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.
Stephanie Palazzolo is an AI reporter at The Information and author of the AI Agenda newsletter, covering artificial intelligence startups, Big Tech, chips, cloud, and policy. A former Morgan Stanley investment banker who pivoted into journalism, she broke major stories on OpenAI, Anthropic, and the broader AI industry, and was part of a SABEW Best in Business award-winning team for coverage of the OpenAI CEO firing in 2023.
Tomas Pueyo is a Franco-Spanish writer, strategist, and newsletter creator best known for his wildly viral COVID-19 articles that reached 60 million readers in 2020 and for his Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, where he explores tech, geopolitics, AI, and the forces shaping civilization. A Stanford MBA and former Silicon Valley executive (Course Hero VP of Growth, Ankorstore CPO), he voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write full-time - building a 123,000+ subscriber audience without spending a dollar on advertising.
Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Hiten Shah is a serial SaaS entrepreneur, angel investor, and startup advisor who co-founded KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, Nira (acquired by Dropbox in 2024), and Product Habits. Over 20+ years, he has built and scaled multiple companies using a philosophy of radical customer obsession, clarity of communication, and deliberate execution. He advises 120+ startups, has invested in 25+ companies, and shares insights through his newsletter, The Startup Chat podcast, and a 272K+ following on X.
Marc Andreessen co-invented the Mosaic browser as a $6.85/hour student programmer, then went on to co-found Netscape, help birth the modern internet, and eventually build Andreessen Horowitz into a $42B+ venture capital juggernaut. The man who wrote 'software is eating the world' in 2011 spent the next decade proving himself right by backing Twitter, Facebook, Coinbase, and GitHub. In 2023 he published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and in 2024 pivoted to advising the Trump administration's DOGE initiative - cementing his status as Silicon Valley's most opinionated, polarizing, and consequential voice.
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a strategic communications firm that bets on founder-led narratives over legacy PR playbooks. A former VP of Communications at Substack and EVP/CCO at Activision Blizzard, she now sits on Shopify's board of directors and manages a $40 million VC fund. Known for her newsletter 'Flack' (also called 'Res Ipsa') on Substack, she is one of the most incisive voices arguing that the future of tech PR is direct-to-audience, not media-mediated. Her clients have included Anduril, Cognition AI, Coinbase, and Ramp.
Shreyas Doshi is one of Silicon Valley's most respected product management voices - a former PM leader at Stripe, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo who now runs High Leverage Labs, advising founders and executives while teaching 4,000+ senior product people through his courses and content. Known for frameworks like LNO prioritization and Radical Delegation, he has built a 400,000+ follower audience with candid, no-nonsense writing on product strategy, leadership, and career growth.
Paul Graham is a programmer, essayist, and co-founder of Y Combinator, the seed accelerator that launched Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Reddit, and OpenAI. He sold his first startup Viaweb to Yahoo for $49.6 million in 1998, then used that platform to build one of the most influential idea-factories in tech history. His essays at paulgraham.com have become the de facto canon of startup culture, read by millions of founders seeking clarity on how to build, think, and live.
Raylene Yung is an engineering leader, organizational designer, and public servant who scaled teams at Facebook and Stripe before co-founding U.S. Digital Response - the nonprofit that mobilized 10,000+ volunteers to help governments navigate COVID-19. She later served as Executive Director of the GSA's Technology Modernization Fund, overseeing $1B+ in federal tech investments, and as Chief of Staff at the Department of Energy's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. Now a board member at USDR and SolarAPP+, she writes 'raylene's field notes,' a Substack newsletter on climate, tech, and complex systems.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most consequential figures in the artificial intelligence era. A Stanford dropout who built his first startup at 19, Altman ran Y Combinator for five years before going all-in on OpenAI's mission to build safe superintelligence. He survived a dramatic 5-day ouster from his own company in 2023, returned to thunderous employee support, and has since steered OpenAI to a $300 billion valuation. He holds no equity in OpenAI, yet built a $3+ billion personal fortune through early bets on Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, and a cluster of deep-tech moonshots.
Isfandiyar 'Asfi' Shaheen is a serial entrepreneur and investment professional known for his work in global connectivity and financial modeling. After a successful career in Pakistan's industrial sector, he served as the first Entrepreneur in Residence at Facebook Connectivity, where he worked on innovative methods to deploy fiber optics. He is currently focused on the intersection of AI and financial analysis, building tools to empower modelers through code.
Jensen Huang is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia Corporation — the world's most valuable semiconductor company, which he built from a Denny's booth in 1993 with $600 in combined cash. Born in Taipei, raised between Thailand and rural Kentucky, Huang is the longest-serving CEO of any S&P 500 technology company. His two-decade gamble on CUDA software created the unassailable moat that made Nvidia the backbone of the global AI revolution. He personally delivered the first AI supercomputer to OpenAI in 2016. As of 2026, Nvidia surpasses $5 trillion in market cap, generates $216 billion in annual revenue, and Huang's net worth stands at approximately $170 billion. The leather jacket is optional. The legacy is not.
Lea Bajc is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and board member with over two decades of experience spanning Silicon Valley and Europe. Born in Croatia and raised in Sweden, she holds degrees from Stockholm School of Economics, HEC Paris, and Harvard Business School. At Northzone Ventures, she co-led landmark investments in iZettle ($2.2B exit to PayPal) and Trustpilot (LSE IPO). She later co-founded Averon in Silicon Valley, raising $20M from Marc Benioff. Now based in Paris, she invests through Blue Horizon and Ozone X Ventures (backing underrepresented founders), serves on corporate boards, and is authoring 'Love After Love' — a forthcoming book reframing divorce as an opportunity for reinvention. A Kauffman Fellow and Forbes Technology Council member, she speaks six languages and is a certified nutritionist.
On March 31, 2026, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anchored by Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with continued participation from Microsoft and a sweeping syndicate of global institutions, the round dwarfs every prior private tech raise and cements OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup by a wide margin. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, counting 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and is widely expected to pursue an IPO.