Rory O'Reilly is the CEO and co-founder of Knot, a New York fintech building the API layer that lets people switch the card on file across hundreds of merchants like Netflix and Amazon in a single tap. A Thiel Fellow and Harvard dropout, he built Knot with his brother Kieran after a decade of ventures together - turning YouTube clips into viral GIFs at gifs.com, riding an early Ethereum wave, and running Millions, the gamified debit card that became the biggest challenger bank on TikTok. Knot raised a $10M Series A led by Nava Ventures with Amex Ventures and Plaid backing.
Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, a cybersecurity company building the identity-native infrastructure access platform trusted by organizations like Samsung, NASDAQ, and IBM. A serial entrepreneur who grew up in Siberia and studied applied mathematics, he previously co-founded Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace in 2012) before starting Teleport in 2015 to eliminate the fragmented, secrets-based approach to infrastructure security. Under his leadership, Teleport reached a $1.1B valuation with its $110M Series C, and he authored an O'Reilly book on identity-native infrastructure access management. He is now focused on defining agentic identity frameworks for the era of AI-driven enterprise infrastructure.
Steve Kelley is a serial clean-energy entrepreneur and CEO of L-Charge, the Sunnyvale-based pioneer of off-grid ultra-fast EV charging for commercial fleets. With six successful startup exits and over two decades building energy and mobility ventures, Kelley co-founded Green Charge Networks (acquired by Engie), scaled InCharge Energy's revenues nearly tenfold, and in October 2025 took the helm at L-Charge to push its grid-free Charging-as-a-Service model nationwide. Under his leadership, L-Charge closed a $10 million funding round in January 2026, enabling fleet operators to electrify in weeks rather than months by bypassing grid bottlenecks entirely.
Charles Cadieu is a serial entrepreneur and computational neuroscientist-turned-climate-tech founder. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spiritus, a direct air capture company aiming to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 per ton - down from the current $600-$1,000 industry standard. Before Spiritus, Cadieu founded Caption Health (AI-guided cardiac ultrasound, acquired by GE HealthCare in 2023) and IQ Engines (AI image recognition, acquired by Yahoo!/Flickr in 2013). Holding a PhD from UC Berkeley and degrees from MIT, he bridges deep academic roots in neural networks with a track record of building and exiting companies that redefine their industries.
Miray Tayfun is the co-founder and CEO of Vivoo, a San Francisco-based health technology company that turns urine test strips into personalized wellness insights via a mobile app. A bioengineering graduate and serial founder, she built Vivoo from a personal frustration with expensive and slow health testing into a platform serving 300,000+ users across 50+ countries. Backed by Tim Draper and $19.4M in total funding, Vivoo expanded from subscription test strips to a $99 smart toilet unveiled at CES 2026, named Best of CES by Gadget Flow. Tayfun is a 2019 Australian Financial Review Top 100 Women of Influence honoree and 2018 Laureate Here for Good Award winner.
Yin Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Pulley, a San Francisco-based equity management platform that has raised $50M and serves over 5,000 startups. A four-time founder and three-time Y Combinator alumnus (S11, S13, W20), she previously built Echo, an Android lock screen app that hit 5 million downloads before being acquired by Microsoft in 2015 (becoming Microsoft Launcher). She founded Pulley in 2019 after a short stint building a blockchain project, driven by a mission to give founders the same informational edge on equity that investors have always had.
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.
Kevin Hartz is a Silicon Valley serial founder and venture investor who co-founded Eventbrite (NYSE: EB) and Xoom (acquired by PayPal for $1.1B), made seed-stage bets on PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Palantir, Square, Stripe, and Slack, and now runs A* Capital — a $300M early-stage fund that bets heavily on teenage founders. His career spans 30+ years of building and backing transformative tech companies from Berkeley to the world stage.
Thibault Louis-Lucas, known as Tibo (@tibo_maker), is a French serial founder and SaaS studio builder who went from bankruptcy to crossing $1M/month in portfolio revenue by March 2026. After selling Tweet Hunter and Taplio to Lempire for $10M+, he built TMAKER - a bootstrapped SaaS studio running multiple profitable products including Revid.ai ($600K MRR), Outrank.so ($300K MRR), and a suite of growth tools. He documents everything publicly.
Andrew Gazdecki is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Acquire.com (formerly MicroAcquire), a marketplace that makes buying and selling startups as accessible as selling a car online. He sold his first company at 20 for $100K, built Bizness Apps into a 100-person SaaS company before selling it for $20M+, survived an Apple App Store near-extinction event via a cold email to Tim Cook, and then turned his own acquisition experience into a platform that has now helped 2,000+ founders exit, closing over $500M in deals across 100+ countries.
Wayne Chang is a Taiwanese-American serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and technologist who co-founded Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter for ~$260M, then sold to Google as Fabric), co-founded Digits (AI-powered fintech for SMBs), and is currently building Reasoner, a neurosymbolic AI company claiming to outperform OpenAI's o1 models. Named one of Forbes' Top 50 Angel Investors with 80+ investments and 31+ exits generating over $150 billion in combined value, Chang also holds the coveted @wayne Twitter handle, holds 20+ patents, won an Emmy for producing Chasing Coral, and helped launch Dropbox by recruiting co-founder Arash Ferdowsi.
Sachin Rekhi is a Silicon Valley product management authority, serial entrepreneur, and the voice behind one of tech's most-read PM newsletters. He co-founded and grew LinkedIn Sales Navigator from $0 to $200M+ ARR, built and sold two companies (Anywhere.FM to imeem; Connected to LinkedIn), and now runs Notejoy with his wife Ada Chen Rekhi while training 10,000+ product managers through his newsletter, courses, and podcast.