Muhammad Rassam is a Pakistani founder and marketer who started as a blockchain engineer at the agency Antematter and pivoted into AI-first go-to-market work. He is co-founder of Ertiqah, writes the 'Efficient Entrepreneur' newsletter, serves as Chief Marketing Officer at the LinkedIn-content tool LiGo, and co-founded the cold-email platform ColdSend.pro. Based in Dubai, he is known for building lean, AI-leveraged businesses and for candid LinkedIn writing about hiring, marketing, and founder life.
Dan Primack is the business editor at Axios and the voice behind Pro Rata, the daily newsletter and podcast that has become required reading for the venture capital, private equity, and M&A worlds. What began as an email he sent from his own Outlook account now reaches hundreds of thousands of dealmakers. Over two decades he has built and rebuilt the same beat three times, launching peHUB at Thomson Reuters, Term Sheet at Fortune, and Pro Rata at Axios, turning the unglamorous mechanics of who-bought-whom into a daily must-read.
Chris Hannah is a UK-based senior software engineer at WorldFirst (Ant Group) who moonlights as an indie app maker. He builds Text Case, a text-transformation utility for iOS, iPadOS and macOS that has grown from 7 to 50-plus formats, plus Text Shot and a Text Case command-line tool. He writes across three blogs and a monthly long-form newsletter about indie tech, productivity, and the craft of working in bursts.
David Jaxon writes the Creator Economy Report, a newsletter covering the business of creators and the media industry built around them. Beyond the newsletter and its stated focus on the creator economy and media, no further details about Jaxon could be independently verified through public sources.
Dickie Bush is the co-founder of Ship 30 for 30, the cohort-based course that has taught more than 10,000 people to write short 'atomic essays' online. A former Princeton football center and BlackRock portfolio analyst from Tampa, he started writing online in January 2020, pivoted from a stalling newsletter to Twitter, and built an audience of 400,000+ followers. With business partner Nicolas Cole he turned a daily writing habit into a seven-figure education business, the writing software Typeshare, and the Premium Ghostwriting Academy.
Eddie Shleyner is a conversion copywriter and the founder of VeryGoodCopy, a newsletter of short 'micro-lessons' on writing, persuasion, and creativity read by millions of people a year. A former Copy Chief at the software-review company G2, he turned a private Google Doc of notes-to-self into one of the most-followed copywriting brands on the internet, a HackerNoon 'Email Newsletter of the Year,' and a 2024 book collecting 207 of his lessons. He works and lives in Chicago.
Evan Armstrong writes about profit and power in technology. He spent four years as lead writer at Every, where his column Napkin Math turned finance terms like revenue, COGS, and net income into deeply reported, deeply funny explainers for an audience of more than 100,000. In April 2026 he walked away to launch The Leverage, a solo publication promising rigorous, actionable, beautiful analysis of tech markets for founders, investors, and senior operators. He had never been paid to write before joining Every, and went on to publish almost 500,000 words there.
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.
Jareau Wadé is a payments entrepreneur, operator, and writer who has spent roughly 15 years building commerce and payments infrastructure. He co-founded Balanced (acquired by Stripe in 2015) and helped scale Finix as its Chief Growth Officer, and now leads product partnerships at Ramp. He writes Batch Processing, a widely-read newsletter dissecting the people, companies, and ideas driving fintech. A Tucson native and UPenn-trained electrical engineer who taught in Ghana before the Bay Area, he relocated to Atlanta and invests in and advises early-stage founders, with a focus on Black entrepreneurship.
Jason Mikula is the publisher of Fintech Business Weekly, an independent newsletter that reaches more than 90,000 subscribers with critical, no-favors analysis of banking, fintech, and crypto. After more than a decade scaling consumer lending businesses at Enova, LendUp, and Goldman Sachs, he became one of the most-cited independent voices on Banking-as-a-Service and fintech regulation, writing the award-winning book on BaaS and co-hosting the Fintech Business Podcast. He works from outside Amsterdam, covering the U.S. fintech-banking ecosystem from across an ocean.
Justin Welsh is a writer and solopreneur who turned a 2019 burnout into one of the internet's most-studied one-person businesses. After scaling SaaS sales teams to nine figures, he walked away, moved to the Catskills, and started writing online daily. His business - powered by The Saturday Solopreneur newsletter, the LinkedIn Operating System, and a stack of self-serve digital products - has crossed roughly $10M+ in cumulative revenue at an ~89% margin with zero employees and zero ads.
