Dr. Dino Dina is a Genoa-born physician-scientist who spent 15 years building Dynavax Technologies as its President and CEO, shepherding the company through the long road toward HEPLISAV-B, a two-dose hepatitis B vaccine whose CpG 1018 adjuvant technology later became a cornerstone of global COVID-19 vaccine programs. Before Dynavax, he built the Vaccine Group at Chiron Corporation and led Chiron Vaccines to the first-ever approval of an adjuvanted influenza vaccine in Italy. Since retiring in 2013, he has poured equal scientific rigor into his Cimarossa estate on Howell Mountain, Napa Valley - 60 mountain acres of vines and 1,200 olive trees named for the Italian phrase meaning 'red hilltop.'
Douglas Leone is an Italian-born American billionaire venture capitalist and former Global Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the most storied VC firms in Silicon Valley history. He joined Sequoia in 1988 after stints at Sun Microsystems, HP, and Prime Computer, rose to Managing Partner in 1996, and led the firm's global expansion into China and India. With investments spanning ServiceNow, RingCentral, Nubank, Medallia, and Wiz, Leone helped shape the modern cloud and enterprise software landscape. He stepped back from the senior operational role in 2022 but remains a general partner. As of late 2025, his net worth is estimated at $10.8 billion.
Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.