Vlad Chernyshov is the co-founder and CEO of Dasha.AI, a New York conversational-voice-AI company he started in late 2016 to build machines that talk like people - with the ums, the breaths, the interruptions and all. A competitive programmer out of Novosibirsk, Russia, he landed his first paying customer (a San Francisco dental practice) the day after Y Combinator rejected him, raised a $2M seed from RTP Global in 2019, and has framed Dasha's real target not as call centers but as artificial general intelligence reached through speech.

John Lai is a Taiwanese-Australian entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of MixerBox, a Palo Alto-based AI super-apps company backed by Y Combinator. A former competitive programmer who won the Australian Championship and a silver medal at the ICPC world finals, Lai parlayed his University of New South Wales computer engineering degree (with First Class Honours and the University Medal) and a Harvard master's degree into building MixerBox in 2012. The company's portfolio of daily-essential mobile apps has surpassed 300 million downloads worldwide, and MixerBox became the largest developer in the ChatGPT Plugin Store by plugin count. Investors include Y Combinator, Adam D'Angelo (Facebook's first CTO, Quora CEO), and Paul Buchheit (Gmail creator).