mobile-app
(26)
Terry Broussard Turned One Bad Night of RV Planning Into a Booking Business
A four-time RV owner handed his son-in-law a phone and issued a simple challenge: find us a campsite tonight. The frustrating search became Spot2Nite - and a lesson in building software from a problem you know by heart.
Andrea Johnston
Andrea Johnston is a seasoned revenue and operations executive with over 30 years of building high-growth businesses across SaaS, consumer tech, and marketplace platforms. After a decade at OpenTable — rising from VP of Western Region Sales to Chief Operating Officer — she led global revenue at Corel/Alludo, joined Truckstop as Chief Revenue Officer in 2024, and is now CEO at Franki, the video-led restaurant discovery and rewards app that is rewriting how 25,000+ monthly users find their next great meal. Johnston is a go-to-market architect, board advisor to multiple tech startups, and speaker at the 2025 Khosla Ventures CEO Summit.
Vu Van
Vu Van is the Vietnamese-born co-founder and CEO of ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant), an AI-powered app that gives non-native speakers instant feedback on English pronunciation, fluency and intonation. She built the idea out of her own struggle to be understood as a Stanford graduate student, teamed up with speech-recognition scientist Xavier Anguera, and has grown ELSA into one of the world's largest AI language platforms, with tens of millions of users across roughly 190 countries. She is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and Endeavor entrepreneur.
Joe Chin
Joe Chin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sparrow, a New York-based sports AI startup using edge AI and computer vision to analyze athletic motion in real time. A 4x serial entrepreneur with 22+ years of leadership experience and three prior exits, Joe built Sparrow around a simple observation: golfers forget lessons the moment they leave the range. Sparrow's flagship golf app has helped 250,000+ golfers analyze their swing against a dataset of 1 million pro golf data points, delivering instant, personalized feedback via smartphone. The company has raised $8.27M in total funding and is expanding into soccer, basketball, and other major sports.
Rocky Collis
Rocky Collis is the co-founder and CEO of Mustard, a sports technology company that uses computer vision and AI to put world-class coaching in a phone. A former Cornell pitcher drafted by the Seattle Mariners, he detoured through Georgetown Law and big-firm litigation before teaming up with legendary throwing coach Dr. Tom House, mental-performance coach Jason Goldsmith, and his brother Luke to build an app that gives any kid the kind of mechanics analysis once reserved for Tom Brady and Nolan Ryan. Mustard has raised roughly $5.45M-$6M from backers including Mark Cuban, Ronnie Lott, and Justin Rose, and has expanded from pitching into golf through a partnership with Golf Digest.
Steven Motta
Steven Motta is the co-founder and CEO of Waveful, an AI-powered social app for sharing passions, building communities and letting creators monetize their content. He wrote his first money-making code at age 9, shipping Minecraft mods that drew more than two million downloads, then designed the first version of Waveful at 16 with his older brother Dennis. By 2025 Waveful had crossed four million users, surpassed $1M in in-app purchases, and became one of the most downloaded social apps of the year. He was the youngest founder in his a16z Speedrun batch and closed a $2.1M seed round in September 2025.
Daniel Yousefian
Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Melody McCloskey
Melody McCloskey is the founder and CEO of StyleSeat, the largest online marketplace for beauty, grooming, and wellness services, connecting over 350,000 independent beauty professionals with 10 million+ consumers across the United States. She co-founded StyleSeat in 2011 alongside Dan Levine, bootstrapped the company for 18 months before raising $40.7 million in venture funding, and has helped power over 200 million appointments while generating $12+ billion in total revenue for small businesses. A San Francisco native who studied French and International Relations at UC Davis, McCloskey built StyleSeat out of her own frustration with booking beauty appointments, turning a personal pain point into a platform that fundamentally reshaped how independent beauty professionals run their businesses. She is also an angel investor and Cleo Capital scout, focused on backing female-led startups at the pre-seed through Series A stages.
Petko Plachkov
Petko Plachkov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bright Money, a San Francisco-based AI-powered personal finance platform that helps middle-income Americans manage debt, build credit, and access affordable financial products. A Princeton and Wharton-educated serial entrepreneur who grew up in Bulgaria and Swaziland, Petko spent over a decade building digital financial products at McKinsey and as Co-Founder of CommuterClub before launching Bright Money in 2019. The company has raised $93M in funding, serves over 1 million users, and is powered by MoneyScience - a patented system of 34 AI algorithms.
