Cognition is the San Francisco AI lab behind Devin, the first autonomous AI software engineer, and the post-acquisition home of the Windsurf IDE. Founded in 2023 by three IOI gold-medalists, the company builds agents that plan, write, test and ship production code, and is reshaping how engineering teams scale.
Material Security is a San Francisco cloud workspace security company that protects email, files, and accounts inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Founded in 2017 by three ex-Dropbox engineers, it assumes attackers will eventually get in - and locks down the sensitive data they came for, instead of stacking yet another perimeter.
Yin Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Pulley, a San Francisco-based equity management platform that has raised $50M and serves over 5,000 startups. A four-time founder and three-time Y Combinator alumnus (S11, S13, W20), she previously built Echo, an Android lock screen app that hit 5 million downloads before being acquired by Microsoft in 2015 (becoming Microsoft Launcher). She founded Pulley in 2019 after a short stint building a blockchain project, driven by a mission to give founders the same informational edge on equity that investors have always had.
Trae Stephens is a co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril Industries, the defense-tech startup that hit $1 billion in revenue in 2024 and reached a $30.5 billion valuation in its 2025 Series G. A partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund since 2014, Stephens has spent his career at the intersection of national security and Silicon Valley - from Arabic computational linguistics in the US intelligence community, to early days at Palantir, to co-founding Anduril with Palmer Luckey in 2017. A devout Christian from Lebanon, Ohio, he frames building autonomous weapons as a moral imperative and became a billionaire in June 2025.
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of technology and venture capital. A Stanford philosophy graduate and law school alumnus, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, pioneering online digital payments before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He then made what became arguably the greatest angel investment in tech history — a $500,000 bet on a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in 2004 that ultimately returned over $1 billion. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies (now valued at over $400 billion), and in 2005 he launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm managing approximately $17 billion that was among the first institutional investors in SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, and Spotify. Thiel's 2014 book Zero to One became a defining text on startup theory, articulating his core belief that genuine innovation is far more valuable than incremental improvement. A self-described libertarian, Thiel surprised Silicon Valley when he endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is also known for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media after the outlet outed him as gay. Through the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $250,000 to young people who skip or defer college, he has championed entrepreneurship over credentialism — producing billionaire alumni including Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Figma's Dylan Field. As of December 2025, Thiel's net worth is estimated at $27.5 billion.
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.
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.