experimentation
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Trina Moitra Bet Her Career on the Marketing You Cannot Scale
She went from an engineering degree and $10-an-hour writing jobs to Convert’s C-suite. Her durable advantage is deliberately inefficient: useful work, close relationships, and the patience to let trust compound.
Makram Mansour Tests the Tiny Things - Because Five Pixels Can Cost $1 Million
The engineer-turned-product leader built experimentation systems at LinkedIn and Intuit. Now, at ID.me, he is applying the same habit of evidence to a trusted marketplace - one small decision at a time.
Paul Meinshausen
Paul Meinshausen is the CEO and co-founder of Aampe, a San Francisco company that deploys agentic AI infrastructure so consumer apps can learn from each user's behavior and adapt their messaging in real time. An anthropologist turned data scientist who started his career in US Army Intelligence, he co-founded the Indian fintech PaySense (acquired by PayU for $185M) before building Aampe with collaborators he first met in a military analysis unit. He argues that businesses win not by understanding the past but by making better decisions about the future, and that personalization should be about responsiveness rather than prediction.
Pete Koomen
Pete Koomen co-founded Optimizely during Y Combinator's Winter 2010 batch, building it from a pivoted idea in week two of YC into a $100M+ ARR experimentation platform before its 2020 acquisition. A former Google product manager who helped launch Google App Engine, Pete brought engineering rigor and scientific method obsession to the messy world of product decisions. He co-authored the field-defining book 'A/B Testing: The Most Powerful Way to Turn Clicks Into Customers,' and now serves as a Group Partner at Y Combinator, where he advises early-stage founders on enterprise sales, AI product design, and the art of building companies that actually figure out what works.
Gustaf Alstromer
Gustaf Alstromer is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most prestigious startup accelerator. A Swedish-born, San Francisco-based operator-turned-investor, he spent five years scaling Airbnb's growth team from 3 to 100+ people before joining YC in 2016. At YC he has mentored 600+ startups with a combined valuation of $118B+, reviewed 9,000+ applications, and become one of Silicon Valley's most cited voices on growth, experimentation, and climate tech entrepreneurship.