Darwin Salazar is Head of Growth at Monad and the founder of The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP), a weekly newsletter read by Fortune 500 CISOs, vendors, and investors. A practitioner-turned-product-leader, he has worked across cloud security, detection engineering, red teaming, and IoT security at Datadog, Accenture, Ford Motor Company, and Johnson & Johnson. With 20,000+ combined followers and 250,000+ newsletter visits, Darwin bridges the gap between hands-on security work and the business of cybersecurity - making complex industry shifts digestible for the people who build, buy, and fund security products.
Turner Novak is the founder and solo General Partner of Banana Capital, a seed-stage venture fund investing in internet-first founders. He grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, in a single-parent household with intermittent internet access, then built a career path from CFA studies and endowment investing to VC entirely through Twitter presence and a viral fantasy portfolio. He hosts The Peel podcast, writes The Split newsletter, and operates from Ann Arbor, Michigan - proving that Midwest contrarianism and relentless online engagement can be a genuine edge in consumer tech investing.
Jeremy Caplan is a journalist, educator, and newsletter creator who built Wonder Tools into one of Substack's most-recommended productivity and AI tools newsletters, with 85,000+ subscribers in 201 countries. He is Director of Teaching and Learning at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where he also runs the Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program. A Princeton and dual-Columbia grad, former Time magazine reporter, and one-time international concertmaster, Caplan has spent over a decade helping journalists and knowledge workers find tools that actually save time.
Tom Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A specialist in Southeast Asian comparative politics, democratic backsliding, and political economy, he is best known for his viral 2017 essay 'Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable,' which warned Americans that authoritarian erosion looks mundane from the inside. Fluent in Indonesian, he has written five books spanning Indonesian and Malaysian politics, COVID-19 partisanship, and global democratic challenges. His Substack newsletter, launched in 2025, continues his two-decade tradition of public-facing analysis at the intersection of academic rigor and accessible political commentary.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and media critic whose decade of reporting on criminal justice, race, and policing in America has made him one of the most consequential voices in modern journalism. Best known for leading the Washington Post's 'Fatal Force' database - the first real-time national tracker of fatal police shootings - Lowery has written two landmark books, built a distinctive independent newsletter, and become an outspoken advocate for objective, truth-centered journalism that refuses false balance. His career spans the Washington Post, CBS News, The Marshall Project, and academia, and his 2016 book 'They Can't Kill Us All' remains essential reading on race, protest, and the limits of American democracy.
Yashar Ali is an Iranian-American journalist, newsletter publisher, and social media powerhouse who built one of the most influential independent media presences in the US almost entirely through Twitter/X. Known for breaking stories that bigger outlets fear to touch - from Fox News sexual misconduct to Scientology cover-ups - Ali runs The Reset newsletter on Substack with over 61,000 subscribers. Time magazine named him one of the most influential people on the internet in 2019. His career is anything but linear: TV production assistant, personal cook for Kathy Griffin, political operative for Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom, and now independent journalist with a devoted following.
Jamin Ball is a Partner at Altimeter Capital and the author of Clouded Judgement, a weekly Substack newsletter with 87,000+ subscribers that tracks SaaS valuations, cloud earnings, and operating metrics for founders and investors alike. A Stanford-trained engineer who went from tech investment banking (Morgan Stanley, BofA) to venture (Redpoint Ventures) to growth-stage investing at Altimeter, Ball has built board seats at Airbyte, Clickhouse, dbt Labs, LiveKit, and Prisma, and coined the 'Rule of X' framework widely cited across SaaS finance circles. His writing bridges public market data with private company decision-making, and his 2024 essay on VC misaligned incentives prompted Bill Gurley to call it 'potentially the single most important issue for the entire venture capital landscape.'
John Cutler is a product thinker, writer, and systems overthinker best known for The Beautiful Mess newsletter (59,000+ subscribers) and the viral concept of the 'feature factory.' A college dropout turned touring musician turned video game creator turned product executive, he has written nearly 1,000 pieces on the messy intersection of product, people, and organizational design. He co-authored Amplitude's North Star Playbook, spent years as a product evangelist coaching teams worldwide, and is now Head of Product at Dotwork — a platform for building product operating systems.
