Salomon Serfati is the co-founder and CEO of Chariot, the New York fintech building payment rails for the $326 billion donor-advised fund market. Its flagship product, DAFpay, turned the clunky multi-step process of donating from a DAF into a three-click checkout button now live on over 100,000 nonprofit donation forms, from the American Cancer Society to GoFundMe, and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and former BlackRock engineer who opened a separate 10%-of-income charity account with his first paycheck, Serfati turned a personal tithing habit into financial infrastructure for giving.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies housing, municipal government, civil society, and philanthropy. A former Emmy-winning WGBH documentary filmmaker who later taught case studies at Harvard's Kennedy School and ran research at the Manhattan Institute, he has spent four decades arguing that American housing policy keeps making the same trillion-dollar mistake. His 2025 book The Projects rereads the history of public housing as a story of demolished communities, not just demolished buildings.
Bloomerang is an Indianapolis-based software company that builds a complete giving platform for nonprofits, combining donor management (CRM), online fundraising, and volunteer management into one system. Founded in 2012 on the insight that nonprofits were losing the majority of first-time donors, Bloomerang centers its product on donor retention and relationship-building rather than one-time transactions. It now serves more than 24,000 small and mid-sized nonprofit organizations.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is a philanthropy and technology organization founded in 2015 by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, structured as an LLC. Once spanning education, science, justice reform and housing, CZI has refocused on a single audacious goal: helping scientists cure, prevent or manage all disease by the end of the century. Its flagship CZ Biohub network now builds AI 'virtual cell' models, generates massive biological datasets, and ships free open-source tools so researchers everywhere can move faster.
Zack Nelson is the American YouTuber behind JerryRigEverything, the most-viewed smartphone repair and teardown channel on YouTube with over 10 million subscribers. Known for his systematic durability tests — scratch, burn, bend — he turned a $1,000 Jeep repair he did himself for $80 into a multi-million-view media empire. Beyond the broken screens and scorched phones, he co-founded Not-a-Wheelchair with his wife Cambry, building affordable off-road and ultra-custom wheelchairs made in the USA, and used his YouTube earnings to fund a full-size community library in Busia County, Kenya.
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.
Chuck Collins (Charles M. Collins) is a Harvard-trained lawyer, MIT city planner, and former real estate developer who spent nearly two decades as President and CEO of YMCA of Greater San Francisco, transforming it into an organization serving more than 42,000 children annually across three Bay Area counties. Born in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1947 and raised as one of the first Black families in Mill Valley, he brings a lifetime of crossing boundaries to his work at the intersection of community, equity, and opportunity. Now a Presidential Fellow at USF's Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service, he continues to shape the region's civic life.
Dr. Geetha Murali is the chief executive officer of Room to Read, the global literacy and girls' education nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. The first non-founder CEO of the organization, she leads a team of roughly 1,200 staff across 29 countries and a network of more than 20,000 partners and volunteers. Under her watch, Room to Read's programs have reached over 60 million children. A PhD in South Asian politics with a master's in biostatistics, she frames her work through a personal lens: her mother was nearly a child bride, and her family's trajectory shifted in a single generation.
Jim Hori is President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley, one of the largest YMCA associations in the United States. He took the helm in June 2022 after 22 years at Silicon Valley Bank, where he served as Managing Director and led the SVB Foundation for 19 years. A Fresno native and Fresno State graduate, Hori spent more than a decade on the YMCA board before being asked to run the place.
Priscilla Chan is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a pediatrician-turned-philanthropist directing one of the largest private bets on biomedical science. With husband Mark Zuckerberg she has pledged the bulk of their fortune to a mission to help scientists cure, prevent, or manage all disease by the end of the century, increasingly through AI-powered biology and the Biohub network.
GoFundMe is the world's largest social fundraising platform, where individuals, communities, and nonprofits raise money for everything from medical bills and tuition to disaster relief. Founded in 2010, it has helped people raise over $40 billion through nearly 200 million donations.
Dheeraj Pandey is the co-founder and CEO of DevRev, an AI-native CRM and support platform valued at $1.15 billion. A serial unicorn builder, he previously co-founded Nutanix in 2009 and led it as CEO through its 2016 Nasdaq IPO, scaling it to an $18+ billion enterprise. Born in Patna, Bihar, India, he arrived in the US in 1997 with $900 borrowed from education trusts, earned his MS at UT Austin, and spent over two decades building distributed systems before founding two generational companies. He sits on Adobe's board and has donated over $20 million to humanitarian causes, including a $10 million gift to UT Austin for personalized medicine research.
