Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Hunter Walk is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a self-funded seed-stage venture capital firm he built with Satya Patel after careers at Linden Lab (Second Life), Google, and YouTube. He also runs Screendoor LP, backing underrepresented emerging venture managers. His 'Bottom Up Economy' thesis targets scrappy teams of 5-50 taking on category incumbents - and his portfolio hits like Chime, Plaid, and Gusto prove the thesis works. A prolific blogger, former TV assistant, and forever a product person at heart.
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.
Addy Osmani is an Irish software engineer and engineering leader who spent nearly 14 years shaping the modern web at Google Chrome - leading the teams behind Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, Chrome DevTools, Puppeteer, and PageSpeed Insights. Now Director at Google Cloud AI, he bridges Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit for millions of developers worldwide. Author of multiple O'Reilly books and curator of the Elevate newsletter, Osmani's work has touched over 20 million developers and his open-source projects have become industry standards.
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
Joe Beda is the co-creator of Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine, a software engineer who helped build the infrastructure layer that now underpins the modern cloud. After a decade at Google where he made the first Kubernetes commit on GitHub, he co-founded Heptio to commercialize Kubernetes adoption, which VMware acquired in 2018 for roughly $550 million. Now semi-retired, he advises companies like Tailscale, invests in startups including Bluesky and Edera, and writes about technology at eightypercent.net - a blog named after his belief that a simpler system solving 80% of the problem beats an overengineered one that never ships.
Kelsey Hightower is one of the most recognized figures in cloud-native computing - a self-taught engineer who rose from sleeping in his car to becoming a Distinguished Engineer (L9) at Google. Co-author of 'Kubernetes: Up and Running' and creator of the legendary 'Kubernetes The Hard Way' tutorial, he spent nearly a decade evangelizing Kubernetes and cloud-native practices before retiring from Google in 2023. Known for his disarming candor, human-first philosophy, and gift for making complex infrastructure accessible, Kelsey now serves as Board Director at Civo and continues to shape the future of platform engineering, AI, and open source sustainability.
Laura Nolan is a Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, a veteran Site Reliability Engineer, and one of tech's most credible voices on autonomous weapons ethics. After five years at Google - where she contributed to the seminal O'Reilly SRE book and resigned over Project Maven - and seven years at Slack as Senior Staff Engineer, she brings deep technical authority to both the reliability engineering world and the global debate over killer robots. Based in rural Ireland, she speaks at SREcon, QCon, and TED stages alike, writes the Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack, and holds seats on the USENIX Board and the SREcon Steering Committee.
Liz Fong-Jones is a Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.io, renowned SRE practitioner, co-author of 'Observability Engineering' (O'Reilly), and one of the most influential voices in the observability and platform engineering space. With 18+ years in software engineering spanning Google (11 years) and Honeycomb, she bridges deep technical expertise with fierce advocacy for labor rights, trans inclusion, and workplace equity. She led the Google Walkout Strike Fund in 2018, founded the Solidarity Fund by Coworker, and sits on the OpenTelemetry governance committee - all while speaking at every major SRE and DevOps conference on Earth.
Paul Kinlan is the Lead for Chrome and Web Platform Developer Relations at Google, where he has spent over 16 years championing the open web. From growing up watching his dad repair computers on the Wirral in North West England, to launching Google Web Fundamentals, killing the 300ms click delay, and shepherding tools like Lighthouse, Squoosh, and Workbox into developers' hands, Kinlan has been the web's tireless advocate inside one of its most influential companies. Now he is turning his lens toward AI's impact on the web through his newsletter and blog AI Focus.
Russ Cox is a Distinguished Engineer at Google and the longtime technical lead of the Go programming language, the open-source language he helped shape for over a decade. Known for foundational work on RE2 (a safe, linear-time regex engine), Plan 9 from User Space, and Go's module system, he bridges deep computer science theory with production-grade engineering. After stepping down as Go tech lead in September 2024, he shifted focus to AI-powered open source tooling - building Gaby and Oscar, agent systems designed to help maintainers with the unglamorous but essential work of keeping software alive.
Sarah Drasner is a Senior Director of Engineering at Google, where she leads the Core Developer Web Infrastructure powering Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Workspace. A rare hybrid of fine artist turned technologist, she spent 15+ years shaping how the web moves - as a Vue.js core team member, staff writer at CSS-Tricks, creator of the Night Owl VS Code theme (used by millions), and author of both 'SVG Animations' (O'Reilly) and 'Engineering Management for the Rest of Us'. Before Google, she was VP of Developer Experience at Netlify and a Principal Lead at Microsoft Azure. She is an award-winning speaker, teacher on Frontend Masters, and co-organizer of ConcatenateConf, a free conference for Nigerian and Kenyan developers.
After 20 years of immutable Gmail usernames, Google finally rolled out the ability for personal @gmail.com users to change their email address — keeping all data intact while converting the old address into a permanent alias. The feature launched in the U.S. in March 2026 after being spotted in Hindi support documentation in December 2025, marking the biggest identity infrastructure change in Gmail's history.