Dave Wiskus is the founder and CEO of Nebula, the creator-owned streaming service he launched in 2019 with a group of independent YouTubers, and of Standard, the talent company behind it. Before building a streaming platform pitched as an A24 for online video, he was a respected human interface designer who co-founded Q Branch with John Gruber and Brent Simmons to make the note-taking app Vesper. He also fronts the New York synth-rock band Airplane Mode and co-hosted the podcast Unprofessional.
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Garrett Dodge is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rockbot, the business media platform that powers music, TV, digital signage, and advertising for nearly 50,000 brick-and-mortar locations across North America. Founded in 2010, Rockbot has grown into a $9.2M revenue company serving major brands including Planet Fitness, Walmart, Shake Shack, and JetBlue, backed by Google Ventures, Universal Music Group, and others. Dodge holds a B.A. from Middlebury College and an MBA from MIT Sloan, and previously helped build Caesars Entertainment's Innovation Team before channeling that experience into reimagining how physical spaces use media to engage customers.
Jon Dahl is the co-founder and CEO of Mux, a developer-first video infrastructure platform that powers video at scale for companies like Robinhood, PBS, and ViacomCBS. A serial founder who sold Zencoder to Brightcove for $30M in 2012 and co-created Video.js — the most widely deployed open-source video player on the web — Dahl has spent two decades turning the complexity of online video into simple, powerful APIs for developers. Mux has raised $173.9M in total funding, achieved unicorn status in 2021, and processes several billion monthly video streams.
Qwilt builds the Open Edge Cloud - a federated CDN embedded inside service provider networks (Verizon, BT, Vodafone, Comcast, Telecom Italia and dozens more) that pushes video, software, and real-time applications closer to the end user than any traditional cloud. Founded in 2010 by ex-Cisco and ex-Juniper engineers, it operates 2,196 edge nodes across 38 countries on 6 continents with 150+ Tbps of edge capacity, and is the leading commercial champion of the Open Caching standard inside the Streaming Video Technology Alliance.
Redpanda Data is a high-performance streaming data platform built in C++ that is wire-compatible with the Apache Kafka API while ditching the JVM and ZooKeeper. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Gallego, the company helps engineering teams move terabytes of real-time data per day with a simpler, faster, and cheaper architecture, and has expanded its remit toward agentic AI infrastructure.
Rockbot is an Oakland-based B2B media platform that powers the music, TV, digital signage, and on-premise advertising playing inside more than 50,000 business locations - from gyms and bars to national retail chains. Founded in 2010 as a social jukebox app, it has grown into a multi-product media operating system for brick-and-mortar venues.
Steve Heffernan is the co-founder and product architect at Mux, the developer-first video infrastructure platform, and creator of Video.js - the open-source HTML5 video player powering playback on Amazon, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Dropbox with over 38,700 GitHub stars. Previously co-founded Zencoder (YC W10), the cloud video encoding startup acquired by Brightcove for $30M in 2012. A self-described hacker on video, he is now leading the ground-up rebuild of Video.js v10 at Mux, which raised $105M Series D in 2021.
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Mathieu Planche is the CEO and Director of R&D at Witbe, a Paris-founded, publicly traded company (Euronext Growth) that builds AI-powered robots and platforms for video Quality of Experience monitoring and automated testing. Since taking the helm in 2019, he has steered Witbe through a rapid AI transformation - from hardware testing appliances to the industry's first agent-native video QA platform - serving 300+ broadcasters, OTT providers, and telecom operators across 120+ countries. A dual-degree engineer from CentraleSupélec and Georgia Tech, Planche rose through every rung of the Witbe ladder: consultant, UI designer, Americas ops manager, Chief Experience Officer, and Chief Product Officer before becoming CEO.
Ali Kutay is the founder, chairman and CEO of Striim, a Palo Alto streaming data integration company. A serial enterprise-software entrepreneur, he previously led GoldenGate Software (acquired by Oracle) and WebLogic (merged with BEA, acquired by Oracle), and ran Carnegie Mellon spin-out Formtek under Lockheed for seven years.
Kun Gao is a serial entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and original CEO of Crunchyroll, the platform that turned anime from a niche US curiosity into a billion-dollar streaming giant (acquired by Sony/AT&T WarnerMedia for $1.2 billion). Now he's doing it again as Co-Founder and CEO of Forge (forge.gg), a San Francisco-based game marketing and loyalty platform that hit 1 million users within its first year. Alongside co-founders Dennis 'Thresh' Fong (the world's first professional esports player) and George Ng, Gao is building the infrastructure layer that indie game developers desperately need: no-code loyalty programs, player analytics, and direct community channels - without the walled gardens.
