Steven Sinofsky spent 23 years at Microsoft building some of the most-used software in history - Office, Windows 7, Windows 8, and secretly, the Surface tablet. A meticulous operator who refused to promise features until they were ready, he rose to become President of the Windows Division and Microsoft's most likely successor to Steve Ballmer before his abrupt departure in 2012. Today he's a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and writes Hardcore Software, a serialized Substack memoir chronicling the rise and fall of the PC revolution from the inside.
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.
Patrick McKenzie, known online as patio11, is a writer, software entrepreneur, and strategic advisor at Stripe who spent two decades bootstrapping software companies in Japan before becoming one of the internet's most influential voices on fintech, career development, and software business strategy. He writes Bits about Money, a deep-dive newsletter on the plumbing of financial systems, hosts the Complex Systems podcast, and co-led VaccinateCA - America's shadow COVID vaccine location infrastructure that likely saved thousands of lives. With 4.7 million words published since 2006, his essays on salary negotiation, software marketing, and financial infrastructure have shaped how a generation of engineers and entrepreneurs think about building and getting paid.