Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.
Jonathan Correia is a co-founder of Torch, a San Francisco-based leadership development and coaching platform that has raised over $85 million in funding and generates $71.8 million in annual revenue. With a mechanical engineering background from Northeastern University and prior experience as an R&D engineer at Johnson & Johnson MedTech, Correia brings a product and engineering lens to Torch's mission of scaling human-centered coaching through behavioral science, AI, and data-driven insights. Torch connects organizations with professional coaches and mentors to develop managers, executives, and high-potential employees at scale.
Will Warren co-founded 0x in October 2016 alongside Amir Bandeali, building the open protocol that became foundational DeFi infrastructure for peer-to-peer trading of Ethereum-based digital assets. A former applied physics researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory who left a PhD program in structural engineering to bet everything on Ethereum, Warren grew 0x from a whitepaper into a protocol powering billions in DEX volume and a developer platform serving the broadest ecosystem of DeFi apps, wallets, and market makers. In May 2026 he stepped down as Co-CEO while remaining a major shareholder and board member.
Aperia Technologies is a Hayward, California hardware-and-software company whose Halo Tire Inflator and Halo Connect platform keep commercial truck tires at the right pressure using only the wheel's rotation. Founded in 2010 by Stanford-trained engineers Josh Carter and Brandon Richardson, the company helps fleets cut fuel use, prevent blowouts, and reduce roadside breakdowns across billions of miles of freight.
William Osman is an American engineer turned YouTuber whose channel turned a homemade 80-watt laser cutter into a comedy career. He builds absurd machines, films the result, and somewhere between a ham-and-cheese Vin Diesel and a backyard X-ray rig has become one of the loudest voices in the modern maker movement. In 2023 he co-founded Open Sauce, a creator-driven STEM convention that has since grown to more than 33,000 attendees.
Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.
Amar Hanspal is the co-founder and CEO of Motif, a cloud-native AI-first design collaboration platform challenging Autodesk's Revit dominance in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) industry. A veteran of three decades in design software, he previously served as Co-CEO of Autodesk - where he helped triple the company's market cap from $8B to $24B - and as founding CEO of robotics startup Bright Machines. With Motif, backed by $46M from CapitalG and Redpoint Ventures and named to Forbes' Next Billion-Dollar Startups list for 2025, Hanspal is building what he describes as 'Figma for architects': a browser-based, real-time collaborative workspace for the world's built environment.
Chris Biddy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astro Digital, a California-founded aerospace company that has delivered 35+ satellites and operates 10+ missions in orbit. A mechanical engineer by training (M.S., Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Biddy steered Astro Digital from an Earth observation startup into a full Mission-as-a-Service platform - cutting the cost, schedule risk, and complexity barrier for organizations wanting to put hardware in space. He previously led engineering at Canopus Systems, and has been active in the commercial smallsat movement since its early commercial days.
Fred Parietti (Federico) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, a San Francisco-based robotics company building automated biomanufacturing infrastructure for next-generation pharmaceuticals. Armed with a PhD in robotics from MIT and a childhood passion for Legos, he bet his career on a contrarian thesis: that the highest-value application for advanced robotics wasn't pizza delivery or self-driving cars, but cell therapy manufacturing — where a single batch is worth $400K to $2 million and still made by hand. Multiply Labs has raised over $25 million and announced an $85 million partnership with Retro Biosciences, positioning itself to slash cell therapy costs by 70% and bring life-saving treatments to millions instead of thousands.
Joshua Carter is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aperia Technologies, a Hayward, California-based cleantech company he helped launch in 2010 after spinning out technology from Stanford University. Under his leadership, Aperia developed the Halo Tire Inflator - a self-powered, bolt-on automatic tire inflation system that uses a wheel's own rotation to maintain optimal tire pressure on commercial trucks and trailers. The company has logged over 100 billion miles with the Halo system, saved more than 716,000 metric tons of CO2, and secured over $148 million in total funding, including a $45 million growth equity round in 2023. In 2025, Aperia signed an exclusive automatic tire inflation agreement with Goodyear for its Tires-as-a-Service platform. Carter holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Santa Barbara and an MS in Design Methodology from Stanford University.