Danny Shader is the founder and CEO of PayNearMe, a Santa Clara-based fintech platform that processes over $50 billion annually for more than 20,000 businesses. A serial entrepreneur whose previous ventures were acquired by Amazon, Motorola, and Netscape, Shader built PayNearMe from a niche cash-payment network into PayXM, the industry's first full-stack Payment Experience Management platform. Backed by $245 million in total funding including a $50M Series E in September 2025, he has spent 15+ years turning a deceptively simple problem - helping the cash-dependent and underbanked pay their bills - into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise payments category.
Frank Chen is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he has been a foundational force since the firm launched in August 2009. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who studied AI before it was fashionable, he has worked alongside Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz across more than 25 years and multiple companies including Loudcloud and Opsware. At a16z, he built the Deal & Research Team, led the Seed Fund, launched the Talent x Opportunity (TxO) initiative, and now heads Early Stage Venture Programs — building the Founder Library and an LLM-based chatbot that delivers a16z institutional knowledge to founders. He is also Silicon Valley's most acclaimed explainer of complex technology: his 2016 AI Primer video became the canonical introduction to deep learning across the industry.
Marc Andreessen co-invented the Mosaic browser as a $6.85/hour student programmer, then went on to co-found Netscape, help birth the modern internet, and eventually build Andreessen Horowitz into a $42B+ venture capital juggernaut. The man who wrote 'software is eating the world' in 2011 spent the next decade proving himself right by backing Twitter, Facebook, Coinbase, and GitHub. In 2023 he published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and in 2024 pivoted to advising the Trump administration's DOGE initiative - cementing his status as Silicon Valley's most opinionated, polarizing, and consequential voice.