Arjun Jayaram is the Founder and CEO of Baton Systems, a San Francisco-based fintech company rebuilding post-trade infrastructure for the world's largest financial institutions. A serial technologist who previously co-founded Compass Labs (acquired by Yahoo) and held roles at Twitter and Dwolla, Jayaram identified a stubborn problem in the financial plumbing - that moving digital assets across different ledgers was the real bottleneck, not the digitization of assets themselves. Under his leadership, Baton's platform now processes nearly $30 billion in daily transaction value for seven of the nine largest western banks, enabling real-time settlement and intraday liquidity management without requiring institutions to replace their core systems.
Modern Treasury is a San Francisco software company that builds payment operations infrastructure for businesses moving money at scale. Its API-first platform connects directly to banks and unifies ACH, wire, RTP, FedNow, and stablecoin rails behind one developer-friendly interface, with a real-time ledger and automated reconciliation built in. Founded in 2018 by three engineers who lived through the pain firsthand at a mortgage marketplace, the company has powered hundreds of billions of dollars in payments for customers like Gusto, Marqeta, Navan, ClassPass, and Procore.
Zach Perret is the co-founder and CEO of Plaid, the financial infrastructure company that quietly powers the apps half of America uses every day. He and co-founder William Hockey built Plaid from a hackathon project in 2013 into a $8B+ company connecting over 500 million bank accounts to thousands of financial apps - including Venmo, Robinhood, and Coinbase. After famously walking away from a $5.3B Visa acquisition in 2021 (called a 'blessing in disguise'), Perret rebuilt Plaid as an independent company, reaching $546M ARR and profitability before raising a $575M Series E in 2025. A symphony conductor's son from North Carolina, he runs Plaid like he leads: with timing, rhythm, and an eye on what everyone else is missing.
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.