Meta Platforms is the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads - a Family of Apps used by more than 3 billion people daily. Founded as Facebook in 2004 and renamed Meta in 2021, it runs one of the world's largest digital advertising businesses while pouring tens of billions into artificial intelligence (the open-weight Llama models and Meta AI assistant) and wearable computing (Quest headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses). In 2025 it reported roughly $201 billion in revenue.
Fedor Pak is the CEO of Chatfuel, the no-code AI chatbot platform trusted by 7 million businesses for over a billion monthly conversations on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. A serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Russian oil and gas before founding coin-machine networks, ride-hailing operations in Pakistan, and e-commerce ventures, Pak joined Chatfuel in October 2022 and has since steered the company from a chatbot builder into a full AI sales and engagement engine - Meta's top automation partner and a platform that saves clinic owners 30+ hours of admin per month.
Nathan Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Retro, a friends-only photo journal app built on the belief that social media can be better - more intimate, more honest, more for the people you actually care about. A Harvard grad and Dartmouth Tuck MBA, Sharp spent six years at Meta where he helped launch Instagram Stories in 2016 before leaving to build Retro with his co-founder Ryan Olson. Backed by Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, and a constellation of top-tier VCs, Retro hit #1 photo app in Canada and broke into the US top charts in 2025, proving that people still want a social app that actually feels like talking to friends.
Roelof Frederik Botha is a South African-American venture capitalist and former Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied VC firms. Grandson of South African foreign minister Pik Botha, he rose from PayPal CFO at age 28 - overseeing the company's IPO and $1.5B sale to eBay - to become one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors. He wrote the original investment memo for YouTube when the company had 3 employees and a valuation of $11.5M; Google bought it 14 months later for $1.65B. Over two decades at Sequoia, he backed YouTube, Instagram, Block (Square), MongoDB, Unity, Natera, and dozens more, generating over $50 billion in returns for limited partners. He stepped down as Sequoia's Senior Steward in November 2025.
Matt Cohler is one of Silicon Valley's most accomplished yet deliberately low-profile venture capitalists. A Yale music graduate turned McKinsey consultant, he joined LinkedIn as a founding member, became Facebook employee #5 and VP of Product under Zuckerberg, then joined Benchmark Capital in 2008 as its youngest-ever General Partner. His investment portfolio - including Instagram, Tinder, Dropbox, Asana, and Zendesk - places him among the most successful consumer internet investors of his era. Since stepping back from active fund management in 2018, he serves on the boards of KKR, the Yale Investments Office, and the Environmental Defense Fund, and sustains a lifelong devotion to classical music through 17+ years on the San Francisco Symphony board and patronage of the Berlin Philharmonic.
John Lilly is a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, where he oversaw Firefox's growth from 7 million to 450+ million users. A Stanford-trained engineer turned VC, he has backed transformative companies including Dropbox, Figma, Instagram, and Discord, while staying rooted in civic technology as Board Chair of Code for America. He currently serves as a lecturer at Stanford GSB and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram in 2010 with Mike Krieger, transforming mobile photography into a global phenomenon with over 1 billion users before selling to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he launched Artifact, an AI-powered news app, later acquired by Yahoo in 2024. A Stanford-educated engineer with a passion for photography and design, Systrom serves on the boards of Walmart and Snowflake while continuing to invest in and advise tech startups from San Francisco.
Michel Krieger is a Brazilian-American engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Instagram in 2010 and scaled it from zero to 1 billion users as CTO before its $1 billion acquisition by Facebook. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he co-launched Rt.live (a COVID-19 tracker) and Artifact (an AI news app acquired by Yahoo), and now co-leads Anthropic Labs, where he's building experimental AI products at the frontier of Claude's capabilities.
Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist, author, and media operator who has spent her career documenting how the internet reshapes fame, culture, power, and everyday life. After stints at Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, she left legacy media in October 2024 to run User Mag, her Substack-based publication covering tech and internet culture, which quickly grew to nearly 100,000 subscribers. Her 2023 book 'Extremely Online' is a landmark social history of the influencer economy. She is widely considered one of the most influential — and most harassed — tech journalists in America.
Sharon McMahon is 'America's Government Teacher' - a former public school educator turned media force who built a nonpartisan civics empire from Duluth, Minnesota. Known for breaking down complex government topics with facts and zero spin, she went viral in 2020 with a kitchen-table explanation of the Electoral College, and never looked back. Today she hosts the top-1% podcast 'Here's Where It Gets Interesting,' writes The Preamble newsletter on Substack, authored the #1 NYT bestseller 'The Small and the Mighty,' and has raised nearly $14 million for charitable causes through her community of 'Governerds.'
Ryan Peterman went from new grad to Staff Engineer at Instagram in three years, then left one of tech's most coveted jobs to build what he wished existed. His newsletter 'The Developing Dev' has 106,000+ subscribers, his podcast 'The Peterman Pod' features career stories from top engineers, and his hardware company Compose is building an ultra-low-profile ergonomic keyboard. Based in San Francisco, he is the rare engineer who codes, writes, interviews Turing Award winners, and designs keyboards with equal intensity.