Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
Sameer Al-Sakran is the co-founder and CEO of Metabase, the open-source business intelligence tool that grew into an 8-figure ARR company used by more than 70,000 organizations. He spent four years building Metabase without charging a dollar, then turned it into a product-led growth case study by burying a single call-to-action deep in the admin panel and letting the software sell itself. A career machine-learning and data person, he worked in data science, engineering, and venture before deciding the world needed a simpler way to ask a database a question.
Shanthi Shanmugam is the co-founder and CEO of Casap, a New York fintech that uses AI to automate payment disputes, chargebacks, and first-party fraud detection for banks, credit unions, and fintechs. A UC Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science graduate, she cut her teeth as a product manager at Facebook and spent roughly five years at Robinhood, where she launched the first crypto trading feature and later ran customer-care products. Watching back-office breakdowns erode consumer trust convinced her the dispute process was broken, so she reconnected with a former Facebook colleague, Saisi Peter, and started Casap in 2023. In August 2025 the company raised a $25M Series A led by Emergence Capital, bringing total funding to $33.5M.
Avital Cohen is Vice President of Marketing at Microsoft, based in Beverly Hills, California. With a legal education from Cardozo School of Law and prior experience as a Marketing Manager at Facebook, she has built a career at the intersection of technology and strategic brand communication. At Microsoft - a company generating over $281 billion in annual revenue and employing 228,000 people globally - she drives marketing strategy across one of the world's most influential technology portfolios, spanning cloud computing, AI, productivity software, and enterprise solutions.
Bret Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, an enterprise AI agent platform valued at $15.8 billion following its $950M Series E in May 2026. A Stanford computer science graduate, he co-created Google Maps, helped invent Facebook's Like button, served as Facebook CTO, co-founded Quip (acquired by Salesforce), and rose to co-CEO of Salesforce before founding Sierra in 2023. He also chairs the OpenAI board, having stabilized the company after Sam Altman's brief ouster in November 2023. Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in 2025, and Silicon Valley has nicknamed him the 'Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley' for his uncanny presence at every landmark moment in the internet age.
Jay Sullivan is the CEO of Fandom, the world's largest fan platform with 350 million monthly visitors spanning wikis, gaming, movies, TV, and pop culture. A Yale-trained applied mathematician turned product visionary, Sullivan built his career shepherding the open web at Mozilla—where he served as SVP of Product, COO, and Interim CEO—before stints driving product at Groupon, Facebook's Reality Labs AI team, and Twitter's consumer and revenue products. Co-inventor of three US patents and co-founder of PhoneSpots (acquired 2007), he has spent two decades building platforms at mass scale. Since joining Fandom in February 2026, he is steering the company from a Google-traffic-dependent reference destination toward a real-time, AI-powered fan engagement platform.
Sadi Khan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aven, a San Francisco-based fintech unicorn valued at $2.2 billion that created the world's first home equity-backed credit card. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate, Khan spent over a decade at Facebook leading product for Internet.org, Maps, Search, and Ads before co-founding Aven in 2019. Aven has since issued over $3 billion in credit lines, saved consumers more than $215 million in interest, and raised $252 million in total funding. Known for his maximally rational decision-making style and habit of wearing the same outfit every day to reduce cognitive load, Khan aims to build America's first 'machine banking' platform and democratize access to home equity for millions of homeowners.
Sherman Ye is the Founder and CEO of NebulaGraph (vesoft Inc.), the company behind one of the world's most scalable open-source distributed graph databases. After engineering stints at Facebook and Ant Financial — where he worked directly on graph database infrastructure — Ye founded vesoft in 2018 to bring enterprise-grade graph database technology to a market hungry for connected-data insights. NebulaGraph can handle trillions of edges with millisecond latency, and counts Tencent, Meituan, and JD Digits among its users. Ye led the company through a $8M pre-A round in 2020 and a Series A in 2022 led by Jeneration Capital, while pioneering the GraphRAG concept that merges knowledge graphs with large language models.
