Stephanie Trunzo is the CEO of MERGE, a hybrid marketing-and-technology firm working at the crossroads of health, consumerism, and storytelling. A 20-plus-year technology leader, she launched Oracle Health and steered the Cerner acquisition, scaled the IBM Garage across 16 co-creation studios worldwide, and earlier doubled revenue year over year as COO/CDO of PointSource before its acquisition by Globant. She holds more than 20 patents, is a certified yoga instructor, and is a vocal advocate for authentic leadership and women in technology.
Anne Fulenwider spent 25 years turning sentences into magazine covers, capped by eight years as editor-in-chief of Marie Claire. Then she walked away from the masthead to co-found Alloy Women's Health, a digital company that connects women in perimenopause and menopause to menopause-trained physicians and doctor-prescribed treatment delivered to the door. She runs it as co-CEO alongside Monica Molenaar, applying an editor's instinct for storytelling to one of medicine's most overlooked subjects.
Nuseir Yassin, better known as Nas Daily, turned a self-imposed dare - a one-minute video every day for 1,000 days - into a media company that now reaches hundreds of millions of people each month. The Harvard economics graduate and former Venmo developer left a comfortable salary to chase a simpler question: how do you make a stranger care about a place, a person, or an idea in sixty seconds? The answer became Nas Company, an ecosystem spanning Nas Daily, Nas Academy, Nas Studios, the creator platform Nas.io, and the AI-driven agency 1000 Media.
Eddie Shleyner is a conversion copywriter and the founder of VeryGoodCopy, a newsletter of short 'micro-lessons' on writing, persuasion, and creativity read by millions of people a year. A former Copy Chief at the software-review company G2, he turned a private Google Doc of notes-to-self into one of the most-followed copywriting brands on the internet, a HackerNoon 'Email Newsletter of the Year,' and a 2024 book collecting 207 of his lessons. He works and lives in Chicago.
Caitlin Epstein is VP of Corporate Communications at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering customer engagement for businesses worldwide. Since joining in 2015, she helped navigate Twilio through its IPO and became one of tech PR's sharpest voices on human-centered storytelling - best known for turning a CEO's breakfast burrito delivery into a Forbes-covered $3 billion acquisition narrative.
Emily Brittain is a Senior Communications Manager at Microsoft, working within the Office of the Americas Markets & Industries President. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, she crafts the stories that shape how Microsoft's largest regional business - spanning Canada, the United States, and Latin America - communicates its vision internally and externally. A Northwestern University-trained journalist with over 11 years at Microsoft, she brought a multimedia storyteller's instincts to one of the world's most consequential technology companies, producing town halls, executive narratives, and brand messaging at scale.
Gavin King is VP of Portfolio Marketing at ServiceNow, where he connects the platform's sprawling product launches, AI vision, and strategic narrative into one coherent story. After 25 years at Microsoft - including a stint as Chief of Staff to CEO Satya Nadella - he brings a rare combination of brand-scaling experience, executive proximity, and B2B marketing depth to one of enterprise tech's most ambitious growth stories.
Jeffrey Whipps is Vice President of Marketing at Google, where he leads the company's global brand studio and holds global responsibility for strategic brand and reputation topics spanning sustainability, digital wellbeing, crisis response, and diversity and inclusion. Before Google, he spent seven years at Apple as Director of Worldwide Advertising, contributing to iconic campaigns including the iPod Silhouettes and Mac vs. PC series. His career spans over two decades at the intersection of technology and storytelling, with earlier roles at Netscape, Shutterfly, Sun Microsystems, and McCann Worldgroup.
Marvin Chow is Vice President of Consumer and AI Marketing at Google, where he leads marketing for flagship products including Search, Maps, Shopping, Google Assistant, Photos, and Google AI. A 16-year Google veteran, he has become the company's de facto 'AI General,' orchestrating the Gemini marketing rollout including a high-profile Super Bowl LX campaign. Before Google, he led Nike's marketing across Greater China, Japan, and Korea, collaborated with Steve Jobs on Nike+, and helped launch Dora the Explorer at Nickelodeon. He grew up working in his family's 7-Eleven store in New Jersey, the child of Taiwanese immigrants.
Stacy Martinet is Adobe's Chief Communications Officer and VP of Marketing Strategy & Communications, overseeing a 200+ person team that handles all stakeholder communications, marketing strategy, events, social media, and corporate social responsibility. A former CMO of Mashable and decade-long veteran of The New York Times digital transition, she bridges the worlds of journalism, media strategy, and enterprise technology with a distinctive voice on AI fluency, creative leadership, and modern brand building.