Justin Gage is the founder and writer of Technically, a newsletter that makes software and AI concepts accessible to non-engineers. With 72,000+ subscribers on Substack, he built one of the most respected tech-explainer newsletters from scratch - conceived during a 7-hour Tokyo airport layover - growing it without paid ads through authentic writing and word-of-mouth. By day, he serves as VP of Developer Marketing at Amplify Partners, an early-stage VC firm focused on technical founders.
Kyla Scanlon is an economist, author, and content creator who coined the term 'vibecession' and has built a multi-platform media presence dedicated to making economics accessible. Her debut book 'In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work' (2024) became a New York Times bestseller. She reaches over 1 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Substack, and Twitter/X, and has been named to Barron's 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance. A triple major from Western Kentucky University, she left a career in institutional asset management at Capital Group to pursue financial education full-time.
Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming (XP) and a pioneer of Test-Driven Development, pair programming, and the Agile Manifesto. A programmer with 52+ years of experience, he co-created JUnit with Erich Gamma, co-invented CRC cards and design patterns in software with Ward Cunningham, and spent seven years coaching at Facebook. Today he runs the 'Software Design: Tidy First?' Substack newsletter (123,500+ subscribers in 195 countries), hosts the Still Burning podcast, and explores augmented human-AI coding. In April 2026 he publicly announced a Parkinson's disease diagnosis, continuing his mission to help technologists feel safe in the world.
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.
Lia Haberman is a creator economy strategist, educator, and the author of ICYMI — a weekly newsletter read by 45,000+ marketers, brand social teams, and creators. Teaching social media and influencer marketing at UCLA Extension since 2018, she built her reputation as an independent, no-nonsense analyst who helps brands and creators navigate a landscape that reinvents itself every six months. With clients ranging from Google to Disney and a Threads following that dwarfs her Instagram audience, she practices what she preaches.
Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.
Luca Rossi is an Italian software engineer, entrepreneur, and writer based in Rome who turned a side project into one of the world's most-read engineering leadership newsletters. After co-founding and scaling travel startup Wanderio to 25M+ customers over eight years, he launched Refactoring in 2020 - a newsletter covering engineering management, software teams, and tech leadership. It now reaches 172,000+ subscribers, ranks in the top 10 Substack business newsletters, and generates approximately $300K/year in revenue, all operated solo. He also hosts the Refactoring Podcast, featuring guests like DHH, Kent Beck, and Camille Fournier, and in 2025 released Tolaria, a free open-source macOS knowledge base app built entirely with AI coding tools.
Mario Gabriele is the founder and writer of The Generalist, a long-form tech and venture newsletter with 163,000+ subscribers ranked among Substack's top business publications. Raised in England by an Italian father and American mother, he cut a nonlinear path through law, culinary school, fiction writing, and seed-stage VC before going full-time as a solo creator in 2020. His signature style - combining equity research depth with fiction-writer storytelling - earned him citations in the FT, WSJ, and Bloomberg and attracted a loyal paid following. In 2022, he launched Generalist Capital, a $12.25M solo GP fund, and by March 2026 he had joined Hummingbird Ventures as a full Partner.
Matt Swider is a consumer tech journalist, media entrepreneur, and founder of The Shortcut - the #1 consumer tech publication on Substack. With 25+ years in technology journalism, he went viral during the 2020-2021 PS5 shortage by tracking console restocks, growing his Twitter following from 8,000 to over 1 million in under two years and helping an estimated 400,000 people buy a console. He left TechRadar after nine years as US Editor-in-Chief to launch The Shortcut on November 8, 2021, which now boasts 155,000+ subscribers, a 40% open rate, and 1.5 million monthly website views.
Max Read is a Brooklyn-based journalist, media critic, and newsletter writer who runs Read Max, a Substack publication covering tech culture, internet phenomena, AI, and digital media with acerbic wit and analytical depth. Former Editor-in-Chief of Gawker and founder of New York Magazine's Select All vertical, Read is one of the sharpest observers of how platforms reshape human behavior - a thinker who treats the internet with the seriousness of a literary critic and the irreverence of someone who has watched it eat itself alive.
Michael Kao is a veteran macro investor, former hedge fund manager, and founder of Akanthos Capital Management, now running his family office. A UC Berkeley EE/CS and Wharton MBA graduate who traded commodities at Goldman Sachs and co-founded Canyon Capital Arbitrage Fund, he built his career on a proprietary framework called 'Alpha With Asymmetry.' Known online as @UrbanKaoboy, he publishes the Kaoboy Musings newsletter on Substack - covering finance, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and thrash metal - and co-hosts the KAOS THEORY podcast with Grant Williams.
