Ryan Avent is an American economics writer and author who spent 15 years at The Economist, six of them writing the magazine's flagship Free Exchange column. He wrote The Wealth of Humans (2016), a widely discussed argument that automation, globalization and a productive elite are creating a glut of labor that breaks the old social contract of work. He now runs portfolio communications at the investment fund Select Equity Group, writes the Substack newsletter The Bellows, and has a book on belief and the fate of societies forthcoming from Yale University Press.
Douglas Pearce is Corporate Vice President of Product Management for M365 Copilot Growth at Microsoft, where he leads the strategy to bring AI-powered productivity tools to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Based in the Seattle area, he has spent over two decades at Microsoft, previously heading product management for Office Growth and Fundamentals before pivoting to spearhead the company's flagship AI copilot initiative across Microsoft 365.
Afshan Azhar is the Chief Executive Officer of Mural, a leading visual collaboration platform headquartered in San Francisco, California, with over 900 employees and $193 million in total funding. Based in Islamabad, Pakistan, Azhar leads a company that has become a cornerstone of enterprise collaboration - enabling remote and hybrid teams to brainstorm, map customer journeys, run design sprints, and facilitate workshops through an AI-powered digital canvas. Mural serves thousands of enterprises globally, integrating deeply with Microsoft 365, Slack, and other productivity ecosystems.
Chris Toy is the CEO and co-founder of MarketerHire, the AI-powered on-demand marketing talent platform that has made over 25,000 successful marketer-company matches for clients including Netflix, Allbirds, and Glossier. With 20+ years spanning direct mail agencies, a soccer webcomic, comic-book marketing, and now leading a company ranked #71 on the 2025 Inc. 5000, Toy built MarketerHire after running his own agency and repeatedly turning down clients because he couldn't staff them fast enough - then deciding to fix the problem himself.
Leigh-Margaret Stull is the CEO of Mural, the visual work platform trusted by 95% of Fortune 100 companies. Appointed in July 2024, she brought over 25 years of operational and product leadership to the role, having previously served as COO and CPO at CareerBuilder. A Kentucky native now based in San Francisco, she is driving Mural's AI-first strategy around the conviction that empathy, creativity, and trust are the capabilities AI can amplify but never replace.
Nicolas Benenzon is the CEO and co-founder of Humand, an AI-powered HR and internal communication platform built for the world's 2.7 billion deskless workers. Founded in 2020 in Argentina and now headquartered in San Francisco, Humand serves 2+ million employees across 2,000+ organizations in 51 countries. In February 2026, Benenzon led the company's $66 million Series A - described by Nasdaq as the largest in Latin American history for its category - backed by Kaszek, Goodwater Capital, Y Combinator, and notable angels including the founders of Dropbox, Vercel, and MercadoLibre.
Sumir Meghani is the CEO and Co-Founder of Instawork, a San Francisco-based on-demand staffing platform connecting over 4 million skilled hourly workers with businesses across hospitality, light industrial, and warehousing sectors. A Stanford and Harvard Business School alumnus and Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Meghani built Instawork from a Y Combinator S15 startup into a $171.8M-funded company operating in 30+ markets across the U.S. and Canada, earning the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award and back-to-back Inc. 5000 rankings.
Christa Quarles is the CEO of Parallels, a KKR-backed desktop virtualization and remote-work software company spun out of Corel Corporation in 2026. A former Wall Street analyst who helped take Google public, she pivoted to operating roles at Playdom, Disney Interactive, Nextdoor, and OpenTable before becoming CEO of Corel Corporation in 2020. Known for her 'leadership by haiku' philosophy and a track record of driving subscription transformation, she grew Parallels Workspace to 49% net new ARR in 2025 and scaled Parallels Desktop to over one million customers. She also serves as Lead Independent Director at Affirm Holdings.
Siddhartha Agarwal is CEO of JazzX AI, the first end-to-end AI platform built for the mortgage industry. With over 30 years steering product strategy and go-to-market transformation at Oracle, Google Cloud, Databricks, and Freshworks — where he helped drive more than $700M in annual recurring revenue — he now leads a SAIGroup-backed company that is rewiring mortgage lending with governed, auditable AI automation. He holds degrees from Grinnell College, Caltech, and Stanford, sits on the Wisconsin School of Business advisory board, and publishes widely on why digital employees will eventually outnumber human ones by a factor of 10 to 20.
Lucas Hoffmann is a Partner at Outlander VC and Head of Business Operations at HavocAI, a maritime autonomy company. A Wake Forest and Emory Business School graduate with corporate roots at ExxonMobil and Delta Air Lines, he pivoted to venture capital in 2021 and built a pre-seed and seed investing practice focused on AI, SaaS, hardware, robotics, fintech, and govtech. He also founded RiskyBreakfast, a media and content venture, and was recognized as a Siemens National Semifinalist in 2010 for ALS research conducted at Columbia University Medical School.
