Kenneth Schlenker is a French-American serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Opal, the #1 screen time and focus app on iOS. He first envisioned a focus app in 2008 while working at Google - it took him 11 years to actually build it. After founding art-tech company ArtList (acquired by artnet), launching Bird's Paris operations, and building a $10M ARR business with just 11 people, he also runs Open Scout, a weekly newsletter covering early-stage startups read by investors at Sequoia, YC, a16z, and Accel.
Leah Tharin is a Swiss product management veteran, solopreneur, and one of the most influential voices on Product-led Growth (PLG) in B2B SaaS. With 25+ years of operator experience — scaling Smallpdf to 50M monthly active users and GotPhoto to 20M+ ARR — she left full-time employment in November 2023 to build an independent advisory and content business. Her newsletter 'Leah's ProducTea' on Substack, her podcast, and her 58,000+ LinkedIn followers have made her a go-to resource for product and growth leaders navigating the shift from sales-led to product-led business models.
Lenny Rachitsky is the author of Lenny's Newsletter, the world's largest product-focused newsletter with 1.2M+ subscribers, host of a top-10 global tech podcast, angel investor in 130+ companies, and former product lead at Airbnb where he helped transform instant booking from 5% to 80%+ of all reservations. Born in Odesa, Ukraine to refusenik parents who emigrated to the US when he was six, Lenny built a lean, high-quality media empire that earns $3M+ annually — all from a home studio in Marin County, with a digital fireplace backdrop and a strict no-meetings-before-3pm rule.
Rosie Hoggmascall is a London-based product and growth expert specialising in subscription apps, monetisation, and product-led growth. With a Cambridge education and a career spanning strategic communications to leading consumer tech startups, she is currently Chief Product & Growth Officer at Fyxer AI - an email productivity tool that grew from $1M to $30M ARR in 2025. She also runs 'Growth Dives', a weekly Substack newsletter delivering annotated product teardowns to 2,000+ subscribers with a remarkable 64% average open rate.
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.
Wahaj us Siraj is the co-founder and CEO of Nayatel, Pakistan's leading fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) telecom company. A mechanical engineer by training who pivoted to entrepreneurship out of frustration with government bureaucracy, he sold a Suzuki car to fund his first venture and went on to build Pakistan's first FTTH network - a first for all of South and Southeast Asia. Under his leadership, Nayatel has grown to 170,000+ customers, 2,500+ employees, and operations in 17+ cities, while also launching Pakistan's first HD TV channels and partnering with Facebook to expand fiber across 8 cities.
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.
Vanta is the leading automated trust management platform that helps companies earn and prove their security posture. Founded in 2018 by Christina Cacioppo after she experienced the manual nightmare of SOC 2 compliance at Dropbox, Vanta automates compliance across 37+ frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and FedRAMP. With 15,000+ customers, $504M raised, and a $4.15B valuation, Vanta has turned the famously tedious world of security audits into a continuous, automated process - and is now evolving into an agentic AI platform where a 24/7 AI GRC engineer does the heavy lifting.
Anthony Pompliano - known as 'Pomp' - is an Army veteran turned tech operator turned Bitcoin maximalist who built one of the most influential finance media empires on the internet. From three tours at Facebook to three weeks at Snapchat (and a whistleblower lawsuit to show for it), he has relentlessly bet on Bitcoin when no one on Wall Street would. Today he runs ProCap Financial (Nasdaq: BRR), a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company holding 5,457+ BTC, while publishing The Pomp Letter to 270,000+ subscribers and hosting a podcast with 50 million downloads.
April Dunford is the world's leading authority on B2B product positioning. A former VP of Marketing at seven venture-backed tech startups (collectively acquired for $2B+), she turned a career of accidental positioning wins into a methodology used by 300+ companies including Google, IBM, and Epic Games. Her book 'Obviously Awesome' (2019, updated 2026) has sold 100,000+ copies and redefined how tech companies think about market context. She consults, speaks, angel invests, and runs a newsletter and podcast under the 'Positioning with April Dunford' brand.
Harry Stebbings is the British founder of 20VC, the world's largest venture capital media brand and a $800M+ AUM fund. Starting his podcast at 18 with $50 and zero industry contacts, he built The Twenty Minute VC into a 100M+ download juggernaut spanning 190 countries, then parlayed that audience into a real VC fund backed by MIT and unicorn founders. He dropped out of King's College London after four weeks, co-founded Stride.VC, then launched 20VC Fund - closing a $400M third fund in October 2024. Equal parts podcaster, investor, and ultramarathoner, Stebbings runs companies and 100-mile races with the same compulsive energy.
