Bin 'Tony' Zhao is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of Agora (NASDAQ: API), the Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service he built after 20 years on the frontlines of internet voice and video - from being a founding engineer at WebEx to CTO of JOYY with 300 million users. Founded in 2013, Agora now powers over 80 billion minutes of real-time engagement monthly, supplied the audio backbone for Clubhouse's viral moment, and in 2025 launched a Conversational AI Engine bridging human voice and large language models.
Junwei Bao is the co-founder and CEO of Seyond (formerly Innovusion), a Silicon Valley-founded LiDAR company that went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in December 2025. With a PhD in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a physics background from Peking University, Bao spent nearly two decades building precision optical sensors before pivoting to autonomous-driving hardware. He co-founded Timbre Technologies - the company that invented OCD (optical critical dimension) scatterometry, a kind of microscale LiDAR for semiconductors - then led Baidu's autonomous driving hardware division before founding Innovusion in 2016. Under his leadership, Seyond delivered 230,000 automotive-grade LiDAR units in 2024 and holds a 12.8% global ADAS LiDAR market share, ranking fourth worldwide.
Sam Liang is the co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai, the AI meeting intelligence platform that crossed $100M ARR in 2025 with just under 200 employees. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who co-invented Google Maps' Blue Dot and sold his first startup Alohar Mobile to Alibaba in 2013, Liang founded Otter in 2016 after drowning in 30-40 weekly meetings with no reliable way to capture what was said. Today Otter serves 35 million users across enterprise, education, and government, processing tens of billions of minutes of conversation - and has evolved from a transcription tool into an autonomous AI meeting agent suite that can answer questions, coach salespeople, and conduct product demos in real time.
Jordan Schneider is the founder and editor-in-chief of ChinaTalk, the premier independent newsletter and podcast covering US-China tech and policy. A Yale-educated historian who earned a master's in economics from Peking University's Yenching Academy, Schneider has built ChinaTalk into a 65,000-subscriber powerhouse with over 1 million podcast downloads in 2025 alone. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and a former 2023-24 AWM Scholar, with bylines in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wired, and Lawfare. Based in New York and fluent in Chinese, Schneider synthesizes elite policy analysis with accessible storytelling, covering semiconductors, AI development, export controls, and the full sweep of US-China competition.