Rise Science is a Chicago-based health technology company behind RISE, a sleep and energy tracking app built on two ideas sleep researchers agree on: sleep debt and circadian rhythm. Rather than scoring your sleep with a vague number, RISE predicts your daily energy peaks and dips and tells you the best time to do everything - from your last coffee to winding down for bed. Founded in 2015 by Northwestern engineers Jeff Kahn and Leon Sasson, the company has raised $15.5M and grown the app past 5 million users.
Specialized Bicycle Components is a Morgan Hill, California maker of high-performance bicycles, components and gear founded in 1974 by Mike Sinyard. It built the first mass-produced mountain bike, the 1981 Stumpjumper, and today designs road, mountain, gravel and Turbo e-bikes alongside helmets, apparel and the Retul fit system. With roughly 1,300 employees and an estimated $500M in revenue, it is one of America's 'Big Three' bike brands and a fixture in pro road, mountain and triathlon racing.
The McLaren Artura is a plug-in hybrid supercar that marks McLaren Automotive's first step into a new era. Powered by an all-new 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6 paired with an axial flux electric motor, it delivers 691bhp through an 8-speed dual-clutch gearbox while weighing just 1,498kg. Built on the brand-new MCLA carbon fibre chassis manufactured in-house at McLaren's Sheffield composites centre, the Artura blends electric-only urban cruising with explosive supercar performance - 0-62mph in 3.0 seconds and a top speed of 205mph.
Jason Ding is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce, leading the engineering teams behind Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Revenue Cloud — the backbone of the world's largest CRM platform. A PhD computer scientist turned performance engineering pioneer, he set nine SPEC benchmark world records at Cisco, helped drive UCS to $1 billion in revenue in under three years, and is now steering Salesforce's engineering toward a future of AI agents and billion-transaction-per-day scale. With 14+ years at Salesforce and deep roots in academia and chip-level performance work at Intel, Ding brings a rare combination of theoretical rigor and enterprise execution.
Nate Berkopec is the world's foremost Ruby on Rails performance expert, founder of Speedshop consultancy, co-maintainer of the Puma web server, and author of 'The Complete Guide to Rails Performance.' A self-taught programmer who pivoted from a Shark Tank appearance at 19, he now runs a thriving consulting and education business from Tokyo, helping Rails developers squeeze every last millisecond out of their applications.
Andrew Kelley is the creator of the Zig programming language and president of the Zig Software Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit he founded in 2020. In 2018, he walked away from a senior engineering role at OkCupid to work on Zig full-time on donations alone - a bet that has since attracted $512,000+ in corporate pledges, spawned production-grade projects like Bun and TigerBeetle, and built one of the most passionate communities in systems programming. He writes the 'Zig Zag' newsletter covering Zig and systems programming.