Jason Calacanis is a Brooklyn-born angel investor, serial entrepreneur, and podcaster who turned a $25,000 check into Uber into a roughly $100 million windfall. He hosts This Week in Startups, co-hosts the chart-topping All-In podcast, runs the LAUNCH accelerator and Founder University, and invests in roughly 100 startups a year. A former dot-com journalist who founded Silicon Alley Reporter and sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL, he wrote the bestselling playbook 'Angel' and is one of the most visible bridges between scrappy founders and the venture world.
Uber is a global technology platform that connects riders, drivers, eaters, couriers, and shippers through a single app. What began in 2009 as a way to summon a black car in San Francisco has grown into a multi-sided marketplace spanning ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery (Uber Eats), and freight logistics (Uber Freight). It operates in roughly 70 countries and 10,000+ cities, serving more than 200 million monthly active users and completing over 13 billion trips a year.
Linus Sebastian is the co-founder and Chief Vision Officer of Linus Media Group (LMG), the Canadian digital media company behind Linus Tech Tips - one of YouTube's most-watched technology channels with 16+ million subscribers and 9.2+ billion views. A college dropout who turned a side gig filming product videos for computer retailer NCIX into a media empire, Sebastian built LMG into a ~120-person company operating multiple YouTube channels. Known for his ADHD-fueled energy, hands-on gear reviews, and the occasional on-camera equipment drop, he stepped back from the CEO role in 2023 to focus on creative vision while his wife Yvonne Ho co-runs the business.
Zack Nelson is the American YouTuber behind JerryRigEverything, the most-viewed smartphone repair and teardown channel on YouTube with over 10 million subscribers. Known for his systematic durability tests — scratch, burn, bend — he turned a $1,000 Jeep repair he did himself for $80 into a multi-million-view media empire. Beyond the broken screens and scorched phones, he co-founded Not-a-Wheelchair with his wife Cambry, building affordable off-road and ultra-custom wheelchairs made in the USA, and used his YouTube earnings to fund a full-size community library in Busia County, Kenya.
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.
Kari Perez is Vice President of Gaming Communications at Microsoft, where she leads global PR and communications strategy for Xbox. She joined the Xbox team in March 2021 after a distinguished career spanning gaming, streaming, and entertainment — including VP-level roles at Netflix Latin America and corporate affairs at HBO Latin America. Multilingual and internationally experienced, Perez has become one of the most prominent communications voices in the gaming industry, issuing statements on major Xbox announcements ranging from Game Pass price changes to leadership speculation.
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.
Ross Wilkie is VP of Global Communications & Public Affairs at Google, based in San Francisco. A biologist-turned-communications-strategist, he spent over 15 years rising through GlaxoSmithKline before serving as Chief Communications Officer at Danaher Corporation. In February 2024, he joined Google to oversee global communications and public affairs for one of the world's most scrutinized technology companies.
Coco Mao is the CEO and co-founder of OpenArt AI, the creative platform that grew from a viral Hacker News post about AI image prompts to $70M+ ARR with just 20 people. A Carnegie Mellon computer scientist who spent seven years at Google building search products and the Tangi short-form video app, she left in 2022 to co-found OpenArt with CTO John Qiao. Under her leadership, OpenArt scaled 7x in 2025, reached 8 million monthly active users, raised a $30M Series A from Canaan Partners, and launched One-Click Story — a feature that lets anyone turn a single sentence into a complete video with persistent characters.
Larry Gadea is the founder and CEO of Envoy, the San Francisco-based workplace platform that turned the humble office sign-in book into a $1.4 billion unicorn. A Romanian refugee who was recruited by Google at 17, created Twitter's 'Murder' infrastructure tool as one of its first 50 employees, and spotted a market gap nobody else noticed: enterprise software had completely ignored the physical office. From smuggled out of communist Romania to building the software that runs 14,000+ workplaces in 70 countries, Gadea's story is one of relentless pattern recognition, resilience, and the stubborn conviction that the office deserves the same engineering love as everything else in tech.
Shawn Mullahy is the Chief Executive Officer of Zumper, North America's largest privately-held rental marketplace. Promoted to CEO in March 2026 after serving as Chief Revenue Officer and before that General Manager and SVP of Sales, Mullahy brings a rare combination of legal training, real estate brokerage experience, and tech-company operational chops. He leads a company that has raised $178M+ in funding and is pushing the rental experience toward a future where finding an apartment feels as seamless as booking a hotel.
