Gabriel Paunescu is the founder and CEO of Naologic, a no-code platform that lets companies build and customize enterprise software (ERP, CRM, workflow apps) without a development team, and now layers multi-agent AI on top of legacy business systems. A Romanian-born serial entrepreneur with seven startups and two exits behind him, he started exporting essential oils at 17 and now keynotes at Google Next, mentors at UC Berkeley, and writes about building AI agents that catch their own hallucinations. His core belief: buying software you cannot modify is like buying a horse instead of a car.
Eran Steinberg is a serial entrepreneur, prolific inventor, and IP strategist who co-founded FotoNation in 1997 - selling it, buying it back, and doing it again a third time. Best known for pioneering the automatic red-eye removal technology now standard in virtually every digital camera and smartphone on earth, he holds 300+ patents across imaging, medical devices, and drug development. A licensed USPTO patent agent with four graduate and undergraduate degrees - including both a B.F.A. in Fine Art Photography and an M.S. in Imaging Science - he bridges the worlds of deep technology and creative vision. Currently CEO and Chairman of Vaica Medical and Chairman of FotoNation following a third management buyout, he also lectures at Johns Hopkins University.
John R. Adler Jr., MD is a neurosurgeon, inventor, and serial entrepreneur best known for inventing the CyberKnife robotic radiosurgery system at Stanford University - a device that has treated over two million patients worldwide. Now CEO of ZAP Surgical Systems in San Carlos, California, he leads development of the ZAP-X gyroscopic radiosurgery platform: a self-shielded, vault-free system that brings precision brain radiosurgery to outpatient settings globally. A 2025 inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Adler is also co-founder and former editor-in-chief of Cureus, an open-access medical journal acquired by Springer Nature. With over 300 peer-reviewed publications and 20+ US patents, he holds the Dorothy and TK Chan Professorship Emeritus at Stanford.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Simone Giertz is a Swedish-born inventor, YouTuber, and product designer best known as the 'Queen of Shitty Robots' - a self-styled title earned by building hilariously dysfunctional machines that helped her (and millions of viewers) overcome perfectionism. She parlayed viral robot comedy into a serious design career, founding Yetch Studio in 2022, whose products include the Every Day Calendar (sold at MoMA) and the Laundry Chair - a swivel-rail accent chair for 'half-dirty' clothes that raised nearly $1 million on Kickstarter in 2026.
William Osman is an American engineer turned YouTuber whose channel turned a homemade 80-watt laser cutter into a comedy career. He builds absurd machines, films the result, and somewhere between a ham-and-cheese Vin Diesel and a backyard X-ray rig has become one of the loudest voices in the modern maker movement. In 2023 he co-founded Open Sauce, a creator-driven STEM convention that has since grown to more than 33,000 attendees.
Sanjai Kohli is the CEO of CSpeed Inc., a Palo Alto silicon photonics company building the future of datacenter connectivity. Best known as the architect of mass-market GPS, he co-founded SiRF Technology in 1995, whose chips eventually powered more than 70% of the world's consumer GPS devices. An IEEE Fellow and European Inventor Award winner, he holds dozens of US patents and has spent three decades founding and running companies in wireless, GPS, robotics and now AI networking.
Advay Mengle is a San Francisco Bay Area-based tech founder, engineer, and self-taught fine artist living a genuinely rare double life. As CEO and founder of a stealth-mode startup, he brings over 25 granted patents and deep experience at Google and Microsoft to bear on whatever he's building next. Simultaneously, in 2025 alone - his first year exhibiting - he was accepted into over 18 juried art exhibitions across the US, Spain, UK, France, and Japan, earning an Award of Excellence at Magnum Opus 2026 for his painting 'The City'. Born in Los Angeles in 1989, he holds a degree from MIT and previously served as VP Engineering at Talos Robotics before founding Holvonix LLC, a game and app studio.
Eric Migicovsky is a Canadian hardware entrepreneur who invented the Pebble smartwatch in 2012, raising $10.26M on Kickstarter in the most-funded campaign of its time. After Pebble's $40M sale to Fitbit in 2016, he served as a Y Combinator partner, then co-founded Beeper — a universal messaging app that sparked a major Apple antitrust investigation before selling to Automattic for $125M in 2024. Now back to his roots, he's reviving the Pebble brand under Core Devices with fully open-source hardware and software.
Robert Norton Noyce co-invented the monolithic integrated circuit in 1959 - the foundational technology behind every modern chip - and then co-founded Intel in 1968, where he also invented Silicon Valley's flat, equity-sharing management culture. Nicknamed 'The Mayor of Silicon Valley' and 'Rapid Robert,' he was a physicist, pilot, hang-glider, and former pig thief who transformed both how the world computes and how technology companies are run.
Tony Fadell is the inventor of the iPod, co-creator of the iPhone, and founder of Nest Labs - the company Google bought for $3.2 billion. Known as the 'Father of the iPod,' he holds 300+ patents and now runs Build Collective from Paris, coaching 200+ deep-tech startups focused on climate, energy, food, and robotics. He also wrote the bestselling book 'Build' (2022) and designs hardware for companies like Ledger.