Michael Walsh ran CyberSource for the decade that turned a quiet payment gateway into a $2 billion mouthful for Visa. He joined in 1998, took North American sales in 2000, ran global sales by 2004, became CEO in January 2010, and closed the Visa deal months later. He had already engineered the $660 million scoop of Authorize.Net in 2007. Now an advisor and board director, he is the kind of operator who reads quietly and signs loudly.
Bill Coughran is a Partner and Founder's Coach at Sequoia Capital who spent two decades at Bell Labs - where C, Unix, and C++ were born - before scaling Google's engineering organization from a few hundred to over 10,000 people across four continents. A mathematician by training (Caltech BS/MS, Stanford PhD in Computer Science), he oversaw Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search at Google before joining Sequoia in 2011. He is one of Silicon Valley's most seasoned operator-turned-investors, known for his belief in small teams, deep technical rigor, and the kind of coaching that only someone who has actually built the thing can offer.
John Collison is the President and co-founder of Stripe, the Irish-American payments giant he built with his brother Patrick from their rural Tipperary roots into a $159 billion fintech colossus processing $1.9 trillion annually. He sold his first company at 17, dropped out of Harvard at 19, and by 26 was the world's youngest self-made billionaire - all while maintaining the understated disposition of someone who grew up in a village of a few hundred people on Lough Derg.