Eric Bailey is a Boston-based accessibility advocate, designer, writer, developer, and speaker. As a staff designer on GitHub's Primer design system, he works to make component libraries genuinely usable for people relying on assistive technologies. He is the longtime lead redesigner and maintainer of The A11Y Project, has published more than 200 articles across publications like CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and the GitHub Blog, and is a fixture on the conference circuit. His guiding line: if it's inaccessible, it is neither radical nor revolutionary.
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British philosopher, author, and entrepreneur who has written 15+ books translated into 30+ languages, co-founded The School of Life in 2008, and built a global movement dedicated to making philosophy practically useful for everyday life - covering love, work, anxiety, and what it means to live wisely.
Patrick Bet-David is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, author, and media personality who fled Iran as a child refugee, served in the 101st Airborne Division, and built PHP Agency into a 40,000-agent life insurance firm before selling it for roughly $250 million. He founded Valuetainment, one of the most-watched business YouTube channels in the world, and hosts the PBD Podcast - a long-form show spanning politics, culture, and business with millions of listeners. A Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 'Your Next Five Moves' and 'Choose Your Enemies Wisely,' Bet-David is known for blunt straight talk, a relentless work ethic forged in a German refugee camp, and a genuine belief that every refugee or immigrant story can have a second act.
Steven Bartlett is a British entrepreneur, investor, author, and podcast host who dropped out of university after a single lecture to build Social Chain - a social media marketing company that went public at a $200M+ valuation before he turned 28. He hosts The Diary of a CEO, the second most-listened podcast globally on Spotify Wrapped 2025, with over 15 million YouTube subscribers. He is the youngest-ever Dragon on BBC's Dragons' Den and the founder of Steven.com, a creator holding company valued at $425 million.
Adam Morgan is VP of Brand at Twilio, where he led the company's 'Be a Builder' brand refresh in 2024 - repositioning Twilio from a developer platform to a movement for all builders. With 29 years in creativity, strategy, and storytelling, he previously served as Executive Creative Director at Adobe for 8.5 years and Senior Director of Brand + Creative at Splunk/Cisco. He is the author of 'Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business' (Morgan James Publishing), host of the Real Creative Leadership podcast, and was named to AdWeek's Creative 100 in 2020. He holds a Master's in Marketing Strategy from Northwestern University and lives in Lehi, Utah.
LaSandra Brill is Vice President of Global Digital Marketing at NVIDIA, one of the most influential technology companies in the world. Leading a team of 185+ people, she oversees data strategy, CRM, media, corporate social, marketing automation, NVIDIA.com, analytics, and NVIDIA's own AI marketing strategy. With 20+ years in tech marketing across Cisco and Symantec, she has been recognized as a Top 50 Influential Digital Marketer and Top 25 Women Who Rock Social Media. Beyond her work at NVIDIA, she is a published children's book author - her 2017 book 'Let's Be Friends' promotes inclusion for children with Down syndrome - and serves on the boards of LuMind IDSC Foundation, Special Olympics, and Abilities United.
Sarah Madden Armstrong is Vice President of Global Marketing Operations at Google, where she leads global marketing infrastructure across one of the world's most complex and far-reaching advertising ecosystems. With over 25 years in global marketing - including two decades at The Coca-Cola Company overseeing agency operations across 200 countries and a stint as a McKinsey partner - she brings rare operational depth to a role that touches every corner of Google's marketing machine. Named one of Advertising Age's 'Women to Watch' in 2009, Armstrong is also a published author of two books: 'The Mom's Guide to a Good Divorce' and 'The Art of the Juggling Act: Bite-Sized Guide for Working Parents' (2024). A former Georgetown University volleyball player turned global executive, she mentors across industries and volunteers with multiple nonprofits while raising her daughter Grace.