Julian Shapiro is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, deeptech seed investor, and prolific writer who built a career that spans open-source animation engines, growth marketing agencies, and a Y Combinator-backed startup. He founded Demand Curve, the largest growth marketing education platform for startups, and now runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund writing $500K-$2M checks into robotics, chips, energy, medtech, and biotech. His free handbooks at julian.com - covering writing, startups, fitness, and audio - are read by over a million people annually. He co-hosts the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen and was previously VP of Marketing at Webflow.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm with $400M+ under management across two funds. A Princeton molecular biology graduate turned venture capitalist, he previously spent eight years at Shasta Ventures where he backed Canva, ClassDojo, Frame.io, and The Farmer's Dog. He writes the 'Next Big Thing' newsletter on Substack with 18,000+ subscribers, publishes public investment theses before backing founders, and built his career on a 'traction-first' philosophy and obsessive focus on founder learning velocity. An Indian-American from a family with deep public service roots, he co-founded Artsy as a Princeton sophomore and has been a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.
Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, an audience research platform that helps marketers understand where their audiences spend time online. Previously, he built Moz into the world's leading SEO software company before stepping down as CEO in 2014 after a public battle with depression. Author of 'Lost and Founder' (Penguin/Random House, 2018), he is known for radical transparency about the messy reality of startup life, pioneering the Whiteboard Friday video series, and championing a 'chill work' philosophy that rejects hustle culture in favor of sustainable, sub-30-hour work weeks.
Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport, the technology-driven freight forwarding company he built from a Y Combinator batch into an $8 billion global logistics giant. A serial entrepreneur who started importing goods from China at 17, he previously co-founded ImportGenius and has become one of the most influential voices in supply chain and trade policy - most famously by renting a boat to tour the LA port congestion in 2021 and posting a viral Twitter thread that prompted California's governor to call him directly. He is also a venture partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and media creator who built The Hustle from zero to 1.5 million subscribers before selling it to HubSpot for ~$27 million. He co-hosts My First Million, a top-25 business podcast with Shaan Puri that pulls over 1 million downloads a month, and co-founded Hampton, a vetted peer community for high-revenue founders now generating ~$8M ARR. Equal parts hustler and storyteller, Parr turned a Nashville hot dog stand into an eight-figure media empire and keeps reinventing what it means to build in public.
Sarah Tavel is a venture investor and product thinker best known as the first female General Partner at Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious and selective VC firms. Before Benchmark, she led core discovery products at Pinterest during its hypergrowth years, having first backed the company as a VC at Bessemer Venture Partners. She is the creator of widely-cited frameworks including the Hierarchy of Marketplaces, Happy GMV, and the 'Sell Work, Not Software' thesis for AI startups. As of April 2025, she transitioned to Venture Partner at Benchmark, focusing on AI tools at the edge and broader exploratory work.
Shaan Puri is an Indian-American entrepreneur, angel investor, and podcast host best known for co-hosting My First Million with Sam Parr - one of the top business podcasts with 25M+ downloads annually. He sold Bebo to Twitch (Amazon) for up to $25M in 2019, launched and sold the Milk Road crypto newsletter in an eight-figure deal in 2023, and built Bums and Roses into a $25M/year baby products brand with his wife. A self-described contrarian on hard work ('hard work is massively overrated'), he now focuses on content creation, early-stage investing, and writing through his Good Friday newsletter and One Hour Books project.
Syed Amir Jafri is the CEO and co-founder of Eocean, a Pakistan-based CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) company serving 2,000+ enterprises across 180+ countries with SMS, WhatsApp, and Voice APIs. He co-founded Eocean in 2008 with his brother Syed Asif Jafri, bootstrapping the company from a local communications startup into a regional technology leader. He is also co-founder of Kistpay, a fintech platform focused on smartphone financing and digital inclusion in Pakistan. A certified Chief Digital Officer from MIT Sloan Executive Education, Jafri bridges the gap between traditional enterprise communication and emerging AI-driven platforms, with clients including Google, Unilever, HBL, and Careem.
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.