Amjad Masad is the co-founder and CEO of Replit, the AI-powered cloud development platform that has grown to over 50 million users and reached a $9 billion valuation after its $400 million Series D in March 2026. Born in Amman, Jordan - where he learned to code at internet cafes by the 15-minute slot - Masad built Replit to remove the setup friction he experienced firsthand. After stints as founding engineer at Codecademy and on Facebook's JavaScript infrastructure team (where he helped build Babel.js and Jest), he co-founded Replit in 2016 with his wife Haya Odeh and brother Faris. Rejected by Y Combinator four times before acceptance, Masad now leads a platform where anyone can go from idea to deployed software without writing a line of code - believing there will be a billion software creators in the AI era.
Sophie Novati is the CEO and co-founder of Formation, an A16Z-backed engineering fellowship that helps underrepresented software engineers break into top-tier tech companies. A Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate who rose to staff engineer at Facebook and Nextdoor, she founded Formation in 2019 after recognizing that talented engineers from non-traditional backgrounds were being systematically excluded from elite tech roles. Formation pairs adaptive AI-driven learning with mentorship from senior engineers, and its graduates have landed roles at Meta, Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Dropbox, with an average first-year compensation increase of over $100,000. The company has raised $9 million in funding and Novati credits a 2am chess game with Mark Zuckerberg as one early spark for thinking about business models.
Michael Buckley is the Chairman and CEO of Be My Eyes, the world's largest digital volunteer organization connecting blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers via live video calls. A communications veteran who spent 12 years at Brunswick Group and three years as Facebook's VP of Global Business Communications, Buckley pivoted to mission-driven tech when he joined Be My Eyes in December 2022. Under his leadership, Be My Eyes launched Be My AI (powered by GPT-4), which TIME named one of the Best Inventions of 2023, and scaled the platform to over 1 million blind and low-vision users supported by 6.7 million volunteers worldwide. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ocean's Halo, a seaweed-based natural foods company, and an active angel investor.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB — a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for cloud-native applications at global scale. A gold medalist from IIT Madras and UC Berkeley alumnus, Kannan spent 13 years at Oracle (PL/SQL compiler) and Facebook (scaling HBase for billions of users) before co-founding Yugabyte in 2016. Under his technical leadership, Yugabyte raised $298M in funding, achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation, and built one of the most respected open-source distributed databases in the industry.
Nikunj Bajaj is the Co-Founder and CEO of TrueFoundry, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI infrastructure platform that lets companies build, deploy, and govern machine learning and generative AI applications on Kubernetes - in cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments. An IIT Kharagpur and UC Berkeley alum, Bajaj previously led machine learning at Facebook where he helped launch the company's first on-device model on Messenger and built the Proactive Assistant. He founded TrueFoundry in 2021 alongside two IIT Kharagpur batchmates, raised $21.3M (including a $19M Series A led by Intel Capital in 2025), and counts Siemens Healthineers, NVIDIA, and Automation Anywhere among customers - compressing typical AI deployment timelines from 14 months to under four.
Stefanos Loukakos is the Co-founder and CEO of Connectly.ai, a San Francisco-based AI conversational commerce platform that raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024, bringing total funding to $37.2M at ~$100M valuation. A native of Greece, he previously served as Head of Facebook Messenger Business and Director of Blockchain at Meta, and as Country Director of Google Greece. He built Connectly to let retailers sell through WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat - turning customer messages into revenue.
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of EdgeCloudLink (ECL), the company building the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered modular data centers. A 20+ year veteran of hyperscale infrastructure at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook/Meta, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure, Bachar co-founded the Open19 open hardware standards project and holds eight U.S. patents. At ECL, he is reimagining what a data center can be - deploying capacity in nine months (vs. the industry's 3-4 years), generating zero emissions, and producing cooling water as a byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells. In May 2024, ECL unveiled the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered AI data center in Mountain View, California, and Lambda deployed the first hydrogen-powered NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems there. ECL's TerraSite-TX1 near Houston is planned as a 1-gigawatt AI factory on 600 acres.
