Jamin Ball is a Partner at Altimeter Capital and the author of Clouded Judgement, a weekly Substack newsletter with 87,000+ subscribers that tracks SaaS valuations, cloud earnings, and operating metrics for founders and investors alike. A Stanford-trained engineer who went from tech investment banking (Morgan Stanley, BofA) to venture (Redpoint Ventures) to growth-stage investing at Altimeter, Ball has built board seats at Airbyte, Clickhouse, dbt Labs, LiveKit, and Prisma, and coined the 'Rule of X' framework widely cited across SaaS finance circles. His writing bridges public market data with private company decision-making, and his 2024 essay on VC misaligned incentives prompted Bill Gurley to call it 'potentially the single most important issue for the entire venture capital landscape.'
Rex Woodbury is the founder and managing partner of Daybreak Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, and the creator of Digital Native, a weekly newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers exploring the intersection of technology and culture. A Dartmouth and Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholar, former Goldman Sachs analyst, TPG and Index Ventures partner, Guinness World Record holder, LGBTQ+ advocate, and competitive runner, Woodbury is one of the most distinctive voices in venture capital — blending anthropological observation with market analysis to decode how Gen Z and emerging technology are reshaping commerce, communication, and culture.
Balaji Srinivasan is a serial founder, investor, and author who holds four Stanford degrees and has co-founded companies sold for nearly half a billion dollars. Former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and first CTO of Coinbase, he is best known for writing The Network State — a WSJ #2 bestselling book advocating technology-enabled sovereign communities — and for building The Network School, a live experiment in startup-society living on a private island near Singapore.
Sahil Bloom is a New York Times bestselling author, investor, and creator who left a Vice President seat at a $3.5B private equity firm to build one of the internet's most-followed newsletters. His Curiosity Chronicle reaches over 800,000 subscribers weekly with ideas on wealth, time, and purpose. His 2025 book 'The 5 Types of Wealth' became an instant bestseller, and in late 2025 he co-founded Wild Roman, a 100% natural men's skincare brand named after his son. A former Division I pitcher at Stanford, he runs sub-3-hour marathons and deadlifts 525 pounds in his spare time.
Azalia Mirhoseini is an Iranian-born AI researcher, Stanford professor, and co-founder of Ricursive Intelligence - a frontier AI lab valued at $4 billion that uses AI to design better chips, which in turn train stronger AI. Best known for AlphaChip, the deep reinforcement learning system that now designs Google's TPUs and has compressed chip floorplanning from months to hours, she also co-invented the Mixture-of-Experts architecture underpinning GPT, Claude, and Gemini. With 20,000+ citations and a $335M-funded startup launched in under four months, she is closing the recursive loop between artificial intelligence and the hardware it runs on.
Charlie Guo is a Stanford and YC alum who turned a personal obsession with AI into a 23,000-subscriber newsletter and a Developer Experience role at OpenAI. Through Artificial Ignorance at ignorance.ai, he writes at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence - cutting through hype to deliver practical, hands-on insights for builders. He has co-founded multiple startups (ClassOwl, FanHero, Crowdmade), published a book of startup interviews called Unscalable, and created a widely-used Python library for Gmail with 1.8k GitHub stars - all while teaching himself AI engineering through relentless experimentation.
Chip Huyen is a Vietnamese-American computer scientist, author, and educator who turned a rejection letter from Stanford into a three-year around-the-world journey, two bestselling Vietnamese travel books, and eventually a second application that got her in. She went on to teach at Stanford, build ML infrastructure at NVIDIA and Netflix, co-found Claypot AI, and write two of the most-read technical books on machine learning systems in production - 'Designing Machine Learning Systems' (2022) and 'AI Engineering' (2025). Her newsletter and blog are required reading for anyone building serious AI products.
Mihail Eric is a Palo Alto-based ML engineer, researcher, educator, and serial founder who has spent a decade bridging cutting-edge AI research and production systems. A Stanford CS alumnus who studied under Christopher Manning and Percy Liang, he built some of Amazon Alexa's earliest large language models, co-founded YC-backed Storia AI, founded Confetti AI (acquired by Towards AI), and now teaches 'The Modern Software Developer' at Stanford while running a newsletter for 17,000+ AI practitioners.
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.
Shreya Shankar is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley's EPIC Lab building AI-powered data systems that are reliable and cost-efficient. A Stanford-trained engineer who worked at Google Brain and Meta, she bridges academic research and industry practice through DocETL (an open-source LLM data processing system with 3.5K+ GitHub stars used by 30+ S&P 500 companies), an O'Reilly book on AI evals co-authored with Hamel Husain, and a Maven course that has reached 4,500+ professionals. She is on the CS faculty job market and gave a faculty candidate talk at Carnegie Mellon in March 2026.
Amber Yang is an Enterprise Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners backing highly technical founders building next-generation AI software and infrastructure. Before VC, she founded Seer Tracking - an AI startup that used neural networks to predict space debris orbits with 98% accuracy - winning the $50K Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and landing on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science at age 18. A Stanford CS/Physics grad with a philosophy detour at Oxford, she brings a rare trifecta of deep technical chops, founder experience, and investor instinct to the table.
Sheba Najmi is a Stanford-trained UX leader, civic technologist, and founder of Code for Pakistan — the country's first civic tech nonprofit. Over two decades she has shaped digital products for hundreds of millions of users (Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, FreeWill) while simultaneously running a parallel mission: using open-source technology to make Pakistani government services work for ordinary people. Her work has served 2.1 million citizens, trained 600 government officials, and opened 6,000 public datasets. In 2024 she received the HUM Women Leaders Award for her contributions to civic innovation in Pakistan.
Andrew Huberman is an American neuroscientist, Stanford associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, and host of the Huberman Lab podcast — the #1 health podcast on Apple Podcasts. Born at Stanford Hospital to a physicist father and children's book author mother, he went from a troubled adolescence marked by skateboarding, truancy, and a stint in a youth detention center to earning a Ph.D. in neuroscience and building one of the world's most listened-to podcasts. With 7.4 million YouTube subscribers, 461 episodes, and a 2025 iHeartPodcast Award, Huberman has translated complex brain science into daily protocols that millions of people follow — from morning sunlight exposure to delayed caffeine to the physiological sigh.