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Ayash Basu Is Bringing a Photographer’s Eye to Public Storage’s Revenue Machine
After two decades of advising brands, building a photography marketplace and documenting people in the street, Ayash Basu has taken on a different kind of frame: pricing, brand and customer experience across Public Storage. His career suggests that growth begins with learning what deserves attention.
Inside the $106 Trillion Infrastructure Bet
Private capital is rushing toward the systems that keep society running. McKinsey partners Alastair Green and Adrian Kwok explain why AI, power and a shortage of skilled labor will decide where the money lands.
The CMO Who Treats Marketing Like a Science Experiment
He grew Wayfair from under $1 billion to more than $12 billion, ran marketing at a health-science startup, and now he is selling copy paper, custom mugs, and a TikTok star to the world. The through-line is a stubborn belief that every big idea should first be a test.
Cenk Bulbul
He earned a PhD studying how feelings drive what people buy, then spent twenty years turning that thesis into marketing for YouTube, Walmart, and now a global bank.
Alex Chatzieleftheriou
He spent five years living out of hotel rooms as a consultant. Then he built the company that lets you move into a city with nothing but a suitcase.
Shourya Vir Jain
Shourya Vir Jain is the co-founder and CEO of RamAIn (YC W26), a San Francisco startup building fast computer-use AI agents that operate legacy systems, desktop apps, and web portals the same way a person would - no API required. An IIT Delhi electrical engineering student turned founder, he is a former McKinsey consultant, previously bootstrapped an AI studio called Genoshi to six figures, and is a FIDE-rated chess player (2118) and karate black belt. RamAIn is backed by Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Nexus Venture Partners and PeakXV.
Wye Yew Ho
Wye Yew Ho is the co-founder and CEO of Proximitty (YC W26), an AI operating system for commercial loans that deploys regulator-grade AI agents to ingest documents, spread financials, track covenants and automate loan servicing for banks, credit unions and fintechs. Before founding Proximitty he led FinCrime and Growth at Taptap Send as the company scaled from $75M to $200M in ARR, and began his career advising banks and fintechs on risk and lending strategy at McKinsey. A Malaysian who studied at the London School of Economics, he is the highest-ranked Malaysian in the history of the Southeast Asian Maths Competition.
Sylvanus Mahe
Sylvanus Mahe is the co-founder and CEO of Flott HQ (YC X25), an AI-native operating system for vehicle fleet management. A former McKinsey and Datadog operator and AI engineer, he teamed up with high school friend Kanvaly Fadiga after running a car rental side business in Cote d'Ivoire exposed them to the fragmented, spreadsheet-and-WhatsApp reality of running fleets. Flott unifies planning, live GPS and fuel tracking, invoicing, and payments into one control center run by AI agents. The company reached $200k ARR growing 45% month over month, almost entirely through word of mouth.
Utkarsh Sinha
Utkarsh Sinha is the co-founder and CEO of Mochatrade, a Y Combinator (Spring 2026) fintech building a platform for traders outside the US to trade perpetual futures on American stocks with up to 20x leverage, self-custodial wallets, and local-currency onboarding. Raised in a middle-class family in Ranchi, he studied EECS at IIT Kharagpur and computer science at Columbia, worked at McKinsey and in engineering roles, and previously built Martian Wallet from his Columbia dorm room, scaling it to 2M+ installs and a $2B+ transaction volume before it was acquired.
Paul Gormley
Paul Gormley is the EVP and Chief Operating Officer of PayNearMe, the Silicon Valley payments company that helps businesses in lending, iGaming, and consumer finance collect payments across cash, cards, ACH, and mobile wallets. He joined in 2023 as SVP of Operations and stepped into the COO seat, bringing a resume that runs from partner at McKinsey & Company to a long run at Google leading Commerce and Payments Partnerships and finance for the Infrastructure and AI/ML groups. He holds a BA from Northwestern and an MBA from Harvard, and is known around the office for long, slow bike rides in the hills above Silicon Valley.
Philip Auerbach
Philip Auerbach is the Chief Marketing Officer of Custom Ink, the Fairfax, Virginia custom apparel and promotional products company, a role he took up in May 2025. A Cornell-trained marketer with roughly 25 years of executive experience, he spent nearly 15 years at McKinsey & Company, where he became a partner in the Sales & Marketing practice and co-founded the firm's Loyalty service, before running commercial and digital operations at Caesars Entertainment, Lindblad Expeditions, Dunkin' Brands, ClearChoice, and Bumble. At Bumble he led global marketing and partnerships and helped scale the business profitably by more than 50%, contributing to over $900 million in annual revenue. At Custom Ink he owns brand strategy, performance marketing, and customer acquisition.
