Joe Betts-LaCroix is the co-founder and CEO of Retro Biosciences, a San Francisco longevity biotech on a mission to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan. A scientist-turned-serial-entrepreneur who once held a Guinness World Record for building the world's smallest Windows PC, he now leads a company backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, valued at $1.8 billion in 2026, that has run an Alzheimer's clinical trial and co-developed a longevity-focused AI model with OpenAI. He came to biology by an unlikely route: a D-average high schooler who tinkered in shared houses, then earned straight A's, transferred to Harvard, and did research at MIT and Caltech before co-discovering principles of electron transfer in proteins.
Formation Bio is a New York-based, AI-native pharmaceutical company that acquires and in-licenses clinical-stage drug candidates and runs them through a proprietary, technology-driven development platform to bring treatments to patients faster and at lower cost. Formerly known as TrialSpark, the company rebranded in December 2023 and raised a $372M Series D in June 2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Sanofi. It pairs in-house drug selection expertise with AI tools for trial design, recruitment, regulatory writing, and safety monitoring, and partnered with OpenAI and Sanofi to build purpose-built AI agents for drug development.
OpenRouter is a unified API gateway for large language models. Through a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint, developers can reach 400+ models from 60+ providers, with automatic routing, price comparison, and failover across vendors. It removes the need to maintain separate integrations for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and dozens of others, and now processes around 100 trillion tokens per month for more than 8 million users.
Leah Bibbo is a seasoned technology marketing executive with 20+ years of experience in strategic communications. She spent eight years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), rising to Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Communications, where she was instrumental in landmark initiatives like the AWS DeepRacer autonomous racing league. Known for her philosophy of embracing uncomfortable opportunities, she has since moved to OpenAI as Vice President of Strategic Pursuits, helping drive enterprise scale and global expansion at one of the world's most consequential AI companies.
Mercor is an AI-powered talent marketplace that recruits domain experts - doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists - to train and evaluate frontier AI models for labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Founded in 2023 by three Thiel Fellows, it has grown from a hiring tool into the human data backbone of the AI economy.
Bret Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of Sierra, an enterprise AI agent platform valued at $15.8 billion following its $950M Series E in May 2026. A Stanford computer science graduate, he co-created Google Maps, helped invent Facebook's Like button, served as Facebook CTO, co-founded Quip (acquired by Salesforce), and rose to co-CEO of Salesforce before founding Sierra in 2023. He also chairs the OpenAI board, having stabilized the company after Sam Altman's brief ouster in November 2023. Forbes recognized him as a billionaire in 2025, and Silicon Valley has nicknamed him the 'Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley' for his uncanny presence at every landmark moment in the internet age.
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.
Jonas Schneider is the Founder and CEO of Daedalus, an AI-powered precision manufacturing company headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, building the factory of the future. A former OpenAI technical lead and co-founder of its robotics team, Schneider left Silicon Valley in 2019 to solve a problem he lived firsthand: getting precision-manufactured parts takes months, and the world's most advanced machines sit idle 80% of the time. Daedalus deploys proprietary AI software across CNC shop floors to double machine utilization, catch defects in real time, and preserve tacit manufacturing knowledge before it disappears with retiring machinists. The company has raised $41.1M in total funding, including a $21M Series A led by NGP Capital in February 2024, and operates a 50,000-square-foot factory serving defense, medical devices, aerospace, and semiconductor clients.
Kurt Beidler is the Chief Executive Officer of Quizlet, the AI-powered learning platform used by hundreds of millions of students worldwide. Appointed in July 2024, he brings 17 years of Amazon experience scaling subscription businesses - most notably growing Amazon Kids+ into the world's largest youth-focused subscription service and launching Kindle into China. Under his leadership, Quizlet has grown revenue to $139M annually while aggressively integrating AI tools including a native ChatGPT app integration, lecture recording features, and an OpenAI partnership aimed at keeping students' entire study workflow on one platform.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
Nikhil Buduma is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ambience Healthcare, an ambient AI platform that automates clinical documentation, coding, and revenue integrity for health systems. A two-time International Biology Olympiad gold medalist, MIT-educated computer scientist, and author of O'Reilly's 'Fundamentals of Deep Learning,' Buduma built Ambience from the ground up - first by running a medical practice, then by creating the AI platform his clinicians needed. The company has raised $343M total, reached a $1.25B valuation after a $243M Series C in 2025, and built a platform that supports 100+ medical specialties across outpatient, emergency, and inpatient settings.