Emily Garza is a customer success executive, founder, and one of the most recognized voices in the CS profession. As Head of Customer Engagement at Unit21 - an AI-powered fraud and AML risk platform trusted by 200+ financial institutions - she oversees the entire post-sale customer journey. She is also the founder of ValueCSwithEmily, a platform and community that produces podcasts, articles, and resources for CS professionals. Named a Top 25 Customer Success Influencer in 2023 and a Top 100 CS Strategist in 2021 and 2022, Garza built her career scaling CS organizations from the ground up at companies like Fastly and Proton.ai, growing recurring revenue from $60M to $300M+ at Fastly alone.
Jack Porter is a serial entrepreneur, multi-time CEO, and co-founder of Cognizer Inc, an AI-powered contract intelligence company based in Pleasanton, California. With a career spanning decades and leadership of more than seven software companies, Porter has worked on AI projects for clients including American Express, Discover Card, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline. At Cognizer, he is building a platform that uses knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and large language models to help enterprise legal, sales, and procurement teams extract intelligence from contracts at scale. Cognizer has raised over $16M in funding and is recognized for its Genius AI platform, which achieves 97% accuracy in extracting contract terms and clauses.
Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing rental and styling subscription service that raised $5M+ and ranked #1 in U.S. menswear rentals by GQ. A Taiwanese-American first-generation immigrant who spent 15+ years at Target, McDonald's, eBay, and Meta (where she helped launch Facebook Shopping), she pivoted to entrepreneurship to solve a problem she saw everywhere: busy professional men who needed to look sharp but hated shopping. Taelor combines AI trend forecasting with human stylists to deliver curated wardrobes to subscribers, tackling fashion's 30% waste problem along the way. Cheng also teaches at Northwestern's Medill School and mentors at 500 Startups.
Sam Wong is Chief Business Officer at ChatLabs - the LVMH Innovation Award-winning AI social commerce platform serving luxury and consumer brands - and CEO of FundableStartups.com, a startup training academy. A five-time startup executive with 30+ years in the trenches and three successful exits under his belt, Wong has turned serial entrepreneurship into a second act: coaching founders and investing through Band of Angels, Silicon Valley's oldest angel group. He's also the author of '21 Secrets of Successful Startups' and a regular fixture at TechCrunch Disrupt, Fortune, and the startup conference circuit.
Chris Lyons is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, where he spent over a decade reshaping how culture and capital intersect. Starting as Chief of Staff to co-founder Ben Horowitz in 2013, he rose to General Partner by 2021 and founded the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) in 2018 - Silicon Valley's first VC fund composed entirely of Black Limited Partners, uniting athletes, musicians, and entertainers as investors in frontier technology. A former sound engineer trained under Grammy-winning producer Jermaine Dupri, Lyons brings a rare cross-industry fluency to tech investing, bridging entertainment, sports, Web3, and enterprise software. As of early 2026, he announced his departure from a16z to launch his own fund, citing the AI revolution as the defining moment to build independently.
Bob Rogers, PhD, is the co-founder and Chief Product & Technology Officer of Oii.ai, a San Francisco-based AI company that deploys probabilistic digital twins to optimize end-to-end supply chains. A Harvard-trained astrophysicist who once modeled supermassive black holes, Rogers pivoted through quantitative hedge funds, healthcare AI (co-founding Apixio, acquired by Centene), and Intel—where he led enterprise-scale AI as Chief Data Scientist—before channeling that eclectic career into Oii.ai's flagship platform Optii. A prolific author of four AI books and TechArena's 2024-2025 Voice of Innovation, Rogers is known for translating dense physics intuition into practical tools that let supply chain executives make real-time decisions instead of waiting weeks for reports.
Carol Bartz is a trailblazing Silicon Valley executive who became the first woman to run a major technology company when she took the helm of Autodesk in 1992, growing revenue from $285M to $1.5B over 14 years. She later served as CEO of Yahoo from 2009 to 2011, famously emailing all 14,000 employees the night she was fired by phone, telling them she'd been let go. Known for her blunt candor, 'Fail Fast Forward' philosophy, and resilience - she delayed breast cancer surgery by a month to keep a professional commitment - Bartz transformed from a dairy farm girl in Wisconsin to one of the most powerful women in American business.
