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Kobus Jooste Left Google's Scale to Chase a More Difficult Metric: Impact
After two decades inside research labs, infrastructure companies, startups, and Google, the engineer behind Syllable AI has settled on a plain test for ambitious work: can you see what changed because you were there?
Aakash Mahalingam
Aakash Mahalingam is the cofounder and CEO of Canary (YC W26), a startup building an AI QA engineer that reads your source code to catch broken user flows before they hit production. Before Canary he built Windsurf's enterprise product and helped push its self-serve plan to roughly $20M ARR in six months. An ICPC APAC finalist with earlier stints at AWS and Morgan Stanley, he now works out of Mountain View on the problem of testing keeping pace with AI-accelerated coding.
Sivan Iram
Sivan Iram is the co-founder and CEO of Flow (Flow Specialty), a Mountain View-based next-generation wholesale brokerage that uses GenAI and licensed human experts to automate specialty commercial insurance placement. A former software engineer turned operator with a Harvard MBA, he spent a decade writing code and running go-to-market at Lenovo before starting Flow in 2021 to bring enterprise-grade service to the small and mid-market accounts the industry had long ignored. Flow has raised roughly $20-25M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Niosha Kayhani
Niosha Kayhani is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Muon Space, a Mountain View based end-to-end space systems company building LEO satellite constellations for climate, earth observation, and national security missions. A chartered mechanical engineer trained at the University of Portsmouth with an executive MBA from Warwick, he arrived in Silicon Valley after building innovation programs at Cubic in London and San Diego, a detour through Google in Dublin, and a first job tuning fiber-optic lasers at SPI. He holds ten-plus U.S. patents and, on the side, has founded Taurus Space, a company working on standards-aligned command-and-control for coalition defense networks.
Bill Wells
Bill Wells is the CEO of AMPL Optimization Inc., the Mountain View company behind AMPL, the algebraic modeling language born at Bell Labs that has long been a gold standard for large-scale mathematical optimization. A UC Berkeley-trained mathematician, Wells runs the small but globally influential team that turns business-critical decisions in energy, finance, supply chain, and transportation into solvable models, while steering the company from a classic modeling language toward a modern, API-driven optimization platform.
Matt Stone
Matt Stone is the Chief Business Officer of Corvic AI, the Mountain View startup building an Intelligence Composition Platform that sits between raw enterprise data and production AI. A Stanford-trained engineer who once walked on as a quarterback at the University of Arizona, Stone has spent more than a decade turning hard enterprise technology into revenue - first at Boeing, then as an operating partner at Intel Capital, and most recently leading strategic partnerships at the cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard. He joined Corvic AI in March 2026 to scale its enterprise go-to-market across pharma, manufacturing, and logistics.
Scott Schorer
Scott Schorer is CEO and Chairman of G-Tech Medical, a Mountain View startup building GutTracker, a wireless dermal-patch system that reads the body's gut signals at home over days instead of hours. A Dartmouth-trained engineer and former 82nd Airborne infantry officer, he has spent two decades founding, turning around and selling medical-device companies, raising more than $120 million in equity and earning his name on six patents along the way.
Kunal Agarwal
Kunal Agarwal is the founder and CEO of dope.security, the 'Fly Direct' Secure Web Gateway that runs security on the endpoint instead of routing all traffic through a distant cloud data center. A self-described hacker since age 8 who once talked his way out of juvenile detention after breaking into his high school's grading system, he spent roughly a decade at Symantec and Forcepoint - rising from engineer to running Symantec's IoT business and leading product at Forcepoint - before launching dope.security in 2022. The company raised a $16M Series A led by GV (Google Ventures), and Agarwal was named SC Awards 2025 Innovator of the Year.
Rob Shilkin
Rob Shilkin is Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google, overseeing one of the world's most complex corporate communications functions. A former antitrust lawyer from Australia who trained at Clayton Utz and Mallesons Stephen Jaques, Shilkin brings rare legal-policy fluency to Google's communications challenges - including antitrust litigation, AI debates, content moderation, and online advertising policy. His team handles approximately 2,000 issues per year. He took overall leadership of Google's communications in 2023, reporting to Chief Marketing Officer Lorraine Twohill, and has been recognized in Provoke Media's Influence 100 2025 rankings.