Eric Levitz is a senior correspondent at Vox who covers American politics, economics and the future of the Democratic Party, most visibly through his newsletter and column 'The Rebuild.' A former creative-writing student turned wonk, he spent roughly eight years at New York Magazine's Intelligencer before joining Vox, earning a reputation for data-driven, argument-forward pieces that frequently irritate both the online left and the right - sometimes in the same week.
Josh Barro is an American journalist who left legacy media to run Very Serious, a subscription newsletter and podcast about politics, business, economics, and culture. A former Republican turned Democrat, ex-host of KCRW's Left, Right & Center and onetime New York Times and Business Insider columnist, he now writes a weekly mailbag called the Mayonnaise Clinic and co-hosts the litigation podcast Serious Trouble with attorney Ken White.
Mike Solana is the founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, the technology, politics, and culture publication that became required reading inside Silicon Valley's investor class. He doubles as Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, where he runs the firm's creative output, including the Anatomy of Next podcast and the Hereticon conference for ideas that get exiled from polite conversation. The Atlantic dubbed him 'the most opinionated man in America.' Operating from Miami, he writes and broadcasts a contrarian, often combative take on tech, the press, and California governance.
ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based marketing automation platform that helps over 180,000 businesses in 170+ countries connect with their customers through email marketing, CRM, SMS, and AI-powered automation. Founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom - who bootstrapped it solo for 13 years before raising $360M - the company reached a $3B valuation in 2021 and now generates $250M+ in annual recurring revenue. Its platform is particularly strong for small and mid-sized businesses that need sophisticated automation without enterprise-level complexity or cost.
Ben Ho is the Singapore-based founder of Hex (hex.sg), a web design and development studio, and the creator of Sendy - a widely-used self-hosted email newsletter application powered by Amazon SES. A self-taught designer and programmer, Ben co-founded Hex with Melly Fong in 2007, building websites and web applications for major brands like Sony, Nokia, Levi's, Changi Airport, and Tiger Beer. His best-known product, Sendy, launched in August 2012 and transformed the email marketing economics for thousands of businesses by offering a one-time $69 fee to send newsletters at a fraction of the cost of platforms like Campaign Monitor - roughly $1 versus $150 per 10,000 emails via Amazon SES.
Jay Campbell is a Knoxville-based fractional AI GTM leader and serial product builder who spent 15+ years in enterprise sales at Staffmark, Avionte, and Sense before turning his builder habit into the point of it all. He has shipped 45+ AI products - including Cadence (a personal AI OS with 50+ API integrations), DealIQ OS (an AI deal-coaching CRM), and getaFNjob - and writes the Selling with AI newsletter, which runs a 70% open rate. His thesis: most companies use AI to do the same things faster; winning teams use it to do things they could never do before.
Jin Ho Hur is a Co-Founder and General Partner at HRZ Han River Partners, a Menlo Park-based early-stage venture capital firm that bridges Silicon Valley and Korea's tech ecosystem. A PhD in Computer Science from KAIST and a serial entrepreneur who built and led internet companies in Korea from the mid-1990s, Hur helped shape the country's early internet economy and served as Chairperson of the Korea Internet Association. He later transitioned into institutional investing via Translink Investment before co-founding Han River Partners, which in October 2024 launched a $100 million fund focused on AI and consumer sectors within the 'Korea Graph.' He also writes the popular Substack newsletter 'Two Cents,' covering global tech and startup trends for over 9,000 subscribers.
Kyle Harrison is a General Partner at Contrary, the talent- and research-driven venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He joined in 2022 to co-found the firm's later-stage investment practice, bringing nearly a decade of experience from Index Ventures, Coatue Management, and TCV, where he backed companies including Ramp, Pave, Anduril, GitLab, Databricks, Snowflake, Figma, and Robinhood. Beyond deploying capital, Harrison built Contrary Research - one of the largest private market research platforms in the world, with 100,000+ subscribers and 500+ published reports. He also publishes the Investing 101 newsletter on Substack (26,000+ subscribers) and co-authored 'The Anduril Thesis,' a 300-page deep dive that took two years and 500+ sources to produce. Married to Camden, father of four, and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Christian Keil is an Investing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz on the American Dynamism team, backing startups that build for the national interest - from aerospace to defense to infrastructure. Before turning investor, he spent seven years as a top executive at Astranis, the satellite company he helped scale from a 50-person R&D shop to a 500-person aerospace-grade factory with over $1 billion in sales. He may be the only venture capitalist who has personally bought a dedicated Falcon 9 rocket. A proud Midwesterner who moved to Silicon Valley in 2017, Keil writes, podcasts, and thinks deeply about what it means to build things that matter for America.
