Nutanix is a San Jose-based enterprise cloud software company that pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), collapsing servers, storage, virtualization and networking into a single software layer that runs the same way in a private data center, at the edge, or in the public cloud. Its platform lets IT teams run virtual machines, containers, databases and AI workloads across clouds without the operational sprawl of traditional three-tier architecture. Now a public company (NASDAQ: NTNX) with more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue and roughly 7,000+ employees, Nutanix competes head-on with VMware as enterprises rethink their virtualization stack.
Joon Sung Park is the CEO and Co-founder of Simile, a Stanford-spinout AI company that raised $100M Series A in February 2026 to build digital twins that simulate human behavior and predict consumer decisions. A PhD in Computer Science from Stanford (2025), Park pioneered the concept of 'generative agents' - AI actors with memory, reflection, and planning capabilities - through a landmark 2023 paper that earned a Best Paper Award at UIST and became one of the most-cited works in HCI. Before launching Simile, he was an oil painter trained in hyper-realism, a background that infuses his research with a rare sensitivity to what makes humans human. His digital-twin platform has already signed CVS Health and Telstra as customers, and his model correctly forecast 8 out of 10 questions asked at a real earnings call.
Prayag Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marvin (HeyMarvin), an AI-native customer insights platform that centralizes, analyzes, and shares qualitative research data for product and UX teams. A researcher-turned-entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator W2011), which raised over $30 million and grew to hundreds of employees before he stepped down to return to his roots in user-centric design. With a graduate research background spanning UC Berkeley's School of Information and Helsinki's Ubiquitous Interaction Group, Narula built Marvin alongside his brother Chirag Narula in 2020 — this time with AI baked in from the ground up. The platform now serves 4,000+ teams and 13,000+ users, including 10 Fortune 100 companies.
Tom Yeh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and the creator of AI by Hand, a wildly popular educational newsletter and community that teaches transformers, LLMs, and deep learning architectures through pen-and-paper calculations. With 62,000+ Substack subscribers, 200,000+ social media followers, and a Feynman-inspired philosophy that you only truly understand what you can build by hand, Yeh has become one of the most influential voices in practical AI education - bridging the gap between black-box hype and genuine first-principles understanding.
Lea Verou is a Greek-American web standards leader, MIT researcher, and creator tools advocate whose fingerprints are on the web itself. She has designed web technologies now baked into every major browser, built 30+ open-source projects with nearly 2 billion npm downloads (including PrismJS and Color.js), authored the bestselling CSS Secrets (O'Reilly, 2015), and served as an elected W3C Technical Architecture Group member. A PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL in Human-Computer Interaction and Programming Language Design, she consults for Google, Mozilla, and Stripe, leads the State of HTML survey, and has delivered 100+ conference talks worldwide - always live-coding.
Shreya Shankar is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's EPIC Lab building AI-powered data systems that are reliable and cost-efficient. A Stanford-trained engineer who worked at Google Brain and Meta, she bridges academic research and industry practice through DocETL (an open-source LLM data processing system with 3.5K+ GitHub stars used by 30+ S&P 500 companies), an O'Reilly book on AI evals co-authored with Hamel Husain, and a Maven course that has reached 4,500+ professionals. She is on the CS faculty job market and gave a faculty candidate talk at Carnegie Mellon in March 2026.