productivity
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John Rampton and the price of three little letters
Before Due became a business, it was a $130,000 domain name. For John Rampton, the distance between a good address and a useful company has always been measured in people.
Alex Young and the art of having another go
A snowbound weekend in New York helped Alex Young decide what to do next. The Virti founder has spent the years since building places where people can practise before the moment counts.
The Microsoft Executive Who Thinks Your Next Colleague Is Software
Jared Spataro spent two decades helping Office become a service and Teams become a workplace. Now he is selling a stranger idea - software will go beyond assisting the organization and join the org chart.
Michael Villar
Michael Villar is the founder and CEO of Height, a New York-based project management platform that is trying to hand the tedious parts of running projects over to an AI reasoning engine. He is Belgian, was selling forum skins at 14, sold his previous startup Kickoff to Stripe in 2013, spent years designing and coding early Stripe products, and now runs Height as a lean team with a Series A behind it.
Kais Khimji
Kais Khimji is the co-founder and CEO of Blockit AI, an autonomous calendar-scheduling agent that negotiates meeting times over email and Slack. A former six-year partner at Sequoia Capital and Harvard alum, he revived a student-era idea about why calendars don't talk to each other, raised a $5M seed led by Pat Grady at Sequoia, and now serves more than 200 companies including Brex, Together.ai, Rogo, a16z, Accel, and Index.
Lawrence Coburn
Lawrence Coburn is the co-founder and CEO of Ambient, an AI chief of staff for founders, CEOs and leadership teams. A four-time founder, he previously built DoubleDutch (the leading mobile event app, acquired by Cvent in 2019), twine (employee connection software for remote teams) and RateItAll (one of the early consumer review sites). Based in San Francisco's Mission District, he combines a generalist's appetite for new platforms with two decades of operating scars.
Elio Assaf
Elio Assaf is the Lebanese co-founder and CEO of Optiverse AG, a Zurich-based AI startup building a meeting assistant that turns everyday conversations into structured, operational intelligence - automating notes, summaries, transcriptions and CRM updates. A computer-vision and machine-learning researcher who worked across ETH Zurich, MIT and EPFL and previously engineered AI at Thales, he incorporated Optiverse in June 2024, won a CHF 150,000 Venture Kick award, and grew the platform to serve over 1,000 businesses worldwide while users report saving an average of 6.8 hours a week.
Ricky Yean
Ricky Yean is the co-founder and CEO of Flow Club, a virtual coworking and body-doubling community where remote, independent, and neurodiverse workers join live focus sessions to get things done together. A Taiwanese immigrant who arrived in the US at eleven and attended Stanford on a full endowment scholarship, he is a three-time startup founder and two-time Y Combinator alum (S10, S21). Before Flow Club he built Crowdbooster, one of the most popular early Twitter and Facebook analytics tools used by brands from Nike to the United Nations, and Upbeat, a tech-enabled PR service. He writes a weekly newsletter on startups, Asian America, and life, and does standup comedy on the side.
Chris Hannah
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 (Seth Brown)
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
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
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
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.
Mel Robbins
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
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 Wieland
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
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
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
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.
Ali Abdaal
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
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.
Matt D'Avella
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
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
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.
Ivan Zhao
Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion, the all-in-one workspace platform used by over 100 million people worldwide. Born in Ürümqi, China, he studied cognitive science and fine arts at the University of British Columbia before nearly going bankrupt building Notion, retreating to Kyoto for eight months to rebuild the entire codebase from scratch. Today Notion is valued at $11 billion with $600 million in annual revenue, and Zhao still owns roughly 30% of it — an unusually large stake that reflects his insistence on building deliberately, keeping the team small, and refusing to let investors dictate the product's direction.
Brian Sharp
Brian Sharp is the CEO of Time Doctor, a workforce analytics platform trusted by over 10,000 organizations globally. A 27-year veteran of building and rebuilding companies, Sharp started his first business at 22 after spinning records as a DJ at 14, and has since navigated every stage of company-building - from bootstrapped startups to $100M+ enterprises. Appointed CEO in February 2026, he champions a philosophy he calls 'Help & Hustle': the belief that high performance and personal happiness are not a tradeoff. He hosts the podcast 'High Performance Happiness' and runs a course called 'Burnout to Balance' for remote leaders.
Omar Shaya
Omar Shaya is the Founder and CEO of Please (formerly MultiOn), a Palo Alto-based AI company building a life planning platform that bridges the gap between what people dream of doing and what they actually achieve. Born in Syria to a Venezuelan mother and Lebanese father, raised across Syria, Germany, and the UK before landing in Silicon Valley, Shaya brings a multicultural perspective to democratizing personal assistance through AI. With an MS from Stanford GSB, dual BS/MS in Computer Science from Göttingen University, and prior product leadership at Meta and Microsoft, he founded MultiOn in 2023, raised a $20M seed round led by General Catalyst at a $100M valuation, then rebranded to Please in early 2025 to signal a gentler, more human approach to AI assistance.
Robert Yang
Robert Yang (Guangyu Robert Yang) is a computational neuroscientist turned AI founder who left a tenure-track professorship at MIT to build Fundamental Research Labs (formerly Altera), a company creating socially intelligent AI agents. Trained in physics at Peking University, with a PhD from NYU and postdoc at Columbia, Yang became a 2022 Searle Scholar before pivoting to the startup world in December 2023. His company made waves running 1,000 autonomous AI agents in Minecraft — watching them spontaneously develop religions, trade economies, and social hierarchies — and has since raised over $45M to bring that vision into enterprise productivity tools and beyond.
Kevin Moody
Kevin Moody is the co-founder and CEO of Mem, an AI-powered knowledge management platform backed by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz. A Stanford Computer Science graduate who once worked at Google X on drone delivery, he spent five years quietly building toward a single obsession: making your past knowledge work as hard as your present focus. Mem has raised $34.7M and is redefining how individuals and teams capture, connect, and retrieve information at the speed of thought.
Sunil Patro
Sunil Patro is the Founder and CEO of Signeasy, the electronic signature and contract management platform he built after a frustrating afternoon hunting for a fax machine in Riviera Maya, Mexico in 2009. He bootstrapped the company for over a decade, coded the first version from hostels across Central and South America, and grew it to 10 million users across 180+ countries before taking any outside funding. A former Microsoft software engineer and IIT Kharagpur graduate, Patro has made a career out of making complex workflows embarrassingly simple.