Selin Song
Selin Song is the President of Google Customer Solutions, leading the global organization that helps millions of small and medium-sized businesses grow using Google's AI-first advertising products. A 20-year Google veteran who started as a temp approving ads, she has lived and worked across four countries - the US, India, Singapore, and Ireland - building a career that spans revenue strategy, operations, and regional leadership across APAC and EMEA before taking the top seat at GCS.
Adrian Ridner
Adrian Ridner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Study.com, one of the world's most visited online education platforms serving 34+ million monthly users. An Argentine-Jewish immigrant who navigated multiple countries before settling in California, Ridner built Study.com from a bootstrapped startup in 2002 into a 4,100-person company offering 20,000+ micro-video lessons and 200+ transferable college courses. His Working Scholars program has saved graduates $20 million in tuition and is particularly focused on first-generation college students and students of color. Ridner is a recipient of the ASU+GSV 2022 Innovator of Color Award and Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40.
Fang Cheng
Fang Cheng is a serial founder who builds AI that actually answers the question. She co-founded Touchco (acquired by Amazon, became the Kindle), founded Linc (acquired by Capacity in 2024), served as SVP & GM of Retail CX Automation at Capacity, and is now building a stealth venture focused on agentic commerce for restricted wallets.
Tomer Weingarten
Tomer Weingarten is the co-founder, chairman, president, and CEO of SentinelOne, the publicly traded cybersecurity company he started in 2013 to replace signature-based antivirus with autonomous, AI-driven endpoint protection. An engineer by trade, Israeli outsider by background, he scaled the company from a Tel Aviv kitchen-table idea to a NYSE-listed business crossing $1B in ARR, betting the platform on agentic AI through Purple AI and Wayfinder.
Mudit Garg
Mudit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Qventus, a Mountain View-based AI healthcare company that automates hospital operations — from surgical scheduling to patient discharge. Trained as an electrical engineer at IIT and holding an MBA from Stanford, Garg spent time at McKinsey's healthcare practice before founding Qventus in 2012. Under his leadership, the company raised a $105M Series D led by KKR in January 2025, reached a valuation of over $400 million, and has helped health systems across the US free up tens of thousands of excess hospital days and generate tens of millions in surgical revenue.
Ofer Feldman
Ofer Feldman is the Co-Founder and CTO of Stampli, a Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation company he co-founded with his brother Eyal Feldman in 2015. A computer engineer by training from Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Ofer spent over a decade building software across defense, enterprise, and healthcare sectors before channeling that depth into Stampli. Under his technical leadership, Stampli has grown to process over $100 billion in invoices annually for 1,600+ businesses, raised $145.7 million in total funding including a $61M Series D led by Blackstone in 2023, and pioneered Cognitive AI that brings human-level PO matching to finance teams worldwide.
Purva Gupta
Purva Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Lily AI, the Mountain View-based AI platform that bridges the gap between how retailers describe products and how consumers actually search for them. Founded in 2015 after her own frustrating experience shopping online as a newly arrived immigrant from India, Gupta built Lily AI into an enterprise-grade solution serving major retailers including Macy's, Bloomingdale's, J.Crew, and thredUP. The company has raised $62 million in total funding, achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, and is recognized as a Deloitte Technology Fast 500 company. A Tory Burch Fellow, Ad Age Leading Women honoree, EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, and venture partner at Unshackled Ventures, Gupta has become a prominent voice in retail AI and immigrant entrepreneurship.
Rukesh Reddy
Rukesh Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Deccan AI, a Mountain View-based AI data and post-training company that raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. Built as a 'born GenAI' company in October 2024, Deccan AI serves frontier AI labs and major tech companies - including Google DeepMind and Snowflake - with high-precision training datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and enterprise evaluation suites. Reddy brings over 15 years of experience spanning finance, strategy consulting, and digital transformation at firms including J.P. Morgan, Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), and Citi, where he led CX and digital transformation for the global retail bank.
