Rory O'Reilly is the CEO and co-founder of Knot, a New York fintech building the API layer that lets people switch the card on file across hundreds of merchants like Netflix and Amazon in a single tap. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he built Knot with his brother Kieran after a decade of ventures together - turning YouTube clips into viral GIFs at gifs.com, riding an early Ethereum wave, and running Millions, the gamified debit card that became the biggest challenger bank on TikTok. Knot raised a $10M Series A led by Nava Ventures with Amex Ventures and Plaid backing.
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Avi Schiffmann is a 23-year-old American technologist and founder who first went viral at 17 when his hand-built COVID-19 tracker hit 36 million daily users. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester, built Ukraine Take Shelter to house 100,000 refugees, then bet nearly his entire $2.5M seed round on a single domain - spending $1.88M on friend.com. His company Friend makes a $99 AI pendant that listens to your life and texts back like a companion, sparking a national debate about loneliness, surveillance, and what it means to connect.
Gavin Uberti is the co-founder and CEO of Etched, a Cupertino-based AI chip startup building the world's first transformer-specific ASIC called Sohu. A Harvard dropout and 2024 Thiel Fellow, Uberti co-founded Etched in 2022 alongside Chris Zhu and Robert Wachen after betting that transformer architecture would dominate AI for years to come. That bet has paid off spectacularly: Etched has raised over $625 million (including a $500M round in January 2026 at a $5 billion valuation), and Sohu claims to run transformer inference 20x faster than Nvidia's H100 at a fraction of the cost - positioning Etched as one of the most serious challengers to Nvidia's dominance in AI compute.
Rujul Zaparde is the co-founder and CEO of Zip, the $2.2 billion AI platform for enterprise procurement trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake, and hundreds of leading enterprises. A serial entrepreneur who dropped out of Harvard at 17 to co-found FlightCar (acquired by Mercedes-Benz in 2016), he later joined Airbnb as a product manager and served as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator before launching Zip in 2020. Under his leadership, Zip has raised $371 million in funding, processes over $107 billion in spend, and manages 3.9 million suppliers, while enabling over $4.4 billion in customer savings. He also co-founded Drinking Water for India, building 50+ wells serving 100,000+ people.
Pedro Paulino is the 25-year-old Harvard dropout CEO and co-founder of Tavrn, an AI-powered case preparation platform transforming personal injury law firms. A former competitive chess player who honed strategic thinking before stints at Kalshi and PearPop, Paulino pivoted from building a creative-professional networking app into one of legal tech's fastest-rising companies - raising $21.6M total to automate medical chronologies, demand letters, and client intake for contingency-fee attorneys across the US.
Dustin Moskovitz co-founded Facebook in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, then quietly built Asana into a billion-dollar project management company while giving away billions through Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving). The youngest self-made billionaire in the world when Forbes first named him in 2011, Moskovitz has spent the years since turning wealth into what he believes are the most high-impact charitable causes on Earth - from malaria nets to AI safety - alongside his wife Cari Tuna.
John Collison is the President and co-founder of Stripe, the Irish-American payments giant he built with his brother Patrick from their rural Tipperary roots into a $159 billion fintech colossus processing $1.9 trillion annually. He sold his first company at 17, dropped out of Harvard at 19, and by 26 was the world's youngest self-made billionaire - all while maintaining the understated disposition of someone who grew up in a village of a few hundred people on Lough Derg.
Jared Friedman is Managing Director of Software at Y Combinator, one of the world's most influential startup accelerators. A Harvard dropout, he co-founded Scribd - one of YC's earliest bets - and grew it to 80M+ users as CTO before joining YC as a partner in 2015. He has read over 12,000 startup applications, advised 20+ YC unicorns, and championed hard tech, biotech, and AI at YC. In 2024 he became one of the loudest voices on vertical AI agents being '10X bigger than SaaS.' He spends roughly 4% of his waking hours in Waymo robotaxis, which he uses as a mobile office.