Jacob Navok is the co-founder and CEO of Genvid Holdings, the New York company betting that audiences would rather steer a story than just watch it. He coined the category MILE - Massively Interactive Live Event - and shipped it with Silent Hill: Ascension and The Walking Dead: Last Mile, where hundreds of thousands of viewers vote, bid, and play their way into canon. Before Genvid he ran worldwide business development at Square Enix and built its cloud gaming arm, Shinra Technologies. He raised $113M in a 2021 Series C to turn interactive streaming from a technology into a consumer brand.
Roblox is an online platform and game-creation system where users build, publish, and play 3D experiences made by other users. Rather than producing its own games, Roblox provides the engine (Roblox Studio), hosting, social layer, and a virtual currency (Robux) that lets a global community of creators turn ideas into playable worlds - and, increasingly, into income. With roughly 132 million daily active users and more than $1 billion paid out to creators in a single year, it has become one of the largest user-generated entertainment platforms in the world.
Allison Romano is Vice President of Xbox Digital Marketing and Media at Microsoft, based in New York. With over 15 years leading high-impact marketing and product teams across Microsoft, Google, American Express, and CLEAR, she has shaped how some of the world's biggest brands reach digital audiences. At Xbox, she oversees digital marketing and media strategy for one of the most recognized gaming brands on the planet, blending B2B and B2C expertise to drive growth at scale.
David Tokheim is a senior executive at Adobe where he has served since 2013, most recently elevated to SVP, CXO Americas Industry and Canadian Sales (April 2026). Previously VP of Experience Cloud leading the Media & Entertainment, Communications, and Travel/Hospitality verticals, he has spent his career at the intersection of digital media, advertising technology, and enterprise software. Before Adobe, he was EVP & GM at Six Apart Media (growing its blog audience to 220 million monthly uniques), SVP at Fox Interactive Media overseeing monetization across MySpace and IGN, and VP of Marketing at IGN Entertainment where he built strategic programs for brands like Pepsi, EA, and Walmart. A UCLA English grad turned ad-tech veteran, he champions AI-driven personalization and content velocity as the defining imperatives of modern customer experience.
Jason Paul is Vice President of GeForce Platform Marketing at NVIDIA, where he has worked since 2003. Over more than two decades, he has led the marketing and launch of every major GeForce GPU generation, pioneered NVIDIA's SHIELD gaming ecosystem, championed GameWorks VR, and now spearheads the company's consumer AI push connecting RTX hardware to over 100 million Windows users. Educated at UCLA and Stanford (MBA), Paul sits at the crossroads of gaming hardware, software platforms, and the emerging era of on-device AI.
Kari Perez is Vice President of Gaming Communications at Microsoft, where she leads global PR and communications strategy for Xbox. She joined the Xbox team in March 2021 after a distinguished career spanning gaming, streaming, and entertainment — including VP-level roles at Netflix Latin America and corporate affairs at HBO Latin America. Multilingual and internationally experienced, Perez has become one of the most prominent communications voices in the gaming industry, issuing statements on major Xbox announcements ranging from Game Pass price changes to leadership speculation.
Lydia Smyers is Vice President of Customer and Partner Solutions for U.S. Telco, Media, and Gaming at Microsoft, leading a team of more than 400 professionals serving the top 200 enterprises in those sectors. Based in Massachusetts, she has spent over a decade at Microsoft in roles spanning U.S. Education, Americas Northeast, and now the converging industries of telco, media, and gaming. Before Microsoft she held senior executive roles at Oracle, Red Hat, and Ernst & Young, building a career defined by large-scale partnerships, channel strategy, and technology-driven transformation. She was named to CRN's Top 100 Women of the Channel five consecutive years and spoke at MWC Barcelona 2026 on AI and its societal implications.
Matt Booty is the EVP and Chief Content Officer of Microsoft Gaming, overseeing content strategy and development across nearly 40 studios including Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King. A Purdue-trained engineer with an MFA, he began his career at Midway Games in 1991 - working on Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam - before rising to CEO of Midway in 2008. He joined Microsoft in 2010, led the Minecraft global team, and has since orchestrated some of the largest acquisitions in gaming history, including the $7.5B ZeniMax/Bethesda deal and the $68.7B Activision Blizzard King acquisition.
