photography
(22)
Diego Rosón and the art of taking the long way
The RYO Agency cofounder built a career in design and communication. On a Royal Enfield named Frankie, he found a way to bring photography, friendship and a long-postponed journey back into the picture.
Matt Schiller and the Business Hidden in a Graduation Photo
A photograph his mother loved helped send Matt Schiller toward a different business. With Snappr, the Australian founder has spent a decade working out what happens between wanting a picture and actually getting one.
Chris Lin and the business of being ready
A school district needed better pictures. Chris Lin found a new career - and went on to help photographers solve the problems that begin long before the shutter clicks.
Helena Bian and the case for a beautiful tool
Before Harlowe, Helena Bian spent years making lighting for other brands. Then the engineer with a lifelong interest in art began asking why the tools behind a beautiful image so rarely looked the part.
Joshua Waldron and the market hiding in plain sight
A magazine photographer stayed in Utah, co-founded SilencerCo, and learned how much of building a business happens outside the factory. Years later, Joshua Waldron is still asking which difficult things are worth doing.
Don MacAskill and the rival worth keeping
He built SmugMug by charging for photographs when free was fashionable. Then he bought Flickr, a competitor he had been defending for years, and took on the harder business of keeping a community alive.
Tanmay Thaker and the business of taking students seriously
From a hotel-industry trade show to Northeastern’s venture accelerator, Tanmay Thaker has moved from learning inside other people’s businesses to helping students build their own. His next assignment is leading IDEA, the organization he joined as a Venture Fellow.
Peter Hadlaw and the Quiet Machinery Behind Getting Paid
Tesorio's founding engineer works where machine learning meets the stubborn rituals of accounts receivable. His other lens is literal: a camera trained on city light, small details and the world beyond the spreadsheet.
JP Battaglia and the Business of Knowing Where You Are
A Virginia Beach operator moves between service businesses, property, and a camera - three kinds of work joined by patience, local knowledge, and the useful habit of paying attention.
Andrew Speight Turned a Rebrand Into a Career in the C-Suite
He arrived at RXNT as a senior graphic designer and, in the same year, became its chief marketing officer. His career makes a tidy case for the executive value of noticing what everyone else skims past.
Jay Kurahashi-Sofue Wants Money to Move Like Music
An art-history graduate turned crypto marketer has spent a decade translating difficult systems into stories people can use. At Eco and SONARA Records, his two worlds now run on the same principle: remove friction, then let the work travel.
Ayash Basu Is Bringing a Photographer’s Eye to Public Storage’s Revenue Machine
After two decades of advising brands, building a photography marketplace and documenting people in the street, Ayash Basu has taken on a different kind of frame: pricing, brand and customer experience across Public Storage. His career suggests that growth begins with learning what deserves attention.
Jen Bekman
Jen Bekman is the founder and CEO of 20x200, the pioneering online venue that sells limited-edition fine art prints starting at $20. After a first career in the early internet (New York Online, Netscape, Disney, Meetup), she opened the Jen Bekman Gallery in Manhattan in 2003, launched the Hey, Hot Shot! photography competition, and in 2007 built 20x200 on a simple formula - small editions, accessible prices - to turn ordinary people into art collectors and help artists make a living.
Ulysse Saltiel
Ulysse Saltiel is an Associate in the Office of the CEO at Armada, the San Francisco edge-computing company building modular data centers and connectivity for the planet's most remote corners. A 2025 Pepperdine graduate who double-majored in finance and philosophy and finished summa cum laude, he founded the Pepperdine Finance Society and built the Coastal Capital Summit from a 50-person idea into a 350-plus person flagship event that has funneled students into JP Morgan, Citigroup and beyond. He came up through wealth management at Bordeaux Wealth Advisors and Pepperdine's $1.5B endowment office before landing at the right hand of Armada's leadership.