Glen Tullman is a serial health-tech entrepreneur and CEO of Transcarent, the consumer-directed health and care platform he founded in 2021. Over three decades he turned Allscripts into the dominant electronic health records provider, founded Livongo Health and sold it to Teladoc for $18.5 billion - the largest consumer digital health deal in history - and co-founded 7wireVentures, one of the top-returning venture funds in Illinois. Now leading Transcarent's $621M acquisition of Accolade and pushing AI-powered 'WayFinding' tools into employee benefits, Tullman is also a Giving Pledge signatory who has committed most of his estimated $1 billion fortune to healthcare and education.
Rohan Seth is the co-founder and CTO of Clubhouse, the live audio social networking app that captured the world's attention in 2020-2021 with a $4 billion valuation and over 10 million weekly active users. A Stanford-trained engineer who spent six years at Google on Android and Maps, Seth has a track record of building and rebuilding - launching nine failed apps with co-founder Paul Davison before Clubhouse broke through. He also co-founded Lydian Accelerator, a nonprofit dedicated to finding genetic cures for rare diseases, named after his daughter Lydia.
Bobba Venkatadri is a General Partner at Ventureast and founder of the DigiLife fund, investing in life sciences and healthcare across India and the US. A pharmacist by training with four decades of operating experience at companies like Warner Lambert, Centocor, Molecular Biosystems, and Aradigm, he sits on the boards of multiple portfolio companies and quietly runs a soybean farm on the side.
Jimmy Donaldson, known globally as MrBeast, is the most-subscribed individual on YouTube with 487+ million subscribers. At 27, he runs Beast Industries, a $5 billion media and consumer goods conglomerate, produces Amazon Prime Video's most-watched unscripted series Beast Games, and has donated tens of millions through initiatives like Team Trees and Team Seas. He reinvests virtually all revenue back into his productions, calling YouTube his true obsession.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Ryan Trahan is an American YouTuber, entrepreneur, and philanthropist from Sugar Land, Texas, best known for his creative challenge series — most famously traveling across the country starting with just a single penny while raising millions for charity. With over 23 million subscribers, he has turned audacious social experiments into a force for good, raising more than $11.65 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in 2025. Beyond YouTube, he co-owns candy brand Joyride Sweets (sold at Target and Walmart), founded Neptune Bottle, launched the Howdy clothing line, and continues to push the boundaries of branded storytelling on the internet.
Andrew Anagnost is the President and CEO of Autodesk, the $41+ billion design and engineering software giant behind AutoCAD, Revit, Maya, and Fusion 360. A PhD aeronautical engineer who once simulated Mars rovers at NASA Ames, he joined Autodesk as a product manager in 1997 and spent two decades reshaping it from the inside - architecting the company's landmark pivot from perpetual licenses to cloud subscriptions before taking the top job in 2017. Under his tenure, revenue has grown from ~$2B to over $6B and the company entered the Fortune 500. Off the clock, he is CSUN's largest-ever alumni donor, having committed $22.1 million to the public university that he credits with saving him from falling through the cracks.
Jonathan Ebinger is a General Partner at BlueRun Ventures and Co-Founder of Transform Capital, a late-stage growth fund built on an unprecedented philanthropic model that donates half the traditional GP carry to universities and nonprofits. With nearly 25 years in venture capital, he backed PayPal as one of its first institutional investors, led Series A investments in Kabbage (acquired by American Express), Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), and Waze (acquired by Google for $1.15B), and championed the thesis that real-time data would reshape lending, payments, and enterprise procurement. His four-factor investment framework - team, market, technology, and whether the company actually matters - reflects a philosophy that has made him one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable early-stage fintech investors.
Noel Fenton is a Founding General Partner of Trinity Ventures, the Menlo Park-based venture capital firm he co-founded in 1986. Before entering venture capital, he built two companies from scratch as CEO — Acurex (scaling revenues to $65M over a decade) and Covalent Systems (profitable at $12M in three years) — and that operating DNA defines everything about how he invests. With a BS in Chemistry from Cornell and an MBA from Stanford, Fenton has spent four decades backing enterprise software and B2B companies, with notable wins including LoopNet (IPO), ServiceMax (acquired by GE), SciQuest (IPO), and DotLoop (acquired by Zillow). Despite repeated attempts at retirement, he is still at his desk by 7:30 AM.