Sergie Magdalin is the co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of Webflow, the visual web development platform that lets designers build production-ready websites without writing code. Alongside his brother Vlad Magdalin and Bryant Chou, Sergie — a former freelance graphic designer and UX designer — built Webflow from a rejected Y Combinator application into a $4B company with over 3.5 million users. His design sensibility shaped Webflow's core UX, including pioneering visual interaction tools and a responsive design system that democratized professional web publishing.
Elizabeth Douglas is the CEO of wikiHow, the world's leading how-to platform visited by more than 150 million people monthly across 230 countries. A Stanford-trained computer scientist and Stanford MBA, she joined wikiHow in 2009 as COO and rose to CEO, overseeing more than 1,500% growth in traffic. Under her leadership, wikiHow has become a trusted, judgment-free resource with 100,000+ guides in English and 300,000+ across 18+ languages, earning a reputation as one of the nicest places on the internet.
Joe Weil is the CEO of Unplugged, a privacy-first smartphone company that makes the UP Phone - an open-source Android device stripped of Google services, built with a hardware battery disconnect switch, on-device firewall, and a no-surveillance business model. Before leading Unplugged, Weil spent roughly a decade at Apple leading zero-to-one special projects for Apple Services, and before that built Psycho Films LLC, directing music videos for Kendrick Lamar, 21 Savage, A$AP Ferg, and Big Sean. He left Apple, by his account, after watching the company shift into political activism, soft censorship, and deep integration with China.
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Zoe Wang is the Operations Partner on the New Media team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the storied Silicon Valley venture firm that manages over $39 billion in assets. She came to a16z through the firm's acquihire of Turpentine, the fast-growing podcast network that became the backbone of a16z's media ambitions. Before Turpentine, Wang built a career spanning venture capital operations, capital markets, and investor relations at firms including 10X Capital and SAX Capital. Based in New York, she sits at the intersection of media, operations, and venture — the rare ops executive who understands both the spreadsheet and the microphone.
Sir Michael Moritz KBE is a Welsh-born venture capitalist and author who spent nearly 38 years at Sequoia Capital, becoming one of the most successful investors in technology history. A former Time magazine journalist who wrote the first history of Apple, he backed Google at a $100 million valuation, Yahoo with a 24-hour ultimatum, and PayPal before anyone knew what digital payments meant. Diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer in 2006, he kept investing for another 17 years. In 2025 he published 'Ausländer,' a memoir about his family's escape from Nazi Germany — and announced he was applying for German citizenship.
Fabrice Grinda is a French-born serial entrepreneur, prolific angel investor, and co-founder of FJ Labs - the venture fund Forbes named home to the #1 Angel Investor in the world. With 1,100+ startup investments, 300+ exits, and a ~39% realized IRR built over 25 years, Grinda has backed household names including Alibaba, Airbnb, Uber, Coupang, and Vinted - often before anyone else saw the potential. He built and sold Zingy for $80M after sleeping in his office on $2/day, scaled OLX into the world's largest free classifieds platform across 90+ countries, and in 2024 co-founded Midas, a tokenization platform that hit $1.4B TVL within a year. Off the clock, he walks to the South Pole, kite-surfs, heli-skis, and throws week-long birthday parties with themed nights for 100+ friends.
Biz Stone is the co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, the platform that redefined public discourse. Born Christopher Isaac Stone in Boston, he dropped out of college twice, designed book covers, and walked away from $2 million in unvested Google stock to help build what became one of the most influential communication platforms in history. Beyond Twitter, he co-founded Jelly Industries (acquired by Pinterest), The Obvious Corporation with Evan Williams, and in 2024 joined the board of Mastodon's U.S. nonprofit - a quiet statement about where social media should go next. His guiding philosophy: opportunity can be manufactured.
Marissa Mayer is a pioneering tech executive and entrepreneur who served as Google's first female engineer (employee #20) and later as Yahoo's CEO. After graduating from Stanford with degrees in symbolic systems and computer science, she spent 13 years at Google shaping products like Search, Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome. As Yahoo CEO from 2012-2017, she led a transformation effort before the company's sale to Verizon. She now runs Dazzle AI, a venture building next-generation AI personal assistants that raised $8M in late 2025. Known for her meticulous attention to detail, product vision, and ability to scale consumer technology, Mayer has been a prominent voice for women in tech while building products used by billions.
