Yashar Ali is an Iranian-American journalist, newsletter publisher, and social media powerhouse who built one of the most influential independent media presences in the US almost entirely through Twitter/X. Known for breaking stories that bigger outlets fear to touch - from Fox News sexual misconduct to Scientology cover-ups - Ali runs The Reset newsletter on Substack with over 61,000 subscribers. Time magazine named him one of the most influential people on the internet in 2019. His career is anything but linear: TV production assistant, personal cook for Kathy Griffin, political operative for Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom, and now independent journalist with a devoted following.
Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.
Amanda Natividad is VP of Marketing and Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the audience research platform co-founded by Rand Fishkin. She coined the term 'zero-click content' — the practice of creating platform-native content that delivers full value without requiring a click — and turned it into a framework, a podcast, a consultancy, and a forthcoming book. A trained chef and former tech journalist before she was ever a marketer, Amanda brings a rare blend of narrative discipline, culinary generosity, and data-driven rigor to a field that often settles for one of the three. Her newsletter 'The Menu' reaches 16,000+ subscribers and was named by Forbes among the top marketing newsletters. She has 200,000+ combined social followers and has guest lectured at Columbia Business School, Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Washington.
Katie Harbath is the founder and CEO of Anchor Change and Chief Global Affairs Officer at Duco Experts, widely known as the 'election whisperer to the tech industry' (Foreign Policy). After a decade at Facebook building the global elections policy team from scratch - eventually managing 60 people across 40+ countries - she left in 2021 to launch her own consulting firm and newsletter. Her weekly Substack 'Anchor Change' and podcast help readers and clients navigate the chaos at the intersection of technology, politics, and democracy, guided by her signature philosophy: panic responsibly.
Vin Clancy (born Vincent Dignan) is a British growth hacker, entrepreneur, author, and speaker who went from collecting welfare in Southwest London to building a global brand as one of the world's most recognizable growth marketing experts. He co-founded Planet Ivy (25,000 views in two weeks, $250k seed funding), pivoted to Magnific (accepted into TechStars London), won Best Speech at SXSW V2V, ran a 100-date world speaking tour, co-authored the bestselling growth hacking book 'Secret Sauce' (nearly $250,000 in sales), and built the Traffic & Copy Facebook community to 21,000+ members. He now operates under the GIGA Venture brand and consults with SaaS companies and startups on reducing customer acquisition costs.
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.