David Jaxon writes the Creator Economy Report, a newsletter covering the business of creators and the media industry built around them. Beyond the newsletter and its stated focus on the creator economy and media, no further details about Jaxon could be independently verified through public sources.
Josh Barro is an American journalist who left legacy media to run Very Serious, a subscription newsletter and podcast about politics, business, economics, and culture. A former Republican turned Democrat, ex-host of KCRW's Left, Right & Center and onetime New York Times and Business Insider columnist, he now writes a weekly mailbag called the Mayonnaise Clinic and co-hosts the litigation podcast Serious Trouble with attorney Ken White.
Mike Solana is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, the technology, politics, and culture publication that became required reading inside Silicon Valley's investor class. He doubles as Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, where he runs the firm's creative output, including the Anatomy of Next podcast and the Hereticon conference for ideas that get exiled from polite conversation. The Atlantic dubbed him 'the most opinionated man in America.' Operating from Miami, he writes and broadcasts a contrarian, often combative take on tech, the press, and California governance.
Allison Romano is Vice President of Xbox Digital Marketing and Media at Microsoft, based in New York. With over 15 years leading high-impact marketing and product teams across Microsoft, Google, American Express, and CLEAR, she has shaped how some of the world's biggest brands reach digital audiences. At Xbox, she oversees digital marketing and media strategy for one of the most recognized gaming brands on the planet, blending B2B and B2C expertise to drive growth at scale.
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.
Mel Robbins is a bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and one of the most-booked motivational speakers in the world. The creator of the 5 Second Rule and The Let Them Theory, she turned a near-bankruptcy crisis at 41 into a media empire with 40 million followers, a top-3 global podcast, and books translated into 65 languages. As CEO of 143 Studios, she produces content for corporate partners including Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase, and LinkedIn.
Steven Bartlett is a British entrepreneur, investor, author, and podcast host who dropped out of university after a single lecture to build Social Chain - a social media marketing company that went public at a $200M+ valuation before he turned 28. He hosts The Diary of a CEO, the second most-listened podcast globally on Spotify Wrapped 2025, with over 15 million YouTube subscribers. He is the youngest-ever Dragon on BBC's Dragons' Den and the founder of Steven.com, a creator holding company valued at $425 million.
Tom Bilyeu is a serial entrepreneur, media founder, and podcast host who co-founded Quest Nutrition - achieving 57,000% growth in three years before selling for $1 billion - then pivoted to build Impact Theory, a media company generating over 1 billion views through content centered on entrepreneurship, mindset, AI, and geopolitics. A USC-trained filmmaker turned business builder, Bilyeu channels his obsession with human potential into daily content, courses, live events, and a graphic novel series, positioning himself as one of the most prolific voices in the creator-entrepreneur space.
Amanda Richman is VP of Global Media Sales at Microsoft Advertising, leading a 700+ person omnichannel sales team from New York. A 30-year veteran of media and advertising, she has run agencies including Wavemaker US and Mindshare North America, winning Adweek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year at Wavemaker in 2020. She joined Microsoft in March 2024 to help brands navigate the convergence of generative AI, search, and connected TV advertising.
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Danielle Sadick is an Area Vice President of Strategic Enterprise - Digital Media at Adobe, based in New York City. She leads enterprise-level digital media sales strategy, working with some of the world's largest organizations to adopt Adobe's creative and digital media solutions. Her career spans over a decade in digital advertising and media, progressing from assistant media planner at Neo@Ogilvy through programmatic trading roles before joining Adobe, where she has steadily advanced from account executive to vice president. She specializes in connecting enterprise clients with Adobe's expansive creative and marketing technology ecosystem.
Jackie Walsh is a Senior Vice President of Media at Microsoft, based in Boston, Massachusetts. Operating within one of the world's largest technology companies - with $281 billion in annual revenue and 228,000 employees - she leads at the intersection of enterprise technology and media. Her role places her inside Microsoft's vast ecosystem spanning cloud infrastructure, AI services, productivity tools, and advertising platforms including Microsoft Advertising, MSN, and Xbox media properties.
Lara Cohen is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Media, Creators & AI at Cloudflare, where she leads efforts to help publishers and creators control, protect, and monetize their content in the age of AI crawlers. A veteran of Twitter (two stints spanning nearly a decade), she orchestrated some of the platform's most iconic cultural moments - including Ellen DeGeneres' record-shattering 2014 Oscars selfie - before serving as SVP at Linktree, championing fair creator compensation at scale. Now at Cloudflare, she sits at the intersection of internet infrastructure and the creator economy, building the policy and partnership frameworks that will define how human-created content interacts with AI systems.
Lydia Smyers is Vice President of Customer and Partner Solutions for U.S. Telco, Media, and Gaming at Microsoft, leading a team of more than 400 professionals serving the top 200 enterprises in those sectors. Based in Massachusetts, she has spent over a decade at Microsoft in roles spanning U.S. Education, Americas Northeast, and now the converging industries of telco, media, and gaming. Before Microsoft she held senior executive roles at Oracle, Red Hat, and Ernst & Young, building a career defined by large-scale partnerships, channel strategy, and technology-driven transformation. She was named to CRN's Top 100 Women of the Channel five consecutive years and spoke at MWC Barcelona 2026 on AI and its societal implications.
