ted-talk
(10)
Joon Silverstein
Joon Silverstein is the Chief Marketing Officer of Coach, the New York leather goods house inside Tapestry Inc., and the founder of Coachtopia, the circular sub-brand she launched in 2023 to build luxury products out of what the industry usually throws away. She trained first as a cultural anthropologist - a BA from Columbia, fieldwork as a Fulbright Fellow - then added an MBA from Harvard Business School and a stint at The Boston Consulting Group before leading change at Louis Vuitton and Victoria's Secret. She joined Coach in 2014 as SVP of Global Customer Experience and worked her way through digital, ecommerce, creative, sustainability and North America marketing before being elevated to CMO in January 2025. Her signature move is treating consumers as collaborators rather than targets: Coach's spring 2026 'Explore Your Story' campaign was co-created with Gen Z communities from the US to China, and the brand posted 25% revenue growth in fiscal Q2 2026 on the back of its strongest new-customer acquisition on record. She gave a TED Talk at TEDNext 2024 arguing that waste is a human invention, not a law of nature.
Allison Schrager
Allison Schrager is an economist who turned the study of risk into a full-contact reporting beat - hanging out with brothel madams, big-wave surfers, paparazzi and horse breeders to figure out how the best risk-takers actually decide. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Bloomberg Opinion columnist and City Journal contributing editor, she holds a PhD in economics from Columbia and once helped Nobel laureate Robert Merton design retirement products. Her 2019 book 'An Economist Walks into a Brothel' argued that financial theory belongs everywhere people gamble with their futures; her follow-up, 'Worth the Risk,' is due from Yale University Press in September 2026.
Mel Robbins
Mel Robbins is a bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and one of the most-booked motivational speakers in the world. The creator of the 5 Second Rule and The Let Them Theory, she turned a near-bankruptcy crisis at 41 into a media empire with 40 million followers, a top-3 global podcast, and books translated into 65 languages. As CEO of 143 Studios, she produces content for corporate partners including Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase, and LinkedIn.
Hamish McKenzie
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
Jason Pontin
Jason Pontin is a General Partner at DCVC (Data Collective Venture Capital) in Palo Alto, where he leads communications and originates investments in early-stage computational biology and chemistry startups. A former journalist who spent 13 years transforming MIT Technology Review into a digital-first powerhouse and three years as Senior Partner at Flagship Pioneering, Pontin brings rare storytelling and scientific fluency to deep tech investing. He co-founded Totus Medicines, a chemical biology company targeting brain cancer, and sits on boards of companies working on DNA synthesis, AI-driven drug discovery, water purification, and lab automation.
Don Vaughn
Don Vaughn, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampa Health, a Palo Alto-based neurotechnology company building FDA-cleared portable TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) devices that compress 36 days of depression treatment into a single day. A Stanford-educated physicist turned UCLA neuroscientist, Vaughn has built a career at the intersection of brain science, machine learning, and accessibility - detoured, notably, through a DJ career that landed him a #28 iTunes Dance chart hit featuring Nick Lachey. His TEDx talk on neurohacking has surpassed one million views. Ampa raised an oversubscribed $8.5M pre-A round in October 2025, achieved FDA clearance for its Ampa One device in February 2025, and is targeting 5,000 patient remissions by end of 2026 - with a long-term audacious goal of a billion remissions in ten years.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD is a French-Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author based in London. After leaving a marketing career at Google, she founded Ness Labs - a bootstrapped newsletter and community focused on science-backed mindful productivity - while simultaneously earning her MSc and PhD in Applied Neuroscience at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) proposes replacing linear goal-setting with a circular, experimental approach to growth. As a UKRI-funded postdoctoral research fellow at King's College London, she studies the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity and has proposed the 'Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD'. Ness Labs has grown to 120,000+ newsletter subscribers and a paid community of 2,000+ members.
Ed Yong
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning British-American science journalist best known for his eight years at The Atlantic, where he wrote over 750 stories including landmark COVID-19 coverage that earned him journalism's highest honor in 2021. Author of two acclaimed bestsellers - 'I Contain Multitudes' (2016) and 'An Immense World' (2022) - he translates complex biology and animal sensory science into vivid, empathetic prose that has won him the George Polk Award, Carnegie Medal, Royal Society Science Book Prize, and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. Now an independent journalist, he publishes the newsletter 'The Ed's Up' and remains one of the most distinctive voices in science communication.
Isaac Saul
Isaac Saul is the founder and editor of Tangle, an independent nonpartisan politics newsletter with 500,000+ subscribers in 60+ countries. A former newspaper editor who contributed to CNN, TIME, HuffPost, and Vox, Saul launched Tangle in 2019 to fight news polarization by presenting the best arguments from left, right, and center on the day's biggest political debates. He's a Shorty Award winner, TED speaker, and one of the most trusted voices in independent political media.
Laura Nolan
Laura Nolan is a Principal Engineer at Stanza Systems, a veteran Site Reliability Engineer, and one of tech's most credible voices on autonomous weapons ethics. After five years at Google - where she contributed to the seminal O'Reilly SRE book and resigned over Project Maven - and seven years at Slack as Senior Staff Engineer, she brings deep technical authority to both the reliability engineering world and the global debate over killer robots. Based in rural Ireland, she speaks at SREcon, QCon, and TED stages alike, writes the Responsible Computing newsletter on Substack, and holds seats on the USENIX Board and the SREcon Steering Committee.