Soo Kang
Soo Kang is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Coffee Meets Bagel, the women-focused dating app she built alongside her sisters Arum and Dawoon. A Korean-American designer by training, Soo immigrated to the US at age 12, studied at Parsons School of Design, and brought creative direction and brand identity to one of the most distinctive dating apps on the market. The company famously turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank - the largest offer in the show's history at the time - and went on to raise $23.2 million in total funding with $36 million in annual revenue.
Vishal Joshi
Vishal Joshi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joy, a modern wedding and celebration platform that has helped millions of couples plan their weddings with beautifully designed websites, all-in-one registries, and guest management tools. A former Microsoft Azure product manager who spent nearly a decade helping build cloud infrastructure, Joshi left to co-found Joy in 2014 through Y Combinator's S16 cohort. Joy has raised over $44M in funding from investors including General Catalyst, Sierra Ventures, and celebrity angels Joe Montana and Marc Pincus, and has grown to nearly 500 employees.
Derek Ting
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Fred Helou
Fred Helou is the founder and CEO of Vagaro, a cloud-based business management platform used by over 75,000 beauty, fitness, and wellness businesses across four countries. Born in Beirut in 1969, he escaped the Lebanese Civil War at 18, arrived in the United States penniless after being pickpocketed in France, and worked his way up from a $5-an-hour pickup boy to director of software development before being laid off in the 2008 recession — the catalyst that led him to build what is now a billion-dollar company. Vagaro has processed over $15 billion in payments, booked over 600 million appointments, and achieved unicorn status with a $1 billion valuation following a 2021 reinvestment by FTV Capital.
Lihua Zhu
Lihua Zhu is the CEO of WiFi Master Key at LinkSure Network, a Singapore-headquartered mobile internet company serving hundreds of millions of users globally with free, secure Wi-Fi connectivity. With a career spanning Princeton research labs, Microsoft engineering, Alibaba's DingTalk, and Momo Technology, Zhu brings a rare combination of deep academic research and large-scale operational execution to one of the world's most widely used connectivity apps.
Michael Buckley
Michael Buckley is the Chairman and CEO of Be My Eyes, the world's largest digital volunteer organization connecting blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers via live video calls. A communications veteran who spent 12 years at Brunswick Group and three years as Facebook's VP of Global Business Communications, Buckley pivoted to mission-driven tech when he joined Be My Eyes in December 2022. Under his leadership, Be My Eyes launched Be My AI (powered by GPT-4), which TIME named one of the Best Inventions of 2023, and scaled the platform to over 1 million blind and low-vision users supported by 6.7 million volunteers worldwide. He is also co-founder and chairman of Ocean's Halo, a seaweed-based natural foods company, and an active angel investor.
Shelby Rhodes
Shelby Rhodes is the Senior Director of Product Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Strava, the world's leading fitness social network with 180+ million athletes across 190+ countries. She brings 11+ years of experience from Google and YouTube, where she oversaw products used by billions of people including YouTube Shorts, Gaming, Live, and Comments. Now at Strava during one of its most pivotal chapters - a confidential IPO filing and a surge past $500M in annual revenue - she sits at the intersection of product strategy and executive leadership at a company betting that movement beats doomscrolling.
Brian Park
Brian Park is the CEO of Skillest, the world's leading remote sports coaching marketplace that connects athletes with elite coaches through asynchronous video analysis. A Silicon Valley veteran who was the 95th employee at Yahoo and co-founder of Yahoo! Messenger, Park pivoted to sports tech to democratize access to elite coaching - putting a world-class coach in every athlete's pocket. Under his leadership, Skillest has grown to 600+ coaches, 200,000+ golfers, and secured partnerships with Stephen Curry's UNDERRATED Golf and Arccos Golf, becoming the digital coaching standard in golf and expanding across multiple sports.
Sanchali Pal
Sanchali Pal is the Founder and CEO of Commons (formerly Joro), an Oakland-based climate action app that connects personal spending data to carbon footprints and rewards users for making sustainable choices. A Princeton and Harvard Business School alumna who spent six years tracking her own carbon footprint in a spreadsheet before building the app to scale that insight for everyone, she has grown Commons to 450,000+ community members, raised $14.7M including a $10M Series A backed by Sequoia Capital and Jay-Z's Arrive, earned a TIME100 Most Influential Companies listing, and is on a mission to prove that climate action and financial wellbeing are the same thing.