Lynne Kjolso is VP of Global Partner and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's retail media strategy and global partner ecosystem. A philosophy PhD turned digital advertising executive, she has spent over 15 years at Microsoft shaping search, retail, and commerce media. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024 and The List 2025, she is a leading voice on retail media standardization, gaming as an advertising frontier, and the intersection of AI and commerce.
Stacy Martinet is Adobe's Chief Communications Officer and VP of Marketing Strategy & Communications, overseeing a 200+ person team that handles all stakeholder communications, marketing strategy, events, social media, and corporate social responsibility. A former CMO of Mashable and decade-long veteran of The New York Times digital transition, she bridges the worlds of journalism, media strategy, and enterprise technology with a distinctive voice on AI fluency, creative leadership, and modern brand building.
Afar is a purpose-driven travel media company built around the idea that the best trips change the people who take them. Launched in 2009 from a chance trip to India, it now publishes a quarterly print magazine, a daily-updated website, podcasts, video, newsletters and travel experiences for a community of curious, conscientious travelers.
Babylist is the operating system for new parenthood — a universal baby registry that grew into an ecommerce destination, a content engine, a healthcare brand, and now a chain of experiential showrooms. Founded in 2011 by ex-Amazon engineer Natalie Gordon, the company hit $750M in 2025 revenue while staying founder-led, profitable, and unapologetically focused on the parent.
Ali Albazaz is the founder and CEO of Inkitt, a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing platform that uses reader engagement data and algorithms to identify and publish bestselling fiction. Born in Baghdad and raised in Germany, he bootstrapped Inkitt from a Berlin startup after 140 investor rejections into a $400M+ valued company with 33 million users across three platforms: Inkitt (writer community), Galatea (immersive reading app), and CandyJar (video entertainment). Inkitt has raised $116.8M in total funding, including a $37M Series C led by Khosla Ventures in February 2024.
Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to independent writers. A systems engineer turned serial entrepreneur, Best previously co-founded Kik Messenger, scaling it to 300 million users before pivoting to rewrite the economics of media. Substack - which he launched in 2017 with Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi - has grown to over 5 million paid subscriptions, raised $213M in total funding including a $100M Series C in 2025, and minted more than 50 creators earning over $1 million annually on the platform.
Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
Kevin Lee is an executive at Substack, the subscription newsletter and media platform based in San Francisco that reached unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation in 2025 after raising a $100 million Series C. Substack has grown to host over 50,000 paid publications, with creators collectively earning more than $600 million annually and 20+ million monthly active subscribers on the platform.
Pete May is President and Co-Founder of Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group), the leading media, events, and peer-network platform for corporate sustainability professionals. In 2006, he and Joel Makower purchased GreenBiz.com and built it from a niche newsletter into a global sustainability intelligence brand with flagship conferences, digital media, and professional communities. Drawing on over two decades of B2B publishing leadership at Primedia, CMP, and Miller Freeman, May brought seasoned media-industry discipline to a space that desperately needed it — transforming green business from fringe conversation to boardroom imperative.
Substack is a subscription publishing platform that lets writers, podcasters, and video creators run paid newsletters and own the direct relationship with their readers. Founded in 2017, the company hosts thousands of paid publications, processes hundreds of millions in subscription revenue annually, and has become the default home for independent media on the internet.
Trellis Group (formerly GreenBiz Group) is an Oakland-based media, events and peer-network company that has spent more than 25 years helping sustainability professionals turn climate ambition into corporate action. Its newsletters, research, and flagship events - GreenBiz, VERGE, Circularity, GreenFin and Bloom - convene the executives, investors and policymakers building the clean economy.
Ben Shapiro is the editor emeritus and co-founder of The Daily Wire, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a syndicated columnist since age 17, and the author of more than a dozen books. A Harvard-trained attorney turned media operator, he has built one of the most-listened-to political podcasts in the United States and helped grow The Daily Wire into a conservative media company valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter) is an all-in-one global creative collaboration platform that connects enterprise brands with a vetted network of 50,000+ creators and production companies across 192 countries. It combines a creator marketplace, an enterprise production management platform, and managed services, having processed over $125M in payments for clients including Meta, CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery, Bloomberg, and Starbucks.
Tucker Carlson is an American journalist, commentator, and founder of the Tucker Carlson Network, an independent streaming and podcast operation he launched in late 2023 after his exit from Fox News. He hosts long-form interviews on X, YouTube, and TCN, where his guests have ranged from Vladimir Putin to obscure scientists, mechanics, and dissidents - a deliberate pivot away from the cable-news format he helped define.
Dave Zilberman is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, where he focuses on early-to-late-stage investments in enterprise software, SaaS, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, data, and media. With over 20 years building companies as operator, advisor, and investor, he spent 15 years at Comcast Ventures before joining Norwest in 2020. His portfolio includes landmark wins like Slack (acquired by Salesforce) and DocuSign (Nasdaq: DOCU), and his current bets span AI infrastructure plays like LlamaIndex and security companies like Orion Security.