open-web
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Derek Alia Keeps Building In the Open
From iPhone apps to decentralized markets and agentic science, the San Francisco engineer has followed one stubborn idea: useful systems should invite people in, then get out of their way.
Decide
Decide is a St. Louis-based advertising technology company - the rebrand of LockerDome, founded in 2008 - that runs a machine-learning platform called the Decision Marketplace. Rather than relying on third-party cookies or intrusive identity data, Decide lets multiple ML models compete in real time to select and price ad impressions, powering a two-sided marketplace that connects publishers and brands across the open web. Its widgets and content-recommendation units have reached over 100 million monthly users, positioning the company as a cookieless, performance-focused alternative to legacy programmatic ad stacks.
Picnic
Picnic is a London-born ad-tech company building user-first advertising for the open web. It packages social-media-style ad formats - Stories, swipe-to-act, emoji reactions - and delivers them on premium publisher inventory, aiming to make ads people actually engage with rather than ignore. Founded in 2017 by Matthew Goldhill, Picnic pairs its creative formats with PIQ, an inventory-quality platform, and ships every campaign carbon neutral, claiming roughly 50% lower emissions than the industry standard.
Mozilla
Mozilla builds Firefox and a family of privacy-first internet products with a single, stubborn goal: keep the web open, private, and not owned by anyone. Spun out of Netscape in 1998 and run by a for-profit corporation wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla competes with the largest companies on earth while answering to a mission instead of shareholders.
Quantcast
Quantcast is a San Francisco-based advertising technology company that uses AI and machine learning to help marketers, agencies and publishers plan, buy, optimize and measure campaigns across the open internet. Built around its patented Ara AI engine and a live Audience Graph that processes trillions of signals a day, Quantcast positions itself as a next-generation demand-side platform for a privacy-first, increasingly cookieless web.
Jay Sullivan
Jay Sullivan is the CEO of Fandom, the world's largest fan platform with 350 million monthly visitors spanning wikis, gaming, movies, TV, and pop culture. A Yale-trained applied mathematician turned product visionary, Sullivan built his career shepherding the open web at Mozilla—where he served as SVP of Product, COO, and Interim CEO—before stints driving product at Groupon, Facebook's Reality Labs AI team, and Twitter's consumer and revenue products. Co-inventor of three US patents and co-founder of PhoneSpots (acquired 2007), he has spent two decades building platforms at mass scale. Since joining Fandom in February 2026, he is steering the company from a Google-traffic-dependent reference destination toward a real-time, AI-powered fan engagement platform.
Declan Chidlow
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Dalton Caldwell
Dalton Caldwell is a serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist best known for co-founding imeem (one of the first legal music social networks), launching App.net as a principled alternative to ad-supported social media, and spending over a decade as a Managing Partner at Y Combinator advising 1,000+ startups. He is now co-founding Standard Capital, a $425M AI-native Series A fund with Paul Buchheit and Bryan Berg.
John Lilly
John Lilly is a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, where he oversaw Firefox's growth from 7 million to 450+ million users. A Stanford-trained engineer turned VC, he has backed transformative companies including Dropbox, Figma, Instagram, and Discord, while staying rooted in civic technology as Board Chair of Code for America. He currently serves as a lecturer at Stanford GSB and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Jim Nielsen
Jim Nielsen is a design engineer, writer, and curator with 20+ years at the intersection of design and code on the web. He writes the popular Jim Nielsen's Blog covering web development philosophy, design thinking, and the craft of building for the web. He's the founding engineer at Quadratic, co-creator of The iOS App Icon Book (€136K Kickstarter), and maintains the beloved iOS/macOS/watchOS icon gallery sites. A champion of the open web, HTML-first thinking, and the emerging 'design engineer' role, Nielsen bridges the gap between visual design and front-end engineering with rare fluency.
Paul Kinlan
Paul Kinlan is the Lead for Chrome and Web Platform Developer Relations at Google, where he has spent over 16 years championing the open web. From growing up watching his dad repair computers on the Wirral in North West England, to launching Google Web Fundamentals, killing the 300ms click delay, and shepherding tools like Lighthouse, Squoosh, and Workbox into developers' hands, Kinlan has been the web's tireless advocate inside one of its most influential companies. Now he is turning his lens toward AI's impact on the web through his newsletter and blog AI Focus.