identity
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Kerry Ok Sells Trust for a Living
She built a career marketing the least glamorous product in tech - the login box - and turned it into a story about who you are online.
Johan Brissmyr
Johan Brissmyr is the CEO and co-founder of Castle, a security company that helps online businesses detect fraud, bots, and account takeover in real time. A computer scientist from Lund University, he started building web products in Malmo, Sweden before moving to Silicon Valley through Y Combinator and relocating the company to New York. Castle grew out of a password-storage side project that revealed a bigger opportunity in behavioral risk scoring, and today combines device fingerprinting, behavioral signals, and analytics into APIs used by companies of many sizes.
Oren Harel
Oren Ohayon Harel is the CEO and co-founder of PlainID, the Tel Aviv- and New York-based authorization company that turned policy-based access control (PBAC) from an XACML white paper into a category. He founded PlainID in 2014 with Gal Helemski and Dmitry Tuchinsky after a decade spent inside Israeli banking security, most recently as Deputy CISO at Bank Hapoalim. He raised a $75M Series C led by Insight Partners in December 2021, bringing PlainID's total funding to roughly $100M.
Wyly Wade
Wyly Wade is the CEO of Biometrica Systems (also operating as Safience), a Las Vegas and Virginia-based company that links physical and digital information to help prevent crime, identify threats, and recover victims. A self-taught coder who published his first video game at age ten and fixed a bug in Lotus Notes 4 while barely out of his teens, Wade has spent more than two decades at the intersection of biometrics, cybersecurity, and public policy. He helped build biometric standards for the U.S. passport, advised the ICAO on e-passports, and was part of the founding core team behind India's Aadhaar, the largest biometric identity program on Earth. Today he is pushing Biometrica toward a privacy-first, biometric-free model of threat and victim detection.
Zain Zaidi
Zain Zaidi is the co-founder and CEO of TransCrypts, a blockchain-powered credential and employment verification platform he started after struggling to access his own college transcript as an SJSU student. Backed by Mark Cuban, Pantera Capital, and Techstars, he has grown the company to 450+ enterprise clients and 4 million users across 9 countries, raised $18M+, launched JustScreen (the world's first free background check service), and earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2026 — all before turning 30. His platform has also helped over 4,000 Ukrainian refugees access medical records.
Aigerim Shorman
Aigerim Shorman is VP of Product Management for Meta's Horizon product, where she leads the platform connecting billions of people across virtual worlds. Born in Kazakhstan, she bootstrapped her way from community college to USC, taught with Teach For America, worked at UBS, and co-founded Triptrotting - a travel startup that raised $1.8M and grew to 150+ countries - before joining Meta where she built the avatar system used by 3+ billion people. One of the most senior women in Meta's metaverse organization, she's also an angel investor backing early-stage consumer and social startups.
Amanda Mull
Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek and one of the sharpest observers of American consumer culture. Writing the 'Buying Power' column, she dissects how everyday purchases shape identity, politics, and society - bringing a decade of retail experience and almost six years at The Atlantic to one of journalism's most under-examined beats.