Stephanie Johnson is Vice President of Global Consumer Marketing at NVIDIA, leading go-to-market strategy for GeForce NOW, NVIDIA Studio, and SHIELD. With over two decades in entertainment and gaming marketing - from Take2 Interactive to Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment - she joined NVIDIA around 2018 and has been instrumental in scaling GeForce NOW from beta to more than 30 million users. Recognized by the Silicon Valley YWCA in 2024 for outstanding professional achievements, Johnson operates at the intersection of gaming, creative tools, and generative AI, shaping how millions of consumers experience NVIDIA's products.
Fandom is the world's largest fan platform - a sprawling network of 250,000+ community-built wikis covering movies, TV, gaming and anime, reaching about 350 million monthly visitors. Born as Wikicities in 2004 from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, it grew into a for-profit pop-culture reference engine and, after acquiring GameSpot, Metacritic, TV Guide, GameFAQs and Giant Bomb in 2022, also one of the loudest editorial voices in entertainment.
Incode is an AI-powered identity verification platform that lets businesses confirm who is really on the other side of a screen — in under two seconds. Founded in San Francisco in 2015, the company has built a modular biometric platform used by banks, hotels, hospitals, and gaming companies across more than 190 countries. Its flagship product, Incode Omni, handles everything from document verification and facial recognition to AML screening and liveness detection, processing more than 100 million user verifications per year. Backed by General Atlantic, SoftBank, J.P. Morgan, and Capital One Ventures at a $1.25 billion valuation, Incode has been named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for Identity Verification two consecutive years running.
Bradford Oberwager is the Executive Chairman of Linden Lab and CEO of Tilia, the fintech arm powering Second Life's virtual economy. A serial entrepreneur who built and sold companies in personalized vitamins, healthy snacks (Bare Snacks, acquired by PepsiCo), and labor technology (Jyve, acquired by Advantage Solutions), Oberwager led the 2020 acquisition of Linden Lab alongside investor Randy Waterfield. Since then he has staked $35 million on securing money transmitter licenses in all U.S. states to enable real-money payouts from Second Life's Linden dollar economy, grown monthly active users to 600,000, and championed a mobile-forward future for the world's original metaverse.
David Lee is the Co-founder and CEO of Nex, a San Jose-based motion gaming company that makes the Nex Playground - a palm-sized AI console that uses motion-tracking cameras to turn living rooms into active play spaces. A Hong Kong native and second-time founder, Lee previously co-founded EditGrid (acquired by Apple in 2008), spent over eight years as a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple leading iWork for iCloud, then left in 2017 to build Nex. The company has raised $40M across three rounds from investors including the NBA, Will Smith's Dreamers Fund, and Blue Pool Capital, with celebrity backers like Steve Nash, Jeremy Lin, Mark Cuban, Simu Liu, and Thierry Henry. Nex Playground launched in December 2023 at $179, sold 600,000+ units in 2025, and landed on Fast Company's Most Innovative Gaming Companies of 2026 and TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies of 2026.
Dean Leitersdorf is the 27-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of Decart, an AI research lab building real-time world models and ultra-fast inference infrastructure. A Technion PhD graduate at 23 and veteran of Israel's elite Unit 8200, he co-founded Decart in late 2023 with Moshe Shalev. The company went from stealth to unicorn status in under a year, raising over $453M total including a $300M Series C in May 2026 backed by NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Adobe, Toyota, and angel investors including Andrej Karpathy. Decart's products - DOS (inference stack), Lucy (real-time video transformation), and Oasis (the viral AI-generated Minecraft-like game) - position it as a vertically integrated AI company targeting a billion-user consumer app.
Graham Gaylor is the co-founder and CEO of VRChat Inc., the social virtual reality platform he built from a single Reddit-recruited room in 2014 into a $500M company with millions of custom avatars and hundreds of thousands of user-created worlds. A Vanderbilt-trained mathematician and software engineer who backed the original Oculus Kickstarter, Gaylor has spent over a decade building the infrastructure for human connection in virtual space - a platform where avatars meet, worlds multiply, and the line between game and community blurs entirely.
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.
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
Amir Sadeghian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astrocade, the world's first agentic AI game creation platform that lets anyone build fully playable games from a text prompt. A Stanford PhD in Computer Vision and AI, Sadeghian previously co-founded Aibee Inc. - a Sequoia-backed AI unicorn - before teaming up with his brother Ali Sadeghian and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li to build Astrocade. The platform has amassed 20 million users and 140 million monthly game plays across 80 countries within 8 months of launch, backed by $68M from Sequoia Capital, Sea, NVIDIA, Google, and Eric Schmidt.