Dror Liebenthal is the Israeli-born cofounder and CEO of Bold.org, a San Francisco-based platform that enables anyone — individual or company — to create and manage scholarships, fellowships, and grants at no cost. A Princeton Chemical Engineering graduate (magna cum laude, Class of 2015) who was the first in his family to navigate the US education system, Liebenthal built Bold.org after personally experiencing how a single scholarship changed his trajectory. The platform operates the Bold Foundation (501c3), has distributed millions in student scholarships, and pairs its philanthropy product with the Bold Debit Card, a fintech tool designed to help students manage their money and reduce debt.
Megan Holston-Alexander is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the Head of the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) - Silicon Valley's first venture capital fund composed exclusively of Black cultural leaders and organizations committed to Black wealth generation. A Montgomery, Alabama native who grew up in the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, she studied sociology at Clark Atlanta University, earned an MA from University of Houston, and an MBA from Stanford (where she relaunched the Black Business Conference after a decade-long absence). Before joining a16z in 2020, she was a founding team member at Unusual Ventures. At CLF, she has helped deploy capital into 300+ startups across consumer, crypto, fintech, healthcare, and enterprise while connecting athletes, entertainers, and executives to technology's early cap tables - all while donating 100% of CLF's management fees and carry to nonprofits that build the next generation of Black technologists.
Thomas W. Morgan is a 30-year private equity veteran who pioneered the GP stakes investing category when he founded Hycroft Capital in 2015, the first firm dedicated solely to minority, non-control investments in private equity management companies. His career arc spans First Boston, Bain Capital during its formative 1990s growth, and 15 years at New Mountain Capital (raising $15B+ AUM). After merging Hycroft into Magnetar Capital and co-founding Aviditi Advisors (acquired by Piper Sandler in 2024), he now manages Greylock Capital Partners, his family office with interests in franchise concepts, commercial real estate, and private investments, from Manhattan's Upper East Side.
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.
Viren Tellis is the Co-Founder and CEO of Uthana, a generative AI platform for 3D character animation backed by A16Z Speedrun and IA Ventures. A serial entrepreneur who started with a Quiznos franchise in his early 20s, pivoted through ad-tech at AppNexus (now Xandr), built the philanthropy platform Hedado, and now scouts early-stage startups for Andreessen Horowitz's speedrun accelerator while building the AI infrastructure for lifelike human motion in games and animation.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Eric Emerson Schmidt is a billionaire technologist, former Google CEO, and relentless polymath who quietly shaped the digital age while most of us were still figuring out dial-up. After steering Google from scrappy startup to global colossus (2001-2011), he pivoted to national security advisory, quantum computing ventures, ocean research, and as of March 2025, rocket manufacturing as CEO of Relativity Space. With a net worth around $54.5 billion, five co-authored books on AI, and philanthropic commitments exceeding $1 billion, Schmidt operates at the intersection of geopolitics, frontier science, and Silicon Valley ambition.
John Doerr is the Chairman of Kleiner Perkins and one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists. The man who backed Google and Amazon with early checks, taught the world OKRs through his bestselling book 'Measure What Matters', and bet $1.1 billion on Stanford to build the Doerr School of Sustainability. A Rice-trained electrical engineer turned Intel salesman turned legendary VC, Doerr has spent 45+ years turning missionary founders into category-defining companies - and is now directing that same energy toward solving the climate crisis.
Jim Goetz is a legendary venture capitalist and former partner at Sequoia Capital who became one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors by backing WhatsApp — the only outside investor in the company — delivering a $3.5 billion return when Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in 2014. A five-time consecutive Forbes Midas List #1 (2013-2017) and TechCrunch VC of the Year (2015), Goetz also nurtured Palo Alto Networks from inception and led investments in HubSpot, GitHub, and AdMob. A Strongsville, Ohio native who described himself as a 'scattered and ill-prepared freshman' at the University of Cincinnati, he now runs Casimir Holdings (family office) and Mae Philanthropies, having donated $25 million to UC in honor of his transformative professor mentor.