Tao Fu
Tao Fu is the founder, CEO, and president of Attovia Therapeutics, a San Carlos, California biotech developing next-generation biologics for immune-mediated diseases using its proprietary ATTOBODY platform. A biologist-turned-business-leader with more than 25 years across pharma, he built his career at McKinsey, Bristol Myers Squibb, Portola Pharmaceuticals, and Zai Lab before starting Attovia, which has raised roughly $255 million to date, including a $90 million Series C in April 2025.
Daragh Murphy
Daragh Murphy is the Irish-born co-founder and CEO of Imprint, a New York fintech that builds co-branded credit card and loyalty programs for consumer brands like Rakuten, Booking.com, Turkish Airlines and H-E-B. A former corporate lawyer and WeWork operator, he started Imprint in 2020 and grew it to unicorn status, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation in a $150 million Series D in December 2025.
Guy Benjamin
Guy Benjamin is the CEO and co-founder of Healthee, a New York-based company that uses AI to help employees understand and use their health benefits. A former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot with a Yale MBA and a McKinsey background, he started Healthee in 2021 after struggling to navigate his own employer benefits in the US. The company has grown past 15,000 customers, counts Instacart, SiriusXM, and Celonis among its clients, and has raised $111 million in total funding, including a $50 million Series B in 2025.
Jake Cronin
Jake Cronin is the founder and CEO of Siro, a New York based conversation intelligence platform that records and analyzes the face-to-face conversations of field sales reps and turns them into AI coaching. He learned the sales craft the hard way, selling Cutco knives door to door as a teenager and ranking among the company's top reps worldwide, then spent two years as a McKinsey business analyst before leaving in 2020 to code Siro's first product himself. The company has raised roughly $75 million, including a $50 million Series B led by SignalFire in 2025, and works with home services, telecom, and multifamily sales teams across the country.
Paul Blanchfield
Paul Blanchfield is the CEO of Alpha-9 Oncology, a Boston-based clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company developing targeted alpha and beta therapies for cancer. He took the top job in November 2025 after running Lantheus as President, following earlier operator stints at Takeda and Shire and a five-year run at McKinsey.
Stefan Bauer
Stefan Bauer is the co-founder and CEO of Marker Learning, a New York City telehealth company that connects families and schools with licensed psychologists for learning disability evaluations, cutting the traditional cost and turnaround time of assessments. A Yale School of Management MBA and former McKinsey and Morgan Stanley professional, Bauer co-founded the company with Emily Yudofsky in 2021; it has since raised $19.7 million in total funding, including a $15 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in 2023.
Tony Kingsley
Tony Kingsley is a biopharmaceutical executive who runs Stablix, Inc., a New York biotech betting that you can treat disease by protecting proteins instead of destroying them. He took the CEO seat in February 2022 after a career of running one drug company after another - Scholar Rock, TARIS Bio, The Medicines Company - and heading global commercial at Biogen, with a McKinsey partnership and a stint in medical devices before that. In July 2025 he joined the board of Indivior. He holds a Dartmouth degree and a Harvard MBA.
Andreas Wallendahl
Andreas Wallendahl is a co-founder and COO of Tenet, a New York fintech that makes electric-vehicle ownership cheaper by rewiring how EV loans get made. An MIT-trained engineer and former McKinsey consultant who helped build businesses inside Ethereum studio ConsenSys, he now partners with credit unions, green banks and asset managers to originate lower-cost EV financing, and bundles free smart-charging so customers save while they drive. Tenet has raised roughly $73 million in equity plus more than $100 million in committed loan funding.
Bassam Chaptini
Bassam Chaptini is the co-founder and co-CEO of Avantos, a New York fintech building an AI-native operating system for client management in financial services. An MIT-trained AI PhD, former McKinsey partner, and founding CTO of no-code pioneer Unqork, he spent years watching banks and wealth managers drown in siloed client data. In 2024 he and co-founder Rabih Ramadi launched Avantos to fix it with a knowledge graph and AI agents that shadow advisors through onboarding, servicing, and growth. In February 2026 the company raised a $25M Series A led by Bessemer, with strategic backing from Vanguard, SEI, and Guardian Life.
Gregory Price
Gregory (Greg) Price is the CEO and co-founder of Shipwell, an Austin-based logistics technology company building a connected, AI-driven transportation management platform. A blue-collar Houston kid turned MIT-trained engineer, he spent seven years building hardware and algorithms for the U.S. Department of Defense at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, then applied machine learning to Fortune 100 supply chains at McKinsey before founding Shipwell in 2016 to bring automation, visibility, and intelligence to the notoriously opaque freight industry.
Noel Greenberger
Noel Greenberger is the CEO of Nob Hill Therapeutics, an Albuquerque-based respiratory company building DryNeb, a dry powder nebulizer that pushes high therapeutic doses deep into the lungs regardless of a patient's breathing capacity. A Wharton MBA and Northwestern-trained industrial engineer, he spent years commercializing respiratory medicines at Sandoz, ran commercial strategy at Vertice Pharma, and consulted at McKinsey and ZS Associates before taking the helm of Nob Hill in 2022. Under his watch the company won a $1.73M HHS Phase II grant and closed a $3M Series A in 2024.
