Tim Novikoff is the founder and CEO of Super Teacher, an AI tutoring app for elementary students that has reached roughly 20,000 families and public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii. A former NYC math teacher with a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell, he co-authored a PNAS paper on the math of spaced repetition, built and sold the video-editing startup Fly Labs to Google in 2015, then worked on Google Photos and ran Google Colab before returning to education. As a kid he voiced Jeffy on MTV's animated series Daria.
Lindon Gao is the co-founder and CEO of Dyna Robotics, a Redwood City-based company building commercially deployed foundation model robots for real-world automation. After immigrating from China at age 11, he attended Stuyvesant High School and NYU Stern before pivoting from Goldman Sachs investment banking to entrepreneurship. He co-founded Caper AI, an AI-powered smart grocery cart company acquired by Instacart for $350 million in 2021. In 2024, he left Instacart to launch Dyna Robotics alongside York Yang and former Google DeepMind scientist Jason Ma. Within a year, Dyna raised $143.5 million in total funding, achieved a $600 million valuation, and deployed robots folding napkins and handling laundry for 16 hours daily at hotels, restaurants, gyms, and laundromats — backed by NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce Ventures, and First Round Capital.