Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.
Sumaira Mirza is the Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy Pakistan, one of the country's most decorated advertising creative leaders with over two decades of experience across WPP and Publicis Groupe networks. Known for campaigns that blend cultural sensitivity with bold social impact — including 'Message in a Mithai Box,' which provided legal support to abused women — she has served on juries at Effie Global Best of the Best, Spikes Asia, AdStars, and Dragons of Asia. In 2024, she became only the second Pakistani ever selected for the Effies Global Best of the Best jury. She is also an adjunct faculty member, a regular contributor to Aurora Magazine, and a participant in Ogilvy's elite APAC 30 for 30 Leadership Program.
Sophie Buonassisi is SVP of Marketing at GTMfund and GTMnow, where she leads a 58,000+ subscriber newsletter and media brand at the intersection of go-to-market strategy, venture capital, and B2B SaaS. A criminology graduate turned growth marketer, she spent 4.5 years as the first GTM hire at Spiralyze before standing out from 400+ applicants to join GTMfund. She transformed the GTM Newsletter into GTMnow - a full media brand that includes the reacquired Sales Hacker podcast (622+ episodes), a private Inner Circle community, and editorial content reaching 50,000+ founders, GTM leaders, and investors globally.
Amanda Natividad is VP of Marketing and Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the audience research platform co-founded by Rand Fishkin. She coined the term 'zero-click content' — the practice of creating platform-native content that delivers full value without requiring a click — and turned it into a framework, a podcast, a consultancy, and a forthcoming book. A trained chef and former tech journalist before she was ever a marketer, Amanda brings a rare blend of narrative discipline, culinary generosity, and data-driven rigor to a field that often settles for one of the three. Her newsletter 'The Menu' reaches 16,000+ subscribers and was named by Forbes among the top marketing newsletters. She has 200,000+ combined social followers and has guest lectured at Columbia Business School, Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Washington.
Typeface is an enterprise marketing AI platform that orchestrates specialized AI agents, brand intelligence, and agentic workflows to help Fortune 500 companies produce personalized, on-brand marketing content at scale. Founded in 2022 by former Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis - before ChatGPT launched - the company became a unicorn within one year of founding, raised $265M, and built the Arc platform: a full-stack marketing operating system spanning brand intelligence (Arc Graph), purpose-built marketing agents (Arc Agents), collaborative workspaces (Arc Spaces), and enterprise-grade custom workflow tooling (Arc Forge).
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and behavioral economics provocateur, delivers a characteristically contrarian set of predictions for 2026. He argues that AI will initially be weaponized by tech companies and consultants as a cost-reduction tool — what he calls the 'doorman fallacy' — stripping out human value while claiming efficiency wins. Drawing on the Austrian vs. Chicago schools of economics, the history of the electric motor, and a devastating critique of self-checkout tills, Sutherland maps out three phases of AI adoption and ends with a rallying cry to marketers: stop selling what you do, and start selling how you think.
April Dunford is the world's leading authority on B2B product positioning. A former VP of Marketing at seven venture-backed tech startups (collectively acquired for $2B+), she turned a career of accidental positioning wins into a methodology used by 300+ companies including Google, IBM, and Epic Games. Her book 'Obviously Awesome' (2019, updated 2026) has sold 100,000+ copies and redefined how tech companies think about market context. She consults, speaks, angel invests, and runs a newsletter and podcast under the 'Positioning with April Dunford' brand.
Harry Dry is a British solo entrepreneur and the creator of Marketing Examples, the self-proclaimed #1 marketing newsletter with 130,000+ subscribers. Built from a pre-marathon epiphany in Paris in May 2019, his newsletter distills world-class marketing and copywriting into sharp, visual, bite-sized breakdowns sent every Monday. With zero paid ads, he grew an audience of 110,000+ across platforms, earned the endorsement of writer David Perell who called him 'the best copywriter I know,' and turned a $1,000 investment into a full-time business - all while operating as a one-man show.
Katelyn Bourgoin is a Canadian serial entrepreneur and the creator of Why We Buy, a buyer psychology newsletter with 280,000+ subscribers that generates multi-seven-figure revenue. Known as 'The Customer Whisperer,' she spent years as a 4x founder - including a VC-backed startup that ended in bankruptcy - before turning her hard-won customer insight expertise into a media and education business. She teaches marketers to decode why people buy through her newsletter, digital products, and the wildly popular Un-Ignorable Challenge, which sold 200 spots in 6 minutes and generated $116,000 in a single launch.
