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Steve Arnold
Steve Arnold is the CEO of E-Line Media, the video game developer and publisher behind the BAFTA- and Peabody-winning Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Beyond Blue, and the upcoming Never Alone 2 and Neighborhoods. He has been making games professionally since 2003, starting at Electronic Arts, where he rose from production intern on the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series to Executive Producer working across EA Partners and the Origin store, with credits on Rock Band, The Beatles: Rock Band and Alice: Madness Returns. In May 2014 he joined Oculus, becoming Head of Oculus Studios in June 2016 and running the company's first-party and partner content slate through November 2019, a period covering Lone Echo, Robo Recall, The Climb, Chronos and Journey of the Gods, with partnerships spanning Epic, Insomniac, Ubisoft, Marvel and Lucasfilm. He then founded his own studio, Imagination Games, and ToyChest.AI, an early-stage venture using computer vision to let ordinary physical toys unlock content in games without special hardware. At E-Line he now leads a studio whose work sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and has reached more than 25 million players.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.
Jeff Yen
Jeff Yen is a Stanford-trained experimental physicist turned entrepreneur, and the co-founder and CEO of Etherdyne Technologies, a Santa Clara startup building 'wire-free' power. His company's Ether Power platform uses low-frequency magnetic resonance to deliver up to 100 watts through the air to multiple devices at once inside a three-dimensional 'Power Zone,' no cords or fixed charging pads required. After eight years of quiet R&D with co-inventor Dr. Robert Moffatt, Yen brought the technology to CES 2026, raised more than $1.2 million from over 400 investors on StartEngine, and now pitches wireless power as the next utility, an 'Electrification 2.0' as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi.
Dongsoo Han
Dongsoo Han is the founder and CEO of z-emotion, a 3D garment simulation company building software that lets fashion brands design, fit, and render clothing entirely in 3D. A computer graphics engineer with 25+ years in simulation and gaming, he built the hair physics that became AMD's TressFX, the first playable real-time hair in a video game (Tomb Raider). He later realized a thread in 3D space moves much like a strand of hair, and turned that insight into z-emotion's products z-weave, z-fit, z-maya, and zeavric, used in projects with brands like Louis Vuitton and Nike.
Kai Jiang
Kai Jiang is the CEO of Nuovo Film Inc., a Silicon Valley materials company that turns silver nanowires into the transparent conductive film behind touchscreens, foldable displays, and large-area interactive panels. Under his watch the company has shipped more than 2.3 million square meters of conductive film, holds 180+ patents worldwide, and claims roughly 60% of the global silver-nanowire market. A Stanford-educated operator with a McKinsey and semiconductor background, Jiang runs a business that is invisible by design: its product is the layer you touch but never see.
Kendra Brassfield
Kendra Brassfield is the Chief Executive Officer of NeoLife International, the Santa Clara-based global nutrition and wellness company founded by her father Jerry Brassfield in 1958. She joined in 2011 as a Market Research Strategist, rose through marketing leadership, drove the rebrand from GNLD to NeoLife, and took the top job in August 2016. A Saint Mary's College of California graduate and Milken Institute Associate, she is also a Certified Personal Trainer, distance runner, and early-morning surfer who insists on a NeoLifeBar before paddling out.
Kannan Kothandaraman
Kannan Kothandaraman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Selector AI, a Santa Clara-based AIOps and network observability platform that uses large language models, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to help Fortune 1000 enterprises detect, diagnose, and resolve infrastructure issues faster. Before founding Selector in 2019, Kannan spent nearly two decades at Juniper Networks - rising from senior software engineer to Vice President of Product Line Management - and before that at Cisco Systems. Selector has raised $104 million in total funding, including a $32M Series B in February 2026 at a valuation of $375 million, and counts Fortune 20 companies in manufacturing and healthcare among its customers.
Pandian Gnanaprakasam
Pandian Gnanaprakasam is the CEO and co-founder of ORDR, a Santa Clara-based cybersecurity company specializing in IoT, OT, and IoMT security with $94M in funding. A serial entrepreneur with 20+ years in networking and security, he previously co-founded Aruba Networks — acquired by HPE for $3 billion in 2015 — and led engineering at Cisco's multi-billion-dollar Wi-Fi business. At ORDR, he returned as CEO in March 2025 to spearhead the evolution of the ORDR AI Protect platform, which provides agentless device discovery, AI-driven risk scoring, and automated zero-trust policy enforcement across millions of connected devices in healthcare, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure.
John Kibarian
John Kibarian is the co-founder, President, and CEO of PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS), a Santa Clara-based semiconductor analytics company he has helmed for over 35 years. Armed with a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, Kibarian started building yield-improvement algorithms while still a researcher at SEMATECH - then turned those algorithms into a company. Today PDF Solutions generates $219 million in annual revenue helping chipmakers, test facilities, and battery manufacturers squeeze more quality out of every wafer, with flagship products like the Exensio Analytics Platform and the Sapience Manufacturing Hub driving AI-powered collaboration across global semiconductor supply chains.
Shivkumar Thiagarajan
Shivkumar Thiagarajan, known as Shiv, is Co-Chief Executive Officer of DynPro Inc., a global IT consulting powerhouse he helped build over more than two decades. Based in Santa Clara, California, Shiv leads an organization of 1,600+ professionals spanning North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, delivering enterprise transformations across SAP, Salesforce, cloud, data, and AI platforms. With 30 years of institutional momentum behind DynPro and a newly minted partnership with Turgon AI that compresses year-long modernization projects into weeks, Shiv is steering one of the IT industry's most enduring firms into its AI-native chapter.
Jane Ren
Jane Ren is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atomiton, a Santa Clara-based industrial IoT and sustainability software company she co-founded in 2013. With a rare combination of a medical degree from Peking Union Medical College and an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas, she bridges the gap between operational technology and enterprise sustainability. At Atomiton, she leads a 33-person team building AI-powered platforms that help data centers, manufacturers, and buildings reduce energy costs, optimize water use, and hit their carbon targets - work that earned the company the 'Most Innovative Platform in Energy and Sustainability 2025' award from Energy Business Review Magazine.