Nathan Blecharczyk is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Airbnb, the world's largest hospitality platform. A self-taught programmer who built a million-dollar software business in high school, Blecharczyk coded Airbnb's original website and led its engineering, data science, and payments teams. Known for the infamous cereal box fundraising stunt that kept Airbnb alive in 2008, he now oversees the company's global strategy and chairs Airbnb China. With a net worth of $9.4 billion and a commitment to The Giving Pledge, he's transformed from a Boston kid tinkering with his father's old machines into one of tech's most influential builders.
Brian Acton is the co-founder of WhatsApp, which sold to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014, and the founder of Signal Foundation, where he champions privacy-focused communication. After walking away from $850 million in unvested Facebook stock over ethical disagreements about user privacy, he invested $50 million to build Signal, an encrypted messaging platform designed to put users first. A Stanford computer science graduate who was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton has given over $1 billion to charitable causes with his wife Tegan, focusing on low-income families, reproductive rights, and internet privacy.
Craig Cannon is Head of Developer Relations and Marketing at Supabase, a venture-backed open-source database platform. Previously, he spent years at Y Combinator as Director of Marketing and Content, where he hosted the YC podcast featuring hundreds of founder interviews. Before tech, he was Graphics Editor at The Onion, co-founded Comedy Hack Day (bringing comedians and developers together), and co-authored The Container Guide (featured in WSJ and The New Yorker). He's also a record-breaking endurance cyclist who rode 95,623 feet of elevation in 48 hours, a music producer, and co-host of the Salt of the Earth podcast about small business owners.
Chris Wheeler is Senior Vice President of Global Ethics & Integrity at Salesforce, where he oversees the company's ethics and compliance programs at a global scale. A trained attorney with roots in the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and private practice at Bingham McCutchen LLP, Wheeler brings a prosecutorial sharpness to corporate ethics work. At Salesforce, he leads third-party anti-corruption programs, partners ethics compliance, and sustainability reporting mandates - helping keep one of the world's most-recognized 'ethical companies' actually earning that title.
Frank 'Reggie' Brown IV is the original co-founder of Snapchat who conceived the idea of disappearing photo messages in 2011 while a junior at Stanford University. He created the concept, named the app 'Picaboo,' designed the ghost logo, and served as CMO - before being locked out of accounts by Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy months after founding. His 2013 lawsuit settled for $157.5 million, exceeding the Winklevoss-Facebook settlement. He has since lived almost entirely out of public view.
Miriam Rivera is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Managing Director of Ulu Ventures, one of the largest Latina-led venture capital firms in the United States with ~$400M AUM. A first-generation college student born to Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers, she earned four degrees from Stanford, joined Google as its second attorney and helped scale the company from $85M to $10B in revenue, then co-founded Ulu Ventures in 2008 with husband Clint Korver. Ulu's data-driven, bias-reducing investment model has backed 10 unicorns including Palantir and Guild Education, with a portfolio where 80% of founders are women, immigrants, or from minority groups.
Auren Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur, data-industry pioneer, and hyper-connected Silicon Valley networker who turned a $60 million exit (LiveRamp to Acxiom, 2014) into a second act as a venture capitalist at Flex Capital, founder of location-data company SafeGraph, and co-founder of the invitation-only Dialog society with Peter Thiel. He publishes the Summation newsletter and podcast - reaching 41,000+ Substack subscribers - exploring non-obvious ideas at the intersection of data, technology, and business.
Ashlee Vance is a South Africa-born, Texas-raised journalist, author, and documentary producer who spent 14 years at Bloomberg Businessweek before launching Core Memory in January 2025 - an independent sci-tech media company. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books including the definitive pre-Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, producer of HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die, and creator of Bloomberg's most-watched video series Hello World. In 2025 he is writing a forthcoming book on OpenAI and Sam Altman with exclusive access, and already sold the film rights.
Melanie Perkins is the co-founder and CEO of Canva, the Australian graphic design platform that grew from a school yearbook tool built in her mother's living room to a US$42 billion company used by 220 million people across 190 countries. She survived 100+ investor rejections, learned kite-surfing purely to network with Silicon Valley VCs, and wore a $30 engagement ring while becoming one of the wealthiest women in tech - then pledged to give most of it away.