For 154 years the Milan tyremaker has chased a single idea: power is nothing without control. Today that means sensors buried inside the rubber, 3,800 factory-approved fitments, and a grip on the premium car that its bigger rivals can't quite copy.
N1 (formerly Layer N) is a high-performance Layer-1 blockchain built specifically for onchain finance at scale. Founded by DeFi veterans Dima Romanov, David Cao, and Sheheryar Parvaz, N1 pairs an ultra-low-latency, congestion-free execution layer with native financial primitives - an onchain orderbook, atomic transaction bundles, unified margining, and RFQ - so that trading applications that previously had to run offchain can run natively onchain. Every app runs in its own isolated environment with no state congestion, and developers can write smart contracts in TypeScript (with Python and other languages on the way). Backed by Founders Fund, Multicoin Capital, dao5, Kraken Ventures, and Arthur Hayes, the New York-based team is targeting the performance ceiling that has kept serious finance from moving onchain.
Brian Sharp is the CEO of Time Doctor, a workforce analytics platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations globally. A 27-year veteran of building and rebuilding companies, Sharp started his first business at 22 after spinning records as a DJ at 14, and has since navigated every stage of company-building - from bootstrapped startups to $100M+ enterprises. Appointed CEO in February 2026, he champions a philosophy he calls 'Help & Hustle': the belief that high performance and personal happiness are not a tradeoff. He hosts the podcast 'High Performance Happiness' and runs a course called 'Burnout to Balance' for remote leaders.

Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.