Sirasom Si is the Chief Executive Officer of Fandom, the world's largest fan platform and wiki hosting service headquartered in San Francisco. With over 350 million monthly visitors, Fandom hosts tens of thousands of fan communities spanning gaming, TV, movies, anime, and pop culture. Based in Bangkok, Thailand, Si leads a company that has raised over $239 million in funding and generates approximately $175 million in annual revenue, sitting at the intersection of community-driven content, entertainment media, and digital advertising.
Susan Kuo is the Co-Founder and COO of Singular, a marketing intelligence platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California that unifies marketing analytics and attribution for the world's top performance marketers. A veteran of mobile ad tech and gaming, she previously built go-to-market strategy from the ground up as SVP of Sales & Business Development at Onavo (acquired by Facebook in 2013), and held senior roles at InMobi, Booyah, Gaia Online, and Electronic Arts. Since co-founding Singular in 2014 alongside Gadi Eliashiv and Eran Friedman, she has led global partnerships and business development while also championing diversity in tech through THRIVE, a community platform she founded to connect and empower women in growth marketing.
Felix Kjellberg, known online as PewDiePie, is a Swedish creator who spent a decade as YouTube's most-subscribed individual and then quietly walked away from the algorithm. He now lives in Japan with his wife Marzia and their son Bjorn, posting irregular videos about parenting, Linux, self-hosted AI, and life off the publishing treadmill.
Asher Siddiqui is a General Partner at Sukna Ventures, a Riyadh-based early-stage venture fund backing software and data-infrastructure startups across MENA. He spent a decade running global M&A and corporate venture at Etisalat (around $15bn in deals), then joined 500 Startups as a partner and investment committee member before settling into the GP role at Sukna. He advises a constellation of funds from Palo Alto to Pakistan and splits time between the San Francisco Bay Area, Dubai, and Riyadh.
Brian Cho is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Patron, a San Francisco seed-stage venture firm investing at the intersection of games, consumer software, and emerging technology. A former founding member of Andreessen Horowitz's investment team and the long-time head of corporate development, ventures, and M&A at Riot Games, Cho launched Patron in 2021 with Jason Yeh and closed a $100M Fund II in September 2024.
Mark Edward Fischbach, known worldwide as Markiplier, is an American YouTuber, filmmaker, and actor with over 38 million subscribers and 23 billion views. Starting with horror game Let's Plays in 2012, he has evolved into an independent filmmaker - his self-financed directorial debut Iron Lung (2026) grossed $51 million worldwide and earned a spot in the top 40 highest-grossing independent films of all time. He co-founded the Cloak clothing line, hosts the Distractible podcast, and has raised millions for charity, all while redefining what a content creator can be.
Tyler 'Ninja' Blevins is the world's most recognized gaming streamer, having transformed competitive gaming into mainstream entertainment. Starting as a Halo pro in 2009, he became the face of Fortnite's cultural takeover - playing live with Drake to a record 628,000 concurrent viewers in 2018 - and parlayed that moment into a media empire spanning Twitch, YouTube, brand deals with Red Bull and Adidas, a Chief Innovation Officer role at GameSquare Holdings, and a co-founded cashew milk brand. With 19+ million Twitch followers and 23+ million YouTube subscribers, he continues to define what a professional streamer can become.
Imane Anys, known globally as Pokimane, is a Moroccan-Canadian content creator who turned a $250 secondhand PC and a Platinum-rank League of Legends account into one of the largest streaming presences on the internet. With over 9.4 million Twitch followers, 6.6 million YouTube subscribers, and a growing portfolio spanning snack brands, talent management, and podcasting, she has spent more than a decade redefining what it means to be a professional gamer - on her own terms.
Rachell Marie Hofstetter, known as Valkyrae, is a Filipino-American streamer, co-owner of 100 Thieves, and founder of Hihi Studios. After a record-breaking YouTube exclusivity run powered by late-2020 Among Us, she returned to Twitch in January 2025 on her tenth streaming anniversary and is now building anime-inspired IP through her own studio.
Eric Wiesen is a General Partner at Bullpen Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm specializing in post-seed and early-growth investments. A two-time founder, former corporate attorney at Fenwick & West, and ex-General Partner at RRE Ventures, Wiesen brings a rare trifecta of legal, entrepreneurial, and investment experience to backing companies that don't fit the standard seed-to-Series-A mold. His track record includes exits through Braintree/PayPal ($800M), Venmo, Makerbot, and TapCommerce, and he's known for hunting non-obvious, non-consensus opportunities where value is obscured from the investment herd.