Kevin Rose is a serial tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and wellness advocate who founded Digg in 2004 with $1,200 and turned it into a 38-million-user social news juggernaut. A former Google Ventures partner with early bets on Twitter, Square, Uber, and Slack, he has since pivoted toward deep wellness practices - Zen meditation, intermittent fasting, cold exposure - while building the ZERO and OAK apps. In 2025, he re-acquired Digg alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, relaunching it in January 2026 as an AI-powered Reddit alternative. He publishes a widely-read newsletter at kevinrose.com and hosts The Kevin Rose Show podcast.
Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.
Peter H. Diamandis is a Greek-American entrepreneur, physician, and futurist who has founded or co-founded 25+ companies and is best known as the creator of the XPRIZE Foundation - which has launched over $600 million in incentive competitions catalyzing $10+ billion in R&D. A data-driven optimist, he co-founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, runs the Metatrends newsletter (157,000+ subscribers), and is a 4x New York Times bestselling author. His current mission centers on longevity - he launched the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan in 2024 and published the Longevity Guidebook in January 2025.
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.
Wahaj us Siraj is the co-founder and CEO of Nayatel, Pakistan's leading fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) telecom company. A mechanical engineer by training who pivoted to entrepreneurship out of frustration with government bureaucracy, he sold a Suzuki car to fund his first venture and went on to build Pakistan's first FTTH network - a first for all of South and Southeast Asia. Under his leadership, Nayatel has grown to 170,000+ customers, 2,500+ employees, and operations in 17+ cities, while also launching Pakistan's first HD TV channels and partnering with Facebook to expand fiber across 8 cities.
Anthony Pompliano - known as 'Pomp' - is an Army veteran turned tech operator turned Bitcoin maximalist who built one of the most influential finance media empires on the internet. From three tours at Facebook to three weeks at Snapchat (and a whistleblower lawsuit to show for it), he has relentlessly bet on Bitcoin when no one on Wall Street would. Today he runs ProCap Financial (Nasdaq: BRR), a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company holding 5,457+ BTC, while publishing The Pomp Letter to 270,000+ subscribers and hosting a podcast with 50 million downloads.
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.
Eliot Peper is the bestselling author of twelve speculative thrillers — including Ensorcelled, Foundry, Reap3r, and the Analog trilogy — that explore the collision of technology, power, and culture. Based in Pacifica, CA, he serves as Head of Story at Portola, where he builds the lore and personality behind Tolan, an AI companion startup that went from $1M to $4M ARR in four weeks. A former entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm, Latin translator, dengue fever survivor, and avid surfer, Peper writes the books he wants to read — and has earned praise from Seth Godin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, and Tim O'Reilly along the way.
Harry Dry is a British solo entrepreneur and the creator of Marketing Examples, the self-proclaimed #1 marketing newsletter with 130,000+ subscribers. Built from a pre-marathon epiphany in Paris in May 2019, his newsletter distills world-class marketing and copywriting into sharp, visual, bite-sized breakdowns sent every Monday. With zero paid ads, he grew an audience of 110,000+ across platforms, earned the endorsement of writer David Perell who called him 'the best copywriter I know,' and turned a $1,000 investment into a full-time business - all while operating as a one-man show.
Harry Stebbings is the British founder of 20VC, the world's largest venture capital media brand and a $800M+ AUM fund. Starting his podcast at 18 with $50 and zero industry contacts, he built The Twenty Minute VC into a 100M+ download juggernaut spanning 190 countries, then parlayed that audience into a real VC fund backed by MIT and unicorn founders. He dropped out of King's College London after four weeks, co-founded Stride.VC, then launched 20VC Fund - closing a $400M third fund in October 2024. Equal parts podcaster, investor, and ultramarathoner, Stebbings runs companies and 100-mile races with the same compulsive energy.
Hiten Shah is a serial SaaS entrepreneur, angel investor, and startup advisor who co-founded KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, Nira (acquired by Dropbox in 2024), and Product Habits. Over 20+ years, he has built and scaled multiple companies using a philosophy of radical customer obsession, clarity of communication, and deliberate execution. He advises 120+ startups, has invested in 25+ companies, and shares insights through his newsletter, The Startup Chat podcast, and a 272K+ following on X.
