Augusto 'Aghi' Marietti is the CEO and co-founder of Kong Inc., the company behind the world's most widely deployed API gateway. Born in Rome in 1988, he co-founded Mashape at age 19 in a Milan garage, arrived in San Francisco with $600 and a 90-day visa, crashed on Travis Kalanick's couch, and built what became Kong - a $2 billion enterprise processing over 20 trillion API requests monthly. Known as the 'API Godfather,' Marietti has raised $424 million in total funding, surpassed $146M in annual recurring revenue with 800+ employees, and is now positioning Kong as the essential AI connectivity layer for the enterprise.
Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram in 2010 with Mike Krieger, transforming mobile photography into a global phenomenon with over 1 billion users before selling to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. After leaving Instagram in 2018, he launched Artifact, an AI-powered news app, later acquired by Yahoo in 2024. A Stanford-educated engineer with a passion for photography and design, Systrom serves on the boards of Walmart and Snowflake while continuing to invest in and advise tech startups from San Francisco.
Patrick Collison is the Irish-born CEO and co-founder of Stripe, the payments infrastructure company valued at over $90 billion. At 21, he and his brother John built Stripe from a prototype hacked together on holiday into one of the most influential fintech companies in the world. Beyond Stripe, Patrick co-founded the Arc Institute for biomedical research, launched Fast Grants that distributed over $200 million for COVID research, and championed Progress Studies with Tyler Cowen. A former teenage programming prodigy who won Ireland's Young Scientist Exhibition at 16, he dropped out of MIT to pursue entrepreneurship and became one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires at 28.
Drew Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, the cloud storage and productivity company he built from a bus-ride frustration in 2006 into a NASDAQ-listed business with over 700 million registered users and ~$2.5B in annual revenue. A MIT computer science graduate who started coding at age 5, Houston famously turned down a ~$250M acquisition offer from Steve Jobs in 2009 and has spent nearly two decades transforming Dropbox from a file-sync tool into an AI-powered universal workspace. In 2024, he and his wife Erin signed The Giving Pledge, committing the majority of their ~$2.4B fortune to education and entrepreneurship causes.
Evan Spiegel is the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, Spectacles, and Bitmoji. He built one of the few social platforms to meaningfully challenge Facebook by betting on ephemeral messaging, augmented reality, and the camera as the primary interface of human communication. At 26, he became the youngest CEO of a newly public major U.S. tech company. He turned down $3 billion from Mark Zuckerberg at 23. He holds dual American and French citizenship, is married to supermodel Miranda Kerr, and completed his Stanford degree six years after dropping out.
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that powers roughly 20% of all web traffic worldwide. A recovering lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, Prince built Cloudflare from a Harvard Business School business plan competition entry into a publicly traded company with a market cap in the tens of billions. Equally at home discussing BGP routing and content moderation philosophy, he is widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures shaping how the internet actually works - for better or for worse, depending on who you ask.