Elliott Spelman
Elliott Spelman is the co-founder and CEO of Polycam, the world's most-used 3D imaging app with over 10 million downloads and nearly 100,000 paying customers. A Stanford-trained designer and creative technologist, Spelman built Polycam to make 3D capture as accessible as photography - describing it as the Kodak Brownie of spatial computing. After meeting co-founder Chris Heinrich at Ubiquity6, they launched Polycam in 2020, raising an $18M Series A in early 2024 backed by Left Lane Capital, Adobe Ventures, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Today Polycam serves individuals across more than half the Fortune 500 and is pushing hard into AI-powered floor plans, generative 3D, and enterprise spatial workflows.
Miray Tayfun
Miray Tayfun is the co-founder and CEO of Vivoo, a San Francisco-based health technology company that turns urine test strips into personalized wellness insights via a mobile app. A bioengineering graduate and serial founder, she built Vivoo from a personal frustration with expensive and slow health testing into a platform serving 300,000+ users across 50+ countries. Backed by Tim Draper and $19.4M in total funding, Vivoo expanded from subscription test strips to a $99 smart toilet unveiled at CES 2026, named Best of CES by Gadget Flow. Tayfun is a 2019 Australian Financial Review Top 100 Women of Influence honoree and 2018 Laureate Here for Good Award winner.
Siddharth Sinha
Siddharth Sinha is the Co-founder and CEO of Dresma, an AI-powered visual content platform that helps ecommerce sellers create studio-quality product images and marketing content at scale. A fourth-generation entrepreneur from Bihar, India, with a Cornell BS and INSEAD MBA, he co-founded Dresma in 2019 alongside his wife Nishka and partner Abhishek Kirti. Dresma's flagship product DoMyShoot has processed over 9 million ecommerce photos for 50,000+ online brands - reducing content creation costs by 85% and cutting time-to-market by 90%. The company raised a $3M seed round in 2021 from SVQuad, Inventus Capital Partners, and Thinkuvate.
Sara Mauskopf
Sara Mauskopf is the CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a marketplace helping millions of parents find daycare, preschool, and childcare across the United States. A MIT computer science graduate and former product leader at YouTube, Twitter, and Postmates, she co-founded Winnie in 2016 after struggling to find childcare for her first child. Under her leadership, Winnie has raised $15.5M in funding, serves over 4 million parents, covers 250K+ licensed providers across 7,000+ U.S. cities, and ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies - earning the #1 Consumer Services Company spot.
Tyler Maloney
Tyler Maloney is a three-time founder and CEO of TeachMe.To, a San Francisco-based marketplace connecting students with vetted local coaches for private lessons in sports, music, and arts. A NC State Park Scholar with a Stanford MBA, he previously co-founded Undercover Colors - a date-rape drug detection nail polish that raised $12M - and Faves, a video bookmarking app with 200,000+ users. TeachMe.To, described as 'the Airbnb for skills,' has grown from 2 lessons per day in 2022 to over 250 daily across every major U.S. city, backed by investors including Sam Altman, Bling Capital, and 1984 Ventures, with $10.5M raised.
Dusko Kelez
Dusko Kelez is the Peruvian founder and CEO of Hapi App (YC W21), a San Francisco-based fintech that lets anyone in Latin America invest in U.S. stocks and crypto with no broker commissions and no minimums. After leading operations at Grin Scooters across seven countries and noticing that Latin Americans had no easy way to access global markets, he co-founded Hapi in 2020 with engineers Piero Sifuentes and Billy Caballero. Today the platform serves over 500,000 users in 20 countries, has raised $4.3M from Y Combinator and leading investors, and is celebrating milestones on the NASDAQ tower in Times Square.
Nathan Sharp
Nathan Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Retro, a friends-only photo journal app built on the belief that social media can be better - more intimate, more honest, more for the people you actually care about. A Harvard grad and Dartmouth Tuck MBA, Sharp spent six years at Meta where he helped launch Instagram Stories in 2016 before leaving to build Retro with his co-founder Ryan Olson. Backed by Thrive Capital, Dylan Field, and a constellation of top-tier VCs, Retro hit #1 photo app in Canada and broke into the US top charts in 2025, proving that people still want a social app that actually feels like talking to friends.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded Tinder, sued it for sexual harassment, and turned that lawsuit into Bumble - the dating app where women make the first move. By 31, she became the world's youngest female self-made billionaire and the youngest woman to take a self-founded company public in U.S. history. After stepping down as CEO in 2023 and experiencing what she calls an 'ego death,' she returned to lead Bumble in 2025 with a new vision: rebuilding it as 'The Love Company.'