Kevin Tan is the co-founder and CEO of Snackpass, the restaurant technology company he started in his last semester at Yale that turned takeout ordering into a social, viral experience. What began as a way to skip the line for campus munchies grew into a multi-product platform - mobile ordering, self-service kiosks, loyalty and gifting - used by hundreds of restaurants. A physics graduate, musician, and self-taught engineer, Tan raised $70 million in Series B funding in 2021 at a roughly $400 million valuation and was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Warren Stearns is a multi-hyphenate creative working at the seam where film, music, and photography meet. He has logged screen credits in independent features including Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty (2004), A Peace of History (2005), and The Absence (2010), and even spent an episode playing a corpse on HBO's Six Feet Under. Off camera he shoots fine-art, event, and session photography, publishing his work through a SmugMug portfolio, and he heads Comfortera Enterprises, Inc. Based in Frazier Park, California, he describes himself plainly as an independent contractor - actor, musician, and CEO.
Brian David Gilbert is a writer, actor, musician, and video producer who turned a fixation on the 337 books inside Skyrim into a media career. Best known as the host of Polygon's Unraveled and as the deeply earnest fact checker on Dropout's Um, Actually, he now runs an independent YouTube channel where horror, comedy, and musical theater keep colliding on purpose.
Shane Dawson (born Shane Lee Yaw) is one of YouTube's original superstar creators, a Long Beach kid who turned a camera and a knack for characters into 4.8 billion combined channel views. Over nearly two decades he pivoted from sketch comedy to celebrity documentary deep-dives, co-authored two New York Times bestselling memoirs, won multiple Streamy Awards, and launched a record-setting makeup collaboration with Jeffree Star. After a high-profile controversy and YouTube demonetization in 2020, he returned in 2021, relocated to a Colorado farm with his husband Ryland Adams, and in 2023 welcomed twin sons. By 2025 he was back with another Jeffree Star docuseries, rebuilding quietly but unmistakably.
Gaetano DiNardi is a B2B SaaS growth marketing consultant, former music producer, and one of the most distinctive voices in modern SEO. After spending years producing tracks for Fat Joe and Shaggy in NYC studios, he stumbled into SEO through a blog post about getting ghosted by Atlantic Records - and never looked back. He has scaled companies from Nextiva ($70M to $200M+ revenue) to Aura (0 to 1 million monthly visitors in 12 months), and now runs Marketing Advice, a boutique consultancy serving 50+ SaaS clients including Semrush, Gong, and Demandbase.
nikhil trivedi is the Director of Web Engineering at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has spent nearly two decades building open-source museum technology while simultaneously championing anti-oppression frameworks in cultural institutions. His tagline - 'Museums. Technology. Social Justice.' - is not a brand, it is a practice: he co-created Visitors of Color, contributed to the MASS Action Toolkit, received a UN Women Gender Equality Award, and built a public data API that connects AIC's collection to historical records of the transatlantic slave trade. A Desi Chicagoan, sitar player, and former high school band member, he codes in PHP by day and runs his own Mastodon instance by night.
Khamari is a Boston-raised, Los Angeles-based R&B and neo-soul singer-songwriter known for his deeply intimate, guitar-driven sound and confessional lyricism. A multi-instrumentalist who started violin at age 4 and briefly attended Berklee College of Music, he drove cross-country alone to chase his vision in LA. After releasing his debut EP 'Eldorado' in 2019 and signing to RCA Records, he dropped his critically acclaimed debut album 'A Brief Nirvana' in 2023 before leaving the major label over creative differences. His sophomore album 'To Dry a Tear' (2025) on independent Encore Recordings marked a major artistic breakthrough - earning him festival slots at Governors Ball 2026 and All Points East 2026, headlining tours across dozens of cities, and comparisons to Frank Ocean, D'Angelo, and Jeff Buckley.
Lexa Gates (born Ivanna Alexandra Martinez) is a Queens-raised rapper, singer, and performance artist blending jazz-soul atmospheres with spoken word rap and stream-of-consciousness lyricism. Known for a calm, unhurried delivery packed with emotional density, she broke through with the viral single 'Angel' (2023) before signing to GoodTalk/Capitol Records and releasing her acclaimed label debut *Elite Vessel* (2024), followed by the 18-track solo statement *I Am* (2026). A Colombian-Puerto Rican artist who dropped out of school at 15 and started recording at 17, Gates has become one of New York's most distinctive emerging voices - equal parts Sade and Mac Miller, with a flair for conceptual stunts like locking herself in a glass box in Union Square for 10 hours on album release day.
Lil Nas X (born Montero Lamar Hill) is an Atlanta-raised rapper, singer, and cultural provocateur who turned a 99-cent beat, a TikTok meme, and sheer internet genius into a record-breaking 19-week #1 hit before he had a major label deal. Since 'Old Town Road,' he has released three #1 Billboard Hot 100 singles, two Grammy wins, a debut album with universal acclaim, a Satan Shoes controversy that sued Nike, and a documentary on Max - all while being one of the most openly gay, openly himself artists in pop music history. Now in his Dreamboy era with a second studio album on deck, Lil Nas X remains the internet's favorite provocateur.
