Numerai is a San Francisco hedge fund that trades the global stock market using a single AI meta-model built from predictions submitted by thousands of anonymous data scientists worldwide. Participants stake the company's Ethereum-based NMR token on their models - good predictions earn more NMR, bad ones get burned. The result is what founder Richard Craib calls 'the last hedge fund.'
Olaf Carlson-Wee is the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, one of the world's largest crypto-focused investment firms managing billions in assets. A Lutheran minister's son from rural Minnesota who wrote his college thesis on Bitcoin, he was Coinbase's first employee, demanded his salary be paid entirely in cryptocurrency, then left to launch Polychain in 2016 with $8 million that grew to $1 billion in under two years. He is a practicing lucid dreamer, a transhumanist, and the brother of two poets — a fact that tells you nearly everything about the household he grew up in.
Taylor Pearson is the CEO and co-founder of Mutiny Fund, a multi-strategy long volatility and tail-risk hedge fund whose sub-advisors manage over $10 billion in client assets. Before building Mutiny, he wrote 'The End of Jobs' (2015), an Amazon #1 bestseller translated into five languages that argued entrepreneurship had become safer than employment. He runs 'Interesting Times,' a monthly newsletter for 27,000+ founders, investors, and executives exploring complex systems, finance, and the future of work. A former college football offensive lineman who once marched for Bolivian workers' rights in Argentina, Pearson cold-called his way into digital marketing at minimum wage before buying a software company and eventually co-founding a hedge fund - all while living across eight countries.
Michael Kao is a veteran macro investor, former hedge fund manager, and founder of Akanthos Capital Management, now running his family office. A UC Berkeley EE/CS and Wharton MBA graduate who traded commodities at Goldman Sachs and co-founded Canyon Capital Arbitrage Fund, he built his career on a proprietary framework called 'Alpha With Asymmetry.' Known online as @UrbanKaoboy, he publishes the Kaoboy Musings newsletter on Substack - covering finance, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and thrash metal - and co-hosts the KAOS THEORY podcast with Grant Williams.
Byrne Hobart is the founder and author of The Diff, a daily newsletter read by hedge fund managers, venture capitalists, and tech founders tracking inflection points in finance and technology. A self-taught investor who landed at SAC Capital without a college degree purely on the strength of his writing, Hobart now co-runs Anomaly, a frontier tech investment firm, and co-authored Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation with Stripe Press. He writes roughly 500,000 words a year and counts 1.5% of the Forbes 400 among his readers.