Kyle Lacy is a seasoned B2B SaaS CMO, author, and podcaster based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Best known for scaling Lessonly's marketing team from 8 to 70+ people and delivering 20x revenue growth before its $170M+ acquisition by Seismic, Kyle has held CMO and VP marketing roles at companies including Jellyfish, Seismic, and OpenView Venture Partners. He's authored three books on social media marketing published in 5 languages, hosts the Revenue Diaries podcast, and currently serves as CMO at Docebo, the AI-powered learning management platform.
Aurimas Griciūnas is a Lithuanian ML/AI engineer, founder of SwirlAI, and author of the SwirlAI Newsletter with 58,000+ Substack followers. A former CPO at neptune.ai (acquired by OpenAI), he now runs SwirlAI — an AI engineering education and consulting firm — and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI with 120,000+ followers. His newsletter covers AI engineering, LLMOps, RAG architectures, and agentic systems from a production-first, no-hype perspective.
Abadesi Osunsade is a British entrepreneur, author, podcast co-host, and inclusion advocate who founded Hustle Crew in 2016 to advance underrepresented talent in tech. A third-culture kid born in Washington D.C. to a Nigerian father and Filipina mother, she studied Economics & Government at LSE before scaling teams at Groupon, Amazon, and HotelTonight. She co-created Elpha (YC S19), co-hosts the Top 20 Apple Podcasts tech show Techish, scouts for Ada Ventures, and currently serves as Ecosystem Lead at Geovation. Recognised by Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe (2019) and the Financial Times' Top 100 Influential Leaders in Tech (2018), she is one of the UK tech ecosystem's most visible champions of equitable hiring and inclusive culture.
Amy Jo Martin is a renegade entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, and human innovation expert who pioneered social media strategy for celebrities and brands before most executives knew what Twitter was. She founded Digital Royalty in 2009 - with Shaquille O'Neal as her first client - and grew it into a global agency operating in 10 countries. Today she runs Renegade Global, an innovation company and investment fund focused on propelling female founders and corporate teams into the AI era, while hosting the 'Why Not Now?' podcast with guests like Mark Cuban, Jessica Alba, and Matthew McConaughey.
Barbara Corcoran turned a $1,000 loan into a $66 million real estate empire, sold it, then went on national television to bet on strangers with big dreams. The founder of The Corcoran Group and an original Shark on ABC's Shark Tank, she has made 130+ deals and invested ~$62 million in startups - including The Comfy, which grew to a ~$468 million valuation. Dyslexic, a D-student, one of ten kids in a two-bedroom house, she credits every single setback as the fuel that got her here.
Des Traynor is the Irish co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, the customer messaging platform that became one of Ireland's most iconic tech exports. A systems thinker who grew up as the youngest of seven children in Dublin, Traynor traces his entire career back to an Amiga 500 his single mother bought him at age five. Today he oversees Intercom's R&D - product, engineering, and design - while steering the company's all-in bet on Fin, its AI customer service agent powered by Anthropic's Claude. A prolific speaker, essayist, and accidental philosopher who moonlights as a Phoenix Park runner, Traynor has become one of the most trusted voices in B2B product strategy.
Corey Haines is a software developer, community catalyst, and author who quit a dead-end job in 2008 with $2,400 in his pocket, hit the road for 9 months pairing with programmers across the US for room and board, and accidentally invented the Coderetreat movement along the way. He co-created Coderetreat (now run in 100+ countries annually), wrote 'Understanding the Four Rules of Simple Design' based on observing thousands of programming pairs, co-founded Hearken (an audience-engagement platform serving 60+ global newsrooms), and has spent two decades championing software fundamentals over hype — all while claiming his only real goal in life is to be happy.
David Siteman Garland (DSG) is a St. Louis-based entrepreneur, author, and online course pioneer who turned a Bar Mitzvah savings account into a multi-million dollar media and education empire. Founder of The Rise To The Top — self-branded as 'The #1 Non-Boring Resource For Building Your Business Smarter, Faster, Cheaper' — he has generated $10M+ in online course sales, built an email list of 85,000+ subscribers, and taught 5,000+ students in 100+ countries through his flagship program Create Awesome Online Courses. A Wiley-published author, Inc. 500 honoree (#938, 2017), and co-founder of software companies Course Cats and Nrdly, DSG is also the founder of STL Maccabi Basketball and grandson of cancer research philanthropist Alvin J. Siteman.
Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant, executive education professor, and bestselling author recognized four times by Thinkers50 as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world. Named the #1 Communication Coach in the World by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards, she teaches at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and has written four books published by Harvard Business Review Press and Portfolio/Penguin. A former political campaign press secretary, documentary filmmaker, and Grammy-winning jazz album producer, Clark is also an active Broadway investor and musical theatre lyricist-in-training - living proof that the 'long game' she preaches is one she plays herself.
Joe Pulizzi is the originator of the term 'content marketing' and the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, which he built from a cocktail-napkin idea to a $17.6 million exit. Known universally as 'The Godfather of Content Marketing,' he has written nine books, spoken in 20+ countries, and now publishes the Orangeletter newsletter to 50,000+ subscribers while advising creators to own their audiences before AI makes discovery obsolete.
Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) is a Boston-based entrepreneur and social media pioneer who convinced the world that Twitter was a serious business tool - years before anyone else believed it. She founded the first Twitter-for-business consultancy (Pistachio Consulting), built the first Twitter app store (oneforty.com, acquired by HubSpot in 2011), co-authored 'Twitter for Dummies' with a foreword by Jack Dorsey, and pioneered the first 'donate by tweeting' charity campaign. After nearly a decade as HubSpot's Inbound Marketing Evangelist, she now runs The Enough Company, applying her evangelism and storytelling skills to accelerating climate solutions through market forces.
Nir Eyal is an Israeli-American behavioral designer, author, and angel investor best known for the 'Hooked Model' - the four-step framework used by the world's most habit-forming tech products. His 2014 book Hooked became a Silicon Valley bible for building engagement; his 2019 book Indistractable offered the antidote. His 2026 NYT bestseller Beyond Belief, co-authored with his wife Julie Li, tackles the hidden variable behind human performance: belief itself. A former Stanford lecturer, Eyal has backed companies like Canva and Kahoot, writes for the NYT and Harvard Business Review, and runs the influential blog NirAndFar.com.
Pat Flynn is an entrepreneur, author, and podcaster best known for founding Smart Passive Income (SPI), a platform where he openly documents the strategies - and the income numbers behind them - that power his online businesses. Laid off from his architecture job in 2008, he turned an e-book about the LEED exam into a career-defining pivot, eventually building a media company with 60 million+ podcast downloads, multiple Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestselling books, a Kickstarter-funded tripod product, and a Pokémon card YouTube channel that became its own standalone business. His signature move: publishing every dollar earned and spent, monthly, in public.
Stephanie Chandler is an American author, entrepreneur, and community builder who traded a Silicon Valley software career for a bookstore, stumbled into publishing, and ended up founding the Nonfiction Authors Association — a membership community helping writers publish, market, and monetize nonfiction books. Author of ten books and founder of Authority Publishing, she runs the annual Nonfiction Writers Conference (since 2010) and advocates openly for suicide loss survivors.
Josh Kaufman is a bestselling author, independent business researcher, and educator best known for 'The Personal MBA' - a book that challenged the necessity of expensive graduate business degrees and sold over a million copies worldwide. His TEDx talk on rapid skill acquisition has amassed over 42 million views, placing it among the most-watched TED talks ever. Through his three books and advisory practice, he helps entrepreneurs, executives, and self-learners build business acumen, acquire new skills faster, and pursue ambitious goals without institutional gatekeeping.
Nathan Latka started Heyo with $119 in his bank account from a Virginia Tech dorm room, grew it to $5M ARR, turned down a $6.5M buyout offer, then sold for $300K - and recorded every conversation. Today he runs Founderpath, which has deployed $200M+ in non-dilutive capital to 500+ SaaS founders, hosts a 30M+ download podcast rated #1 by INC Magazine, and operates GetLatka, a database of 58,600+ private SaaS companies built entirely from CEO interviews.