Carla Faraguna is the Executive Assistant to the Chief Executive Officer at Substack, the San Francisco newsletter and media platform. She joined in 2024 after nearly seven years running operations and people functions at Golden (Recursion Inc), the knowledge-graph startup. Her path runs through HR and employee programs at Fandom (Wikia), cultural exchange work with the Asia Society and the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, and a stretch of self-directed travel and volunteering across a dozen countries. She holds a master's in East Asia Studies from Stanford and a political science degree from Stony Brook.
Shafique Virani is a neurosurgeon-turned-biotech dealmaker who serves as Chief Business Officer of Noetik, an AI-native cancer therapeutics company in South San Francisco. He has spent two decades turning early-stage science into landmark partnerships, including one of the largest drug discovery deals ever struck at Recursion, and earlier built a neuroscience and rare-disease portfolio at Roche/Genentech that produced approved medicines like Risdiplam and Enspryng. At Noetik he is selling a new idea to pharma: not AI services, but licensable AI infrastructure for biology.
Ron Alfa is Co-Founder and CEO of Noetik, an AI-native biotech building foundation models trained on one of the world's largest collections of multimodal human tumor data. A physician-scientist with an MD-PhD from Stanford and an MA in the History of Medicine from UCL, Alfa spent six years at Recursion Pharmaceuticals rising to SVP Head of Research before co-founding Noetik in 2023. The company's OCTO-VC virtual cell models and TARIO-2 autoregressive transformer are designed to predict which cancer patients will respond to which therapies - attacking the 95% failure rate of cancer clinical trials from the data side rather than the pharmacology side. In January 2026, Noetik signed a landmark $50M licensing deal with GSK, one of the first large-scale transactions to monetize a biological foundation model as a scalable enterprise asset.