Elan Greenberg is the CEO of Augury, the Industrial AI company that listens to factory machines and predicts their failures before they happen. A former US Marine Corps captain who went from Morgan Stanley M&A to launching DoorDash's non-restaurant business to running operations at Flock Safety, he took the top job at the roughly $1 billion-valued Augury in October 2025 after a year as its COO. His through-line is operations at scale: taking proven technology and putting it in front of every customer who needs it.
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.
Anthony Costello is the CEO of Medidata Solutions, a Dassault Systèmes company, and one of clinical research technology's most seasoned architects. With nearly 30 years in the field, he started as a data manager at Genentech, co-founded two companies (Nextrials and Mytrus), and was acquired by Medidata before rising to lead it. Today he oversees over 8,000 active clinical studies globally each year, championing AI-driven trial innovation, decentralized models, and patient-centric design at the White House Clinical Trials Forum and beyond.
Bob McCollum is the long-serving CEO and driving force behind R.S. Hughes Co., Inc., an employee-owned industrial distributor headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that has grown into a $527 million enterprise spanning North America. A University of Michigan alumnus and former college quarterback, McCollum spent decades building RS Hughes into one of North America's top 50 industrial distributors, known for its culture of integrity and genuine care for employees. He has been recognized for significant philanthropic contributions to the University of Michigan athletics program, endowing the quarterbacks coaching position with a $2 million gift in 2022.
David 'Dave' Ripley is Co-CEO of Kraken, one of the world's largest and longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. He joined via Kraken's 2016 acquisition of Glidera, a bitcoin wallet service he co-founded, and rose from COO to CEO to Co-CEO as Kraken expanded aggressively — completing $1.5B acquisitions, raising $800M in 2025, and filing confidentially for a U.S. IPO. A former BCG principal and electrical engineer turned crypto operator, Ripley has shepherded Kraken from a 50-person startup to a 2,600+ employee global exchange while navigating major SEC enforcement actions and a shifting regulatory landscape.
Dennis Woodside is the CEO and President of Freshworks, a Nasdaq-listed SaaS company serving 75,000 customers worldwide with AI-powered business software. A Cornell rower turned Stanford lawyer turned McKinsey consultant turned tech executive, he has spent two decades building and scaling iconic companies - leading Google's EMEA sales engine, running Motorola Mobility after its $12.5B acquisition by Google, scaling Dropbox from $250M to a $1B+ IPO, and betting on plant-based food at Impossible Foods before landing at Freshworks in 2022. Off the screen, he is a 15-time Ironman Triathlon finisher who qualified for the World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.
Jessa Reus traded twenty years of digital marketing leadership for three boutique stretch studios in San Francisco. She founded Redhead Ventures in 2023 and now runs StretchLab Castro, Union Street, and a third city location, building a portfolio of premium consumer wellness brands from the ground up.
Martina Tam is the CEO of Paper, the Montreal-based edtech company that runs one of North America's largest virtual tutoring services for K-12 districts. A Stanford and Wharton alum, she stepped in at the start of 2025 after operator stints at Brightwheel, MasterClass, and Eventbrite, and is now steering Paper's pivot toward its high-impact tutoring program, GROW.
Kerem Ozkay is the CEO of Carbon Health, the modern primary and urgent care chain. An aerospace engineer turned marketer turned operator, he ran growth and operations at Carbon for years before founder Eren Bali handed him the top job in August 2024. He now steers the company through a Chapter 11 restructuring designed to refocus on its hybrid care model and homegrown EHR.
Nina Herold is the CEO of Reed & Mackay, a Navan company, leading one of the most storied names in luxury corporate travel as it merges with the technology platform that acquired it. Previously COO of Navan (formerly TripActions), she built and scaled the travel side of a hyper-growth fintech-and-travel SaaS company through a pandemic, an acquisition spree, and a market-defining pivot into expense management.
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is the CEO of Xero, the New Zealand-headquartered cloud accounting platform serving small businesses globally. A 25-year Silicon Valley operator, she co-founded Yodlee, ran Asia Pacific and Latin America for Google, served as President of StubHub, founded Joyus and theBoardlist, and authored the WSJ bestseller Choose Possibility.
Babak Nivi is the co-founder of AngelList, the platform that rewired how startups raise money and find talent. Alongside Naval Ravikant, he turned a casual email list of angel investors into a $3.5B+ funding infrastructure that backed over 7,000 startups and produced 200+ unicorns. Before AngelList, Nivi co-created Venture Hacks, the blog that demystified term sheets and negotiation for a generation of founders. An MIT-trained engineer who once co-invented the first printed inorganic transistor, he brings both scientific rigor and street-level startup pragmatism to everything he builds.
Steven Pease is the CEO of Clarify Health Solutions, a San Francisco-based healthcare analytics platform serving payers, providers, and life sciences companies with AI-powered patient journey insights. A seasoned operator with 25+ years of C-suite experience across industries ranging from toys to big data, Pease is perhaps best known for steering Hustle - a venture-backed peer-to-peer texting platform - from the brink of shutdown to a profitable $29M exit in under two years. He joined Clarify in October 2024 as CFO and COO before ascending to CEO, bringing financial discipline and operational rigor to a company that has raised over $400M and serves as healthcare's premier analytics intelligence platform.
Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Yan-David 'Yanda' Erlich is a General Partner and Head of Tech Investment Practice at B Capital Group, a multistage global venture firm. A four-time venture-backed founder and CEO, he brings an unusual combination of operator depth and investor acuity: he scaled Weights & Biases from $3M to $50M ARR as COO/CRO before joining B Capital in January 2025, and previously built the enterprise venture practice at Coatue Management. His personal angel investment in Weights & Biases achieved 55x DPI. He focuses on AI co-workers, ML infrastructure, and B2B AI applications, with checks ranging from $5M to $50M.
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.
Greg Strickland is the CEO of Ignition, a Sydney-founded revenue operations platform used by over 7,500 professional services businesses globally. A Silicon Valley veteran with 20+ years of experience scaling SaaS companies, Greg helped grow Box from 18 employees to a publicly traded enterprise, served as COO at Periscope Data and Productboard, and advised startups including Loom, Preset, and Grain before joining Ignition as Global President in 2024. In his first year he drove a 50% year-over-year revenue increase in North America, and in early 2025 he stepped up as CEO as co-founder Guy Pearson moved to Executive Chairman.
Hannah Greenberg is the CEO of Eleven Software, the cloud-based Wi-Fi authentication platform powering connectivity for 25,000+ hotel properties across 140+ countries - processing over 10 billion authentications per year for brands like Hilton, Marriott, Accor, and Wyndham. She acquired Eleven in 2022 through a search fund she built after her MBA at UC Berkeley Haas, then led the 2023 acquisition of UK-based Airangel to create the world's leading hospitality Wi-Fi management company. A Cornell Hotel School alumna with roots in PwC consulting and $1 billion in hotel development at Seaview Investors, Greenberg brings the rare combination of an owner-operator's instinct and a technologist's ambition to one of hospitality's most infrastructure-critical categories.
Matt Curl is the CEO of Apollo.io, the AI-native go-to-market platform approaching $200M ARR with nearly 100,000 paying customers. A career operator who scaled companies from seed to exit at Fivestars and led product launches at Checkr before joining Apollo as COO in 2024, Curl was elevated to CEO in February 2026 after effectively running the company for a year. His thesis: AI should not merely recommend - it should act.
Shelley Perry is a seasoned software executive with nearly three decades of experience scaling technology organizations. As CEO and Founder of ScaleLogix Ventures and Operating Partner at Insight Partners, she specializes in helping SaaS companies navigate the 'messy middle' - the critical growth phase between product-market fit and full-scale maturity. Her career spans VP Engineering at TicketMaster, CTO of Industry SaaS Solutions at HP, Chief Product Officer at NTT, and Operating Partner at Insight Partners, where she built their Product Center of Excellence and launched the CPO Accelerator program. She is a keynote speaker, board director at multiple SaaS companies including Chargebee, and founder of the Path to CPO initiative.
Brian Yoo is Chief Business Officer at FriendliAI, an AI inference platform that helps enterprises deploy and scale large language models faster and cheaper. Before joining FriendliAI in April 2026, he spent nearly a decade as COO at Moloco, where he scaled the AI-driven advertising company from 10 employees to 600+ and grew revenue over 500x to $250M+, helping it reach a ~$4 billion valuation. A Cornell-trained operations research engineer turned business operator, Yoo brings deep expertise in scaling AI-native companies through go-to-market strategy, financial operations, and global team building.
Fatima Husain is the Chief Business Officer at Numeral, a San Francisco-based AI-powered sales tax automation platform that raised $35M in Series B funding in September 2025. A Yale-educated operator-turned-investor originally from India, she spent six years leading growth and product at Airbnb - achieving 20x+ YoY growth on the supply side - before co-founding Mosaic General Partnership with NBA champion Andre Iguodala. She was an early angel investor in Numeral and joined as CBO to build again, bringing two decades of operational instincts and venture capital pattern recognition to one of fintech's most unsexy yet massive problems.
Jennifer Nuckles is the Chairperson and CEO of R-Zero, a San Francisco-based smart building technology company that deploys UV-C light, IoT sensors, and AI to make indoor environments safer, healthier, and more energy-efficient. With 25+ years spanning consumer goods giants (Clorox), social gaming (Zynga), digital health (Doctor on Demand), and fintech (SoFi), she is one of the rare executives who has led marketing and operations at scale across radically different industries. She took the helm at R-Zero in October 2022, raised a $105M Series C, and is on a mission to fix the fact that we spend 90% of our lives inside buildings that were never designed to keep us healthy.
Mitesh Agrawal is the CEO of Positron AI, a Reno-based AI inference hardware startup that has raised $305M and achieved unicorn status in under 34 months. A co-founder and long-time COO of Lambda Labs - where he helped grow revenues from $500K to ~$500M - Agrawal brought his front-row view of GPU limitations to Positron, a company building purpose-built silicon (the Atlas system, and next-gen Asimov chip) that delivers 3x the performance of Nvidia GPUs at one-third the power. Backed by Arm, Qatar Investment Authority, Jump Trading, and others, Positron is building America's first at-scale AI inference silicon company.
Zoe Wang is the Operations Partner on the New Media team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the storied Silicon Valley venture firm that manages over $39 billion in assets. She came to a16z through the firm's acquihire of Turpentine, the fast-growing podcast network that became the backbone of a16z's media ambitions. Before Turpentine, Wang built a career spanning venture capital operations, capital markets, and investor relations at firms including 10X Capital and SAX Capital. Based in New York, she sits at the intersection of media, operations, and venture — the rare ops executive who understands both the spreadsheet and the microphone.