Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal are an American comedy duo and lifelong best friends who have built one of YouTube's most enduring empires — Good Mythical Morning — into a daily talk show with over 19.5 million subscribers and 10.8 billion views. Operating out of Burbank as Mythical Entertainment, they create shows, podcasts, merchandise, books, and live experiences, ranking #4 on Forbes' 2025 highest-earning creator list with $36M in annual earnings.
Nels Stromborg is a VP Transformational Leader for Media and Entertainment at Adobe, based in Chicago, with 20+ years of digital media sales experience. Known for scaling sales organizations and consistently outperforming targets - hitting 300% of goal in FY2020 and winning Adobe's North American and Media & Entertainment Seller of the Year award - he has built a career arc from floor trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange to driving Adobe's most strategic entertainment partnerships. He has held senior sales leadership roles at Undertone, Retale, and AOL before joining Adobe.
TeachMe.To is a marketplace for booking in-person private lessons - golf, tennis, pickleball, music, yoga, and more - that matches beginners with vetted local coaches and handles scheduling, payments, and reviews in one place.
Matt Rappaport is General Partner at Future Frontier Capital, a pre-seed frontier technology VC fund based in Berkeley, California. A former professional musician who studied West African Sabar drumming in Senegal, Rappaport brings an unconventional lens to deep tech investing - 20+ years of IP strategy expertise, a faculty role at UC Berkeley's Fung Institute, and a data-driven methodology using patent landscape analytics to identify emerging sectors before mainstream adoption. He co-founded FFC with longtime partner Mark Garner in late 2023, building a portfolio of 100+ early-stage startups across AI, biotech, robotics, climate, and advanced materials - achieving nearly 11X TVPI on previous investments.
Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the cloud-based music creation platform powering millions of producers worldwide with sample libraries, plugins, and AI-powered tools. A mechanical engineer turned product visionary, she grew Flickr from 37,000 to 60 million users, led product at GitHub and Adobe's Creative Cloud, and co-founded the enterprise app studio Tomfoolery. Named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025 and Billboard's Women in Music Executives list three years running, she champions a philosophy that technology should empower artists — not replace them.
Kiley Grimes is the Head of Ecosystem at Redbud VC, the early-stage venture fund co-founded by the founders of EquipmentShare, based in Columbia, Missouri. A 2025 Mizzou BSBA graduate, she built Soundcheck - a 24/7 on-demand music practice studio in Columbia's North Village Arts District - from a $6,500 seed check to profitability in under a year, winning $10,000 at Entrepreneur Quest along the way. Equal parts operator and community builder, she now channels that founder instinct into growing Redbud's startup ecosystem across the Heartland.
Michael Ovitz is the most powerful talent agent in Hollywood history and co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), which he built from a $21,000 bank loan into the dominant force reshaping how entertainment deals are made. After departing with a $140 million severance from Disney's presidency, Ovitz reinvented himself as a Silicon Valley investor and advisor, backing Palantir, helping architect Andreessen Horowitz, and investing in 200+ companies. At 79, he remains a live wire: he reportedly convinced Bill Ackman to pursue a $64 billion takeover of Universal Music Group and is slated to become its chairman.
Anish Acharya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) who led the firm's consumer fintech and consumer AI investing for five-plus years before announcing his departure in 2025/2026 to build again. A University of Waterloo computer engineering grad, he co-founded SocialDeck (acquired by Google in 2010) and Snowball (acquired by Credit Karma in 2015), where he then rose to GM overseeing a platform of 100M+ members. Known for coining the 'Era of Abundance' consumer AI thesis, writing 'Disposable Software,' and spending weekends spinning deep house records under his DJ alias 'illscience,' Acharya occupies a rare space where operator intuition, engineering rigor, and cultural ear collide.
Nasir Jones - known simply as Nas - is one of hip-hop's most decorated lyricists, the Queensbridge-raised MC who turned a dropped-out eighth-grader's street poetry into Illmatic, a 1994 debut so precise it became a benchmark for the entire art form. Three decades later he's still dropping critically acclaimed records, co-founded Queensbridge Venture Partners (early Dropbox, Coinbase, Lyft, Robinhood), holds a Harvard-named fellowship, and released Light-Years with DJ Premier in late 2025. His pen never stopped; neither did his portfolio.