Emily Bennett is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads investing for a16z speedrun - the firm's high-velocity startup accelerator that has deployed over $180M to 150+ startups since 2023. A neuroscience graduate of Middlebury College (magna cum laude) turned Harvard MBA, she carved a winding path through product roles at Spotify, The New York Times, and Facebook before pivoting fully into venture at Owl Ventures, where she rose to Partner with a focus on edtech. At a16z, her investment thesis centers on AI-native tools that allow single founders to operate what once required entire teams, and she is a vocal advocate for the first AI-native university - an institution where learning paths, schedules, and research adapt in real time through continuous data feedback loops.
Glen Evans is Partner of Core Talent at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. A veteran recruiter who built Facebook's engineering recruiting team from scratch and served as Slack's first Head of Global Recruiting, Evans now helps Greylock's portfolio companies build world-class teams. He advises founders on hiring strategy, recruiting operations, compensation benchmarks, and talent pipelines - translating the hard-won lessons of hyper-growth into practical playbooks for startups.
David Sze is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners who built the firm's consumer investing franchise from scratch, backing Facebook at a $500M valuation in 2006, LinkedIn when it had 1 million users in 2004, Discord in 2016, and Roblox before it became a household name. A former operator at Excite, Electronic Arts, and HBO, he ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012 and remains one of Silicon Valley's most decorated consumer internet investors. He is a Yale trustee, Rockefeller University board member, and advisor to McLaren Racing.
Kevin Efrusy is a Stanford-trained engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist best known for personally sourcing Accel's $12.2M Series A investment in Facebook in 2005 - widely cited as one of the most profitable VC bets in history. A former co-founder of Corio (SaaS pioneer, IPO'd, acquired by IBM) and first CEO of IronPlanet, Efrusy joined Accel in 2003 and ranked #6 on the Forbes Midas List in 2011. He pioneered Accel's Latin America investment thesis after a year-long family sabbatical across South Africa, Brazil, and Japan in 2012, and has since backed unicorns including QuintoAndar ($5.1B), Gympass ($2.2B), and Nuvemshop ($3.1B). He transitioned to Emeritus Partner at Accel in 2019 and continues as an active angel investor and philanthropist through the Efrusy Family Foundation.
Matt Cohler is one of Silicon Valley's most accomplished yet deliberately low-profile venture capitalists. A Yale music graduate turned McKinsey consultant, he joined LinkedIn as a founding member, became Facebook employee #5 and VP of Product under Zuckerberg, then joined Benchmark Capital in 2008 as its youngest-ever General Partner. His investment portfolio - including Instagram, Tinder, Dropbox, Asana, and Zendesk - places him among the most successful consumer internet investors of his era. Since stepping back from active fund management in 2018, he serves on the boards of KKR, the Yale Investments Office, and the Environmental Defense Fund, and sustains a lifelong devotion to classical music through 17+ years on the San Francisco Symphony board and patronage of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Ron Conway is the undisputed 'Godfather of Silicon Valley' - a San Francisco-born angel investor who backed Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Stripe, OpenAI, and 650+ other companies through SV Angel, the firm he founded in 2009. Known as 'The Human Router' by Marc Andreessen for his legendary ability to connect founders with capital, talent, and opportunity, Conway pioneered seed-stage investing with small checks and high conviction in people, writing 1+ investments per week at his peak. A lifelong Democrat and civic power broker, philanthropist, and father of three sons who all work in his ecosystem, Conway announced a rare cancer diagnosis in April 2026 while vowing to never back down from a fight.
Theresia Gouw is a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant who became America's first female billionaire venture capitalist. A Brown-trained engineer turned Stanford MBA, she rose to become the first female investing partner at Accel Partners, where she helped back Facebook at a $98 million valuation in 2005. She co-founded Aspect Ventures and then Acrew Capital, managing ~$1.7 billion with a firm where 85% of employees are women or BIPOC. Beyond VC, she holds minority ownership stakes in the Buffalo Bills, Bay FC, and Golden State Warriors, and is Lead Investor and Executive Chair of an incoming Major League Volleyball franchise in Northern California.