Jennifer Fonstad is a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Owl Capital Group, with a 25+ year career that spans DFJ, Aspect Ventures, and her current early-stage fund. She helped grow DFJ's AUM from $150M to $3.5B, co-founded Aspect Ventures with Theresia Gouw in 2014, and is a champion of diverse founding teams. A Kauffman Fellow mentored by Tim Draper, she has backed companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Athenahealth, and ForeScout, racking up 8 IPOs and 23 M&A transactions. She co-founded Broadway Angels, is a founding member of All-Raise, serves on the Mastercard Foundation board, and was named to Forbes 50 Over 50 in 2025.
Nancy Xu is VP of Agentforce at Salesforce, the architect behind one of enterprise AI's most-watched platforms. A Stanford CS PhD and MBA dual-degree holder, she founded Moonhub in 2022 — the world's first AI recruiter — raised $10M+, landed on TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, and then joined Salesforce in 2025 when the company brought her entire team aboard. She also runs Xu Ventures, an early-stage AI-focused fund, and co-founded The Gradient, a respected AI research publication. A first-generation immigrant, Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and relentless builder, Xu is now leading Salesforce's charge to make autonomous AI agents accessible to every business user on the planet.
Tiffany Luck is a Partner at NEA (New Enterprise Associates), one of the world's largest and oldest venture capital firms, where she focuses on early-stage investments in AI, APIs, and B2B SaaS. Previously a Partner at GGV Capital (now Notable Capital), she brings deep experience across enterprise software, fintech, and the AI application layer. Tiffany has a rare blend of operating, banking, and investing experience - having worked at Forbes, Amazon, and Morgan Stanley before entering venture. She is known for backing founders obsessed with their problems and for her thesis around vertical AI closing the 'last mile' gap that horizontal LLMs leave wide open.
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian technology entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded Flickr (2004) and Slack (2013) — two landmark products that emerged as accidental pivots from failed multiplayer games. A self-taught coder with a Cambridge philosophy degree, Butterfield sold Flickr to Yahoo for ~$25 million in 2005 and Slack to Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021. His 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' memo became a canonical document in Silicon Valley product thinking. Since departing Slack in January 2023, he has been active as an angel investor with 32+ portfolio companies.
Maren Kate Donovan is a serial entrepreneur and operator best known for founding Zirtual, a US-based virtual assistant marketplace that grew to 400+ employees and $11M ARR before its dramatic overnight collapse in 2015. She turned that spectacular failure into a career studying how people work, building Avra Talent (later Carrara), co-founding Inde.co for remote workers, serving as interim COO at Calm, and writing candidly about the realities of building companies. Currently exploring SMB acquisition and building Zozy, an AI-powered home inventory app, she writes at marenkate.com under the banner 'Build Real Things.'
Taylor Pearson is the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny Fund, a multi-strategy long volatility and tail-risk hedge fund whose sub-advisors manage over $10 billion in client assets. Before building Mutiny, he wrote 'The End of Jobs' (2015), an Amazon #1 bestseller translated into five languages that argued entrepreneurship had become safer than employment. He runs 'Interesting Times,' a monthly newsletter for 27,000+ founders, investors, and executives exploring complex systems, finance, and the future of work. A former college football offensive lineman who once marched for Bolivian workers' rights in Argentina, Pearson cold-called his way into digital marketing at minimum wage before buying a software company and eventually co-founding a hedge fund - all while living across eight countries.
Paige Finn Doherty is the founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed VC firm managing ~$14M AUM across two funds. One of the youngest women in the world to start a venture fund (at age 22), she is also the author of 'Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital,' host of the Seed to Harvest podcast, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Venture Capital (2022). A San Diego native and SDSU computer science graduate, she built her fund from a book she wrote to explain VC to her parents, using Twitter to raise her first $60K syndicate from 17 investors. She invests in 'technical storytellers' building 'clipboard companies' — verticalized AI applied to legacy industries.
Li Jin is a venture capitalist, writer, and creator who coined the term 'passion economy' and spent years investing in platforms that help individuals turn their passions into livelihoods. She served as a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), then founded Atelier Ventures, and later co-founded Variant Fund - raising over $450M to back web3 and ownership-driven platforms. An active creator herself, she writes 'Li's Newsletter' on Substack with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and co-hosted the Means of Creation podcast. In August 2024, she transitioned from General Partner to Advisor at Variant to pursue interests in education, innovation, and creative projects.