Marcel Santilli is the CEO and Co-Founder of GrowthX AI, a San Francisco-based 'service-as-software' company that combines expert-led strategy with AI workflows to drive organic growth for B2B companies. Born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Santilli spent 15+ years as a CMO and marketing executive at companies including IBM, HP/HPE, HashiCorp, Scale AI, and Deepgram, helping scale a combined $1B+ in ARR across three unicorns. After spending over 1,000 hours encoding marketing workflows into AI at Deepgram, he co-founded GrowthX AI in September 2024 with CTO Daniel Lopes. The company reached $7M+ ARR profitably in under 12 months — using only its own methodology, zero paid ads — before raising a $12M Series A led by Madrona Ventures in May 2025.
Alexandr Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI and current Chief AI Officer at Meta Platforms. Born in 1997 to Chinese immigrant physicists in Los Alamos, New Mexico, he dropped out of MIT at 19 to build Scale AI, which became the backbone of AI training data infrastructure for companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. By 24, he was the world's youngest self-made billionaire. Scale AI grew to a ~$29B valuation after Meta's $14.8B strategic investment in 2025, and Wang now leads Meta's AI superintelligence efforts.
William Hockey co-founded Plaid - the invisible rails that power Venmo, Coinbase, and thousands of fintech apps - then quietly bought a bank. As co-founder and co-CEO of Column, he built the only nationally chartered bank designed for developers, processing 40% of Bay Area fintech money movement with a 110-person team generating $200M in revenue and $100M+ in free cash flow. No outside investors, no VC dilution, just a former farm kid from Central California who learned that the best way to fix broken financial infrastructure is to own it.
Dan Hendrycks is the Executive Director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), the UC Berkeley PhD who created MMLU - the benchmark that shaped how the world measures AI intelligence - and invented GELU, the activation function running inside BERT, GPT, and virtually every major AI model. From a rural evangelical town in Missouri, he's become one of AI safety's most consequential voices, advising Elon Musk's xAI and Scale AI while sounding alarms about civilizational-scale AI risk, accepting $1/year to keep his independence intact.