Shamal Ranasinghe is the Chief Business Officer at Audius, the decentralized blockchain-based music streaming platform. A 25-year music-tech veteran, he co-founded Topspin Media in 2007 - one of the first direct-to-fan platforms for musicians - before spending eight years as VP of Product at Pandora/SiriusXM building creator tools. At Audius, he leads major label and publishing deals, including a landmark global licensing agreement with Kobalt Music in 2024, while championing a world where artists own their music, keep 90% of revenue, and connect directly with fans without gatekeepers.
Adam Mitchell is CEO at Mitchell & Associates Talent, a SAG-AFTRA franchised boutique agency headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico with California operations - named one of Hollywood's top 7 agencies by Backstage.com. The agency represents hundreds of actors across commercials, studio films, streaming platforms, voiceover, and television, with credits spanning Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, Star Wars, and Disney productions. Operating at the intersection of the Southwest and Hollywood, Mitchell & Associates has built a family-like culture that distinguishes it from larger, impersonal agencies while punching well above its weight in major market bookings.
Emmett Shear co-founded Twitch in 2007 and spent 12 years as its CEO, growing it from a scrappy live-streaming experiment into the dominant gaming and creator platform that Amazon acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2014. After a surreal 72-hour stint as interim CEO of OpenAI during the Sam Altman board crisis in November 2023, he pivoted to founding Softmax, an a16z-backed AI alignment startup working on 'organic alignment' - a biology-inspired approach to making AI systems genuinely care about their communities rather than merely comply with rules.
Justin Kan is a serial entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of Twitch, the live streaming platform acquired by Amazon for $970 million in 2014. A Yale graduate who studied physics and philosophy, Kan pioneered lifecasting by wearing a camera 24/7 for Justin.tv in 2007, which evolved into Twitch and revolutionized gaming culture. He's launched multiple ventures including Socialcam (sold to Autodesk for $60M), served as a Y Combinator partner, and now invests through Goat Capital while building new companies in Web3, commerce, and music. Despite selling Twitch for nearly $1 billion, Kan has been candid about struggles with happiness, anxiety, and finding fulfillment beyond exits, making him a rare voice of authenticity in Silicon Valley's success-obsessed culture.
Kyle Vogt is a Kansas-born serial entrepreneur and robotics pioneer who has founded three billion-dollar companies before age 40. He co-founded Twitch (acquired by Amazon for $970M), founded Cruise Automation (acquired by GM for $1B+), and currently leads The Bot Company, developing AI-powered household robots. Starting as a teenage BattleBots competitor who built his first self-driving car at 14, Vogt left MIT to pursue entrepreneurship, becoming one of the rare founders to create multiple unicorns across live-streaming, autonomous vehicles, and consumer robotics.
Bill Campbell is the founder and CEO of Barefoot Media LLC, a global advisory firm specializing in digital strategy, content licensing, and fundraising for startups in the music, streaming, and entertainment tech space. With over 30 years of experience, he previously served as Senior Vice President of Global Digital Business at both Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, where he structured landmark deals with Spotify, Apple Music, Google, and Amazon. His client roster includes TikTok/Bytedance, SoundCloud, Square, and United Masters, making him one of the most influential behind-the-scenes operators in digital entertainment.
Ozuna (Juan Carlos Ozuna Rosado) is Puerto Rico's reigning melodic reggaeton king — the artist who spent more consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums than any male in history, held four Guinness World Records simultaneously, and became the most-viewed artist on YouTube globally in 2018. Raised by his grandmother above a San Juan bodega after losing his father at age three, he turned hardship into a sonic empire spanning seven studio albums, 23+ million Instagram followers, and collaborations with Cardi B, Selena Gomez, DJ Snake, and Rosalía. His smooth melodic tenor and genre-fluid approach — blending reggaeton, melodic trap, Afrobeats, and Latin pop — have made him a defining voice of the streaming era.
Peso Pluma (Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija) is the 25-year-old Mexican singer-songwriter from Zapopan, Jalisco who turned corridos tumbados - the fusion of traditional Mexican corridos with trap beats and hip-hop swagger - into a global phenomenon. In under five years, he broke a 64-year Billboard Hot 100 record, won a Grammy, became Mexico's most-streamed Spotify artist of all time, and built Double P Records into an independent powerhouse. His albums Génesis and Éxodo redefined what regional Mexican music could mean on a world stage.
Sienna Spiro is a 20-year-old British singer-songwriter from London who went from posting TikTok covers at 16 to amassing nearly 900 million Spotify streams and landing on Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2026. Signed to Capitol Records and produced largely by Omer Fedi, she writes confessional indie-pop infused with soul and jazz, channeling the raw emotional candor of artists like Etta James and Frank Sinatra into chart-breaking anthems about regret, self-sabotage, and longing. Her breakthrough single 'Die on This Hill' hit UK #9 and US Billboard Hot 100 #19, while 'MAYBE.' generated 600M+ TikTok views - all without a single renegade dance.