John Aristotle Phillips is the co-founder and CEO of Aristotle, the Washington DC-based political technology firm he built with his brother Dean since 1983. Known worldwide as 'The A-Bomb Kid' after his Princeton term paper on nuclear weapon design made headlines in 1977, Phillips parlayed celebrity into activism, lost two congressional races, then quietly built a data empire that has served virtually every U.S. president from Reagan onward. Today Aristotle powers campaign compliance, voter data, PAC management, and identity verification for campaigns across the globe, while Phillips co-founded PredictIt, the world's largest political prediction market, partnering with Victoria University of Wellington to bring real-money political forecasting to the mainstream.
Dan Robinson is General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of crypto's most influential investment and research firms. A Harvard-trained lawyer turned protocol engineer, Robinson has co-authored landmark papers including the 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' MEV essay, the Uniswap v3 whitepaper, and the Blend NFT lending protocol. His work sits at the intersection of mechanism design, mathematical finance, and open-source software - making him one of the rare figures who shapes both how DeFi protocols are built and how capital flows into them.
Vlad Tenev is the Bulgarian-American co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the company that forced Wall Street to abolish trading commissions and put a brokerage in every pocket. Born in Varna, Bulgaria, and raised in Virginia after emigrating at age 5, Tenev studied mathematics at Stanford and UCLA before dropping his PhD to build trading software startups. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt launched Robinhood to give ordinary people the same tools as professional traders - for free. After navigating the GameStop firestorm, congressional testimony, a bruising post-IPO collapse, and two rounds of layoffs, Tenev rebuilt Robinhood into a diversified financial platform now worth nearly $100 billion and included in the S&P 500. He also co-founded Harmonic, an AI startup pursuing mathematical superintelligence, which reached a $1.45 billion valuation in 2025 after its AI model won a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.