Nicola Ballotta is an Italian engineering leader with 25+ years of internet industry experience, currently serving as Director of Cloud at Namecheap where he built EasyWP — one of the world's most affordable managed WordPress hosting platforms — from prototype to production. He is best known as the creator of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter that grew from zero to 30,000 subscribers in 18 months before being acquired by Refactoring in June 2024. The combined publication now reaches 120,000+ readers and serves a 900+ member private community of engineering leaders.
Noah Smith is an independent economist-turned-writer best known for Noahpinion, one of Substack's largest economics newsletters with over 414,000 subscribers. A former Bloomberg Opinion columnist and ex-finance professor at Stony Brook University, he writes about technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and domestic policy with a techno-optimist, center-left lens. He also co-hosts the 'Econ 102' podcast with Erik Torenberg and is working on an English-language macroeconomics book.
Packy McCormick is the founder of Not Boring, a weekly newsletter with 250,000+ subscribers that covers technology, business strategy, and startups through long-form essays. He also runs Not Boring Capital, a solo-GP venture fund with two funds totaling ~$38M invested across 79+ companies. A former investment banker and startup operator, he turned a writing homework assignment into one of the most-read independent tech publications, pioneering a 'media flywheel' model where newsletter content and venture investing reinforce each other.
Paweł Huryn is a Warsaw-based product management expert, creator of The Product Compass - a Substack newsletter with 133,000+ subscribers ranked #1 in product management worldwide by Favikon. A former software developer turned CPO turned full-time educator, he brings 15+ years of hands-on product experience to weekly deep-dives on AI product management, strategy, and discovery. His philosophy: build it first, test it, then teach it.
Peter Yang is a product leader turned creator economy educator, currently a Principal Product Lead at Roblox with a decade of experience shipping features at Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Credit Karma, and Reddit. He runs Behind the Craft, a Substack newsletter and podcast with 148,000+ subscribers focused on practical AI tutorials and interviews with top product and AI leaders. He invented Twitch Raids, launched Reddit Talk, and grew Facebook Live from zero to millions of viewers — and now teaches 100,000+ subscribers how to build products and careers in the AI era.
Rex Woodbury is the founder and managing partner of Daybreak Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, and the creator of Digital Native, a weekly newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers exploring the intersection of technology and culture. A Dartmouth and Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholar, former Goldman Sachs analyst, TPG and Index Ventures partner, Guinness World Record holder, LGBTQ+ advocate, and competitive runner, Woodbury is one of the most distinctive voices in venture capital — blending anthropological observation with market analysis to decode how Gen Z and emerging technology are reshaping commerce, communication, and culture.
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.
Simon Carless is a British-born gaming industry veteran who spent 16 years shaping trade media and the Game Developers Conference at UBM/Informa before going independent in 2020 to found GameDiscoverCo - a newsletter, data platform, and consultancy focused on how players find, buy, and enjoy video games. With 43,000+ subscribers on Substack and enterprise SaaS clients including 90+ publishers and studios, he's become the de facto Bloomberg Terminal of game discovery data for the global indie games ecosystem.
Simon Owens is a Washington, DC-based media industry journalist, newsletter writer, and podcast host who runs Simon Owens's Media Newsletter on Substack. Known for deep-dive reporting on how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content, he has interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs and built one of the most-followed independent media newsletters, with 38,000+ Substack followers and 61,000+ LinkedIn followers. His work covers the creator economy, subscription models, local news, and the evolving business of digital publishing.
Sophie Buonassisi is SVP of Marketing at GTMfund and GTMnow, where she leads a 58,000+ subscriber newsletter and media brand at the intersection of go-to-market strategy, venture capital, and B2B SaaS. A criminology graduate turned growth marketer, she spent 4.5 years as the first GTM hire at Spiralyze before standing out from 400+ applicants to join GTMfund. She transformed the GTM Newsletter into GTMnow - a full media brand that includes the reacquired Sales Hacker podcast (622+ episodes), a private Inner Circle community, and editorial content reaching 50,000+ founders, GTM leaders, and investors globally.