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Tejas Manohar
Tejas Manohar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Hightouch, the San Francisco company that helped create the Composable CDP category by bringing customer data platform capabilities directly onto the data warehouse. He moved to San Francisco at 16 to become one of Segment's first ten engineers, then left in 2018 to start Hightouch with Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Under his leadership Hightouch has crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.75B valuation, pivoting the company toward AI Decisioning and agentic marketing.
Jaimal Soni
Jaimal Soni is the co-founder and CEO of Insight Health AI, an Austin-based healthcare startup building AI agents that handle clinical busywork - referrals, intake, scheduling, fax processing, and note-taking - so clinicians can spend more time with patients. A University of Waterloo engineer and former Y Combinator founder, he spent six-plus years at Segment leading global sales engineering ahead of its $3.2 billion Twilio acquisition, and co-led R&D on Twilio's CustomerAI. He founded Insight Health in 2023 with a cardiologist, a neurosurgeon, and a former Twilio infrastructure leader; the company raised an $11 million Series A in April 2026 led by Standard Capital.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications company that gives software developers programmable APIs to add messaging, voice, email, video, and authentication to their applications. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it has grown from a pay-as-you-go SMS and voice API into a broad customer-engagement platform that pairs those channels with Segment's customer data platform and a growing set of AI-driven tools. Twilio is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker TWLO and serves developers and enterprises across nearly every industry.
How the Best Startups Really Begin — YC Office Hours
In this episode of Y Combinator's Office Hours, a rotating cast of YC group partners pulls back the curtain on how legendary startups actually began. Using real interview memories of companies like Solugen, CaptivateIQ, Amplitude, Segment, Brex, Jeeves and Nourish, the partners argue that companies such as Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox looked indistinguishable from every other early-stage startup on day zero. The through-line: greatness comes not from a magical origin but from tens of thousands of decisions, a bias for action, obstinate conviction, clear and honest communication, and the willingness to pivot until you build something people want.
Tom Eliaz
Tom Eliaz is the Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at Bedrock Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous systems for heavy construction equipment. With over two decades of software engineering leadership spanning robotics, cloud infrastructure, and AI, he previously led 100+ engineers at Twilio Engage, directed engineering at Segment through its $3.2B acquisition, and was an early cloud platform engineer at Anki. Before Bedrock, he also founded a healthcare technology company. At Bedrock - a $1.75B-valued company that raised $270M in Series B funding in February 2026 - Eliaz applies engineering depth to the problem of retrofitting excavators and heavy machinery with LiDAR, GPS, and AI software to run autonomously on construction sites 24/7.
Peter Reinhardt
Peter Reinhardt is CEO and co-founder of Charm Industrial, a San Francisco-based climate tech company that converts agricultural and forest biomass residues into bio-oil and permanently sequesters it underground - effectively putting carbon back where it came from. Before pivoting to saving the planet, he co-founded Segment, the customer data infrastructure platform, and scaled it from a MIT dorm-room idea to a $3.2 billion acquisition by Twilio in 2020. Now he runs Charm with a mission to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm, counting Stripe, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and Meta among customers.
Ilya Volodarsky
Ilya Volodarsky co-founded Segment in 2011 with MIT dorm-mates, building it from a failed classroom tool into the definitive customer data platform before selling to Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. After nine years scaling Segment to 600 employees, he pivoted to the problem of catastrophic wildfires, co-founding Wildfires.org and joining Convective Capital as a partner to back early-stage climate and healthcare startups.