Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.
Maxim (Max) Kholin is the co-founder and COO of Gero, a physics-powered longevity biotech company applying statistical physics and AI to crack the biology of aging. With roots in contract law, international business, and computational drug design, he bridges the gap between cutting-edge science and real-world commercialization. Gero - which he co-founded with physicist Peter Fedichev in 2015 - has pioneered the field of 'Gerophysics,' trained its models on 100M+ longitudinal medical records, and secured partnerships with Pfizer and Chugai Pharmaceutical worth up to $250M in milestones. Based across Singapore and Palo Alto, Kholin's mission is nothing less than transforming humans into a non-aging species.
Stand is a San Francisco insurtech that uses physics-based simulation and AI to underwrite and insure homes in places most carriers have abandoned - the wildfire belt of California and the hurricane corridors of Florida. Instead of statistical averages, Stand builds a digital twin of each property and models how embers, wind, and water would actually attack it, pairing coverage with concrete mitigation upgrades.
Toby Gabriner is the CEO of Help Scout, a Boston-based customer support platform serving over 12,000 businesses. A four-time CEO and five-time president with more than two decades of scaling B2B software companies, Gabriner grew Adap.tv from $200K to $200M+ in revenue before its $465M acquisition by AOL in 2013, transformed Bitly from a link shortener into a multi-product analytics platform, and led AdRoll's evolution into NextRoll. A Mission District native who started community college after being kicked out of home at 18, he now brings a customer-first philosophy to Help Scout at the precise moment AI is reshaping customer support.
Barbara Corcoran turned a $1,000 loan into a $66 million real estate empire, sold it, then went on national television to bet on strangers with big dreams. The founder of The Corcoran Group and an original Shark on ABC's Shark Tank, she has made 130+ deals and invested ~$62 million in startups - including The Comfy, which grew to a ~$468 million valuation. Dyslexic, a D-student, one of ten kids in a two-bedroom house, she credits every single setback as the fuel that got her here.
Sam Newman is an independent consultant, author, and speaker who has spent over 25 years helping organisations navigate the messy realities of distributed systems. Best known for 'Building Microservices' - one of the most widely read technical books of its era - he runs Sam Newman and Associates from London, advising engineering teams worldwide on cloud architecture, microservices, and software resilience. A former ThoughtWorks principal, he is also the host of the Magpie Talk Show podcast and a sought-after conference speaker at events like QCon, NDC, and GOTO.