Pratik Thakker started with a carrom board. The market got bigger.
A Diwali stall, five free websites, and a career built between countries. The founder of INSIDEA has spent years finding customers for ideas that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Eric Owski and the problem waiting in the garage
Before Treehouse, Eric Owski built an app for rescuing family photographs and helped LinkedIn make sense of the labor market. Now he is working on the awkward distance between buying an electric car and plugging it in at home.
Sid Viswanathan and the Business Card That Wouldn’t Die
He helped turn business cards into phone contacts, sold CardMunch to LinkedIn, and went on to co-found Truepill. Years later, a fresh stack of printed cards brought Sid Viswanathan back to a familiar problem: how people actually connect.
Justin Nassiri and the Trouble With Looking Successful
He raised venture money, sold companies, and still called the decade a failure. At Executive Presence, the former submarine officer is building a business around the stories a polished résumé leaves out.
Swaroop Jagadish and the Trouble with Knowing Too Much
At Airbnb, Swaroop Jagadish helped people find and trust their data. Now the DataHub co-founder and CEO is taking on a more demanding audience: AI agents that need the same institutional knowledge, without a colleague to ask.
Daniel Shapero and the advantage of starting over
Before he became LinkedIn’s CEO, Daniel Shapero traded a sales leadership job for a beginner’s place in product. His career makes a case for taking your ambition seriously enough to change direction.
Eduardo Vivas and the expensive mistake that became Curated
The Curated co-founder bought the wrong gear, found the right advice, and built a business around the difference. His career runs from job matching at Bright and LinkedIn to expert commerce, Flip, and the AppLovin board.
Oby Sumampouw and the interview that needed rewriting
After 13 years in the United States, Oby Sumampouw returned to Indonesia to help build Cermati. The engineer brought experience from LinkedIn and Oracle - and soon found reasons to revise his own playbook.
Blake Buisson Left the Straight Line for a Scatter Plot
After 12 years at LinkedIn, Blake Buisson chose unfamiliar terrain. One first-time CMO role, one AI product launch, and one more category jump later, he is bringing his appetite for hard problems to Anrok.
Makram Mansour Tests the Tiny Things - Because Five Pixels Can Cost $1 Million
The engineer-turned-product leader built experimentation systems at LinkedIn and Intuit. Now, at ID.me, he is applying the same habit of evidence to a trusted marketplace - one small decision at a time.
Emily Ketchen
She spent 14 years selling other companies' ideas before she got to shape one of the world's biggest tech brands. Now she is trying to teach a 70,000-person company to market like it grew up online.
Mike Derezin
Mike Derezin is a technology executive and lifelong entrepreneur who became CEO of Teaching Strategies, an early-childhood education company, in May 2025. He spent nearly a decade at LinkedIn, where he helped launch and scale LinkedIn Sales Solutions (Sales Navigator) and later ran LinkedIn Learning Solutions, growing it into one of the largest professional-development platforms in the world. Before LinkedIn he founded companies including Porvenir and VoxPop, advised Fortune 500 firms as a Bain & Company consultant, and taught elementary-school computer classes in Oakland and Santiago, Chile.
Vitaly Gordon
Vitaly Gordon is the co-founder and CEO of Faros AI, an AI-native engineering intelligence platform he started in 2019 with former Salesforce colleagues. Before Faros, he founded Salesforce Einstein and led it as VP of Engineering and Data Science, scaling it from zero to a platform serving billions of predictions per day. Earlier in his career he was a data science lead at LinkedIn and a data science manager at LivePerson. He now builds tooling that helps engineering organizations measure and improve productivity, and navigate the shift to AI-augmented software development.
Max Kauderer
Max Kauderer is the co-founder and CEO of Yuzu Health, a New York-based third-party administrator building an operating system for health insurance. After stints at LinkedIn, Capital One, and Bain & Company, he started Yuzu in 2022 with Russell Pekala and Ryan Lee to let small businesses spin up flexible, transparent health plans in days rather than months. Yuzu raised a $35M Series A in April 2026 led by General Catalyst and Chemistry, bringing total funding to about $40M.
David Chevalier
David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, a Paris-born sales-tech company that bridges LinkedIn and the CRM. He and Romain Ginestou dreamed up the tool during an exchange at UC Berkeley after getting fed up with copy-pasting prospects into their CRM. Launched as Leadjet, the company bootstrapped to over 1,500 paying customers and 1M EUR ARR with no sales team before rebranding to Surfe and raising a 4M EUR seed round in 2022. Customers include Google, Uber, Spendesk, Mirakl and Opendoor. Chevalier is a vocal advocate for keeping the human in B2B selling, even as he builds tools to automate the busywork around it.
Richard Meng
Richard Meng is the co-founder and CEO of Roe AI, a Y Combinator-backed (W24) startup building an AI-powered data warehouse that lets data teams query unstructured, multimodal data - documents, images, web pages, video - with plain SQL. A UC Berkeley CS and Statistics double major, he previously led generative AI engineering at Snowflake and worked on the Skills and Knowledge Graph products at LinkedIn before founding Roe AI in 2023 to solve a problem that nagged him for a decade: the 80% of enterprise data that never gets used because it isn't in neat rows and columns.
Muhammad Zubair Khan
Muhammad Zubair Khan is a professional with a Pakistan-registered LinkedIn presence under the handle mzubairmehsood. Beyond his LinkedIn profile, verifiable public details about his career, role, and background are limited, so this profile records only what can be confirmed from public sources and leaves the rest open rather than guessing.
Usama Hamid Hotiana
Usama Hamid Hotiana maintains a professional presence on LinkedIn. Beyond that verified profile, no further public record could be confirmed through open web research. The Hotiana surname is a Punjabi family name most associated with the Lahore region of Pakistan, but no specific biographical details for this individual were verifiable, and none have been invented here.