Jan-Felix Schneider
Jan-Felix Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of Arlo, a New York health insurance company rebuilding coverage for small and mid-sized businesses from the ground up. A former Palantir deployment strategist and McKinsey consultant who grew up in Germany, he pairs a Columbia data science background with a plain conviction that people should not go broke while insured. Under his lead, Arlo underwrites its own level-funded plans, supports members directly, and builds its own technology - scaling to tens of thousands of covered lives and hundreds of employer groups, reaching profitability, and raising a $4M seed in 2025.
Jason Rudin
Jason Rudin is the founder and CEO of Clad, a Y Combinator-backed (W23) startup building what he calls the operating system for telecom construction. From a New York base, Clad unifies project operations and finance so utilities, internet companies, and their subcontractors can bid, manage, permit, and get paid for laying fiber and rebuilding power networks. Before founding Clad in 2022, Rudin spent four years as a product manager at Meta and Instagram, externed at Google[X], and worked as a business analyst at McKinsey after graduating from Penn's Wharton School and its Management & Technology program. A self-described builder fascinated by how physical things get made, he woodworks, makes art, and reads widely when he is not automating the unglamorous plumbing of American infrastructure.
Jen Rhi
Jen Rhi is the founder and CEO of NXN Labs, a San Francisco and Seoul based AI company building an operating system for fashion and commerce imagery. A Stanford computer science graduate and former McKinsey and SoftBank Ventures alum, she left the investor side of the table to attack a problem she kept seeing in brands: creative ideas were cheap, but the production bandwidth to shoot models, garments and campaigns at scale was the real bottleneck. NXN Labs answers that with proprietary multimodal diffusion models that generate photorealistic on-model imagery, video and virtual try-ons without a physical shoot. Two months after founding, the company was backed by Naver D2SF, KB Investment and Smilegate; by 2026 it had landed European luxury clients and a spot on the NRF Innovators' Showcase Top 50.
Kris Sandor
Kris Sandor is the co-founder and CEO of Readyly, an agentic AI platform automating customer support and public services for governments and enterprises. A former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer turned McKinsey consultant, Palantir business lead, and CEO of Citi Bike (acquired by Lyft in 2018), he now builds AI agents that replace decision-tree chatbots across voice, chat, and email.
Leise Sandeman
Leise Sandeman is the CEO and co-founder of Pathways, a climate-tech startup building the data layer for sustainable manufacturing. Pathways uses AI to automate the creation of Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for building-material makers - concrete, steel, cement, glass - turning a months-long consultant slog into a process that takes weeks. A Copenhagen native and former McKinsey sustainability consultant who scaled a recycling venture before studying at Harvard and MIT, Leise co-founded Pathways in 2022 with Alex Cooper after meeting in an MIT entrepreneurship class. The company raised an oversubscribed $2.5M seed round in February 2024 and now serves manufacturers across hundreds of plants.
Abdulhamid Haidar
Abdulhamid Haidar is the founder and CEO of Darsel, a nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over text messages. Instead of apps and video that assume reliable Wi-Fi, Darsel runs entirely on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS, using AI-powered adaptive algorithms to tutor students in Jordan, India and Nigeria. Built during the 2020 COVID lockdown by a Syrian-American who grew up in a family of teachers, Darsel has had more than 120,000 students answer over 170 million math questions. Haidar holds degrees from MIT, Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and previously spent three years at McKinsey. His goal: meaningfully reach 100 million students by 2030.
Brenden Prins-McKinney
Brenden Prins-McKinney is the co-founder and CEO of Duranium (YC S25), an Alameda, California company working to bring critical light metal production - titanium, magnesium, aluminum, zirconium and hafnium - back to American soil. A Stanford Law graduate and Knight-Hennessy Scholar with a research background at McKinsey and a stint as a Goldman Sachs banker, he advised the Department of Defense on reshoring critical chemical production before deciding to build the supply chain himself. He pairs a policy-and-finance brain with chemistry borrowed from the 1950s, modernized so the U.S. can make metals it currently buys almost entirely from China and Russia.
Elisa Piscitelli
Elisa Piscitelli is the CEO and co-founder of Futurely (myfuturely.com), an Italian edtech platform that uses data and structured self-discovery to help teenagers choose what to study and who to become. A management engineer from Politecnico di Milano who went on to McKinsey and an MIT Master in Business Analytics on a Zegna scholarship, she traded a data-science career in California to build a company that now guides over 14,000 students a year across 50 schools and 30 companies. She was named to Forbes Italia's 30 Under 30 in 2021 for her work in education.