Ben Reinhardt is the founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab built on the ARPA model to unlock materials and manufacturing breakthroughs that have no natural home in startups, academia, or government. A space-robotics PhD who once built tractor beams at Cornell and taught machines to see at Magic Leap, he became one of the most-read writers on how DARPA actually works, then set out to build a privately funded version of it. He hosts the Idea Machines podcast, where he interviews people who design the systems that produce innovation.
Dan Robinson is a General Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm, one of the most influential crypto venture firms in the world. A former litigation attorney turned protocol engineer, he co-authored 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' - the paper that defined MEV for the industry - and played a central role in designing Uniswap V2 and V3. Robinson joined Paradigm in 2019 as its first Research Partner, was later promoted to General Partner, and has published foundational work on MEV taxes, Gradual Dutch Auctions, and prediction market AMMs. His rare combination of legal training and deep blockchain engineering makes him one of crypto's most distinctive voices at the intersection of mechanism design and decentralized finance.
Yongwei Zhang is the CEO of Complete Genomics and MGI Americas, leading one of the most ambitious efforts to make whole-genome sequencing fast, accurate, and affordable at scale. With a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins and dual bachelor's degrees from Tsinghua University, Zhang brings a rare blend of optics precision, software fluency, and entrepreneurial grit to the genomics frontier. He architected the DNBSEQ sequencing platform series now used by over 2,600 researchers in 100 countries, and has positioned Complete Genomics as a formidable challenger to Illumina's market dominance - at a fraction of the cost.
Vishwanath Lingappa is the CEO and CTO of Prosetta Biosciences, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company he founded in 2003 after 22 years as a faculty member at UCSF. An MD-PhD with a doctorate from The Rockefeller University under Nobel laureate Gunter Blobel, Lingappa developed a proprietary Cell-Free Protein Synthesis System (CFPSS) drug discovery platform that targets transient multi-protein complexes - a class of drug targets largely ignored by traditional pharma. His company is pursuing small-molecule therapeutics across neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's), oncology, and infectious diseases (COVID-19, HIV, influenza), and won an ARPA-H Dash competition for a pan-cancer drug candidate. With over 157 publications and 12,800+ citations, Lingappa bridges rigorous academia with commercial biotech ambition.
Cody Coleman is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coactive AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI platform that brings structure to unstructured visual content - images and video - using multimodal AI. Born in prison and raised by grandparents on Social Security, he earned a BS from MIT and a PhD from Stanford, where he co-created DAWNBench and MLPerf, the industry-standard ML benchmarking suite. Today he leads a 63-person company backed by $44M in funding from Emerson Collective, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, with a mission to make AI accessible regardless of background.
Markos Georghiades is an Engineering Partner at Andreessen Horowitz's crypto division (a16z crypto), where he focuses on cryptography and core development of Jolt - a16z's open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM). An undergraduate studying Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, he has co-authored multiple research breakthroughs: helping Jolt achieve a 6x throughput speedup (over 1 million RISC-V cycles/sec), enabling true zero-knowledge proofs via the NovaBlindFold technique, and implementing 64-bit proving without performance slowdown. His GitHub bio - 'sumcheck is love sumcheck is life' - says everything you need to know about where his obsessions lie.
Zoa Research is a New York-based AI research lab building cross-domain quantitative forecasting models that generalize across finance, science, and beyond. Founded by Greg Volynsky and Sam Damashek - a Harvard Law/CMU duo and a Jane Street algorithmic trading veteran - Zoa trains LLM-powered multi-agent systems to automate the model-build-test-improve cycle. The result: forecasting engines that outperform narrow models in event prediction, deployed both as proprietary trading capital and as a Forecast-as-a-Service API for researchers, traders, and scientific labs. Backed by Y Combinator (S24), Zoa is building the infrastructure layer for probabilistic reasoning at scale.
Dylan Patel is the founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis, a boutique AI infrastructure research and consulting firm he started as a solo blog on his 24th birthday. Growing up working night shifts at his immigrant parents' motel in rural Georgia, he taught himself semiconductor analysis while toggling between RuneScape and chip-geek forums. Today SemiAnalysis has 85+ employees, 260,000+ subscribers, and is on track to surpass $100 million in revenue in 2026 - making Patel one of the most influential voices in AI infrastructure, cited by Jensen Huang at GTC and referenced by Sam Altman.
Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, co-director of the Wharton Generative AI Labs, and one of the most widely read voices on artificial intelligence in practice. Author of the 2024 New York Times bestseller 'Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI,' his newsletter 'One Useful Thing' reaches 429,000+ subscribers. His landmark 2023 BCG study on AI and knowledge workers - the 'Jagged Frontier' research - became the empirical bedrock for how organizations understand AI's real impact on work. Named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Nathan Lambert is a Senior Research Scientist and Post-Training Lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where he leads open-source language model development on the OLMo and Tulu series. A UC Berkeley PhD, he previously led the RLHF team at Hugging Face, co-building the TRL library and the Zephyr model. He runs Interconnects AI, a Substack newsletter read by tens of thousands covering post-training, open models, and AI policy, and is the author of The RLHF Book (Manning Publications). With roughly 8,000 academic citations and a reputation for demystifying the hardest parts of modern AI, Lambert is one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of open-source AI research and public education.
Ryan Selkis is the co-founder and former CEO of Messari, the leading crypto intelligence and research platform. Known by his pseudonym 'Two Bit Idiot,' he broke the news of the Mt. Gox hack in 2014 that shook the crypto world, helped build CoinDesk and the Digital Currency Group, and spent six years publishing Messari's annual 'Crypto Theses' - the most widely read forecasting reports in the industry. He stepped down as Messari CEO in July 2024 amid political controversy, but remains an advisor and one of crypto's most influential voices.
Elvis Saravia is the co-founder and lead AI researcher at DAIR.AI, a mission-driven organization democratizing AI research and education worldwide. Based in Belize, he is the author of the Prompt Engineering Guide - one of the most widely read AI resources on the internet with 73,000+ GitHub stars and over 3 million learners - and publishes the AI Agents Weekly newsletter. A PhD graduate from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, he has contributed to landmark AI projects including the Galactica large language model at Meta AI, and is known for bridging rigorous research with accessible, production-minded education for the next generation of AI builders.
Eugene Yan is a Principal Applied Scientist turned Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he bridges cutting-edge AI research with production-scale systems. Formerly at Amazon for five years building real-time recommendation and LLM-powered systems for Kindle and Search, Eugene is equally well-known for his prolific writing: 209 blog posts, 420,000+ words published, and a newsletter with over 11,800 subscribers. His open-source repository applied-ml on GitHub has become a canonical reference for teams shipping machine learning in production. He lives in Seattle, snowboards on weekends, and writes like someone who actually wants you to understand.
Osman Ali Mian is an early-career AI researcher specializing in causal discovery and trustworthy machine learning. He completed his PhD magna cum laude at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Saarland University, Germany) and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (IKIM) in Essen. He has published at top-tier venues including AAAI, ICML, AISTATS, and KDD, and won an Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2026 — marking him as a rising star in causal ML.
Yao Fu (符尧) is an AI researcher at xAI specializing in large language model reasoning, efficient inference, and distributed systems. A PhD graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he previously worked at Google DeepMind on Gemini 3 and Project Astra. With over 5,000 citations and key papers like ServerlessLLM (OSDI '24) and DuoAttention (ICLR '25), Fu bridges systems engineering and ML research. He writes the 'Yao Fu' newsletter on Notion and is known for the Chain-of-Thought Hub benchmark repository, which helped track LLM reasoning progress across the field.