Lewis Howes
Lewis Howes is a former professional athlete turned media entrepreneur, best known as the host of 'The School of Greatness' podcast - one of the world's top podcasts with over 500 million downloads. A three-time New York Times bestselling author, Howes transformed a career-ending wrist injury and a spell sleeping on his sister's couch into a multi-platform media empire spanning podcasts, books, television, and the Greatness Network. Recognized by the Obama White House as one of the top 100 entrepreneurs under 30, he has interviewed everyone from Tony Robbins to Alanis Morissette.
Jay Kreps
Jay Kreps is the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the data-streaming company built around Apache Kafka, the open-source platform he co-created at LinkedIn in 2010. In December 2025, IBM announced a deal to acquire Confluent for roughly $11 billion. He also serves on Anthropic's Board of Directors and wrote the book I Heart Logs.
Josiah Ong
Josiah Ong is a Senior Deal Desk Analyst at Mixpanel, the San Francisco-based product analytics platform. A National University of Singapore graduate with First Class Honours in Business Administration, he brings over five years of deal desk and sales strategy expertise - spanning LinkedIn's Asia-Pacific channel partner network and Mixpanel's global commercial operations. Known for his advocacy around inclusion and awareness, Josiah combines analytical rigour with a genuine commitment to people and community.
DJ Patil
DJ Patil is a General Partner at GreatPoint Ventures in San Francisco. He coined the modern title 'data scientist' while at LinkedIn, served as the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist under President Obama, and was CTO of the Biden-Harris Transition. He now invests in healthcare, enterprise tech, and national security.
Yuval Bachar
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of EdgeCloudLink (ECL), the company building the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered modular data centers. A 20+ year veteran of hyperscale infrastructure at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook/Meta, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure, Bachar co-founded the Open19 open hardware standards project and holds eight U.S. patents. At ECL, he is reimagining what a data center can be - deploying capacity in nine months (vs. the industry's 3-4 years), generating zero emissions, and producing cooling water as a byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells. In May 2024, ECL unveiled the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered AI data center in Mountain View, California, and Lambda deployed the first hydrogen-powered NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems there. ECL's TerraSite-TX1 near Houston is planned as a 1-gigawatt AI factory on 600 acres.
Kevin Scott
Kevin Scott is the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft, where he has served since January 2017 under CEO Satya Nadella. A computer scientist from Gladys, Virginia, Scott rose from a working-class background to become one of the most influential technologists in the world, architecting Microsoft's landmark partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot suite, and the 'agentic web' vision. Before Microsoft, he held senior engineering roles at Google, AdMob, and LinkedIn, where he led the infrastructure overhaul known as 'Operation InVersion.' He is also a Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling author of 'Reprogramming the American Dream' (2020), which argues that AI must be harnessed to serve rural and working-class communities, not just coastal elites.
Tomer Cohen
Tomer Cohen spent 14 years reshaping LinkedIn from a dusty resume repository into a platform used by a billion professionals daily. As Chief Product Officer, he oversaw the transformation of the feed, led the charge into AI-first product development, and coined the 'Full Stack Builder' model that is rewriting how product teams work. Born in Beer Sheba to Tunisian immigrant parents who lived in transit camps, he coded BASIC at age 10, served in IDF intelligence, backpacked through Latin America and Southeast Asia, earned an MBA from Stanford, and arrived at LinkedIn in 2012 - leaving more than a decade later as one of the most influential product minds in Silicon Valley.
John Eng
John Eng is the Funding Ecosystem Partner at Right Side Capital Management, a San Francisco-based VC firm that has deployed $250M+ across 8 funds into 2,200+ early-stage B2B startups since 2012. With 25 years in B2B marketing and partnerships leadership at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Parallels - plus CMO stints at Tradeshift, Remix, NewVoiceMedia, and Swiftly - Eng brings rare operator-investor credibility to RSCM's sprawling portfolio. He writes $50K-$200K checks into pre-seed B2B startups with real traction, helping founders navigate fundraising and growth through RSCM's operating platform.
David Sze
David Sze is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners who built the firm's consumer investing franchise from scratch, backing Facebook at a $500M valuation in 2006, LinkedIn when it had 1 million users in 2004, Discord in 2016, and Roblox before it became a household name. A former operator at Excite, Electronic Arts, and HBO, he ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012 and remains one of Silicon Valley's most decorated consumer internet investors. He is a Yale trustee, Rockefeller University board member, and advisor to McLaren Racing.
Matt Cohler
Matt Cohler is one of Silicon Valley's most accomplished yet deliberately low-profile venture capitalists. A Yale music graduate turned McKinsey consultant, he joined LinkedIn as a founding member, became Facebook employee #5 and VP of Product under Zuckerberg, then joined Benchmark Capital in 2008 as its youngest-ever General Partner. His investment portfolio - including Instagram, Tinder, Dropbox, Asana, and Zendesk - places him among the most successful consumer internet investors of his era. Since stepping back from active fund management in 2018, he serves on the boards of KKR, the Yale Investments Office, and the Environmental Defense Fund, and sustains a lifelong devotion to classical music through 17+ years on the San Francisco Symphony board and patronage of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Keith Rabois
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.
Josh Spector
Josh Spector is a content strategist, newsletter creator, and solopreneur who helps businesses and creative entrepreneurs get more clients from their content. He runs For The Interested, a newsletter with 35,000+ subscribers, and previously spent 5.5 years growing the Oscars' social media following from 300K to 10 million — including overseeing the Ellen DeGeneres selfie that broke Twitter. He now operates a multi-six-figure consulting and creator business with zero outbound marketing.