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, then quietly built Asana into a billion-dollar project management company while giving away billions through Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving). The youngest self-made billionaire in the world when Forbes first named him in 2011, Moskovitz has spent the years since turning wealth into what he believes are the most high-impact charitable causes on Earth - from malaria nets to AI safety - alongside his wife Cari Tuna.
Justin Rosenstein is the co-founder of Asana and creator of some of the internet's most influential features - including the Facebook Like button and Gmail Chat. A Stanford mathematics graduate who dropped out of grad school at 20 to join Google, he went on to shape how billions communicate and collaborate online. Now he's wrestling with the consequences of his creations, starring in Netflix's The Social Dilemma and founding One Project, a nonprofit reimagining governance and economics. He lives in Agape, a cooperative house in San Francisco's Mission District founded on unconditional love, and has banned himself from the very technologies he helped build.
Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram in 2010 with Mike Krieger, transforming mobile photography into a global phenomenon with over 1 billion users before selling to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he launched Artifact, an AI-powered news app, later acquired by Yahoo in 2024. A Stanford-educated engineer with a passion for photography and design, Systrom serves on the boards of Walmart and Snowflake while continuing to invest in and advise tech startups from San Francisco.
Sheryl Sandberg is a technology executive, author, and philanthropist who served as Meta's COO for 14 years, transforming Facebook into a profitable advertising powerhouse and becoming one of the most influential voices in business leadership. The author of 'Lean In' and founder of LeanIn.org, she's a champion for women's leadership and currently runs Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, investing in AI-native companies while serving on Meta's board and advising early-stage founders.
Avichal Garg is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Electric Capital, one of the largest digital assets investment firms globally. A serial entrepreneur who sold companies to Facebook and Google, he previously led product management at Facebook's Local team (responsible for $3.5B in revenue) and worked on search and ads at Google. With both BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford, Garg has invested in over 100 startups with combined market cap exceeding $50 billion, including Notion, Figma, Cruise, Airtable, and Boom Supersonic. He chairs the Crypto Council for Innovation and serves on CNAS's Board of Advisors, advocating for web3 innovation while leading Electric Capital's engineer-first approach to crypto investing.
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, and the founder of Signal Foundation, where he champions privacy-focused communication. After walking away from $850 million in unvested Facebook stock over ethical disagreements about user privacy, he invested $50 million to build Signal, an encrypted messaging platform designed to put users first. A Stanford computer science graduate who was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton has given over $1 billion to charitable causes with his wife Tegan, focusing on low-income families, reproductive rights, and internet privacy.
Curtis Spencer is the co-founder and managing partner of Electric Capital, a leading crypto-focused venture capital firm managing over $2 billion in assets. A Stanford-trained computer scientist and serial entrepreneur, Spencer built and sold two companies - Cruxlux to Kosmix (Walmart Labs) and Spool to Facebook - before partnering with his college friend Avichal Garg to launch Electric Capital in 2018. Known for creating the industry-standard Electric Capital Developer Report and the crypto-ecosystems taxonomy, Spencer combines deep technical expertise with a community-first investment philosophy, focusing on open source developer ecosystems, privacy-preserving technologies, and decentralized economies.
Jan Koum is the Ukrainian-born co-founder of WhatsApp who built one of the world's most-used messaging platforms on a foundation of radical privacy and zero advertising — then sold it to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014. A self-taught programmer who arrived in the US at 16 on food stamps, Koum's journey from a Soviet surveillance state to the pinnacle of Silicon Valley is one of the most unlikely origin stories in tech. He left WhatsApp in 2018 rather than compromise its privacy principles, and now runs Newlands, a secretive investment firm, while giving billions through the Koum Family Foundation.