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Leonard Adler is the founder and CEO of Green Jobs Network, a San Francisco-based social enterprise he launched in 2008 to connect job seekers with careers in sustainability, conservation, and clean energy. A Stanford-educated political scientist who went on to earn a J.D. from Georgetown Law and an MPP from Harvard's Kennedy School, Adler parlayed his early work in public-interest law and poverty research into building one of the internet's most active communities dedicated to green and climate careers. Under his leadership, Green Jobs Network has grown to run the largest LinkedIn group focused exclusively on green jobs—135,000+ members worldwide—while publishing a newsletter with more than 100,000 subscribers, hosting the Green Jobs Pod, and launching ClimateJobs.AI, an AI-powered career coaching platform. An Echoing Green Global Fellow and serial social entrepreneur, Adler has spoken at Stanford, the Commonwealth Club's Climate One, the National Career Development Association, and the Green Festivals, making him one of the most visible connectors in the climate workforce ecosystem.
Maria Heyen is an early-stage investor at Lightbank in Chicago, previously the first hire at Redbud VC in Columbia, Missouri, where she helped deploy $5M+ across 35+ companies. A Pacific Northwest native who worked 80-100 hour weeks to fund her own education, she went on to co-found the Husker Venture Fund at UNL and build a reputation as one of the emerging voices in Midwest venture. She invests at the intersection of vertical SaaS, fintech, and infrastructure in overlooked industries, and writes the Soapbox newsletter on career, culture, and capital.
Tony Cueva Bravo is a Venture Partner at Hustle Fund, angel investor, and the founder of Emerging Fintech - a weekly newsletter and podcast covering frontier fintech across Latin America, Asia, and Africa. A Peruvian-born engineer who earned his MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Tony has lived and worked across three continents, driven 50% MoM growth at Rebill (the Stripe of LatAm), won dual startup competitions in Peru and Chile, and built a reputation as one of the sharpest fintech voices in emerging markets. He invests at the pre-seed stage and serves as a fractional operator for early-stage founders who need a thought partner to unlock growth bottlenecks.
Justine Moore is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) where she invests in AI-native consumer products and generative media, with a portfolio spanning companies like ElevenLabs and Viggle AI. A Stanford alum who co-founded Cardinal Ventures as a student, she launched the 'Accelerated' newsletter with her identical twin sister Olivia (also a partner at a16z), and together they are known as the 'Venture Twins.' Before a16z, Justine spent four years at CRV investing in DTC and consumer startups, and briefly took an operator role at Canal between VC stints. Her mother was a venture investor, making her something of VC royalty who grew up watching pitch meetings from a stroller.
Auren Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur, data-industry pioneer, and hyper-connected Silicon Valley networker who turned a $60 million exit (LiveRamp to Acxiom, 2014) into a second act as a venture capitalist at Flex Capital, founder of location-data company SafeGraph, and co-founder of the invitation-only Dialog society with Peter Thiel. He publishes the Summation newsletter and podcast - reaching 41,000+ Substack subscribers - exploring non-obvious ideas at the intersection of data, technology, and business.
Alberto Romero is a Spanish AI analyst, writer, and newsletter author behind The Algorithmic Bridge, a Substack publication with 40,000+ subscribers. A former machine learning engineer turned independent journalist, he brings an unusual fusion of aerospace engineering, cognitive neuroscience, and ML expertise to bear on the most pressing questions in AI - with a commitment to honesty, no ads, and no sponsors. He is also an analyst at CambrianAI Research, focusing on large language models and AI hardware/software.
Alex Kantrowitz is an independent technology journalist, author, and the founder of Big Technology - one of the most widely read independent tech newsletters in the world with 150,000+ subscribers. A former BuzzFeed News senior reporter and CNBC on-air contributor, he wrote 'Always Day One,' a deeply reported look at how tech titans like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook maintain dominance through constant reinvention. Kantrowitz covers the systems and mechanisms driving big tech, not just the headlines, and has been named one of the ten most cited technology reporters in the world.