real-time
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Paulo Martins
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Russ d'Sa
Russ d'Sa is the co-founder and CEO of LiveKit, the open source real-time communication platform that became the connective tissue of voice AI. When you tap the voice button in ChatGPT, your phone is talking to a LiveKit server. He has built five companies, shipped Twitter Cards, sold a launcher app (Evie) to Medium, and now runs the nervous system for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce Agentforce, Tesla, Spotify and thousands of other voice agents.