growth
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Makram Mansour Tests the Tiny Things - Because Five Pixels Can Cost $1 Million
The engineer-turned-product leader built experimentation systems at LinkedIn and Intuit. Now, at ID.me, he is applying the same habit of evidence to a trusted marketplace - one small decision at a time.
Luke Button Is Teaching Insurance to Stop Asking, ‘Any Update?’
After startups in cloud software, warehouse staffing and retail brokerage, Luke Button found his next company in the least glamorous sentence in commercial insurance: ‘Any update?’ Hedge is his attempt to make the answer arrive before the opportunity disappears.
The CMO Who Treats Marketing Like a Science Experiment
He grew Wayfair from under $1 billion to more than $12 billion, ran marketing at a health-science startup, and now he is selling copy paper, custom mugs, and a TikTok star to the world. The through-line is a stubborn belief that every big idea should first be a test.
Candu
The no-code editor that hands product and growth teams the keys to their own software - so onboarding, tours and in-app messages ship in an afternoon, not a sprint.
Sherpa
Sherpa is a San Francisco startup building an AI agent that makes websites improve themselves. It installs with a single line of code, studies how visitors behave, generates on-brand variants of pages and flows, runs A/B tests on live traffic, and ships the winners - all without a designer, developer, or analyst in the loop. Founded in 2026 by ex-Lindy engineers Ethan Kinnan and Norbu Sonam and backed by Y Combinator (Spring 2026 / P26 batch), Sherpa also optimizes sites for AI agents, tuning agent-facing pages so that assistants recommend a company more often. Early customers report 15-35% lifts in their primary conversion metric within the first 30-60 days.
The Hog
The Hog is a San Francisco startup from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch that packages people data, company data, web search, news, social signals, sentiment, and scraping behind a single pay-per-call API for AI agents and go-to-market teams. It routes each request through multiple data providers using waterfall logic, positioning itself as one endpoint that replaces a stack of tools like Clay, Apollo, Exa, and Tavily. Founded by growth operator Hudson Liao and AI engineer Paulo Nascimento, it aims to compress market research and outreach from hours into minutes.
Kular
Kular is a London-based, Y Combinator-backed AI lead generation platform that finds and books qualified customers for businesses over email, LinkedIn, and AI voice - and only charges when it works. Instead of selling software seats or campaign hours, Kular runs the outreach itself and bills per positive reply or booked meeting, aligning its revenue with the results it delivers. The platform serves over 1,000 companies and is built by a team of MIT, Cambridge, and Oxford graduates.
Fatima Husain
Fatima Husain is the Chief Business Officer at Numeral, a San Francisco-based AI-powered sales tax automation platform that raised $35M in Series B funding (led by Mayfield) at a $350M valuation in September 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $57M. By that round Numeral had processed $5B+ in transaction volume, filed 150,000 returns, tripled revenue year over year, and served 2,000+ ecommerce and SaaS brands across 11,000+ jurisdictions - and has since expanded into international VAT/GST compliance across 70+ countries. A Yale-educated operator-turned-investor originally from India, she spent six years leading growth and product at Airbnb - achieving 20x+ YoY growth on the supply side - before co-founding Mosaic General Partnership (formerly Mastry Ventures) with NBA champion Andre Iguodala. She was an early angel investor in Numeral and joined as CBO to build again, bringing two decades of operational instincts and venture capital pattern recognition to one of fintech's most unsexy yet massive problems.
Gaurav Saini
Gaurav Saini is the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of ChangeEngine, a San Francisco AI platform that merges marketing and people operations so HR teams can run employee programs the way marketers run campaigns. A go-to-market and customer success operator, he has spent his career turning early-stage SaaS companies into scaling businesses, including senior growth roles at WorkSpan and UserVoice, and a stint co-founding the advisory firm GTM Venture Studio. At ChangeEngine he leads the charge to collapse the sprawl of HR point tools into one platform, often citing conversations with more than 100 HR teams as the source of the company's roadmap.
Neha Mittal
Neha Mittal is the CEO and co-founder of JustAI (formerly Just Words), a Y Combinator W24 startup in San Francisco building an AI-first marketing engine that continuously writes, tests, and optimizes copy across email, push, SMS, and landing pages. Before founding the company in 2024, she led Retention and Growth product teams at Pinterest and Twitter, where a single notification tweak - changing "Elon tweeted" to "Elon just tweeted" - added roughly 800,000 users and planted the seed for her company. A computer engineer turned product leader, she earned a master's at UC Berkeley's School of Information and has raised about $2.2M in seed funding from Cloud Capital, Peak XV Partners, and Y Combinator.
