Drew Baglino spent 18 years at Tesla building the guts of the electric age - the Model S powertrain, the Powerwall and Megapack, the 4680 battery cell and a clean-sheet 50 GWh factory in Texas. In 2024 he walked away as Senior Vice President of Powertrain and Energy and aimed his next act at the one piece of grid hardware almost nobody had touched in a century: the transformer. His startup, Heron Power, builds software-controlled solid-state transformers and in February 2026 raised a $140 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build a 40 GW U.S. factory. He also quietly founded a residential heat-pump company, Sadi Thermal Machines.
Nikhil Reddy is the co-founder and CEO of Kaizen, a New York based civic technology company building modern, people-first software for America's public services. After stints engineering at Tesla, Anduril, and Archive Resale and a degree from UC Berkeley, he set out to replace the clunky legacy systems behind recreation sign-ups, permits, transit fares, DMVs, and licensing. Kaizen's platform now reaches more than 30 million residents across 17 states and 50-plus agencies, and has raised over $35 million from NEA, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice, and others. Outside the company he runs a YouTube channel with 36,000+ subscribers about life, technology, and ideas.
Chris Walti is co-founder and CEO of Mytra, the Brisbane, CA-based robotics company rebuilding industrial material flow from the software up. Before founding Mytra in 2022, he spent 7.5 years at Tesla leading Model 3 material flow engineering, building the company's internal mobile robotics team, and becoming the first lead of what would become the Optimus humanoid robot program. Mytra has since raised $198M in total funding including a $120M Series C in January 2026, and its 3D robotic storage systems are deployed at Albertsons distribution centers, delivering up to 88% labor hour savings versus conventional solutions.
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.
Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday, a Mountain View-based robotics company building Memo - a home robot trained on 10 million episodes of real household routines. A Stanford PhD dropout and UC Berkeley EECS alum, Zhao invented ALOHA and ACT during his doctoral research, open-source frameworks that became foundational to modern robot manipulation. Sunday reached unicorn status in March 2026 with a $165M Series B led by Coatue, putting the company at a $1.15B valuation with a mission to put a helpful robot in every home.
Laurie Yoler is a General Partner at Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep-tech venture capital firm backing companies working on fundamental technologies - robotics, AI, quantum computing, biotech, and beyond. A founding board member of Tesla and early backer of Zoox (acquired by Amazon for $1.3B), she has spent three decades at the intersection of engineering, strategy, and capital allocation. Before venture, she helped launch Visa's debit card division, built Sun Microsystems' server platform dominance, and ran Qualcomm Labs as President. She holds a summa cum laude degree from Washington State University and audits courses at Stanford across engineering, law, and neuroscience.
Milo Werner is a General Partner at DCVC leading the firm's climate investments, bringing a rare combination of deep operational experience - nearly a decade at Tesla launching the Model S, Model X, and dual-motor powertrain - and a track record of venture investing at Khosla Ventures, Ajax Strategies, and MIT's The Engine. She founded The NextGen Industry Group, a nonprofit helping ~140 companies navigate the treacherous 'missing middle' between pilot production and commercial scale. At DCVC, she focuses on breakthrough deep tech ventures that decarbonize high-emitting industries and transform value chains.
Ian Glow is the co-founder and CEO of Zeromatter, a Mountain View-based simulation platform that lets robotics, aerospace, and autonomy teams build, test, and train anything in virtual environments. He previously helped pioneer Tesla's Autopilot simulation infrastructure - working as Manager of Autopilot Simulation - before striking out to democratize simulation tooling for the broader industry. Zeromatter has raised $45M and assembled a 75+ person team of engineers from Tesla, Cruise, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Activision, and id Software.
Christopher Van Dyke is the Co-Founder and CEO of Overview AI, a San Francisco-based industrial machine vision company using deep learning to catch manufacturing defects before they cost factories millions. A Stanford-educated mechanical engineer who spent eight-plus years at Tesla launching the Supercharger network and scaling the Model 3 battery program, Van Dyke founded Overview in 2018 with a simple premise: manual inspection costs manufacturers an estimated $300 billion a year, and AI can fix that. Overview's smart cameras - running NVIDIA GPUs at the edge - now serve over 100 manufacturers across 15 countries, including Toyota, Honda, and Tyson Foods, typically delivering ROI within three to six months.
Brijesh Tripathi is the CEO and Co-Founder of FlexAI, a Paris-based AI infrastructure startup that raised $30M in seed funding in April 2024. A veteran of NVIDIA, Apple, Tesla, and Intel, he deployed Aurora (one of the world's largest supercomputers) and managed 50,000+ GPUs at Intel before co-founding FlexAI to democratize access to AI compute through a Workload-as-a-Service platform that routes AI workloads across any hardware - cloud or on-prem - without vendor lock-in.
