Andrew Mao is the co-founder and CEO of Parsnip, an AI-powered learning app often called 'Duolingo for cooking' that helps novices build real confidence in the kitchen. A Harvard computer-science PhD and former computational social scientist, he ran the longest iterated prisoner's dilemma experiment ever conducted, built ML systems at neural-interface startup CTRL-labs (acquired by Facebook), and now applies the science of how people learn to the very human problem of figuring out what's for dinner.

Jacob Cole is the CEO and cofounder of Ideaflow, a Palo Alto company building intelligence-amplifying software - a notebook and team knowledge platform designed to fuse human thinking with AI. A former MIT Media Lab collective-intelligence researcher who also studied at Oxford, Cole frames Ideaflow as a life mission: a future where 'nobody feels alone with their ideas.' The company has raised more than $10M from First Round Capital, 8VC, StartX, Tim Draper, and Naval, building a human-AI hybrid 'shared brain' for organizations.
Ricky Yean is the co-founder and CEO of Flow Club, a virtual coworking and body-doubling community where remote, independent, and neurodiverse workers join live focus sessions to get things done together. A Taiwanese immigrant who arrived in the US at eleven and attended Stanford on a full endowment scholarship, he is a three-time startup founder and two-time Y Combinator alum (S10, S21). Before Flow Club he built Crowdbooster, one of the most popular early Twitter and Facebook analytics tools used by brands from Nike to the United Nations, and Upbeat, a tech-enabled PR service. He writes a weekly newsletter on startups, Asian America, and life, and does standup comedy on the side.
Sarah Chou is the co-founder and CEO of Informed K12, an Oakland-based software company that helps school districts trade paper forms and manual approvals for digital workflow automation. A former district administrator who ran an $8M professional development program in Providence, she met co-founder Qian Wang at Stanford's Graduate School of Education in 2012. After their first idea (a teacher-collaboration tool called Chalk) failed, they noticed that the real pain in schools wasn't a lack of ideas but a mountain of paperwork. Informed K12 now serves hundreds of districts with a team of 70+ people, most of whom come from education or social-sector backgrounds.

Iain Usiri is the co-founder and CEO of Ramani, a Tanzanian fintech building financial infrastructure for Africa's consumer-packaged-goods supply chains. A Stanford computer science graduate and former Salesforce product manager, he gave up his US immigration status and flew home one-way in 2019 to start the company with his brother Calvin and friend Martin Kibet. Ramani gives micro distribution centers free point-of-sale and inventory software, then monetizes through lending - and in 2022 raised a $32M Series A led by Flexcap Ventures after passing through Y Combinator's W20 batch.
Noureddine Tayebi is the founder and CEO of Yassir, North Africa's most valuable tech startup and the leading super app for francophone Africa. Born in Algiers in 1977, he earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University after completing a master's degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He spent eight years at Intel in Silicon Valley accumulating over 50 patents before founding InSense, a nano-motion sensor startup acquired by Mojo Vision in 2018. In 2017, he co-founded Yassir, which has grown to serve 8 million+ users across 45 cities in six countries, offering ride-hailing, food delivery, grocery delivery, and fintech services. Yassir has raised $193.25 million in total, including a historic $150M Series B led by Mary Meeker's BOND, cementing Tayebi's position as a defining figure in Africa's digital economy.