Dashverse is an AI-native entertainment company building tools and platforms that let anyone create, publish and monetize stories - from comics to microdramas - at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional production. Its ecosystem includes Frameo.AI (generative video studio), DashReels and ShortFree (microdrama apps), and Dashtoon (AI comics).
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.
Ali Albazaz is the founder and CEO of Inkitt, a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing platform that uses reader engagement data and algorithms to identify and publish bestselling fiction. Born in Baghdad and raised in Germany, he bootstrapped Inkitt from a Berlin startup after 140 investor rejections into a $400M+ valued company with 33 million users across three platforms: Inkitt (writer community), Galatea (immersive reading app), and CandyJar (video entertainment). Inkitt has raised $116.8M in total funding, including a $37M Series C led by Khosla Ventures in February 2024.
Sanidhya Narain is the CEO and Co-Founder of Dashverse, the parent company behind Dashtoon, DashReels, and Frameo.AI - a portfolio of AI-native entertainment platforms reaching 20+ million users worldwide. A chemical engineer turned content entrepreneur, Narain spent nearly four years at Pocket FM building its global content engine to $120M in revenue before pivoting to his conviction that generative AI would do for storytelling what the camera phone did for photography. Dashverse raised a $13M Series A led by Peak XV Partners in August 2025 and, by early 2026, had inked a multi-year deal with Harlequin to co-produce animated microdramas using its Frameo.AI studio.
Nathaniel Drew is an American content creator, polyglot, and filmmaker based in Paris, France, with over 1.79 million YouTube subscribers. Born in Los Angeles to Argentine-immigrant parents and raised in Portland, Oregon, he skipped college to teach himself filmmaking and launched his YouTube channel in 2015. Known for his cinematic vlogs exploring travel, language learning, identity, and existential questions, he speaks five or more languages and went viral with 'Speaking 5+ Languages with my Polyglot Grandma.' He also hosts the 'No Backup Plan' podcast, runs a Substack newsletter, creates music, and teaches filmmaking through his 'Frame by Frame' masterclass course.
Theo Von is a comedian, podcaster, and storyteller from Covington, Louisiana, whose show 'This Past Weekend' ranked as the 4th biggest podcast globally on Spotify in 2024. Known for his absurdist Southern wit, deeply personal storytelling, and a gift for finding humor in unlikely places, he has built one of the most loyal audiences in independent media — interviewing everyone from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders while remaining stubbornly, disarmingly himself.
Byron Hoffman is the Co-CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Offset, a Napa Valley-based company that is simultaneously a premium wine ecommerce platform and a brand design studio. Born and raised in Napa to a family steeped in food and wine culture - his grandfather was a winemaker at Christian Brothers and his grandmother Sally Schmitt was the original founder of The French Laundry - Byron brings both heritage and craft to his work. He co-founded Offset by merging his design studio Hoffman & Co. with Tyson Caly's 750 Group in 2015, having first collaborated on Last Bottle wine in 2011. Today, Offset serves legendary wineries like Frog's Leap, Grace Family Vineyards, Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, Kosta Browne, and Realm Cellars. Beyond wine, Byron spent ten years producing and designing his grandmother's memoir and cookbook 'Six California Kitchens,' which won the 2023 IACP Award for Best American Cookbook and generated coverage in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Wall Street Journal.
Susan Hobbs is the Global Operations Chief of Staff to the CEO at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, and a portfolio of open-source web infrastructure. A veteran Silicon Valley operator who started as a public school teacher, she has spent two decades at the intersection of technology, media, and startups - as first hire at acquired companies (Codian, CoTweet), programming architect behind TechCrunch Disrupt, a partner at CrunchFund, and an operations leader at Cloudflare before landing at Automattic. An active angel investor, board member, and arts patron, she brings rare cross-functional range to high-stakes organizational roles.
Tyson Caly is Co-CEO and Chief Product Officer of Offset Partners, a Napa-based company he co-founded with Byron Hoffman that is equal parts wine commerce platform and brand studio. Self-taught coder who forewent college, he started in wine web design at 14 after moving from suburban Chicago, built his first wine site at Don Sebastiani & Sons in the early 2000s, and spent 17 years quietly building Offset into the premier DTC ecommerce and brand partner for America's finest wineries - from Kosta Browne and Bryant Estate to Kermit Lynch and Frog's Leap.