Alex Danco is a Canadian writer, thinker, and now Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he shapes the firm's editorial voice. A former neuroscientist turned ska musician turned VC associate turned Shopify product director, Danco spent five years at Shopify leading merchant financing and blockchain initiatives before joining a16z in August 2025. He is best known for his newsletter Dancoland and foundational essays including 'Debt Is Coming,' 'The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class,' and the 'Emergent Layers' framework - works that apply Carlota Perez, René Girard, and Jane Jacobs to the inner workings of Silicon Valley. He writes approximately 5,000 words per week and is a descendant of Belgian polar explorer Émile Danco, after whom Danco Island in Antarctica is named.
Lil Baby is one of Atlanta's most commercially dominant rappers, born Dominique Armani Jones on December 3, 1994. He went from dealing drugs in Southwest Atlanta to releasing four consecutive number-one Billboard 200 albums between 2020 and 2025. His 2020 album 'My Turn' was the best-selling album of the year across all genres, and 'Drip Too Hard' with Gunna is RIAA Diamond certified. In his Trendsetter era (2025-2026), he released the birthday mixtape 'The Leaks' and the charting singles 'Mrs. Trendsetter' and 'Mr. Trendsetter,' continuing to define Atlanta trap for a new generation.
Lola Young is a Grammy-winning British singer-songwriter from South London whose raw, confessional dark soul-pop has taken her from South London open mic nights to Coachella and a Grammy podium. Her 2024 single 'Messy' - a candid anthem about being imperfect and unapologetic - exploded globally after going viral on TikTok in November 2024, racking up a UK #1 and US Billboard Hot 100 #14. Her second album 'This Wasn't Meant for You Anyway' cemented her as one of the most arresting voices of her generation, blending confessional lyricism with muscular soul-pop production. She has collaborated with Tyler, the Creator, performed at Coachella, won the Ivor Novello Rising Star Award, and taken home a Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance in February 2026.
MOIO (Moyo Mobolaji) is a Nigerian-Irish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer from Dublin whose 2023 single 'Moments' went viral in late 2024 - racking up 19M+ Spotify streams and hitting #1 on Spotify's Viral 50 in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and New Zealand. His debut EP 'Earthday' (October 2025) announced him as one of Ireland's most compelling new artists, blending R&B warmth with indie introspection and self-produced bedroom-pop textures. A co-founder of the Chamomile Club collective in Dublin, he now performs internationally and is signed to Republic Records.
Taylor Alison Swift is the most-streamed artist in Spotify history with 118B+ lifetime streams and the only musician to win the Grammy Album of the Year four times. Born in West Reading, Pennsylvania on December 13, 1989, she parlayed a childhood on a Christmas tree farm and an opera-singer grandmother's DNA into a genre-defying career spanning country, synth-pop, indie folk, and art-rock. Her record-breaking Eras Tour grossed ~$2 billion - the first concert tour in history to cross $1 billion - and her 2025 album The Life of a Showgirl broke all-time first-week sales records with 4.002 million units. In 2025, she finally bought back her first six albums' masters for ~$360 million, closed out a long fight with her former label, and got engaged to NFL superstar Travis Kelce. As of 2026, she's a billionaire, a Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, and the IFPI Global Artist of the Year for a record sixth time.
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known as The Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, record producer, and actor who transformed R&B from the shadows of a Scarborough upbringing into a global phenomenon. With 75+ million records sold, a billion-dollar touring empire, and the most-streamed song in Spotify history, he is redefining what a career exit looks like — retiring the Weeknd persona after his 2025 album and film 'Hurry Up Tomorrow', the closing chapter of a dark pop trilogy, to begin again as Abel Tesfaye.
Tyla (born Tyla Laura Seethal, January 30, 2002) is a South African singer-songwriter who made history when her debut single 'Water' became the first-ever Grammy Award-winning Best African Music Performance in 2024. Blending amapiano, pop, and R&B into a genre she calls 'Popiano,' Tyla broke onto the global stage at 21, charting higher on the US Billboard Hot 100 than any African female soloist in history. By 24, she had two Grammy wins, a platinum-certified self-titled debut album, and a highly anticipated second album A*POP on the horizon — cementing her as the defining voice of Africa's pop moment.
Megan Thee Stallion is a Grammy Award-winning rapper, entertainer, and entrepreneur from Houston, Texas, who turned a childhood in recording studios into one of hip-hop's most commanding careers. Known for anthems of self-confidence and female empowerment, she graduated college while topping charts, built her own label (Hot Girl Productions), made her Broadway debut in Moulin Rouge!, and runs a foundation in honor of her late parents. Off stage she is an anime devotee, horror movie enthusiast, and tireless mental health advocate whose 'Hot Girl' philosophy has become a genuine cultural movement.