Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she has shaped conservative thinking on the Middle East, Iran, and national security for more than two decades. A former senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer under Jesse Helms, she co-hosts the AEI podcast 'What the Hell Is Going On?' with Marc Thiessen, teaches at Georgetown, and appears regularly across major print and broadcast media.
Yasmin Razavi is a General Partner at Spark Capital, where she leads growth-stage investments in fintech, enterprise software, and AI infrastructure. Born in Tehran and educated at the University of Toronto (engineering) and Harvard Business School (MBA), she brings an operator's lens to venture - forged at McKinsey, Index Ventures, and Snap's monetization team. Since joining Spark in 2017, she has backed defining companies including Deel, Marqeta, Anthropic (leading its $450M Series C), and Qdrant, and now sits on Anthropic's Board of Directors.
Frank Zamani is the Founder, President, and CEO of Caspio, a pioneering low-code platform that has powered over one million business applications in 150+ countries. Born Farhang Zamani in Tehran, Iran, he fled religious persecution as a Baha'i in 1986, was smuggled across the border to Pakistan, and received U.S. asylum in 1988 - arriving in San Francisco with his brother and just $70 between them. After earning a CS degree from Cal State Chico, working on Microsoft's PowerPoint team, and co-founding Autoweb.com (which IPO'd in 1999 at a $938 million valuation), he started Caspio in 2000 with a single conviction: business professionals should not need to code to build the tools their organizations need. By 2024, Caspio had grown to $120.7 million in annual revenue, 15,000+ customers, and roughly 230 employees.
Azalia Mirhoseini is an Iranian-born AI researcher, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence - a frontier AI lab valued at $4 billion that uses AI to design better chips, which in turn train stronger AI. Best known for AlphaChip, the deep reinforcement learning system that now designs Google's TPUs and has compressed chip floorplanning from months to hours, she also co-invented the Mixture-of-Experts architecture underpinning GPT, Claude, and Gemini. With 20,000+ citations and a $335M-funded startup launched in under four months, she is closing the recursive loop between artificial intelligence and the hardware it runs on.