media-technology
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Hector Botero Has Spent 30 Years Rewiring the Newswire
Before targeted ads and answer engines became the communications industry's new vocabulary, Hector Botero was already treating distribution as a problem of audience, language and proof. Now his newswire playbook is moving from Google-era targeting into AI-era discovery.
Kelly Jura Put Listening at the Center of the Product
The Qwoted CXO has built a career around a patient idea: before changing a product, a brand or a workplace, learn how people actually experience it.
Bant Breen Built a Career on a Simple Bet: People Trust People
Long before executive visibility became a boardroom concern, Breen was building the machinery behind digital reputation. His second act with Qnary began with a pointed question from his father: after early recognition, what would he do next?
Geoff Stedman Makes the Invisible Machinery of Television Make Sense
For more than two decades, the SDVI chief marketing officer has translated servers, storage, and cloud workflows into a language executives can act on. His favorite word may be “builder.” His best material is what happens after the building begins.
Melanie Nelson Put an AI Rep on the Night Shift - Then the Numbers Woke Up
The Rightsline CMO has spent a career making invisible infrastructure legible. Her latest move gave an AI sales agent the unanswered website traffic - and gave the board numbers it could understand.
Nadia Khan Makes the Invisible Work Visible
An MBA project became a career in broadcast technology. At LTN, Nadia Khan has learned to market the machinery viewers never see by listening closely, translating clearly, and letting specialists do their best work.
Becky Jones Has Spent 25 Years Making Advertising Feel Human
An internship pulled her toward cable. A research job got her through the door. At Viamedia, Becky Jones turned the supporting work of marketing into a 25-year study of how people, culture and technology move together.
Shahid Butt Has Spent a Career Making Television Behave More Like the Internet
From bargain broadband to live TV on a laptop and addressable ads on offline set-top boxes, Shahid Butt's career follows one persistent idea: make complicated media technology useful to ordinary people.
Stefan Lederer Put the Invisible Machinery of Streaming on Play
A university research project became a developer platform, an Emmy-winning encoding technology, and a lesson in how open work can travel farther than guarded ideas.
Blair Harrison Has Been Rebuilding Television Since Before It Had a Skip Button
The Frequency founder has spent three decades making video easier to find, program and distribute. His latest bet is that television's next control room will be software that can learn.
Daniel Anstandig Has Spent a Career Teaching Old Media New Moves
He started in a small Ohio radio station at nine. Now the Futuri founder is betting that the useful future of AI belongs to operators who listen before they automate.
Sara Beykpour
Sara Beykpour is the co-founder and CEO of Particle, an AI-powered news app that summarizes the day's stories and shows readers how coverage differs across the political spectrum. She spent more than a decade at Twitter shaping products like Vine, Periscope, and Twitter Blue before leaving in 2022 to build Particle with former Twitter engineer Marcel Molina. The company launched publicly in November 2024 and has raised roughly $15.3 million, including a $10.9M Series A led by Lightspeed.
Lucky Gunasekara
Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.
Jacob Navok
Jacob Navok is the co-founder and CEO of Genvid Holdings, the New York company betting that audiences would rather steer a story than just watch it. He coined the category MILE - Massively Interactive Live Event - and shipped it with Silent Hill: Ascension and The Walking Dead: Last Mile, where hundreds of thousands of viewers vote, bid, and play their way into canon. Before Genvid he ran worldwide business development at Square Enix and built its cloud gaming arm, Shinra Technologies. He raised $113M in a 2021 Series C to turn interactive streaming from a technology into a consumer brand.
Cali Tran
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Malcolm McRoberts
Malcolm McRoberts is the Chief Executive Officer of Mood Media, the world's leading in-store media solutions company, which reaches over 150 million consumers daily across 500,000 business locations in 140+ countries. With more than 30 years of executive-level management experience spanning Fortune 500 companies like Deluxe Corporation and NCR, McRoberts joined Mood Media in January 2021 following Vector Capital's acquisition of the company. Under his leadership, Mood Media acquired Vibenomics in 2023 - the leading in-store ad network technology provider - and subsequently partnered with Stingray Advertising to create the largest U.S. in-store retail media network, reaching over 800 million monthly shoppers.
Aaron Sisto
Aaron Sisto is the Co-Founder & CEO of Chronicle Studios, a content intelligence platform that uses proprietary agentic AI to help creators launch and scale global IP franchises. A PhD quantum chemist turned deep-tech investor turned entertainment entrepreneur, Sisto blends hard science and pop culture instincts in a company that raised an oversubscribed $11.6M seed round in 2025 backed by Patron and Point72 Ventures. Previously a partner at First Spark Ventures and Director of Engineering at Schmidt Futures, he co-founded Chronicle alongside entertainment veteran Chris deFaria, former president of DreamWorks Animation.
Ryan Hollander
Ryan Hollander is the CEO of Glimmer (formerly Storyhunter), the all-in-one creator management platform connecting enterprises with 50,000+ vetted creators, production companies, and agencies across 192 countries. Headquartered in New York, Glimmer manages billions in corporate content spending and has produced content for clients including Meta, CNN, Bloomberg, Hearst, and Airbnb. Hollander leads the company through its evolution from a video production marketplace into a full-stack creative workforce platform backed by $11.9M in total funding.
Talal Shamoon
Talal G. Shamoon is a Silicon Valley-based CEO, electrical engineer, and computer scientist who has led Intertrust Technologies since 2003. A Cornell-trained PhD, he helped pioneer digital rights management in the late 1990s and has since built Intertrust into a global leader in trusted computing, data governance, and IoT security. Under his leadership, Intertrust's patents and products now underpin billions of licensed devices worldwide, spanning entertainment, energy, and connected infrastructure.