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.