Amet Alvirde
Amet Alvirde is a founder and software engineer based in Mexico City, associated with Render - the cloud deployment platform that hit a $1.5 billion valuation after its $100 million Series C extension in February 2026. A long-time Linux advocate, TypeScript developer, and Fullscreen content creator since 2012, he maintains a public digital garden of philosophical writing in Spanish, shoots street photography on a Sony a7iv, and plays guitar. His GitHub projects span fitness data tooling, trading system analysis, and personal infrastructure - a practitioner who builds for himself as readily as for the platform serving 4.5 million developers.
Vickram Saigal
Vickram Saigal is a seasoned product leader and co-founder with over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology, business strategy, and emerging markets. After stints at Bain & Company, the Gates Foundation in Ethiopia, IDEO.org, and Adobe - where he built low-latency identity and privacy systems for Adobe Advertising Cloud - he went on to serve as Head of Product at SaaS Labs (makers of JustCall), leading a 20+ person product and design team as the company scaled to a $42M Series B. In November 2024, he joined Fundamento as Co-Founder to drive product and technology innovation at one of India's leading AI-powered voice agent companies backed by Google, applying his decade of experience across global enterprise software to the frontier of AI-native customer experience.
Peter McKinnon
Peter McKinnon is a Toronto-based photographer, cinematographer, and YouTube creator with nearly 6 million subscribers, known for his cinematic visual style and fast-paced, coffee-fueled tutorials. A former magician and Ellusionist Production Manager turned self-taught filmmaker, he built one of YouTube's most distinctive photography channels from a spare bedroom, won the 2019 Shorty Award for Breakout YouTuber of the Year and the 2020 Streamy Award for Cinematography, and had his landscape photography minted on official Canadian currency by the Royal Canadian Mint. Beyond tutorials, he has launched his own multi-tool for photographers, multiple Lightroom preset packs, a signature coffee blend with James Coffee Co., and the 'Pete's Pirate Life' EDC brand.
Nicolai Ouporov
Nicolai 'Nic' Ouporov is Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet AI, a startup building reinforcement learning training environments - or 'RL gyms' - that let AI agents practice operating real software tools like Salesforce and Excel before deployment. Fleet raised ~$45M total and grew from $1M to $60M+ annualized revenue in under a year. Nic is also a 3x YoungArts Award winner in photography and visual arts, a former pre-professional ballet dancer trained at Boston Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and a QuestBridge Scholar from Columbia University. He previously served as Founding Engineer at Respell (acquired by Salesforce in 2024) and published AI research at Stanford's Robotics and Embodied AI Lab.
Bijan Sabet
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.
Kevin Systrom
Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram in 2010 with Mike Krieger, transforming mobile photography into a global phenomenon with over 1 billion users before selling to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he launched Artifact, an AI-powered news app, later acquired by Yahoo in 2024. A Stanford-educated engineer with a passion for photography and design, Systrom serves on the boards of Walmart and Snowflake while continuing to invest in and advise tech startups from San Francisco.
Steve Jurvetson
Steve Jurvetson is a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures, best known for coining the term 'viral marketing,' backing Hotmail, SpaceX, and Tesla from their earliest days, and bringing a scientist's obsession to everything from model rockets to nanotechnology. After two decades at Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing over $6 billion, he launched Future Ventures in 2018 with a patient, 15-year fund structure focused on deep tech, AI, space, and synthetic biology. A triple Stanford alumnus who finished his EE degree in 2.5 years at the top of his class, Jurvetson is as likely to be found photographing rocket launches on his Flickr account as sitting on SpaceX's board.
Haje Jan Kamps
Haje Jan Kamps is a Dutch-born journalist, serial founder, and pitch coach who turned a decade covering startups for TechCrunch into an AI-powered pitch deck review service. Best known for his long-running 'Pitch Deck Teardown' series analyzing real decks from companies that raised $125K to $500M, he now runs Pitch Guide - an AI tool that reviews startup pitch decks against 250+ criteria. A former hardware founder (Triggertrap), VC portfolio director (Bolt), and prolific author of 8+ books, he brings rare operator-journalist-investor perspective to early-stage startup fundraising.