Aliisa Rosenthal is a General Partner at Acrew Capital and the firm's first GP hire since founding in 2019. She was the first commercial leader at OpenAI, where she scaled enterprise revenue from roughly $10M to roughly $10B and built ChatGPT Enterprise's go-to-market motion. She invests in AI-native companies reshaping enterprise software.
Speak is an AI-powered language learning app that gets users speaking out loud from day one. Backed by OpenAI's Startup Fund, Accel, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the San Francisco company reached unicorn status in December 2024 after raising a $78M Series C at a $1B valuation. Its AI tutor offers unlimited conversational practice and instant feedback to over 10 million learners.
Ramu Arunachalam is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based VC firm known for a founder-friendly approach and a portfolio spanning Notion, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, and Replit. An engineer turned product manager turned investor, Ramu brings a rare depth of technical credibility to the table - he helped build VMware's first virtual switch, shaped a16z's Cloud and Big Data thesis during his time as Partner there, and now leads A.Capital's $180M Fund V with a focus on AI and crypto-native companies.
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Daniel Lewis is the Global CEO of LegalOn Technologies, the most well-funded AI platform for in-house contract review, having raised over $200 million. A Stanford Law grad who co-founded Ravel Law from a Stanford dorm, partnered with Harvard to digitize 360 years of U.S. case law, and then led LexisNexis's Practical Guidance division before taking the helm at LegalOn in 2022. Under his leadership, LegalOn's US and UK business quadrupled, secured a $50M Series E led by Goldman Sachs, and struck a strategic partnership with OpenAI - all while building attorney-curated AI playbooks that help legal teams cut contract review time by up to 85%.
Russ d'Sa is the co-founder and CEO of LiveKit, the open source real-time communication platform that became the connective tissue of voice AI. When you tap the voice button in ChatGPT, your phone is talking to a LiveKit server. He has built five companies, shipped Twitter Cards, sold a launcher app (Evie) to Medium, and now runs the nervous system for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce Agentforce, Tesla, Spotify and thousands of other voice agents.
Connor Zwick is the CEO and co-founder of Speak, an AI-powered language learning platform that crossed $1 billion in valuation and $100 million in annualized revenue in 2024. A Thiel Fellow who dropped out of Harvard, Zwick built his first app at age 13 and sold Flashcards+ to Chegg as a teenager. He founded Speak in 2016 with Andrew Hsu, and spent years living between San Francisco and Seoul to perfect AI conversation technology for English learners. Today Speak counts over 15 million downloads, backing from OpenAI and Accel, and enterprise customers including KPMG and HD Hyundai.
Kevin Moody is the co-founder and CEO of Mem, an AI-powered knowledge management platform backed by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz. A Stanford Computer Science graduate who once worked at Google X on drone delivery, he spent five years quietly building toward a single obsession: making your past knowledge work as hard as your present focus. Mem has raised $34.7M and is redefining how individuals and teams capture, connect, and retrieve information at the speed of thought.
Cole Pergament is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, one of the most storied venture platforms in Silicon Valley. A Wharton summa cum laude graduate who founded his university's undergraduate fintech group, Cole cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley's Global Technology Group before spending four years at BOND Capital, where he backed companies that became household names in AI and enterprise software - including OpenAI, Decagon, AlphaSense, Weights & Biases, and Wiz. He joined Sequoia in July 2025, bringing a reputation for seeking founders who embrace discomfort, question convention, and are fully committed to their vision.
Ethan Choi is a Partner at Khosla Ventures leading the firm's Growth Fund, where he writes checks between $15M and $70M into cloud infrastructure, SaaS, enterprise, and consumer internet companies from Seed through Series C. Before joining Khosla in 2024, he was a Partner at Accel, where he backed Klaviyo (now NYSE: KVYO), 1Password, and Pismo (acquired by Visa). His investing philosophy pivoted from metrics-first to founder-first — he now spends 90% of his diligence energy on the people rather than the numbers. A former LDS missionary who spent two years in South Korea, Choi is an unusually direct voice on AI's disruption of white-collar work and the coming robotics inflection point.
Samir Kaul is a Founding General Partner at Khosla Ventures who cut the first and largest check into OpenAI before the world knew what a language model could do. A former genomics researcher who co-authored the landmark Arabidopsis genome paper in Nature, he brings a rare scientist's rigor to venture capital - betting on technical risk, not market risk. His portfolio spans Guardant Health, Nutanix, Impossible Foods, and Varda Space Industries, and his philosophy is deceptively simple: find visionary founders attacking large markets with real technology.
