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.
Lenny Rachitsky is the author of Lenny's Newsletter, the world's largest product-focused newsletter with 1.2M+ subscribers, host of a top-10 global tech podcast, angel investor in 130+ companies, and former product lead at Airbnb where he helped transform instant booking from 5% to 80%+ of all reservations. Born in Odesa, Ukraine to refusenik parents who emigrated to the US when he was six, Lenny built a lean, high-quality media empire that earns $3M+ annually — all from a home studio in Marin County, with a digital fireplace backdrop and a strict no-meetings-before-3pm rule.
Sophie Buonassisi is SVP of Marketing at GTMfund and GTMnow, where she leads a 58,000+ subscriber newsletter and media brand at the intersection of go-to-market strategy, venture capital, and B2B SaaS. A criminology graduate turned growth marketer, she spent 4.5 years as the first GTM hire at Spiralyze before standing out from 400+ applicants to join GTMfund. She transformed the GTM Newsletter into GTMnow - a full media brand that includes the reacquired Sales Hacker podcast (622+ episodes), a private Inner Circle community, and editorial content reaching 50,000+ founders, GTM leaders, and investors globally.
Tomas Pueyo is a Franco-Spanish writer, strategist, and newsletter creator best known for his wildly viral COVID-19 articles that reached 60 million readers in 2020 and for his Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, where he explores tech, geopolitics, AI, and the forces shaping civilization. A Stanford MBA and former Silicon Valley executive (Course Hero VP of Growth, Ankorstore CPO), he voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write full-time - building a 123,000+ subscriber audience without spending a dollar on advertising.
Brendan Hufford is a content marketing and SEO strategist who spent a decade as a high school teacher and assistant principal before pivoting to digital marketing. He founded Growth Sprints, an agency helping SaaS companies scale from $10M to $100M ARR, and created 'SEO for the Rest of Us,' a free newsletter with 6,000+ subscribers. Known for practical, no-BS approaches to content strategy and SEO, Brendan has worked with companies like ActiveCampaign and Allstate, built and sold multiple online businesses, and is a sought-after speaker and educator in the B2B marketing space.
Katelyn Bourgoin is a Canadian serial entrepreneur and the creator of Why We Buy, a buyer psychology newsletter with 280,000+ subscribers that generates multi-seven-figure revenue. Known as 'The Customer Whisperer,' she spent years as a 4x founder - including a VC-backed startup that ended in bankruptcy - before turning her hard-won customer insight expertise into a media and education business. She teaches marketers to decode why people buy through her newsletter, digital products, and the wildly popular Un-Ignorable Challenge, which sold 200 spots in 6 minutes and generated $116,000 in a single launch.
Kieran Flanagan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zapier and one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. A former software engineer turned marketing leader, he spent nearly a decade at HubSpot building its international marketing engine - growing the Dublin office from 12 to 1,000+ employees. Today he co-hosts the 'Marketing Against the Grain' podcast with HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar, publishes 'The AI Marketing Generalist' newsletter on Substack, and invests as a Sequoia Scout. He is widely credited with pioneering the B2B creator approach to marketing and is an outspoken champion of AI-driven marketing transformation.
Basit Abbassi is a Karachi-based marketing and growth leader with 13+ years of experience scaling startups and brands across Pakistan. Known for his bootstrapping ethos and hands-on brand-building, he has contributed to ventures that were acquired by the likes of Careem and the Malak Group. Currently serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Snapp! Box, a Tehran-based logistics platform, he brings a rare blend of service-sector grit and digital strategy to every role.
The no-fluff guide to building a newsletter people actually open. Published by YesPress, it aggregates expert insights, case studies (Morning Brew, Lenny's Newsletter), and statistical trends to help creators start, grow, and monetize email lists in 2026.
Saqib Arshad Qureshi is a performance digital marketing professional based in Karachi, Pakistan, with 6+ years of experience in paid media, SEO/SEM, and digital growth strategy. Currently serving as Manager of Performance Digital at Publicis Groupe (Starcom), he has previously driven digital growth at TCS Private Limited (Pakistan's leading courier/logistics company) and CodeLabs. Known in Pakistan's digital marketing ecosystem for his expertise in Shopify optimization, lead generation, and performance-based media buying, he brings a results-oriented approach to helping brands achieve measurable returns on their paid media investments.