Jared Friedman is Managing Director of Software at Y Combinator, one of the world's most influential startup accelerators. A Harvard dropout, he co-founded Scribd - one of YC's earliest bets - and grew it to 80M+ users as CTO before joining YC as a partner in 2015. He has read over 12,000 startup applications, advised 20+ YC unicorns, and championed hard tech, biotech, and AI at YC. In 2024 he became one of the loudest voices on vertical AI agents being '10X bigger than SaaS.' He spends roughly 4% of his waking hours in Waymo robotaxis, which he uses as a mobile office.
Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955, in Pune, India) is one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - a self-made billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, then went on to back transformative companies including OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, Stripe, Affirm, and Impossible Foods through his firm Khosla Ventures, which manages approximately $15 billion in capital. Known for his contrarian, 'black swan' investment philosophy, uncompromising directness, and audacious predictions - including that AI will replace 80% of all jobs by 2030 and make core services like healthcare and education free by 2040 - Khosla frames his life's work not as wealth creation but as deploying technology to solve civilization-scale problems. A Giving Pledge signatory with a net worth of $13.4 billion (Forbes, January 2026), he is also a philanthropist whose wife Neeru's CK-12 Foundation has reached over 130 million learners globally, and who prefers the title 'venture assistant' to 'venture capitalist.'
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.