Terry Lee
Terry Lee is a Bay Area technology executive who serves as CEO at Cube (cubehq.ai), an AI-powered digital marketing platform that helps businesses run and optimize campaigns across search, social, email, and web from one dashboard. A UC Berkeley graduate based in San Jose, California, he has spent his career across media and marketing ventures including Storyblender, Shin & Lee Corp., and Lachesis Media & News Co. before stepping into the marketing-AI space.
Ross Kennedy
Ross Kennedy is the Global Vice President of AI Startups & Emerging Growth at Microsoft, based in New York. With two decades of experience scaling technology organizations from startup to hyperscale, he leads Microsoft's efforts to help AI startups innovate, grow, and become market makers. Before Microsoft, he was a key force behind Google Cloud's expansion from $5.8B to over $30B in revenue, leading the global Strategic Deal Pursuit division for four years. Earlier, he scaled Liferay's international operations from 200 to 900 employees across 30+ countries. His guiding philosophy: culture beats strategy.
Talal Naseem Janjua
Talal Naseem Janjua is a growth and product operator working at the seam where payments, analytics, and behavior meet. He is Head of Growth at Ace Money Transfer, a UK-regulated remittance company, after building growth and product functions at two of Pakistan's biggest digital-finance players, JazzCash and Zindigi. His specialty is turning channel planning, advanced analytics, and automation into measurable movement in the numbers that matter.
Gibson Biddle
Gibson Biddle is a product strategy teacher who ran product at Netflix from 2005 to 2010 and was Chief Product Officer at Chegg through its 2014 IPO. He now writes the 'Ask Gib' newsletter for 30,000+ product people, runs workshops, and gives talks built around his DHM model: delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. His career stretches from building video games at Electronic Arts to co-founding kids' software firm Creative Wonders to lecturing at Stanford.
Jake Winebaum
Jake Winebaum is an American serial entrepreneur who has spent more than three decades turning observations into companies. He built the business plan for Disney's first internet push and ran Disney Online, co-founded the dot-com incubator eCompanies with EarthLink's Sky Dayton, founded and sold Business.com for $345 million, launched the healthcare marketplace Brighter (acquired by Cigna), and now serves as Executive Chairman of Applied Cognition. A self-described accidental entrepreneur, he is also a serious endurance athlete and the author of a business strategy and growth newsletter, the Strategy Letter.
Jareau Wadé
Jareau Wadé is a payments entrepreneur, operator, and writer who has spent roughly 15 years building commerce and payments infrastructure. He co-founded Balanced (acquired by Stripe in 2015) and helped scale Finix as its Chief Growth Officer, and now leads product partnerships at Ramp. He writes Batch Processing, a widely-read newsletter dissecting the people, companies, and ideas driving fintech. A Tucson native and UPenn-trained electrical engineer who taught in Ghana before the Bay Area, he relocated to Atlanta and invests in and advises early-stage founders, with a focus on Black entrepreneurship.
Douglas Pearce
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.
Jonathan Manalo
Jonathan Manalo is VP of Growth at Microsoft, operating from Central Luzon, Philippines. In this role he drives commercial expansion across one of the world's most influential technology companies - a company whose annual revenue exceeds $281 billion and whose technologies power enterprises from startups to sovereign governments. Based in the Philippines, Manalo sits at the intersection of Microsoft's deep enterprise portfolio - Azure, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Dynamics 365 - and the rapidly digitizing Southeast Asian market.
Muneeza Zaidi
Muneeza Zaidi is VP of Product Strategy and Growth at Microsoft, where she leads cloud ecosystem strategy and AI for Security initiatives. With over 12 years spanning Microsoft, AWS, and Splunk, she has shaped product direction at some of tech's most influential companies. A guest lecturer at Stanford's CS229 machine learning course and a vocal advocate for women in technology, she brings a rare blend of financial modeling rigor and ecosystem-scale thinking to her work.
Martina Tam
Martina Tam is the CEO of Paper, the Montreal-based edtech company that runs one of North America's largest virtual tutoring services for K-12 districts. A Stanford and Wharton alum, she stepped in at the start of 2025 after operator stints at Brightwheel, MasterClass, and Eventbrite, and is now steering Paper's pivot toward its high-impact tutoring program, GROW.
Sumit Pawar
Sumit Pawar is a Vice President of Growth at Microsoft, one of the world's largest technology companies. Based in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India, he operates within Microsoft's expansive global organization - a company with over 228,000 employees and annual revenues exceeding $281 billion. His role sits at the intersection of business strategy and technology growth, working with Microsoft's broad portfolio that spans cloud computing (Azure), productivity tools (Microsoft 365), AI services, enterprise software, and developer platforms.
