Kevin Rose is a serial tech entrepreneur, angel investor, and wellness advocate who founded Digg in 2004 with $1,200 and turned it into a 38-million-user social news juggernaut. A former Google Ventures partner with early bets on Twitter, Square, Uber, and Slack, he has since pivoted toward deep wellness practices - Zen meditation, intermittent fasting, cold exposure - while building the ZERO and OAK apps. In 2025, he re-acquired Digg alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, relaunching it in January 2026 as an AI-powered Reddit alternative. He publishes a widely-read newsletter at kevinrose.com and hosts The Kevin Rose Show podcast.
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.
Lior Abutbul is an AI practitioner and newsletter writer focused on the frontier of agentic AI systems. Through the Agentic AI Weekly newsletter, Lior breaks down how autonomous AI agents work, where they're headed, and how builders and operators can put them to use today.
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.
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.
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.
April Dunford is the world's leading authority on B2B product positioning. A former VP of Marketing at seven venture-backed tech startups (collectively acquired for $2B+), she turned a career of accidental positioning wins into a methodology used by 300+ companies including Google, IBM, and Epic Games. Her book 'Obviously Awesome' (2019, updated 2026) has sold 100,000+ copies and redefined how tech companies think about market context. She consults, speaks, angel invests, and runs a newsletter and podcast under the 'Positioning with April Dunford' brand.
Erik Torenberg is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he joined in April 2025 after a16z acquired his media network Turpentine. A serial founder and investor, he was a first employee at Product Hunt, co-founded Village Global (a $100M VC fund backed by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg), founded On Deck (a fellowship network for founders), and built Turpentine into a leading tech media network before its acquisition. Known for his wide-ranging intellectual curiosity spanning technology, culture, politics, and philosophy, he now leads a16z's media and ecosystem efforts including the New Media Fellowship and the live news venture MTS.
Hunter Walk is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a self-funded seed-stage venture capital firm he built with Satya Patel after careers at Linden Lab (Second Life), Google, and YouTube. He also runs Screendoor LP, backing underrepresented emerging venture managers. His 'Bottom Up Economy' thesis targets scrappy teams of 5-50 taking on category incumbents - and his portfolio hits like Chime, Plaid, and Gusto prove the thesis works. A prolific blogger, former TV assistant, and forever a product person at heart.
Marc Andreessen co-invented the Mosaic browser as a $6.85/hour student programmer, then went on to co-found Netscape, help birth the modern internet, and eventually build Andreessen Horowitz into a $42B+ venture capital juggernaut. The man who wrote 'software is eating the world' in 2011 spent the next decade proving himself right by backing Twitter, Facebook, Coinbase, and GitHub. In 2023 he published the Techno-Optimist Manifesto and in 2024 pivoted to advising the Trump administration's DOGE initiative - cementing his status as Silicon Valley's most opinionated, polarizing, and consequential voice.
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a strategic communications firm that bets on founder-led narratives over legacy PR playbooks. A former VP of Communications at Substack and EVP/CCO at Activision Blizzard, she now sits on Shopify's board of directors and manages a $40 million VC fund. Known for her newsletter 'Flack' (also called 'Res Ipsa') on Substack, she is one of the most incisive voices arguing that the future of tech PR is direct-to-audience, not media-mediated. Her clients have included Anduril, Cognition AI, Coinbase, and Ramp.
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, NYU Stern professor, five-time New York Times bestselling author, and one of the most outspoken voices in business and tech. Known for his unfiltered analysis of Big Tech, wealth inequality, and generational economics, he built and sold L2 Inc to Gartner for $155 million, co-hosts the Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, writes the Webby Award-winning No Mercy / No Malice newsletter, and reaches millions through his Prof G Pod. His books - from The Four to The Algebra of Wealth - have made him a trusted, provocative guide to navigating capitalism in the 21st century.
Trung Phan is a Canadian writer, newsletter author, and co-founder who built one of the internet's most entertaining business media brands. His Saturday newsletter SatPost mixes deep-dive tech and business analysis with viral memes, earning him 725k+ Twitter followers and tens of thousands of Substack subscribers. A former equity analyst, Kensho Technologies researcher, and The Hustle writer, Phan is descended from Vietnam's most famous anti-colonial revolutionary, Phan Boi Chau - a lineage that sits somewhere between irony and destiny for a man who now runs his own media empire from a laptop.
Wes Kao is an executive coach, co-founder of Maven (the cohort-based learning platform backed by a16z and First Round), and co-creator of the altMBA with Seth Godin. She pioneered the cohort-based course category, scaled altMBA to 550 cities in 45 countries, and now helps senior tech operators at companies like Google, Amazon, and Shopify sharpen their executive communication and influence. Her biweekly newsletter reaches 300,000+ readers across platforms.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most consequential figures in the artificial intelligence era. A Stanford dropout who built his first startup at 19, Altman ran Y Combinator for five years before going all-in on OpenAI's mission to build safe superintelligence. He survived a dramatic 5-day ouster from his own company in 2023, returned to thunderous employee support, and has since steered OpenAI to a $300 billion valuation. He holds no equity in OpenAI, yet built a $3+ billion personal fortune through early bets on Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, and a cluster of deep-tech moonshots.
Vik Paruchuri is the founder and CEO of Datalab, an AI startup building small, efficient foundation models for document intelligence. A self-taught ML engineer who majored in American History, he previously founded Dataquest - an online learning platform that taught data skills to over 1 million students. His open-source projects (Marker, Surya, Chandra OCR) have earned thousands of GitHub stars and benchmark-topping accuracy scores. He publishes 'The Vik Letter' newsletter covering semiconductors and tech.