openai
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Joshua Kushner and the arithmetic of staying close
From a photo app bought days after his investment to an AI company that needed billions, Joshua Kushner has built Thrive Capital around a small number of consequential relationships. Now he is taking that approach into businesses he can operate and institutions he hopes to own for decades.
Yash Patil and the case for a machine with one job
Before Applied Compute, there were text-message tools, campus apps, and a bubble-tea machine. Yash Patil’s next project asks what AI can learn from the particular way a company works.
Claudia Laurie and the business of coming back
A fashion internship led Claudia Laurie toward software. After co-founding Prive and selling it to Recurly, she is still working on the same question: what makes a customer return?
Jason Boehmig and the trouble with paperwork
He learned to code because legal work had too many clicks. After building Ironclad and handing over the CEO job, Jason Boehmig is taking the same impatience to OpenAI’s legal business.
Masayoshi Son keeps moving the finish line
He planned to hand over SoftBank in his sixties. Then artificial intelligence gave Masayoshi Son another reason to stay - and another future to finance.
Arka Dhar and the trouble with a good idea
At Lift12, Arka Dhar learned that knowing what to do was only half the job. From Zinier to OpenAI and Google DeepMind, he has kept returning to the difficult business of turning intelligence into something people can use.
Noam Shazeer and the Art of Making Machines Talk
He helped give language models their modern architecture, then left the lab to see whether people would actually talk to them. His route from Google to Character.AI, back to Gemini, and on to OpenAI began with a crayon chart on a wall.
Mira Murati and the Question of Who Gets to Steer AI
She helped bring ChatGPT into everyday life. Now the engineer from Albania is building a lab around a more demanding question: how much control should the people using AI actually have?
Lilian Weng and the Art of Learning in Public
She taught a robot hand to solve a Rubik’s Cube, helped build OpenAI’s safety systems, and turned her private learning notes into a public map of modern AI. After co-founding Thinking Machines Lab, she returned to OpenAI in 2026 to work on how research itself might accelerate.
The engineer behind the uptime
Kyle Kosic helped keep GPT-4 training steady, joined xAI at its launch, and now works on personal AI at River. His career follows the infrastructure that makes ambitious models possible.
Logan Kilpatrick and the Art of Opening the Door
From a community college computer lab to NASA lunar software, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, Kilpatrick has followed a persistent idea: powerful tools matter most when people can use them.
Peter Steinberger and the Art of Building What He Wants to Use
After 13 years making PDF software, Peter Steinberger returned to the keyboard with a simpler brief: make something useful, then let people play with it. His WhatsApp experiment became OpenClaw, an open project with a life far beyond one laptop.
Luke Metz Learned to Teach Machines to Learn
A cardboard quadcopter, a robot built for tea, and years spent asking whether software could learn how to learn. That curiosity carried Luke Metz from Google Brain to ChatGPT, Thinking Machines Lab and Meta.
David Luan and the Computer That Takes the Next Click
At Adept, David Luan asked an unusually practical question of artificial intelligence: could it use the software already on our screens? After taking that wager to Amazon, he left in 2026 with another experiment in mind.
Igor Babuschkin Wants AI to Remember Who It Works For
After helping build AlphaStar, Grok and the machinery behind xAI, the physicist turned founder is asking a more personal question: who gets to shape the intelligence we use?
John Schulman and the Art of Teaching Machines What We Mean
He began with a robot that tied knots, helped turn human feedback into ChatGPT's manners, and now wants powerful models to be easier for people to shape. John Schulman's career is a study in making intelligence less mysterious and more steerable.
Durk Kingma and the Quiet Machinery Behind Modern AI
Before generative AI became a spectacle, the Dutch researcher helped invent two of the methods that made it practical. His career is a study in quiet leverage: change the machinery, and the whole field moves.
Vicki Cheung and the Art of Building Before the Blueprint
Before the office, before the laptop, sometimes before the company, Vicki Cheung has made a career of arriving early - then listening closely enough to build what people actually need.
Chris Olah Wants to Read the Mind We Built
For more than a decade, the Anthropic co-founder has pursued one stubborn question: if neural networks can surprise their makers, can we learn to see what they are actually doing?
Sam McCandlish Found a Ruler for Intelligence - Then Tried to Build the Guardrails
A physicist trained to see depth in flat surfaces helped turn neural-network growth into something measurable. Now Anthropic's Chief Architect works on the harder sequel: making immense systems useful, legible, and governable at once.
Pamela Vagata Built the Roads AI Learned to Travel
Before AI became a public spectacle, Pamela Vagata was building the machinery that let thousands of engineers put it to work. Now, at Pebblebed, she is betting on the people constructing what comes next.
Aliisa Rosenthal
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.
Joe Betts-LaCroix
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.
Leah Bibbo
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.
Bret Taylor
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
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
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
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
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
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.