Vanessa Thompson is the Vice President of Revenue and Growth Marketing at Twilio, where she leads a global team driving top-of-funnel growth across demand generation, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, competitive intelligence, and the developer network. A New Zealander who built her career through government tech, analyst research at IDC, and SaaS consulting at Bluewolf before joining Twilio in 2018, she has ascended from IoT marketing director to interim CMO and now oversees the full revenue marketing engine at one of the world's leading cloud communications platforms.
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
Vicky Wang is the founder and CEO of WuKong Education, a Silicon Valley-based online learning platform serving 300,000+ families across 118 countries. She built the company from Auckland, New Zealand in 2016 into a Series B-backed edtech brand with 4,000 employees, offering Chinese language, math, and English programs for students aged 3-18. Recognized by Fortune China as one of the Most Influential Business Women in 2021 and 2022, named among HolonIQ's 144 global EdTech Women Leaders, and awarded the 2024 Cognia School of Distinction, Wang is redefining how the world's children learn Mandarin and mathematics.
Tom Fox is the Chief Executive Officer of Fingermark, a New Zealand-founded technology company that deploys vision AI, intelligent kiosks, and digital menu systems inside some of the world's biggest quick-service restaurant chains. Based in San Francisco, Fox leads a 90-person global operation whose Eyecue platform turns ordinary restaurant cameras into real-time operational intelligence - monitoring drive-thru queues, measuring speed of service, and surfacing AI-generated performance diagnostics across fleets of McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeyes, and Carl's Jr. locations. He brings a career built at the intersection of restaurant technology and enterprise operations, having previously served as Chief Business Officer at Omnivore (acquired by Olo), Chief Product Officer at Bite, and Head of Partnerships at Ansa.
Steven Banerjee is the Founder and CEO of Nextnet, a life sciences AI platform that organizes and connects the world's biomedical knowledge. A serial biotech entrepreneur originally from New Zealand, he trained as a mechanical engineer at the University of Canterbury, served as a Doctoral Fellow at IBM Labs, and collaborated with gene sequencing pioneer Ron Davis at Stanford before founding his first venture, Mekonos - a cell and gene therapy company that raised over $40 million and was acquired. He then founded Nextnet in late 2020 to bring AI-native research tools to scientists, building a platform now used across 100+ countries by researchers at Harvard, MIT, MD Anderson, and UCSF. Nextnet's Copilot and Explorer tools are powered by a purpose-built biomedical ontology unifying data from PubMed, ChEMBL, Ensembl, and millions of scientific sources.
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt, West Germany) is one of the most consequential and controversial figures in the history of technology and venture capital. A Stanford philosophy graduate and law school alumnus, Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, pioneering online digital payments before selling it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. He then made what became arguably the greatest angel investment in tech history — a $500,000 bet on a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook in 2004 that ultimately returned over $1 billion. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies (now valued at over $400 billion), and in 2005 he launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm managing approximately $17 billion that was among the first institutional investors in SpaceX, Palantir, Stripe, Airbnb, and Spotify. Thiel's 2014 book Zero to One became a defining text on startup theory, articulating his core belief that genuine innovation is far more valuable than incremental improvement. A self-described libertarian, Thiel surprised Silicon Valley when he endorsed Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is also known for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker Media after the outlet outed him as gay. Through the Thiel Fellowship, which awards $250,000 to young people who skip or defer college, he has championed entrepreneurship over credentialism — producing billionaire alumni including Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin and Figma's Dylan Field. As of December 2025, Thiel's net worth is estimated at $27.5 billion.
Natalia Panferova is a Swift developer, author, and co-founder of Nil Coalescing - a technical education company built on the premise that understanding why SwiftUI works the way it does beats memorizing what it does. A former Apple SwiftUI Frameworks Engineer who was recruited after Apple discovered her blog, she personally built APIs (AttributedString, Markdown in Text, sheet detents) now used by millions of iOS developers daily. She publishes books, a blog, and the Nilcoalescing newsletter from a small town in New Zealand's wine country.
Rosé (Park Chae-young) is a New Zealand-born, Australian-raised South Korean singer-songwriter and main vocalist of BLACKPINK, one of the world's best-selling girl groups. Her 2024 collaboration 'APT.' with Bruno Mars became the best-selling global single of 2025 per IFPI, making her the first K-pop artist nominated for Grammy Record of the Year and Song of the Year, the first to win a Brit Award, and the first female K-pop act to crack the US Billboard Hot 100 top 3. Signed to The Black Label and Atlantic Records for her solo career, Rosé is simultaneously the most-followed K-pop solo artist on Instagram and a global fashion icon as YSL's first-ever global brand ambassador.