Sadie Jean Wilcox is an independent indie-pop singer-songwriter from Tustin, California, who turned a dorm-room song written as revenge on a cheating ex into a viral TikTok phenomenon. Her 2021 debut single 'WYD Now?' went Gold in the US and Silver in the UK, earned 100M+ Spotify streams, and went so viral mid-finals that she dropped out of NYU's prestigious Clive Davis Institute to pursue music full-time. Since then she has released the EP 'Simple Like 17' (2023) and her debut studio album 'Early Twenties Torture' (2025), toured with Rod Wave, Snow Patrol, Cian Ducrot, and Lauren Spencer Smith, and built a devoted fanbase through her 'Jeanmail' newsletter - all while remaining fully independent.
sombr is the stage name of Shane Michael Boose, a Gen Z singer-songwriter from New York City who built a global fanbase from his bedroom before ever stepping into a proper studio. Born July 5, 2005, he went viral in 2022 with 'Caroline', signed to Warner Records in 2023, and broke through to mainstream pop in 2024-2025 with 'Back to Friends' - a song that spent 44+ weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking at #7), hit #1 on Alternative Airplay and Pop Airplay, earned RIAA Platinum certification, and earned him a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. His debut album 'I Barely Know Her' (August 2025) cemented his status as one of the defining voices of indie-bedroom-pop's crossover moment.
Rex Woodbury is the founder and managing partner of Daybreak Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, and the creator of Digital Native, a weekly newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers exploring the intersection of technology and culture. A Dartmouth and Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholar, former Goldman Sachs analyst, TPG and Index Ventures partner, Guinness World Record holder, LGBTQ+ advocate, and competitive runner, Woodbury is one of the most distinctive voices in venture capital — blending anthropological observation with market analysis to decode how Gen Z and emerging technology are reshaping commerce, communication, and culture.
Stephanie Palazzolo is an AI reporter at The Information and author of the AI Agenda newsletter, covering artificial intelligence startups, Big Tech, chips, cloud, and policy. A former Morgan Stanley investment banker who pivoted into journalism, she broke major stories on OpenAI, Anthropic, and the broader AI industry, and was part of a SABEW Best in Business award-winning team for coverage of the OpenAI CEO firing in 2023.
Leandra Medine Cohen is the New York-based fashion writer, cultural commentator, and founder of Man Repeller - the blog that coined a phrase and built a media empire around the radical idea that women dress for themselves. After shutting down Man Repeller in 2020, she re-emerged with The Cereal Aisle, a Substack newsletter now boasting 166,000+ subscribers and a top-5 ranking in Fashion & Beauty. Part sharp wit, part earnest diarist, she writes about getting dressed, motherhood, and everything in between with a voice that is unmistakably her own.
Nihal Mehta is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist and Co-Founder & General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, one of New York's leading seed funds. Known as the 'Human Rolodex,' Mehta has backed early investments in Uber, Airbnb, AdMob (acquired by Google), and SwiftKey (acquired by Microsoft) while building a reputation as a founder-first investor who connects people without keeping score. He founded Pitch & Run NYC, a community blending startup pitches with morning runs, and hosts the Human Unicorn Podcast. A UPenn dual-degree graduate who once filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in his 20s, Mehta channels that hard-won empathy into backing the next generation of founders through ENIAC's $160M sixth fund.
Nikhil Krishnan is the founder and 'Thinkboi' behind Out-of-Pocket, a healthcare newsletter and education platform that makes the bewildering business of American healthcare funny, accessible, and actually worth reading. A Brooklyn-based writer, creator, and early-stage investor, Krishnan grew up in a family of physicians and parlayed a career in healthcare research at CB Insights and clinical trial partnerships at TrialSpark into one of the most original media brands in health tech - one that includes a newsletter with 30,000+ subscribers, educational crash courses, a medical bankruptcy card game, a children's book about clinical trials, hackathons, and a scout fund backing early-stage healthcare startups.
ZeroEval is a New York-based AI startup from Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch building an auto-optimizer for AI agents. Founded by Jonathan Chavez and Sebastian Crossa - two friends who met in college in Mexico - the platform captures every interaction your AI agent makes, scores quality with custom LLM judges, and automatically turns real production data into better prompts. The result: agents that get smarter after launch without manual intervention. Trusted by DoorDash, Datadog, Hugging Face, and Harvard Medical School, ZeroEval closes what the founders call 'the last mile reliability gap' in agentic AI.