Katelyn Bourgoin is a Canadian serial entrepreneur and the creator of Why We Buy, a buyer psychology newsletter with 280,000+ subscribers that generates multi-seven-figure revenue. Known as 'The Customer Whisperer,' she spent years as a 4x founder - including a VC-backed startup that ended in bankruptcy - before turning her hard-won customer insight expertise into a media and education business. She teaches marketers to decode why people buy through her newsletter, digital products, and the wildly popular Un-Ignorable Challenge, which sold 200 spots in 6 minutes and generated $116,000 in a single launch.
Megan Thee Stallion is a Grammy Award-winning rapper, entertainer, and entrepreneur from Houston, Texas, who turned a childhood in recording studios into one of hip-hop's most commanding careers. Known for anthems of self-confidence and female empowerment, she graduated college while topping charts, built her own label (Hot Girl Productions), made her Broadway debut in Moulin Rouge!, and runs a foundation in honor of her late parents. Off stage she is an anime devotee, horror movie enthusiast, and tireless mental health advocate whose 'Hot Girl' philosophy has become a genuine cultural movement.
Marc Andreessen co-invented the Mosaic browser as a $6.85/hour student programmer, then went on to co-found Netscape, help birth the modern internet, and eventually build Andreessen Horowitz into a $42B+ venture capital juggernaut. The man who wrote 'software is eating the world' in 2011 spent the next decade proving himself right by backing Twitter, Facebook, Coinbase, and GitHub. In 2023 he published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and in 2024 pivoted to advising the Trump administration's DOGE initiative - cementing his status as Silicon Valley's most opinionated, polarizing, and consequential voice.
Meb Faber is the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management, overseeing roughly $20 billion in assets across a suite of quantitative ETFs and private funds. A prolific author of six investing books (all free to download), host of the top-rated Meb Faber Show podcast with 615+ episodes, and curator of The Idea Farm newsletter reaching 100,000+ subscribers, Faber has made a career out of democratizing evidence-based investing - blending rigorous quantitative research with a rare willingness to share it all for free.
Nicolas Cole is a digital writer, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most-read writers on the internet - accumulating over 100 million views across platforms. He co-founded Ship 30 for 30, the largest cohort-based writing program online, alongside Dickie Bush. A former #1 most-read writer on Quora out of 200 million users, Cole built a ghostwriting agency (Digital Press) scaling to $2M+ annual revenue, co-created Category Pirates newsletter with Eddie Yoon and Christopher Lochhead, and launched the Premium Ghostwriting Academy - a 7-figure program in under 90 days. Author of 'The Art & Business of Online Writing,' he runs a portfolio of writing businesses generating over $5M annually, training thousands of writers worldwide.
Nihal Mehta is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist and Co-Founder & General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, one of New York's leading seed funds. Known as the 'Human Rolodex,' Mehta has backed early investments in Uber, Airbnb, AdMob (acquired by Google), and SwiftKey (acquired by Microsoft) while building a reputation as a founder-first investor who connects people without keeping score. He founded Pitch & Run NYC, a community blending startup pitches with morning runs, and hosts the Human Unicorn Podcast. A UPenn dual-degree graduate who once filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in his 20s, Mehta channels that hard-won empathy into backing the next generation of founders through ENIAC's $160M sixth fund.
MIT and ETH Zürich-trained aerospace engineer who worked on Airbus programs before pivoting to children's literature and energy policy consulting. She is the author of 'The Extraordinary Life of Riz' and the founder of savejoules.com.
Peep Laja is an Estonian-born entrepreneur and marketing strategist who built three companies from scratch - CXL (marketing education), Speero (CRO consulting), and Wynter (B2B message testing) - all bootstrapped. Recognized as the world's most influential conversion rate optimization expert in 2016, he now focuses on B2B strategy and competitive positioning through his 'How to Win' podcast, biweekly newsletter, and daily LinkedIn presence with 69K+ followers.
Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, the technology-driven freight forwarding company he built from a Y Combinator batch into an $8 billion global logistics giant. A serial entrepreneur who started importing goods from China at 17, he previously co-founded ImportGenius and has become one of the most influential voices in supply chain and trade policy - most famously by renting a boat to tour the LA port congestion in 2021 and posting a viral Twitter thread that prompted California's governor to call him directly. He is also a venture partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and media creator who built The Hustle from zero to 1.5 million subscribers before selling it to HubSpot for ~$27 million. He co-hosts My First Million, a top-25 business podcast with Shaan Puri that pulls over 1 million downloads a month, and co-founded Hampton, a vetted peer community for high-revenue founders now generating ~$8M ARR. Equal parts hustler and storyteller, Parr turned a Nashville hot dog stand into an eight-figure media empire and keeps reinventing what it means to build in public.
