Gibson Biddle is a product strategy teacher who ran product at Netflix from 2005 to 2010 and was Chief Product Officer at Chegg through its 2014 IPO. He now writes the 'Ask Gib' newsletter for 30,000+ product people, runs workshops, and gives talks built around his DHM model: delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. His career stretches from building video games at Electronic Arts to co-founding kids' software firm Creative Wonders to lecturing at Stanford.
Andrew Schulz is a New York-born stand-up comedian, podcaster, and actor who upended the comedy industry by self-distributing his specials directly to fans — selling out Radio City Music Hall twice in a night and Madison Square Garden multiple times — while co-hosting the hit Flagrant podcast with Akaash Singh. His 2022 special 'Infamous' and 2025 Netflix special 'Life' cemented his reputation as one of the most commercially independent voices in modern comedy.
Tom Segura is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and podcaster who has built one of comedy's most expansive multi-platform empires. Known for six Netflix specials, the long-running Your Mom's House podcast (co-hosted with wife Christina Pazsitzky), the Emmy-nominated Netflix sketch series Bad Thoughts, and the YMH Studios podcast network, Segura has turned deadpan observational comedy into a sprawling entertainment franchise from his base in Austin, Texas.
Kari Perez is Vice President of Gaming Communications at Microsoft, where she leads global PR and communications strategy for Xbox. She joined the Xbox team in March 2021 after a distinguished career spanning gaming, streaming, and entertainment — including VP-level roles at Netflix Latin America and corporate affairs at HBO Latin America. Multilingual and internationally experienced, Perez has become one of the most prominent communications voices in the gaming industry, issuing statements on major Xbox announcements ranging from Game Pass price changes to leadership speculation.
Kevin Hart is a Philadelphia-born comedian, actor, and entrepreneur who turned a rough start - booed off stage as 'Lil Kev' - into a $450 million empire. One of the most followed entertainers on the planet, he has sold out arenas worldwide, headlined Hollywood blockbusters, received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2024, and built a portfolio of businesses including tequila brand Gran Coramino (which crossed $200 million in lifetime retail sales), Fabletics Men, and media company HartBeat. In 2026, he struck a brand partnership with Authentic Brands Group and was the subject of a Netflix live roast featuring The Rock, Katt Williams, and Tom Brady.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Matt D'Avella is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, YouTuber, and podcaster who turned a $97,000 debt crisis into a Netflix documentary career. Best known for directing Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things and The Minimalists: Less Is Now on Netflix, he now runs one of YouTube's most visually distinct self-improvement channels with over 4 million subscribers, combining cinematic production quality with sharp, skeptical takes on hustle culture, habits, and modern life.
Theo Von is a comedian, podcaster, and storyteller from Covington, Louisiana, whose show 'This Past Weekend' ranked as the 4th biggest podcast globally on Spotify in 2024. Known for his absurdist Southern wit, deeply personal storytelling, and a gift for finding humor in unlikely places, he has built one of the most loyal audiences in independent media — interviewing everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders while remaining stubbornly, disarmingly himself.
Rick Kimball is a Founding General Partner at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), the growth-equity firm he co-founded with Jay Hoag in 1995. Over four decades as a technology investor, he backed category-defining companies including Netflix, GoDaddy, Spotify, and eHarmony. Before TCV, he spent more than a decade at Montgomery Securities as a Managing Director covering telecommunications and data communications. He has appeared multiple times on the Forbes Midas List as one of the top technology investors in the world, and currently serves on the UC San Francisco Board of Trustees and the Ohana Foundation board.
Woody Marshall is a General Partner at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), one of the world's leading growth equity firms. With nearly three decades in venture capital, he has backed some of the defining technology companies of the internet era - including Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Nubank, and Peloton. He joined TCV in 2008 after 12 years at Trident Capital and today sits on the boards of Spotify, Payoneer, GoFundMe, Nerdy, Newsela, and onX. A multiple Forbes Midas List honoree, Marshall focuses on fintech, mobile, and digital media investments with a philosophy rooted in backing exceptional entrepreneurs and patient, long-term capital deployment.
Gregg Spiridellis is an American media and technology entrepreneur who co-founded JibJab with his brother Evan in a Brooklyn garage in 1999, pioneering viral internet video before it was called that. He followed it up with StoryBots, the 11x Emmy Award-winning educational children's franchise acquired by Netflix in 2019. Now back with Spiridellis Bros. Studios, an AI-powered animation company backed by Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss, and Google's AI Futures Fund, he is betting that generative AI is the biggest creative wave yet.
Reid Weaver Dennis (1926-2024) was the founding father of institutional venture capital in Silicon Valley. As founder of Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), he pioneered the model of raising venture funds from institutional investors - insurance companies and endowments - at a time when VC was barely a cottage industry. His 1974 fund raised nearly half of all private venture capital in the U.S. that year. Over seven decades, he backed companies like Seagate, Netflix, TiVo, and Juniper Networks, served 37 years on the San Francisco Opera board, and built IVP into a firm managing $7 billion with a 40-year IRR of 43.1%.
Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at Netflix's Globalization team and the author of Deep (Learning) Focus, a twice-weekly Substack newsletter with 60,000+ subscribers that translates cutting-edge ML research into approachable long-form essays. A Rice University computer science PhD, he has built a reputation as one of the clearest explainers of large language models, RLHF, and AI agents in the field, bridging academia and industry with methodical depth and intellectual generosity.
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.
Brendan Gregg is an Australian systems performance engineer at OpenAI, where he works on datacenter optimizations for ChatGPT. He invented flame graphs and the USE Method, pioneered eBPF observability, and is the author of landmark books including 'Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud'. His work is credited with saving the industry over $1 billion in compute costs. Previously an Intel Fellow and performance engineering leader at Netflix, Gregg is one of the most influential engineers in Linux and cloud infrastructure.
Lorin Hochstein is a Staff Software Engineer specializing in reliability at Airbnb, and one of the most respected voices in incident analysis and resilience engineering. Known for rewriting Chaos Monkey at Netflix, co-authoring the O'Reilly book 'Ansible: Up and Running', and contributing to the 'Learning from Incidents' community, he bridges the gap between academic complexity theory and real-world software operations. His blog 'Surfing Complexity' and conference talks challenge engineers to think more deeply about why systems fail and how humans make sense of them.
Roy Rapoport is a veteran engineering leader and writer whose work has quietly reshaped how tech companies think about people, reliability, and operational culture. Best known for his two stints at Netflix (where he built Insight Engineering and its operational platform) and a stint at Slack, Roy popularized the Manager README format and authored influential frameworks on feedback, trust, and performance improvement. He writes on Medium about the subtler mechanics of leadership, raises goats in California, and insists he will never retire.