Karim Faris
Karim Faris is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he leads investments in enterprise software, AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, and frontier technology. A self-described 'grounded optimist,' he brings a rare combination of deep engineering roots - he published peer-reviewed neural network papers at Brown University and was a product manager for the Pentium processor at Intel - and decades of venture experience. He joined GV at its inception, and has backed companies including DocuSign, Duo Security (acquired by Cisco), Cohesity, FullStory, and SecurityScorecard, while serving on 25+ boards across his career.
Eyal Feldman
Eyal Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Stampli, the Mountain View-based AI-powered accounts payable automation platform that processes over $100 billion in annual invoices for 1,700+ enterprises. A former SAP implementation specialist turned fintech founder, Feldman built Stampli around a simple belief: that AP should be a collaborative process, not a bureaucratic bottleneck. Under his leadership, Stampli has raised $145.7M in total funding, earned the #10 Best CEO of 2024 recognition from Comparably, and become a G2 Leader in 9 categories for AP automation software.
Ian Glow
Ian Glow is the co-founder and CEO of Zeromatter, a Mountain View-based simulation platform that lets robotics, aerospace, and autonomy teams build, test, and train anything in virtual environments. He previously helped pioneer Tesla's Autopilot simulation infrastructure - working as Manager of Autopilot Simulation - before striking out to democratize simulation tooling for the broader industry. Zeromatter has raised $45M and assembled a 75+ person team of engineers from Tesla, Cruise, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Activision, and id Software.
Yinan Na
Yinan Na (also known as Steven) is the co-founder and CEO of Creatify AI, an AI-powered video ad platform that lets marketers produce, test, and optimize short-form video ads in minutes. Built on a decade of engineering at Meta and Snap, Creatify crossed $9M ARR within 18 months of launch, raised a $15.5M Series A co-led by Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, and now serves over 1 million marketers across 10,000+ teams including Alibaba.com, Comcast, and Binance. Na holds a Master's in Computer Science from Stanford and a Bachelor's in Automation from Tsinghua University.
Ambuj Kumar
Ambuj Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of Simbian, an AI-native security company building autonomous AI agents that run security operations 10x faster than human teams. A Gold Medalist from IIT Kanpur and Stanford EE graduate, he spent eight years designing NVIDIA's early GPUs before pivoting to security - where he invented Confidential Computing, raised $135M for Fortanix, and is now betting that AI agents can solve the industry's 3.5-million-person talent gap. With 100+ patents and recognition from IIT Kanpur's Distinguished Alumni Award 2025, Kumar stands at the intersection of the GPU revolution he helped build and the AI security era he is now shaping.
Yuval Bachar
Yuval Bachar is the founder and CEO of EdgeCloudLink (ECL), the company building the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered modular data centers. A 20+ year veteran of hyperscale infrastructure at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Facebook/Meta, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure, Bachar co-founded the Open19 open hardware standards project and holds eight U.S. patents. At ECL, he is reimagining what a data center can be - deploying capacity in nine months (vs. the industry's 3-4 years), generating zero emissions, and producing cooling water as a byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells. In May 2024, ECL unveiled the world's first off-grid hydrogen-powered AI data center in Mountain View, California, and Lambda deployed the first hydrogen-powered NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 systems there. ECL's TerraSite-TX1 near Houston is planned as a 1-gigawatt AI factory on 600 acres.
Mehak Aggarwal
Mehak Aggarwal is the Co-Founder, CPO, and Head of AI at Sybill, an AI-powered sales assistant platform that analyzes sales calls, writes follow-up emails, and updates CRMs automatically. A product of IIT Delhi's dual-degree program in Mathematics and Computing, she went on to conduct research at Harvard's biomedical imaging center (where she developed a patented CT scan fracture-detection algorithm), Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Singapore University of Technology and Design. She and her co-founders - including her brother Gorish Aggarwal - built Sybill into a 700+ customer platform with $14.6M in total funding. In 2025, she was named a fully funded Knight-Hennessy Scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, continuing to lead Sybill while studying.