Alex Tabarrok is a Canadian-American economist, the Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and a professor of economics at George Mason University. With Tyler Cowen he co-writes the influential blog Marginal Revolution and co-founded Marginal Revolution University, one of the largest free online libraries of economics education. His work spans patent reform, the economics of innovation, high-skilled immigration, bounty hunters, and voting theory, and he became a prominent public voice during the COVID-19 pandemic advising the US government on incentives to accelerate vaccine production.
Ben Reinhardt is the founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab built on the ARPA model to unlock materials and manufacturing breakthroughs that have no natural home in startups, academia, or government. A space-robotics PhD who once built tractor beams at Cornell and taught machines to see at Magic Leap, he became one of the most-read writers on how DARPA actually works, then set out to build a privately funded version of it. He hosts the Idea Machines podcast, where he interviews people who design the systems that produce innovation.
Eli Dourado is an economist and head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute, where he deploys capital to push frontier technologies in energy, aerospace, and other capital-intensive, heavily regulated sectors. He describes his work as a 'sacred quest to increase the pace of American economic growth,' which he argues has stagnated since around 1973. A former regulatory hacker at Boom Supersonic and director of the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center, he is known for influential essays on geothermal energy, supersonic flight, cargo airships, and ending the Great Stagnation.
Specialized Bicycle Components is a Morgan Hill, California maker of high-performance bicycles, components and gear founded in 1974 by Mike Sinyard. It built the first mass-produced mountain bike, the 1981 Stumpjumper, and today designs road, mountain, gravel and Turbo e-bikes alongside helmets, apparel and the Retul fit system. With roughly 1,300 employees and an estimated $500M in revenue, it is one of America's 'Big Three' bike brands and a fixture in pro road, mountain and triathlon racing.
Philipp Skogstad runs Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America - the Sunnyvale-to-San-Jose corridor of the company that invented the car. A Stanford-trained engineer who once managed open innovation programs at SAP, he now oversees an 830-person R&D operation that ships Drive Pilot (the only SAE-certified Level 3 system on US roads), the MBUX infotainment stack, and Mercedes' ChatGPT-in-the-dashboard experiment.
Anita Batho is the Co-Founder and Principal at Torch (torch.com.au), a boutique brand strategy and innovation consultancy based in Sydney, Australia that has illuminated brand futures for blue-chip clients since 1999. Drawing on a career spanning consumer goods giants Unilever (Best Foods) and ICI Paints, and senior roles at Kantar, Anita built Torch into a respected agency known for immersive consumer research, bespoke brand workshops, and commercially grounded innovation work for clients including Arnott's, Telstra, PepsiCo, A2 Milk, Mercedes-Benz, and Moët Hennessy.
Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.
Rob Reis is the founder and President/CEO of Higher Ground LLC, a Palo Alto-based satellite telecommunications company building the world's most compact, affordable, and secure satellite communicator. With roots at Stanford and a career spanning pioneering ventures in laser turntables (Finial Technology), RFID tracking (Savi Technology), and innovation leadership at Texas Instruments, Reis brings decades of deep-tech entrepreneurship to a mission-critical problem: keeping people connected and safe anywhere on Earth, from the backcountry to the battlefield. His flagship product, the SatPaq, uses geostationary satellites with AES-256 encryption and spread spectrum signaling to deliver two-way messaging, voice, and GPS-backup - independent of cellular infrastructure.
Souvik Paul is the CEO and Founder of Aurie, a medtech company that built the first FDA De Novo-cleared reusable intermittent catheter system. A Harvard-educated designer and former J&J strategist, Paul was driven to start Aurie after witnessing a family member's struggle with catheter-associated infections following a spinal cord injury. His Oakland-based startup has raised $14.24M and is pioneering a no-touch, automatically disinfecting catheter system designed to transform care for the 600,000 Americans who rely on intermittent catheters.
