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.
Chris Hannah is a UK-based senior software engineer at WorldFirst (Ant Group) who moonlights as an indie app maker. He builds Text Case, a text-transformation utility for iOS, iPadOS and macOS that has grown from 7 to 50-plus formats, plus Text Shot and a Text Case command-line tool. He writes across three blogs and a monthly long-form newsletter about indie tech, productivity, and the craft of working in bursts.
Dr. Bunsen is the long-running weblog of Seth Brown, a data scientist who built a cult following among Mac power users by treating productivity as a science experiment. He writes precise, unhurried essays on Mac scripting, Markdown workflows, standing desks, and the art of telling stories with data. By day he studies complex systems and the structure of the internet; by night he ships small, sharp command-line tools and chronicles the obsessive pursuit of a frictionless workspace.
Dr. Drang is the pseudonymous engineer behind 'And now it's all this,' the long-running blog at leancrew.com where he posts small, fully-explained scripts that bend macOS to his will. By day he is a practicing civil and mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. in stress and structural analysis; by night he writes Python in BBEdit, glues apps together with AppleScript and Shortcuts, and walks readers through every line of code. His pen name is an engineering in-joke - 'Drang' is German for stress - and he has guarded his anonymity for over two decades to keep his consulting clients from finding his musings on math, music, and Mac automation.
Federico Viticci is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, the Italy-based Apple publication he started in 2009 at age 21. He is best known for his book-length annual iOS and iPadOS reviews, his pioneering, almost evangelical insistence on using the iPad as his primary computer, and his deep work on Apple's Shortcuts automation. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast and several Relay FM shows including Connected, and runs the membership community Club MacStories.
Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, where she co-directs the Bennett Institute and spends her days arguing that the numbers we use to run the economy are quietly out of date. A former economics editor at The Independent turned academic, she has written ten books, including the surprise hit GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History and her 2025 work The Measure of Progress. She has helped shape UK competition policy, sat on the BBC Trust, advised the Competition and Markets Authority, and was made a Dame in 2023 for services to economics.
Airtable is a San Francisco software company that turned the humble spreadsheet into a flexible app platform, letting non-engineers build relational databases, interfaces, and automated workflows without code. Founded in 2012 and launched publicly in 2015, it now serves more than 500,000 organizations - including the majority of the Fortune 100 - and has refounded itself as an AI-native app platform anchored by its conversational builder, Omni.
Dropbox is the company that made 'just put it in my Dropbox' a sentence everyone understood. Founded in 2007 after Drew Houston got tired of forgetting his USB drive, it turned file sync into a verb and grew into a content-collaboration platform used by roughly 700 million registered users and about 18 million paying subscribers. Today the San Francisco company, public on the Nasdaq as DBX with about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, is betting its next chapter on Dash, an AI-powered universal search layer that hunts across every app where your work actually lives.
Wrike is an enterprise work management platform that helps teams plan, coordinate, and execute complex projects in one place. Founded in 2006, it combines Gantt charts, Kanban boards, custom workflows, automation, and AI agents to give large organizations visibility and accountability across thousands of users. After passing through several owners - Vista, Citrix, and now Symphony Technology Group - Wrike serves more than two million users across over 18,000 organizations.
Zapier is the automation platform that connects more than 8,000 apps so people can build workflows - called Zaps - without writing code. Founded in 2011 by Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, the fully remote company has grown from a Y Combinator side project into a roughly $5 billion business serving millions of users, and it is now reorienting around AI agents that don't just move data between apps but make decisions inside the workflow.
Close is a bootstrapped, profitable sales CRM built for small and mid-sized teams that want to spend less time on admin and more time actually selling. Founded in 2013 out of a San Francisco sales agency, it combines pipeline management, built-in calling, email, and SMS into one platform - no integrations required. With $17M+ ARR and a fully remote team across 40+ countries, Close has grown almost entirely without venture capital, making it one of the more unusual success stories in SaaS.
Copper is a CRM built for Google Workspace users - specifically teams of 5 to 100 people who live in Gmail and Google Calendar all day. Founded in 2013 as ProsperWorks and rebranded in 2018, Copper is the only CRM officially recommended by Google on the Workspace Marketplace. Rather than forcing sales reps to log every interaction manually, Copper pulls contact and activity data straight from Gmail, auto-populating records so nothing falls through the cracks. Used by over 30,000 businesses across 100+ countries - from creative agencies to consulting firms to real estate teams - Copper has raised $99.5 million and evolved from a sales tool into a full client management platform for professional services.
Mel Robbins is a bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and one of the most-booked motivational speakers in the world. The creator of the 5 Second Rule and The Let Them Theory, she turned a near-bankruptcy crisis at 41 into a media empire with 40 million followers, a top-3 global podcast, and books translated into 65 languages. As CEO of 143 Studios, she produces content for corporate partners including Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase, and LinkedIn.
Douglas Pearce is Corporate Vice President of Product Management for M365 Copilot Growth at Microsoft, where he leads the strategy to bring AI-powered productivity tools to hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Based in the Seattle area, he has spent over two decades at Microsoft, previously heading product management for Office Growth and Fundamentals before pivoting to spearhead the company's flagship AI copilot initiative across Microsoft 365.