Sarah Wang is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads growth-stage investments across AI, enterprise applications, and infrastructure. A Harvard and Stanford GSB alumna with rare dual-mode investor instincts - equally comfortable asking 'Is it working?' and 'What if it works?' - she has backed defining companies of the AI era including Cursor, Wiz, Character.ai, Gamma, Decagon, and Thinking Machines Lab, while working closely with a16z's positions in OpenAI, Databricks, SpaceX, SSI, and Figma.
Sonya Huang is a Partner at Sequoia Capital where she has become one of Silicon Valley's most influential voices on AI investing. A Princeton economics graduate (summa cum laude) with a minors in Computer Science and Statistics/Machine Learning, she co-leads Sequoia's AI thesis through the annual AI Ascent conference and the Training Data podcast. Her portfolio includes OpenAI, Hugging Face, LangChain, Glean, Mercury, Gong, and Harvey. Known for her conviction that the application layer - not infrastructure - is where AI's value ultimately concentrates, she has bet over $1.5 billion of Sequoia's capital on that view.
Kevin Scott is the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft, where he has served since January 2017 under CEO Satya Nadella. A computer scientist from Gladys, Virginia, Scott rose from a working-class background to become one of the most influential technologists in the world, architecting Microsoft's landmark partnership with OpenAI, the Copilot suite, and the 'agentic web' vision. Before Microsoft, he held senior engineering roles at Google, AdMob, and LinkedIn, where he led the infrastructure overhaul known as 'Operation InVersion.' He is also a Wall Street Journal #1 bestselling author of 'Reprogramming the American Dream' (2020), which argues that AI must be harnessed to serve rural and working-class communities, not just coastal elites.
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Alfred Lin is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of venture capital's most storied firms, where he co-steers a $7 billion AI-focused expansion fund alongside Pat Grady. A Taiwanese immigrant who resold Tony Hsieh's pizza by the slice at Harvard, Lin went on to be CFO, COO, and Chairman of Zappos - guiding it to its first profitable year and a $1.2 billion Amazon acquisition - before joining Sequoia in 2010. His portfolio reads like a decade of defining bets: Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Instacart, Reddit, and OpenAI. A three-time Forbes Midas List #1, he is the rare investor who has lived the operator's grind and brings that lens to every founder he backs.
Josh Kushner is the founder and managing partner of Thrive Capital, a New York-based venture firm he started at age 24 with $5 million and has since grown to $50+ billion in AUM across 10 funds. He made one of the most consequential single bets in VC history by providing the only term sheet OpenAI received in 2022 at a $29 billion valuation. Co-founder of Oscar Health and Cadre, minority owner of the Miami Heat and San Francisco Giants, and husband of supermodel and media entrepreneur Karlie Kloss, Kushner operates from the Puck Building in Manhattan where his apartment and office share the same address. Known for his low-key demeanor, obsessive work ethic, and a hiring process that famously takes eight months.
Laurence 'Lo' Toney is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, a San Francisco-based institutional VC firm he incubated at GV (Google Ventures) and spun out independently in 2018. Plexo's distinctive 'full stack' model invests across three layers - LP stakes in emerging diverse fund managers, direct investments in companies sourced through those networks, and equity stakes in the GP management entities themselves. After senior operating roles at Nike, eBay, and Zynga (where he ran Zynga Poker to $250M in annual bookings), Toney moved into VC via Comcast Ventures and GV before building Plexo Capital's $42.5M Fund I with backers including Alphabet, Intel Capital, and the Ford Foundation. Named to Forbes BLK 50: Money Masters 2026, he has championed diverse fund managers as alpha generators long before it became conventional wisdom.
Ron Conway is the undisputed 'Godfather of Silicon Valley' - a San Francisco-born angel investor who backed Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Stripe, OpenAI, and 650+ other companies through SV Angel, the firm he founded in 2009. Known as 'The Human Router' by Marc Andreessen for his legendary ability to connect founders with capital, talent, and opportunity, Conway pioneered seed-stage investing with small checks and high conviction in people, writing 1+ investments per week at his peak. A lifelong Democrat and civic power broker, philanthropist, and father of three sons who all work in his ecosystem, Conway announced a rare cancer diagnosis in April 2026 while vowing to never back down from a fight.