Chad Powell
Chad Powell is the CEO of FLOWER CO. (Flower Company Cannabis), a members-only cannabis delivery service operating in California. He co-founded BloomThat, a Y Combinator-backed same-day flower delivery startup that was acquired by FTD Companies in 2018. After honing his product and growth chops at startups like Nebia and Boosted, Powell joined FLOWER CO. as Head of Growth, rose to VP of Product Development, and eventually became CEO. Under his leadership, FLOWER CO. has scaled to $53.4M in annual revenue with a lean team, offering 40-50% discounts vs. traditional dispensaries through a Costco-style membership model sourcing directly from California cannabis farms.
Lalith Gudipati
Lalith Gudipati is Co-Founder of Dashverse, a San Francisco-based AI entertainment company building tools to democratize storytelling at scale. With a background in high-velocity growth at Pocket FM and Moonfrog Labs, Lalith brings a data-driven operator's lens to an ambitious creative vision - Dashverse's suite (Dashtoon, DashReels, Frameo.AI) has amassed over 20 million users worldwide. In August 2025, the company closed a $13M Series A led by Peak XV Partners, cementing its place as a leader in AI-native entertainment.
Kushal Agrawal
Kushal Agrawal is a co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Xoxoday, a B2B SaaS platform that powers rewards, recognition, and loyalty programs for 5,000+ businesses globally. He co-founded the company in 2012 at age 22, helping transform it from a consumer gifting startup called Giftxoxo into a global enterprise platform processing nearly 250,000 daily transactions across 75+ countries. An adventurer who has traveled to 70+ countries, Kushal brings an unconventional, storytelling-driven approach to building enterprise growth - serving simultaneously as angel investor and co-founder of multiple Xoxoday sub-brands including Empuls and Compass AI.
Adam Bo
Adam Bo is a Silicon Valley growth operator and behavioral scientist turned investor and active advisor. As General Partner at a12i, a San Francisco firm working at the intersection of fintech, e-commerce, and AI, he writes checks, opens doors, and rolls up his sleeves on growth problems for the founders he backs.
ChenLi Wang
ChenLi Wang is a General Partner at WndrCo, the Redwood City venture firm that builds and backs early-stage technology companies. He was Dropbox's second business hire and built its growth, monetization, analytics and international teams before later running the core Dropbox app. At WndrCo he led investments in CompanyCam, Exa, Material Security, Meter, Socket, Defakto and Webflow, and has served operationally as Chief Product Officer at Aura and Pango.
Anh-Tho Chuong
Anh-Tho Chuong is the co-founder and CEO of Lago, the open-source billing and invoicing platform trusted by companies like Mistral AI, Groq, PayPal, and Synthesia. Born in Réunion to a Vietnamese father who fled the war, she built her career through McKinsey consulting, a formative run as VP Growth (employee #1) at Qonto, and a pivot inside Y Combinator that turned a failed data-tools idea into one of Europe's fastest-growing developer infrastructure plays. Lago has raised $44M in total funding, amassed 9,000+ GitHub stars, and is reshaping how SaaS companies handle complex pricing without handing control to Stripe.
Gagan Palrecha
Gagan Palrecha is a seasoned technology entrepreneur, executive, and investor with over two decades of experience spanning early internet infrastructure, consumer tech, blockchain, and fiber optic networking. Currently CEO of Stealth, a Los Angeles-based fiber internet provider that has raised $22.8M in funding, Gagan has held senior roles at Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Getaround, and NFTSTAR, while also serving as COO at RLY Network Association. A Y Combinator alumnus (2010) and General Partner at Palrecha Capital with 36+ portfolio companies, he brings an engineering foundation from Loudcloud - the legendary cloud infrastructure startup co-founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz - to every venture he touches.
Irana Wasti
Irana Wasti is the CEO of Thought Industries, the AI-powered customer learning and engagement platform trusted by 99 of the Fortune 100. A product leader who scaled GoDaddy's EMEA business past $500M and helped take BILL to $1B in annual revenue, she now leads Thought Industries through its transformation into an agentic AI intelligence platform that connects learning, customer behavior, and business outcomes. With a CS degree from UC Berkeley and an MBA from Harvard Business School, she has spent 20+ years at the intersection of technology, product, and growth.
Ro Bhatia
Ro Bhatia is the CEO and Board Member of PlanHub, the leading preconstruction SaaS platform connecting over 32,000 general contractors, 350,000 subcontractors, and 30,000+ suppliers across the United States. A veteran SaaS executive with 18+ years spanning Google, eBay, Yahoo, and The Home Depot, Bhatia joined PlanHub in January 2022 and transformed it from a slow-growing lifestyle business into a fast-growing platform with 245% revenue growth over three years, culminating in PlanHub's acquisition by GrowthCurve Capital in September 2025.