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, NYU Stern professor, five-time New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most outspoken voices in business and tech. Known for his unfiltered analysis of Big Tech, wealth inequality, and generational economics, he built and sold L2 Inc to Gartner for $155 million, co-hosts the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, writes the Webby Award-winning No Mercy / No Malice newsletter, and reaches millions through his Prof G Pod. His books - from The Four to The Algebra of Wealth - have made him a trusted, provocative guide to navigating capitalism in the 21st century.
Shaan Puri is an Indian-American entrepreneur, angel investor, and podcast host best known for co-hosting My First Million with Sam Parr - one of the top business podcasts with 25M+ downloads annually. He sold Bebo to Twitch (Amazon) for up to $25M in 2019, launched and sold the Milk Road crypto newsletter in an eight-figure deal in 2023, and built Bums and Roses into a $25M/year baby products brand with his wife. A self-described contrarian on hard work ('hard work is massively overrated'), he now focuses on content creation, early-stage investing, and writing through his Good Friday newsletter and One Hour Books project.
Syed Amir Jafri is the CEO and co-founder of Eocean, a Pakistan-based CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) company serving 2,000+ enterprises across 180+ countries with SMS, WhatsApp, and Voice APIs. He co-founded Eocean in 2008 with his brother Syed Asif Jafri, bootstrapping the company from a local communications startup into a regional technology leader. He is also co-founder of Kistpay, a fintech platform focused on smartphone financing and digital inclusion in Pakistan. A certified Chief Digital Officer from MIT Sloan Executive Education, Jafri bridges the gap between traditional enterprise communication and emerging AI-driven platforms, with clients including Google, Unilever, HBL, and Careem.
Tiago Forte is the founder of Forte Labs and creator of the Building a Second Brain methodology - a framework that has helped 20,000+ people in 70+ countries organize their digital lives and unlock creative potential. Author of the bestselling book of the same name (Simon & Schuster, 2022), named Financial Times Book of the Year, he has built one of the most influential productivity brands online, with 125,000+ newsletter subscribers and a YouTube channel crossing 100K subscribers. Known for the PARA method and Progressive Summarization, Forte turned his own struggle with information overload into a global movement.
Vin Clancy (born Vincent Dignan) is a British growth hacker, entrepreneur, author, and speaker who went from collecting welfare in Southwest London to building a global brand as one of the world's most recognizable growth marketing experts. He co-founded Planet Ivy (25,000 views in two weeks, $250k seed funding), pivoted to Magnific (accepted into TechStars London), won Best Speech at SXSW V2V, ran a 100-date world speaking tour, co-authored the bestselling growth hacking book 'Secret Sauce' (nearly $250,000 in sales), and built the Traffic & Copy Facebook community to 21,000+ members. He now operates under the GIGA Venture brand and consults with SaaS companies and startups on reducing customer acquisition costs.
Patrick McKenzie, known online as patio11, is a writer, software entrepreneur, and strategic advisor at Stripe who spent two decades bootstrapping software companies in Japan before becoming one of the internet's most influential voices on fintech, career development, and software business strategy. He writes Bits about Money, a deep-dive newsletter on the plumbing of financial systems, hosts the Complex Systems podcast, and co-led VaccinateCA - America's shadow COVID vaccine location infrastructure that likely saved thousands of lives. With 4.7 million words published since 2006, his essays on salary negotiation, software marketing, and financial infrastructure have shaped how a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs think about building and getting paid.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most consequential figures in the artificial intelligence era. A Stanford dropout who built his first startup at 19, Altman ran Y Combinator for five years before going all-in on OpenAI's mission to build safe superintelligence. He survived a dramatic 5-day ouster from his own company in 2023, returned to thunderous employee support, and has since steered OpenAI to a $300 billion valuation. He holds no equity in OpenAI, yet built a $3+ billion personal fortune through early bets on Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, and a cluster of deep-tech moonshots.
Sylvain Kerkour is a French software engineer, security researcher, and author best known for 'Black Hat Rust' - a hands-on book applying offensive security techniques with the Rust programming language. Self-described as a 'professional troublemaker', he writes about programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship at kerkour.com under the tagline '(Ab)using technology for fun & profit'. He is a vocal advocate for supply chain security in the Rust ecosystem and creator of the Bloom open-technology platform and the ChaCha20-BLAKE3 AEAD cipher implementation.