Turner Caldwell is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, a San Francisco-based startup rewriting the rulebook on how critical minerals are found, dug up, and refined. After nearly a decade ascending Tesla's battery supply chain from factory design to heading the metals and minerals team, Caldwell left to build Mariana in 2024. The company now operates Copper One in southeastern Utah - the world's first mine running autonomous haul trucks, robotic drills, and AI-driven refining under a single proprietary operating system called MarianaOS. Backed by a16z, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and Khosla Ventures with $85M in Series A funding, Mariana targets 10 mineral projects in 10 years, compressing a timeline that traditionally stretches 15+ years for a single mine.
Graham Doorley is the Founder and CEO of Terraline, a Fremont-based startup building the first clean-sheet, battery-electric Class 8 long-haul truck with 500+ miles of range. A lifelong car enthusiast with a Physics-Materials Science degree from Carnegie Mellon and a Mechatronics Masters from Stanford, he spent eight years as a senior engineer at Google X and Waymo - where he led the early self-driving truck project that became Waymo Via - before designing Tesla Model S suspension systems. In 2021, he channeled that accumulated expertise into Terraline (originally Solo AVT), assembling a team of Waymo, Tesla, BMW, Ford, Faraday Futures, and Rivian alumni to tackle freight's massive emissions problem with a truck agnostic to whether the driver is human or autonomous.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in recorded history and the founder or co-founder of nine major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, and Neuralink. Born in Pretoria, South Africa, he taught himself to code at 10, sold his first game at 12, and dropped out of a Stanford PhD after two days to chase the internet gold rush. His companies collectively own 65% of all operational Earth satellites, produce the world's best-selling electric vehicles, and are actively building brain-computer interfaces and rockets to colonize Mars. As of May 2026, his net worth stands at approximately $809 billion.
Tim Draper is a third-generation venture capitalist and founder of Draper Associates, the firm behind early bets on Hotmail, Baidu, Skype, Tesla, Coinbase, and Robinhood. He pioneered viral marketing with Hotmail's email footer tagline, bought 30,000 bitcoins at a U.S. Marshals auction in 2014 for $19 million, and has never sold. The founder of Draper University of Heroes in San Mateo, he frames entrepreneurship as a heroic calling - handing students superhero capes on day one. Twice tried to split California into multiple states. Consistently predicts Bitcoin will hit $250,000. Sings his own original songs at startup conferences. Backed 60+ unicorns from seed stage across four decades.
Andrej Karpathy is a Slovak-Canadian-American AI researcher and educator who co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's Autopilot AI as Director of AI from 2017-2022, and now runs Eureka Labs, an AI-native education startup. He coined 'vibe coding' (Collins Dictionary 2025 Word of the Year), created the legendary Stanford CS 231n course, and builds open-source tools like nanoGPT that have become essential references for the global ML community. His YouTube 'Zero to Hero' series and multi-hour deep dives have demystified deep learning for millions.
The Tesla Model 3 is a battery electric mid-size sedan that became the world's best-selling plug-in electric car for three consecutive years (2018-2020) and the first EV to surpass 1 million global sales. Designed by Franz von Holzhausen and produced since 2017, it combines minimalist design, over-the-air software updates, and Autopilot capabilities at a more accessible price point than Tesla's earlier vehicles.
The Tesla Model S is a battery-electric full-size luxury sedan produced by Tesla, Inc. from 2012 to 2026. Widely credited with proving electric vehicles could outperform combustion-engine rivals, it introduced features like over-the-air updates, a minimalist touchscreen dashboard, and Autopilot.
The Tesla Model X is a battery electric mid-size luxury crossover SUV produced by Tesla, Inc. from 2015 to 2026. Known for its distinctive falcon wing doors, panoramic windshield, and blistering acceleration, it was the world's first all-electric luxury SUV and remains one of the quickest production SUVs ever built.
The Tesla Model Y is a battery electric compact crossover SUV that became the best-selling vehicle of any kind worldwide in 2023, marking the first time an electric vehicle claimed that title. With over 2.16 million units sold globally, it represents the mainstream breakthrough of EVs into mass-market adoption.
Steve Jurvetson is a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures, best known for coining the term 'viral marketing,' backing Hotmail, SpaceX, and Tesla from their earliest days, and bringing a scientist's obsession to everything from model rockets to nanotechnology. After two decades at Draper Fisher Jurvetson managing over $6 billion, he launched Future Ventures in 2018 with a patient, 15-year fund structure focused on deep tech, AI, space, and synthetic biology. A triple Stanford alumnus who finished his EE degree in 2.5 years at the top of his class, Jurvetson is as likely to be found photographing rocket launches on his Flickr account as sitting on SpaceX's board.