Erin Russell Wieland is a Program & Communications Lead at Microsoft, serving in the Office of the EVP & CRO for Global Enterprise Sales in Seattle. With over a decade at the intersection of consulting and technology, she built her career from Bridge Partners Consulting - where she rose from Consultant to Manager over seven years - to Microsoft, where she has led readiness, communications, and social strategy for some of the company's largest commercial partner and sales organizations. Her work on the first-ever digital Microsoft Inspire conference earned her a Delivering Success Award, and she has also received the Microsoft Gold Club Award for extraordinary individual performance. She operates at the nerve center of Microsoft's enterprise revenue engine, translating complex organizational priorities into programs and communications that land across thousands of field sellers and partners worldwide.
Jacqueline Ramos is a seasoned Executive Business Administrator at Microsoft with over 25 years of experience, currently supporting the COO, CMO for Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa (CEMA), and VP for Global Partner Solutions (GPS) in the EMEA region. Based in Dubai, UAE, she has built her Microsoft career from the ground up - starting as an Executive Assistant to the Gulf Services Director in 2008, rising through roles in business operations, and eventually becoming an executive-level administrator supporting some of the company's most senior regional leaders. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of San Jose-Recoletos in the Philippines and has leveraged her technical grounding alongside exceptional organizational and leadership skills to become one of Microsoft's most trusted operational connectors across its vast Middle East and global operations.
Jonathan Manalo is VP of Growth at Microsoft, operating from Central Luzon, Philippines. In this role he drives commercial expansion across one of the world's most influential technology companies - a company whose annual revenue exceeds $281 billion and whose technologies power enterprises from startups to sovereign governments. Based in the Philippines, Manalo sits at the intersection of Microsoft's deep enterprise portfolio - Azure, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Dynamics 365 - and the rapidly digitizing Southeast Asian market.
Josh Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Swit Technologies Inc., a San Francisco-based enterprise Work OS that unifies team chat and task management into a single platform. A former English teacher from Korea who turned his frustration with fragmented collaboration tools into a $20M ARR business, Lee launched Swit in March 2019 with co-founder Max Lim. Today, over 40,000 teams across 184 countries use Swit, which has raised $85.8M in total funding including a $32.7M Series B in 2022. Lee has pioneered the 'Super Work' framework for AI-era collaboration and unveiled Swit Snap, an AI co-pilot, at Google Next 24 in April 2024.
British-Pakistani former NHS doctor turned creator-entrepreneur. Ali Abdaal hosts the Deep Dive podcast, runs the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, and wrote the New York Times bestseller Feel-Good Productivity, which has been translated into 35+ languages.
Cal Newport is a Georgetown University computer science professor and bestselling author who has shaped how a generation of knowledge workers thinks about attention. He coined the modern usage of 'deep work,' argued for 'digital minimalism,' and most recently introduced 'slow productivity.' He has never opened a social media account.
Cursor is an AI-first code editor built by Anysphere, a San Francisco startup founded in 2022 by four MIT graduates. Originally a fork of Visual Studio Code, Cursor has evolved into a full agent-based development platform where autonomous AI handles everything from autocomplete to end-to-end feature building. With $2B+ in annualised revenue, over half the Fortune 500 as customers, and a valuation that reached $29.3B after its Series D in November 2025, Cursor has become the fastest-growing SaaS company ever from $1M to $500M ARR - turning the IDE from a code-writing tool into an AI orchestration layer.
Gamma is an AI-native platform for creating presentations, documents, and websites by typing a prompt. Founded in 2020 in San Francisco, it reached 70+ million users and $100M ARR by late 2025, profitably, with a small team and a focus on letting non-designers ship polished work fast.
Matt D'Avella is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, YouTuber, and podcaster who turned a $97,000 debt crisis into a Netflix documentary career. Best known for directing Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things and The Minimalists: Less Is Now on Netflix, he now runs one of YouTube's most visually distinct self-improvement channels with over 4 million subscribers, combining cinematic production quality with sharp, skeptical takes on hustle culture, habits, and modern life.
Thomas Frank is a productivity YouTuber, entrepreneur, and Notion expert who built a multi-million dollar business helping students and professionals work smarter. Starting with College Info Geek in 2010, he grew to 2.9 million YouTube subscribers, generated $2.1 million in Notion template sales in two years, and co-founded Flylighter, a web clipper SaaS. He runs two YouTube channels, a podcast, and continues to build tools and systems for the creator economy.
Tim Ferriss is a five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author, host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast (1 billion+ downloads), early-stage investor in Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, and 50+ companies, and founder of the Saisei Foundation funding psychedelic research. Known for popularizing 'lifestyle design' with The 4-Hour Workweek, he is also a Guinness World Record holder in tango, a national kickboxing champion, and a polyglot who speaks five languages.
Mem is an AI-native notes app that doubles as a thought partner. Founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, the company is rebuilding personal knowledge management around a simple bet: you should never have to organize information again. Backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, Mem captures voice, web, and email inputs and resurfaces them at exactly the right moment.
Nylas is a San Francisco-based API platform that gives developers a single, secure way to plug email, calendar, and contacts into their apps - replacing months of provider-by-provider integration work with a few lines of code.
Otter.ai builds AI meeting assistants that join your Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet calls, transcribe them in real time, summarize the noise, and pull out action items - so people stop scribbling and start paying attention.
Wispr Flow is a San Francisco-based AI voice dictation platform that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text across any application at roughly 220 words per minute - about 4x faster than typing. Built by two Stanford AI researchers, the company has quietly become the voice layer that 270 Fortune 500 companies rely on, combining a 10% word error rate (vs. 27% for OpenAI Whisper), 100+ language support, and context-aware formatting that automatically adjusts tone and style based on the active app. With $81M raised and a $700M valuation as of late 2025, Wispr Flow is racing to become the default voice-first operating system for a billion users.