Mehdi Hasan is a British-American journalist, broadcaster, and media entrepreneur best known as the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Zeteo - an independent digital news company he launched in 2024 after departing MSNBC. A relentless interviewer and master debater who studied PPE at Oxford, Hasan has built a formidable track record at Al Jazeera, The Intercept, and MSNBC before going independent. His 2023 book 'Win Every Argument' became a New York Times bestseller, and Zeteo has rapidly grown to over 1.8 million YouTube subscribers and 450,000 newsletter subscribers within its first year.
Anne Helen Petersen is an American journalist, culture critic, and author best known for her newsletter Culture Study and her book 'Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.' Holding a PhD in Media Studies from UT Austin, she went from academic celebrity-gossip historian to BuzzFeed News Senior Culture Writer before launching one of Substack's most-read newsletters. She writes about the structural forces — work culture, consumerism, loneliness, burnout — that shape everyday life, blending academic rigor with deeply personal, accessible prose. She now lives on Lummi Island, Washington, with her partner Charlie Warzel and their dogs.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD is a French-Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author based in London. After leaving a marketing career at Google, she founded Ness Labs - a bootstrapped newsletter and community focused on science-backed mindful productivity - while simultaneously earning her MSc and PhD in Applied Neuroscience at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) proposes replacing linear goal-setting with a circular, experimental approach to growth. As a UKRI-funded postdoctoral research fellow at King's College London, she studies the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity and has proposed the 'Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD'. Ness Labs has grown to 120,000+ newsletter subscribers and a paid community of 2,000+ members.
Brendan Hufford is a content marketing and SEO strategist who spent a decade as a high school teacher and assistant principal before pivoting to digital marketing. He founded Growth Sprints, an agency helping SaaS companies scale from $10M to $100M ARR, and created 'SEO for the Rest of Us,' a free newsletter with 6,000+ subscribers. Known for practical, no-BS approaches to content strategy and SEO, Brendan has worked with companies like ActiveCampaign and Allstate, built and sold multiple online businesses, and is a sought-after speaker and educator in the B2B marketing space.
Ben Carlson is a CFA charterholder, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and one of the most widely-read finance writers in the United States. Through his blog A Wealth of Common Sense, co-hosted podcast Animal Spirits, and six books, Carlson has built a reputation for translating Wall Street complexity into plain-English wisdom that ordinary investors can actually use - advocating for simplicity, patience, and behavioral discipline over market-timing and stock-picking.
David Perell is a writer, educator, and founder best known for Write of Passage, the online writing course that turned thousands of lurkers into published voices. Armed with 474,000+ Twitter followers and a newsletter empire, he spent six years teaching people to think and write better on the internet - then stopped cold in 2025 when AI upended his mental model of education. He is now figuring out what comes next, in public, as always.
Mark Manson is a three-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, blogger, and podcaster whose books have sold approximately 20 million copies worldwide across 65+ languages. Known for his brutally honest, profanity-laced take on self-help, his breakout book 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' spent over 279 weeks on the NYT bestseller list and was adapted into a documentary by Universal Pictures in 2023. He runs a popular weekly newsletter, an AI-powered coaching app called Purpose, and the podcast 'SOLVED with Mark Manson.'
Adam Wathan is a Canadian developer, entrepreneur, and the creator of Tailwind CSS - the utility-first CSS framework used by millions of developers worldwide. As CEO of Tailwind Labs, he turned a side-project experiment into a multi-million dollar business encompassing Tailwind UI, Headless UI, and an ecosystem of developer tools. A college dropout turned prolific course creator, he built his reputation first through 'Refactoring to Collections' and 'Refactoring UI' (co-authored with Steve Schoger), generating over $2.5 million in book sales alone. In January 2026, he made headlines again when AI's disruption of developer documentation led to dramatic revenue declines and significant layoffs at Tailwind Labs, prompting major sponsorships from Vercel, Google, and others rallying to support what they called 'foundational web infrastructure.'
Jake Archibald is a web platform engineer at Mozilla working on Firefox, and one of the most recognisable voices in web standards. Originally a Flash developer turned BBC JavaScript engineer, he helped define the modern web's offline capabilities as one of the editors of the Service Worker specification. He spent years as a Developer Advocate at Google Chrome, co-hosted the HTTP 203 podcast with Paul Lewis, and delivered one of the most-watched browser internals talks ever - 'In The Loop' at JSConf.Asia 2018. He resigned from Google in 2023, joined Mozilla, and continues pushing the web forward with the same irreverent clarity that made him a developer favourite.
Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.