Andrew Chen is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Games Fund and the Speedrun accelerator program. He is best known for coining the term 'growth hacker' in a 2012 essay that reshaped how Silicon Valley thinks about product distribution, and for his book 'The Cold Start Problem' (2021), a landmark text on how networked products escape the bootstrapping trap. Before a16z, he led Rider Growth at Uber during the company's most explosive era - expanding from dozens to 800 cities and reaching 100 million active riders. A prolific writer with 650+ essays and a Substack newsletter, he is one of the most-read voices on growth, gaming, and consumer startups.
Matt Swider is a consumer tech journalist, media entrepreneur, and founder of The Shortcut - the #1 consumer tech publication on Substack. With 25+ years in technology journalism, he went viral during the 2020-2021 PS5 shortage by tracking console restocks, growing his Twitter following from 8,000 to over 1 million in under two years and helping an estimated 400,000 people buy a console. He left TechRadar after nine years as US Editor-in-Chief to launch The Shortcut on November 8, 2021, which now boasts 155,000+ subscribers, a 40% open rate, and 1.5 million monthly website views.
Simon Carless is a British-born gaming industry veteran who spent 16 years shaping trade media and the Game Developers Conference at UBM/Informa before going independent in 2020 to found GameDiscoverCo - a newsletter, data platform, and consultancy focused on how players find, buy, and enjoy video games. With 43,000+ subscribers on Substack and enterprise SaaS clients including 90+ publishers and studios, he's become the de facto Bloomberg Terminal of game discovery data for the global indie games ecosystem.
Carly Taylor is a data scientist, ML engineer, and Field CTO for Gaming at Databricks who blends computational chemistry roots with cutting-edge machine learning to transform how the gaming industry understands player behavior. As founder of Rebel Data Science and creator of the Taylor on Tech newsletter, she advocates fiercely for diversity in data science while holding two ML patents and a track record that includes reducing player churn by 17% at Activision.
Wavedash is a San Francisco-based startup (YC X25) that lets players jump into high-end PC games directly in their browser - no launcher, no download, no install. Built on WebAssembly and WebGPU, the platform acts like 'Steam for the web,' giving indie developers a friction-free distribution channel where they keep 90% of revenue. Backed by Floodgate's Mike Maples Jr., Jawed Karim (YouTube co-founder), Griffin Gaming Partners, and Y Combinator, Wavedash launched its public beta in December 2025.