Jhanvi Shriram is the co-founder and CEO of Krikey AI, a San Francisco-based generative AI 3D animation platform that enables anyone to create professional-grade animations in minutes without prior technical experience. A Stanford BA and MBA graduate with an MFA from USC's Peter Stark Producing Program, Jhanvi previously worked at YouTube, JauntVR, and Participant Media before launching Krikey in 2016 with her sister Dr. Ketaki Shriram (CTO). Krikey has raised $22M, counts Reliance Jio, AWS Startups, T-Mobile Accelerator, and Thirty Five Ventures among its investors, and reached over 100,000 creators through integrations with Canva and Adobe Express. A Tribeca Film Festival-premiered documentary producer turned AI entrepreneur, Jhanvi sits at the intersection of creative storytelling and cutting-edge technology.
Leila Chreiteh is a digital communications strategist and activist who has spent her career bridging social justice causes with the people who care about them. A Georgia-raised, Agnes Scott College honors graduate with a self-designed Human Rights major, she founded a refugee resettlement nonprofit on her college campus, ran for Alabama state legislature, championed immigrant rights at the Justice Action Center, and brought her storytelling instincts to the startup world as Communications Strategist and Director of Community at Outlander VC in New York - weaving a thread of progressive purpose through every platform she touches.
Samantha Lewis is the Head of Marketing at Right Side Capital Management (RSCM), a data-driven pre-seed venture firm in San Francisco that has backed 2,000+ startups since 2012. With 16+ years of content marketing and editorial experience spanning companies like Segment, PagerDuty, ebrary, and Springer Science+Business Media, she brings a rare blend of startup operator savvy and publishing depth to the VC world. Having participated in 30+ startups with 2 IPOs, Lewis shapes how RSCM tells the story of early-stage tech investing to founders, limited partners, and the broader startup ecosystem.
Tim Denning is an Australian writer, blogger, and online educator who went from a $32K/year bank call center job to 1 billion+ views across platforms and $6M+ earned through writing. He runs the 'Modern Freedom' Substack newsletter (151,000+ subscribers), teaches writing at Bad-Assery Academy, and publishes 10 articles per week on Medium, LinkedIn, and his personal site - all built on a philosophy of radical vulnerability, strategic imperfection, and the pursuit of time freedom over net worth.
George Ten is a copywriter, educator, and strategist known online as @GrammarHippy. He invented the 'CopyThinking' philosophy — the contrarian belief that great copy is 90% strategic thinking and 10% actual writing. With 11 years in marketing, he has helped build 8-figure info-product funnels, sold over 500,000 products online, and spent $10M+ profitably on Facebook ads. He teaches thousands of entrepreneurs on X/Twitter and through his courses and community.
Bernadette Jiwa is an Irish-Australian author, brand strategist, and storytelling expert who has written 10 #1 Amazon bestselling business books - including Story Driven, Marketing: A Love Story, and Hunch - plus two novels published by Penguin Random House. A former business consultant who began blogging in her forties, she built one of Australia's most-read business blogs, created the Story Skills Workshop on Seth Godin's Akimbo platform, and has become one of the most cited voices on the power of narrative in business and human connection.
Jay Acunzo is a business storytelling advisor, author, and keynote speaker who helps experts, entrepreneurs, and executives develop stronger ideas, more resonant stories, and more influential voices. A former Google and HubSpot strategist turned independent creator, he champions intuition over best practices and deep resonance over broad reach. He's the author of 'Break the Wheel,' host of the 'How Stories Happen' podcast, and has spoken in 25 states and 3 countries to audiences from 40 CEOs to 4,000 marketers.
Tomas Pueyo is a Franco-Spanish writer, strategist, and newsletter creator best known for his wildly viral COVID-19 articles that reached 60 million readers in 2020 and for his Substack newsletter Uncharted Territories, where he explores tech, geopolitics, AI, and the forces shaping civilization. A Stanford MBA and former Silicon Valley executive (Course Hero VP of Growth, Ankorstore CPO), he voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write full-time - building a 123,000+ subscriber audience without spending a dollar on advertising.
Eliot Peper is the bestselling author of twelve speculative thrillers — including Ensorcelled, Foundry, Reap3r, and the Analog trilogy — that explore the collision of technology, power, and culture. Based in Pacifica, CA, he serves as Head of Story at Portola, where he builds the lore and personality behind Tolan, an AI companion startup that went from $1M to $4M ARR in four weeks. A former entrepreneur-in-residence at a VC firm, Latin translator, dengue fever survivor, and avid surfer, Peper writes the books he wants to read — and has earned praise from Seth Godin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, and Tim O'Reilly along the way.