Wes Kao is an executive coach, co-founder of Maven (the cohort-based learning platform backed by a16z and First Round), and co-creator of the altMBA with Seth Godin. She pioneered the cohort-based course category, scaled altMBA to 550 cities in 45 countries, and now helps senior tech operators at companies like Google, Amazon, and Shopify sharpen their executive communication and influence. Her biweekly newsletter reaches 300,000+ readers across platforms.
Adam Jacob is the co-founder of Chef (the infrastructure automation company acquired for $220M) and current CEO of System Initiative, a next-generation DevOps platform using digital twins to visually model and simulate infrastructure. A self-taught systems engineer who ran ISPs as a teenager and built automated infrastructure for 15 startups before co-founding Opscode/Chef in 2008, Jacob created the Chef, InSpec, and Habitat open-source tools that helped define the DevOps movement. Today he advocates for rebuilding DevOps from the ground up, arguing that tooling and culture must evolve together - and that Infrastructure as Code, as practiced, is still broken.
Ross Haleliuk is a Ukrainian-born, San Francisco-based cybersecurity entrepreneur, author, angel investor, and operator who built one of the industry's most influential newsletters, 'Venture in Security,' with 21,000+ subscribers. He authored the Amazon bestseller 'Cyber for Builders,' co-founded the world's first angel syndicate exclusively for security practitioners, and currently leads a stealth-mode cybersecurity startup as co-founder and CEO. With a background spanning history studies in Ukraine, product leadership in Canada, and a deep pivot into cybersecurity, he has become a leading voice on building, funding, and growing security companies.
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.
Swizec Teller is a Slovenian-American software engineer, bestselling author, and educator based in San Francisco who has spent 20+ years turning hard-won startup experience into actionable career wisdom. Best known for his Senior Mindset newsletter and books like 'Scaling Fast' and 'Senior Engineer Mindset,' he teaches engineers how to stop writing code and start building leverage. Currently building web UX for gene sequencing at Plasmidsaurus, he's the rare person who codes all day and then writes about coding all evening - and makes that seem entirely reasonable.
Ahmad Ajmal is a Toronto-based fintech entrepreneur with an MBA and Master of Finance from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is a founder and operator at Upfinity Inc., an AI-driven platform that helps startup founders transform ideas into operating businesses. With roots in corporate banking and a strong foundation in programming, Ahmad bridges the gap between traditional finance and modern technology - his team at Rotman was recognized as one of the top 3 for solving the Financial Inclusion Problem using machine learning, and Upfinity has since grown to over 11,000 users through organic growth alone.
Basit Abbassi is a Karachi-based marketing and growth leader with 13+ years of experience scaling startups and brands across Pakistan. Known for his bootstrapping ethos and hands-on brand-building, he has contributed to ventures that were acquired by the likes of Careem and the Malak Group. Currently serving as Chief Marketing Officer at Snapp! Box, a Tehran-based logistics platform, he brings a rare blend of service-sector grit and digital strategy to every role.
Zero is an AI-native email client built from scratch to put artificial intelligence at the center of how people read, write, and manage email. Founded in 2025 by Nizar Abi Zaher and Adam Wazzan, Zero went through Y Combinator's X25 batch and raised $2M from 1984 Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and YC. The product lives at 0.email and promises to cut the time knowledge workers spend on email by 70% through smart prioritization, thread summarization, AI-drafted replies, and conversational inbox search. With over 10,000 GitHub stars on its open-source repo, Zero is one of the fastest-growing AI email projects of 2025.
Huzaifa Zahoor is a Pakistani-Australian software engineer and co-founder of Meyka AI, an AI-powered stock research platform serving 3,000+ monthly users. With over 4 years of experience building financial technology systems, he bridges data engineering, machine learning, and product development to democratize access to sophisticated financial analysis tools for retail investors and traders worldwide.
Yevgeniy 'Jim' Brikman is the co-founder of Gruntwork and one of the most influential voices in infrastructure-as-code. Author of three O'Reilly books — 'Terraform: Up & Running' (now in its 3rd edition), 'Hello, Startup', and 'Fundamentals of DevOps and Software Delivery' (2025) — he has spent 15+ years building infrastructure that served hundreds of millions of users at LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Cisco Systems, and Thomson Financial. At Gruntwork, he helped pioneer the idea of treating infrastructure like software: testable, reusable, and versioned.