA), LA Football Club (MLS), and Leeds United (EPL), and received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in 2019. Estimated at $700-800 million in net worth, Hurley remains a prolific investor and quiet force in Silicon Valley, famously reclusive despite his outsized impact on how the world creates and consumes video.