Kieran Flanagan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zapier and one of the most influential voices in B2B marketing. A former software engineer turned marketing leader, he spent nearly a decade at HubSpot building its international marketing engine - growing the Dublin office from 12 to 1,000+ employees. Today he co-hosts the 'Marketing Against the Grain' podcast with HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar, publishes 'The AI Marketing Generalist' newsletter on Substack, and invests as a Sequoia Scout. He is widely credited with pioneering the B2B creator approach to marketing and is an outspoken champion of AI-driven marketing transformation.
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research platform that helps marketers understand where their audiences spend time online. Previously, he built Moz into the world's leading SEO software company before stepping down as CEO in 2014 after a public battle with depression. Author of 'Lost and Founder' (Penguin/Random House, 2018), he is known for radical transparency about the messy reality of startup life, pioneering the Whiteboard Friday video series, and championing a 'chill work' philosophy that rejects hustle culture in favor of sustainable, sub-30-hour work weeks.
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, NYU Stern professor, five-time New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most outspoken voices in business and tech. Known for his unfiltered analysis of Big Tech, wealth inequality, and generational economics, he built and sold L2 Inc to Gartner for $155 million, co-hosts the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, writes the Webby Award-winning No Mercy / No Malice newsletter, and reaches millions through his Prof G Pod. His books - from The Four to The Algebra of Wealth - have made him a trusted, provocative guide to navigating capitalism in the 21st century.
Vin Clancy (born Vincent Dignan) is a British growth hacker, entrepreneur, author, and speaker who went from collecting welfare in Southwest London to building a global brand as one of the world's most recognizable growth marketing experts. He co-founded Planet Ivy (25,000 views in two weeks, $250k seed funding), pivoted to Magnific (accepted into TechStars London), won Best Speech at SXSW V2V, ran a 100-date world speaking tour, co-authored the bestselling growth hacking book 'Secret Sauce' (nearly $250,000 in sales), and built the Traffic & Copy Facebook community to 21,000+ members. He now operates under the GIGA Venture brand and consults with SaaS companies and startups on reducing customer acquisition costs.
Wes Kao is an executive coach, co-founder of Maven (the cohort-based learning platform backed by a16z and First Round), and co-creator of the altMBA with Seth Godin. She pioneered the cohort-based course category, scaled altMBA to 550 cities in 45 countries, and now helps senior tech operators at companies like Google, Amazon, and Shopify sharpen their executive communication and influence. Her biweekly newsletter reaches 300,000+ readers across platforms.
Basit Abbassi is a Karachi-based marketing and growth leader with 13+ years of experience scaling startups and brands across Pakistan. Known for his bootstrapping ethos and hands-on brand-building, he has contributed to ventures that were acquired by the likes of Careem and the Malak Group. Currently serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Snapp! Box, a Tehran-based logistics platform, he brings a rare blend of service-sector grit and digital strategy to every role.
Ejaz Asi is a Lahore-based digital strategist and serial technopreneur with over 20 years of experience at the crossroads of culture, technology, and design. Co-founder of Chameleon Worldwide - a full-service digital agency serving clients from North America to the Middle East - and ALRUG, a handmade carpet e-commerce venture, he is a passionate advocate of User-Centered Design and Ubiquitous Computing. Beyond building businesses, he shaped the next generation as visiting faculty at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, where he created the institution's first-ever Digital Strategy course. Father of three, avid reader, and a persistent optimist about what technology can do for people.
Zoho CRM is the flagship product of Zoho Corporation, a bootstrapped Indian SaaS powerhouse founded in 1996 that has never taken external funding yet grown to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue and 1 million+ paying customers. Zoho CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management platform used by 250,000+ businesses in 180+ countries, offering AI-powered sales automation, marketing automation, and omnichannel communication—all at a fraction of competitor pricing. Zoho Corporation's wider suite of 55+ integrated business applications makes it one of the most comprehensive software vendors in the world, competing simultaneously with Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and SAP while championing privacy, rural employment, and long-term independence over short-term shareholder returns.