Trip Adler is a San Francisco tech founder who co-founded Scribd in 2007 and ran it for 16 years, building it into a reading platform used by roughly 100 million people. In 2024 he launched Created by Humans, a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators set terms and get paid when AI companies use their work to train and run models. His pitch is not to fight AI in court but to build the plumbing for a fair market between creators and the labs racing to license high-quality content.

Jared Friedman is Managing Director of Software at Y Combinator, one of the world's most influential startup accelerators. A Harvard dropout, he co-founded Scribd - one of YC's earliest bets - and grew it to 80M+ users as CTO before joining YC as a partner in 2015. He has read over 12,000 startup applications, advised 20+ YC unicorns, and championed hard tech, biotech, and AI at YC. In 2024 he became one of the loudest voices on vertical AI agents being '10X bigger than SaaS.' He spends roughly 4% of his waking hours in Waymo robotaxis, which he uses as a mobile office.