Linda Tong is the Chief Executive Officer of Webflow, the visual web development platform powering over 300,000 businesses. Promoted from COO to CEO in June 2024, she brings a rare cross-industry pedigree - from helping launch Google Chrome and Android, to co-founding Tapjoy, to driving product innovation at the NFL, to running Cisco's AppDynamics division. A Yale-educated economist who discovered she 'never felt empowered to build' herself, she now leads the platform designed to fix exactly that problem.
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.
Scott Andrew Shane is one of the most cited entrepreneurship scholars alive, holding the A. Malachi Mixon III Professorship at Case Western Reserve University while simultaneously running Comeback Capital, a pre-seed VC fund backing Heartland startups, and advising Right Side Capital Management. He has written or edited 16 books, published over 94 scholarly articles, won the 2009 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, and manages a personal angel portfolio of 50+ companies - all while arguing, with data, that most things people believe about entrepreneurship are wrong.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in recorded history and the founder or co-founder of nine major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and Neuralink. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself to code at 10, sold his first game at 12, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD after two days to chase the internet gold rush. His companies collectively own 65% of all operational Earth satellites, produce the world's best-selling electric vehicles, and are actively building brain-computer interfaces and rockets to colonize Mars. As of May 2026, his net worth stands at approximately $809 billion.
Eric Emerson Schmidt is a billionaire technologist, former Google CEO, and relentless polymath who quietly shaped the digital age while most of us were still figuring out dial-up. After steering Google from scrappy startup to global colossus (2001-2011), he pivoted to national security advisory, quantum computing ventures, ocean research, and as of March 2025, rocket manufacturing as CEO of Relativity Space. With a net worth around $54.5 billion, five co-authored books on AI, and philanthropic commitments exceeding $1 billion, Schmidt operates at the intersection of geopolitics, frontier science, and Silicon Valley ambition.
Steve Blank is the father of modern entrepreneurship - a Silicon Valley serial founder who retired the day before his company E.piphany's 1999 IPO, then spent the next two decades teaching the world that startups aren't small versions of big companies. His Customer Development methodology and Lean LaunchPad curriculum, adopted by the NSF as I-Corps, have trained 9,300+ scientists, launched ~1,400 startups, and raised over $3 billion. A Vietnam-era Air Force veteran who never finished college, Blank now teaches at Stanford, advises the U.S. Navy, and co-directs Stanford's Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation - applying startup thinking to national defense.
Marissa Mayer is a pioneering tech executive and entrepreneur who served as Google's first female engineer (employee #20) and later as Yahoo's CEO. After graduating from Stanford with degrees in symbolic systems and computer science, she spent 13 years at Google shaping products like Search, Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome. As Yahoo CEO from 2012-2017, she led a transformation effort before the company's sale to Verizon. She now runs Dazzle AI, a venture building next-generation AI personal assistants that raised $8M in late 2025. Known for her meticulous attention to detail, product vision, and ability to scale consumer technology, Mayer has been a prominent voice for women in tech while building products used by billions.
Shervin Pishevar is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and super angel investor known for early-stage investments in Uber, Airbnb, and over 200 startups. A former managing director at Menlo Ventures and co-founder of Sherpa Capital, he has achieved 93 exits in his 27-year tech career and averaged 73x returns on investments. Co-founder and former executive chairman of Hyperloop One, Pishevar championed Elon Musk's vision for high-speed transportation. Currently, he runs the Edison Fund and serves as chairman of Telly, continuing to shape the future of technology and innovation. His journey from an immigrant family that arrived with $35 to becoming a Forbes Midas List investor for four consecutive years exemplifies the American Dream.
D. Scott Phoenix is a deep tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Vicarious, an artificial general intelligence company that raised $250M from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and other tech luminaries before being acquired by Alphabet in 2022. Now a partner at Fifty Years, he invests in scientists and engineers solving humanity's biggest problems. A Y Combinator alum who founded his first startup at 16, Phoenix is a leading voice in AI safety advocacy and believes artificial general intelligence will be 'humanity's last invention.'
