Tulane University is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana, founded in 1834 as the Medical College of Louisiana to fight cholera and yellow fever. Now one of 71 members of the Association of American Universities, it enrolls roughly 14,000-15,000 students across schools spanning medicine, public health and tropical medicine, law, architecture, business, science and engineering, social work and liberal arts. Known for a deep service ethic - it became the first major U.S. research university to require public service for graduation after Hurricane Katrina - Tulane pairs high-level research with a distinctive New Orleans culture.
Rob Shilkin is Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google, overseeing one of the world's most complex corporate communications functions. A former antitrust lawyer from Australia who trained at Clayton Utz and Mallesons Stephen Jaques, Shilkin brings rare legal-policy fluency to Google's communications challenges - including antitrust litigation, AI debates, content moderation, and online advertising policy. His team handles approximately 2,000 issues per year. He took overall leadership of Google's communications in 2023, reporting to Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill, and has been recognized in Provoke Media's Influence 100 2025 rankings.
Jordan Lewis is the General Counsel of Redbud VC and Vice President & General Counsel of The Premiere Group, both based in Columbia, Missouri. A dual-licensed attorney (Missouri and Illinois) with a decade-plus of experience, he bridges the worlds of law, tax, and venture capital - handling M&A, fund structuring, governance, and legal strategy for a pre-seed VC firm that bets on founders shaped by struggle. Before Redbud, he cut his teeth as a litigator at Carmody MacDonald in St. Louis and has been a published voice in Missouri In-House Counsel on biometric privacy and employment law.
Katie Haun is the founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a $1.5 billion crypto and frontier technology venture firm she launched in 2022 after co-leading a16z Crypto. A former federal prosecutor who created the DOJ's first cryptocurrency task force, she is one of the most credible voices at the intersection of law, policy, and digital assets - a former skeptic turned crypto believer, converted by the very Silk Road case she was assigned to prosecute.
Matt Levine is Bloomberg Opinion's most-read finance columnist and the voice behind Money Stuff, a daily newsletter that turns Wall Street's most bewildering moments into something approaching comedy. A Harvard classics grad turned Yale-trained lawyer turned Goldman Sachs banker turned Dealbreaker editor, Levine spent his career collecting lenses before finding the one that let him explain finance to everyone who ever wondered what a 'synthetic CDO' actually is - and why it matters. With over 300,000 subscribers, Money Stuff is the rare financial publication that people actually look forward to reading.
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that powers roughly 20% of all web traffic worldwide. A recovering lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, Prince built Cloudflare from a Harvard Business School business plan competition entry into a publicly traded company with a market cap in the tens of billions. Equally at home discussing BGP routing and content moderation philosophy, he is widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures shaping how the internet actually works - for better or for worse, depending on who you ask.