Mk.gee (Michael Todd Gordon) is a New Jersey-born musician, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose debut album Two Star & the Dream Police (2024) became a critical phenomenon - ranking #1 album of 2024 by The New York Times, Dazed, and Clash, and earning a Metacritic score of 83. A reclusive guitar savant with an ear for lo-fi distortion and cassette warmth, he has co-produced for Omar Apollo and Dijon, co-written for Bon Iver, and collaborated with Justin Bieber, all while maintaining a fiercely independent artistic identity.
Nxdia (born Nadia Ahmed) is an Egyptian-British alt-pop and pop-punk artist based in Manchester and London whose bilingual English-Arabic songwriting, queer identity, and confessional lyricism about obsession, desire, and self-discovery have made them one of the most exciting emerging voices in UK indie music. Known for hooky, pulsating tracks like 'She Likes a Boy' and 'Jennifer's Body', Nxdia's debut mixtape 'I Promise No One's Watching' surpassed 100 million Spotify streams by August 2025, and their 2026 single 'Cool' cements a more confident, genre-blurring new era.
Olivia Isabel Rodrigo is an American singer-songwriter and actress who burst onto the global stage in January 2021 with 'drivers license', a debut single that shattered Spotify streaming records and debuted at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 - making her, at 17, the youngest artist ever to top the chart on debut. Her debut album SOUR (2021) and sophomore record GUTS (2023) both opened at #1 in multiple countries, cementing her as one of the defining voices of Gen Z alt-pop and pop-punk. The GUTS World Tour (2024-2025) grossed over $209 million - the highest-grossing tour by any artist born in the 21st century. A three-time Grammy winner, Billboard Woman of the Year, Time Entertainer of the Year, and founder of reproductive rights initiative Fund 4 Good, Rodrigo is simultaneously a chart phenomenon, an arena headliner, and a outspoken activist - with her third studio album due June 2026.
REI AMI (born Sarah Yeeun Lee) is a Korean-American singer, rapper, and genre-bending artist from Germantown, Maryland, who blends hip-hop, R&B, alternative pop, and pop-punk aggression into a sound entirely her own. After breaking through with Sub Urban's viral 'Freak' (2020) and debuting with her mixtape FOIL (2021), she catapulted to global stardom in 2025 as Zoey in Netflix's animated film KPop Demon Hunters, voicing and performing as part of the fictional K-pop trio HUNTR/X. Their single 'Golden' became Netflix's most-watched film's signature track, hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and won both a Grammy and an Oscar — firsts for any K-pop song.
Sofia Isella is a Los Angeles-born, 21-year-old indie-pop musician crafting sharp, cinematic dark pop about womanhood, rage, and the absurdity of modern life. Classically trained on violin from age two and daughter of Oscar-winning cinematographer Claudio Miranda, she grew up between Taiwan, Australia, and New Mexico before channeling her itinerant childhood into ferociously literary songwriting. Her 2023 viral breakout 'Hot Gum' (16M+ streams) led to opening for Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium before 90,000 fans in August 2024, where Swift personally sent her a handwritten letter praising 'Everybody Supports Women.' By April 2026, Isella has released four EPs and surpassed 150 million worldwide streams, headlining sold-out shows across Europe and the US on her 'Her Desire, The Nemesis' tour.
Sophia Stel is a 27-year-old Vancouver-based Canadian alt-pop artist, singer, and self-producer whose music blends dreamy synths, auto-tuned alto vocals, skittering breakbeats, and rave-adjacent textures into something critics call the 'sonic lovechild of Ethel Cain and 070 Shake.' Growing up on Vancouver Island in a large religious household with 10 siblings, she taught herself production on GarageBand before building a makeshift studio in a nightclub basement. After years of bartending to fund her art, she broke through with her 2024 debut EP Object Permanence, scored a viral TikTok moment with 'I'll Take It' (8.6M+ Spotify streams), walked the Ann Demeulemeester SS26 runway, graced the NME cover, and in early 2026 became only the second artist signed to A24 Music - all while recording mostly from home on a 2013 MacBook.
Zachary Lane Bryan is an American singer-songwriter and record producer who went from posting iPhone recordings on YouTube while serving as a U.S. Navy Aviation Ordnanceman to breaking U.S. concert attendance records and landing back-to-back Billboard 200 #1 albums. Rooted in Americana, outlaw country, and raw emotional storytelling, Bryan released his sixth studio album With Heaven on Top in January 2026 — debuting 18 songs simultaneously on the Billboard Hot 100 — and has maintained a consistent Hot 100 presence throughout 2026 with singles 'Plastic Cigarette' (#13) and 'Say Why' (#25). A Grammy winner, a literary patron (he paid $12.1M for Jack Kerouac's On the Road scroll), and an artist who refuses to be called country, Bryan is one of the most commercially and culturally influential musicians of his generation.