Isaac Eaves is the co-founder and CEO of Joon, a San Francisco startup that turns kids' real-life chores and routines into a video game they actually want to play. A UC Berkeley computer science and business grad who ran profitable Minecraft servers as a teenager and worked in product at Workday, he took Joon through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. His pitch is simple: he spent 10,000 hours gaming as a kid, so he knows exactly what keeps a child glued to a screen - and he is bending that same pull toward homework, bedtime, and brushing teeth.
Matt Booty is the EVP and Chief Content Officer of Microsoft Gaming, overseeing content strategy and development across nearly 40 studios including Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda, Activision Blizzard, and King. A Purdue-trained engineer with an MFA, he began his career at Midway Games in 1991 - working on Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam - before rising to CEO of Midway in 2008. He joined Microsoft in 2010, led the Minecraft global team, and has since orchestrated some of the largest acquisitions in gaming history, including the $7.5B ZeniMax/Bethesda deal and the $68.7B Activision Blizzard King acquisition.
Robert Yang (Guangyu Robert Yang) is a computational neuroscientist turned AI founder who left a tenure-track professorship at MIT to build Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera), a company creating socially intelligent AI agents. Trained in physics at Peking University, with a PhD from NYU and postdoc at Columbia, Yang became a 2022 Searle Scholar before pivoting to the startup world in December 2023. His company made waves running 1,000 autonomous AI agents in Minecraft — watching them spontaneously develop religions, trade economies, and social hierarchies — and has since raised over $45M to bring that vision into enterprise productivity tools and beyond.