Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.
Daniel Bourke is an Australian machine learning engineer, educator, and content creator who teaches over 230,000 students worldwide through the Zero to Mastery Academy. Operating under the brand 'mrdbourke', he built a self-designed AI education path from a film degree and zero coding experience, and now creates courses on PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Hugging Face. He co-founded Nutrify, an AI-powered food tracking app, with his brother Joshua, and published his debut novel 'Charlie Walks' in 2024. His newsletter 'Eat, Move, Learn, Make' blends personal philosophy with technical insight.
Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, the frontend cloud platform that powers millions of developers and some of the world's most visited websites. A self-taught engineer from Lanús, Argentina who never finished high school, Rauch built two of JavaScript's most widely used open-source libraries (Socket.IO and Mongoose), co-created Next.js — the world's most popular React framework — and turned Vercel into a $9.3 billion company with $340 million ARR. He is also one of the most prolific angel investors in tech, with over 700 known investments, and recently launched v0, an AI-powered coding tool with over 3.5 million users.
Kelsey Hightower is one of the most recognized figures in cloud-native computing - a self-taught engineer who rose from sleeping in his car to becoming a Distinguished Engineer (L9) at Google. Co-author of 'Kubernetes: Up and Running' and creator of the legendary 'Kubernetes The Hard Way' tutorial, he spent nearly a decade evangelizing Kubernetes and cloud-native practices before retiring from Google in 2023. Known for his disarming candor, human-first philosophy, and gift for making complex infrastructure accessible, Kelsey now serves as Board Director at Civo and continues to shape the future of platform engineering, AI, and open source sustainability.