The Arm software specialist helps manufacturers escape ageing code and keep products useful. Now it is changing its own business model, pairing paid engineering with a free collaboration forum.
Xiaochen Zou, who publishes as Eten (ETenal) and signs his work with the Chinese name 笑尘, is a Linux kernel security researcher turned founder. He earned a PhD in cybersecurity at UC Riverside under Zhiyun Qian, building automated tools that discovered dozens of kernel vulnerabilities, then worked as a security researcher at Microsoft before co-founding Nebula Security (YC S26), an AI-native cybersecurity company where he serves as CEO. Nebula pairs elite human hackers with an autonomous agent, VEGA, that finds bugs, writes proofs of concept, and proposes patches.

Nelson Elhage is a systems engineer turned AI safety researcher who has left fingerprints across the modern software stack. At Anthropic, he co-authored foundational work on mechanistic interpretability and transformer circuits that shaped how the field understands language models. Before that, he was employee ~30 at Stripe and a founding engineer of Sorbet, the Ruby typechecker now used across one of the world's largest payment platforms. His open-source tools - reptyr, livegrep, and ministrace - are staples in the Linux hacker's toolkit. He blogs at 'Made of Bugs' and runs a Buttondown newsletter on computer systems.