Gordon Earle Moore (1929-2023) was the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation, and the visionary behind Moore's Law - the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. A chemist and physicist by training, Moore was one of the 'Traitorous Eight' who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then co-founded Intel in 1968 with Robert Noyce. His 1965 prediction became the guiding principle of the semiconductor industry and fueled the digital revolution. Beyond technology, Moore and his wife Betty donated over $10 billion through their foundation to environmental conservation, scientific research, and patient care, making him one of the most generous philanthropists in history.
Matt Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, is a British science writer, journalist, and hereditary peer whose books - from Genome to The Rational Optimist to How Innovation Works - have sold nearly two million copies in 31 languages. A zoologist by training (Oxford DPhil on pheasant mating systems), he argues that human progress is driven by the bottom-up exchange of ideas rather than top-down planning. Co-founder of the Rational Optimist Society newsletter, he writes a weekly column for The Times and is known for being simultaneously Britain's most prominent optimist about civilization and the chairman who presided over Northern Rock's catastrophic 2007 bank run.
Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Wharton Generative AI Labs, and one of the most widely read voices on artificial intelligence in practice. Author of the 2024 New York Times bestseller 'Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI,' his newsletter 'One Useful Thing' reaches 429,000+ subscribers. His landmark 2023 BCG study on AI and knowledge workers - the 'Jagged Frontier' research - became the empirical bedrock for how organizations understand AI's real impact on work. Named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Bernadette Jiwa is an Irish-Australian author, brand strategist, and storytelling expert who has written 10 #1 Amazon bestselling business books - including Story Driven, Marketing: A Love Story, and Hunch - plus two novels published by Penguin Random House. A former business consultant who began blogging in her forties, she built one of Australia's most-read business blogs, created the Story Skills Workshop on Seth Godin's Akimbo platform, and has become one of the most cited voices on the power of narrative in business and human connection.
Brian Solis is a digital anthropologist, 9x bestselling author, and Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow who has spent three decades decoding how emerging technology reshapes business and human behavior. He coined 'Digital Darwinism,' co-created The Conversation Prism (one of the internet's first viral infographics), and has advised Oprah, Shaq, Ashton Kutcher, and more than 1,000 startups. His 2024 book Mindshift challenges leaders to move from efficiency-first thinking to curiosity-driven reinvention in an AI-first world.
Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955, in Pune, India) is one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - a self-made billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, then went on to back transformative companies including OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, Stripe, Affirm, and Impossible Foods through his firm Khosla Ventures, which manages approximately $15 billion in capital. Known for his contrarian, 'black swan' investment philosophy, uncompromising directness, and audacious predictions - including that AI will replace 80% of all jobs by 2030 and make core services like healthcare and education free by 2040 - Khosla frames his life's work not as wealth creation but as deploying technology to solve civilization-scale problems. A Giving Pledge signatory with a net worth of $13.4 billion (Forbes, January 2026), he is also a philanthropist whose wife Neeru's CK-12 Foundation has reached over 130 million learners globally, and who prefers the title 'venture assistant' to 'venture capitalist.'
James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.
The Samsung Galaxy Z TriFold is Samsung's first tri-fold smartphone — a 309g engineering marvel that unfolds from a pocketable phone into a full 10-inch tablet via two precision hinges. Launched in December 2025 at $2,899, it sold out globally within minutes of each restock before being discontinued in March 2026, with a successor already confirmed for 2027.
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and behavioral economics provocateur, delivers a characteristically contrarian set of predictions for 2026. He argues that AI will initially be weaponized by tech companies and consultants as a cost-reduction tool — what he calls the 'doorman fallacy' — stripping out human value while claiming efficiency wins. Drawing on the Austrian vs. Chicago schools of economics, the history of the electric motor, and a devastating critique of self-checkout tills, Sutherland maps out three phases of AI adoption and ends with a rallying cry to marketers: stop selling what you do, and start selling how you think.