Anthony Noto and the education of an operator
From Army football to the NFL, Twitter and SoFi, Anthony Noto kept trading expertise for unfamiliar responsibility. His latest assignment is to make a financial institution useful enough to earn a place in everyday life.
Parag Agrawal and the Reader Who Never Clicks
He spent eleven years helping Twitter decide what people should see. At Parallel Web Systems, Parag Agrawal is building for a different reader: the AI agent, and the people whose work supplies its answers.
Mitko Simeonov and the work around the breakthrough
A teenage math competitor took an older student’s advice and went to the library. Years later, Pioneer co-founder Mitko Simeonov is still working on the steps between a promising idea and the resources to pursue it.
Leslie Berland
From American Express's first tweets to Verizon's glowing V, Leslie Berland has built a career by making giant systems feel human - and by treating attention as something a brand must earn.
Sara Beykpour
Sara Beykpour is the co-founder and CEO of Particle, an AI-powered news app that summarizes the day's stories and shows readers how coverage differs across the political spectrum. She spent more than a decade at Twitter shaping products like Vine, Periscope, and Twitter Blue before leaving in 2022 to build Particle with former Twitter engineer Marcel Molina. The company launched publicly in November 2024 and has raised roughly $15.3 million, including a $10.9M Series A led by Lightspeed.
Sarah Personette
Sarah Personette is the CEO of Puck, the journalist-owned media company often described as 'Vanity Fair for the Substack era.' She took the top job in January 2024 after a career spent on the revenue side of media's biggest platforms - head of ad sales and Chief Customer Officer at Twitter through its 2022 sale, VP of global business marketing at Facebook, COO of Refinery29, and U.S. president of Universal McCann. At Puck she is betting that journalists are the original influencers, fusing the financial incentives of the creator economy with old-school reporting rigor, and pushing the company toward profitability while expanding into fashion, sports, and live events.
Ellen DaSilva
Ellen DaSilva is the founder and CEO of Summer Health, a New York-based pediatric telehealth company that lets parents text a pediatrician and get an answer in under 15 minutes, 24/7. A mother of three, she built the company after living the gap herself: long waits, short visits, and a pile of unanswered questions. Before founding Summer Health in 2022, she was the eighth employee at Hims & Hers, led business operations at Twitter as revenue scaled from $100M to $2B, and worked on more than $10B of IPOs at Barclays. She is an HBS MBA, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of the startup business-development book 'Pitching & Closing.'
Will Stancil
Will Stancil is a civil rights attorney and research fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School's Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, known for his prolific and combative presence on social media - dubbed by Slate as 'the most harassed man in the history of Twitter.' A specialist in housing policy, school segregation, and metropolitan governance, Stancil gained national attention in 2023 defending Biden-era economic narratives against 'vibecession' framing, ran for Minnesota state legislature in 2024, and emerged in 2026 as a visible organizer documenting ICE operations in Minneapolis. His mix of rigorous policy research and relentless online engagement has made him one of the most recognizable progressive voices in American digital politics.
Lara Cohen
Lara Cohen is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Media, Creators & AI at Cloudflare, where she leads efforts to help publishers and creators control, protect, and monetize their content in the age of AI crawlers. A veteran of Twitter (two stints spanning nearly a decade), she orchestrated some of the platform's most iconic cultural moments - including Ellen DeGeneres' record-shattering 2014 Oscars selfie - before serving as SVP at Linktree, championing fair creator compensation at scale. Now at Cloudflare, she sits at the intersection of internet infrastructure and the creator economy, building the policy and partnership frameworks that will define how human-created content interacts with AI systems.
Jay Sullivan
Jay Sullivan is the CEO of Fandom, the world's largest fan platform with 350 million monthly visitors spanning wikis, gaming, movies, TV, and pop culture. A Yale-trained applied mathematician turned product visionary, Sullivan built his career shepherding the open web at Mozilla—where he served as SVP of Product, COO, and Interim CEO—before stints driving product at Groupon, Facebook's Reality Labs AI team, and Twitter's consumer and revenue products. Co-inventor of three US patents and co-founder of PhoneSpots (acquired 2007), he has spent two decades building platforms at mass scale. Since joining Fandom in February 2026, he is steering the company from a Google-traffic-dependent reference destination toward a real-time, AI-powered fan engagement platform.
Jeyappragash Jj
Jeyappragash 'JJ' Jeyakeerthi is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the company that made Istio enterprise-ready and brought FIPS-verified service mesh to regulated industries including the US federal government. An IIT Madras graduate who once ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure, JJ co-founded Tetrate in 2018 with Varun Talwar to secure the cloud-native stack from edge to datacenter - building one of the most technically credible teams in the service mesh ecosystem, trusted by the US Air Force and some of the world's largest enterprises.
Larry Gadea
Larry Gadea is the founder and CEO of Envoy, the San Francisco-based workplace platform that turned the humble office sign-in book into a $1.4 billion unicorn. A Romanian refugee who was recruited by Google at 17, created Twitter's 'Murder' infrastructure tool as one of its first 50 employees, and spotted a market gap nobody else noticed: enterprise software had completely ignored the physical office. From smuggled out of communist Romania to building the software that runs 14,000+ workplaces in 70 countries, Gadea's story is one of relentless pattern recognition, resilience, and the stubborn conviction that the office deserves the same engineering love as everything else in tech.
Elad Gil
Elad Gil is a Silicon Valley polymath - biologist-turned-Googler-turned-Twitter VP-turned-solo venture capitalist - who has backed 40+ unicorns including Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Pinterest, and OpenAI. Managing $3+ billion as one of the largest solo GPs in venture history, he also co-founded Color Genomics, wrote the 'High Growth Handbook' (published by Stripe Press), and co-hosts the No Priors AI podcast with Sarah Guo. His blog (Elad Blog) reaches tens of thousands of readers on startups, AI, and longevity.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.
Kayvon Beykpour
Kayvon Beykpour is the co-founder and CEO of Macroscope, an AI-powered code intelligence platform that raised $40M in funding. Before Macroscope, he co-founded Periscope - the live video streaming app acquired by Twitter in 2015 for a reported $100 million - and spent seven years at Twitter rising to Head of Consumer Product. A Stanford Computer Science graduate of Iranian heritage who grew up in Northern California, Beykpour has a pattern of building tools that make invisible things visible: first the world's live moments, now the inner workings of engineering teams.
Jeff Seibert
Jeff Seibert is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor best known as co-founder and CEO of Digits, the world's first AI-native accounting platform, and previously co-founder and CEO of Crashlytics — the mobile crash reporting platform acquired by Twitter for over $100 million just 14 months after founding. A Stanford computer science graduate who taught himself to code at 12, Seibert also served as Twitter's Head of Consumer Product, appeared in the Emmy-winning Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, and has made 100+ angel investments. He is based in San Francisco, California.
Pankaj Gupta
Pankaj Gupta is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned tech executive who built Twitter's early recommendation engine (Who-to-Follow, MagicRecs), led Google Pay's engineering across India and globally, scaled Coinbase's India operations from zero, and co-founded Yupp — a crypto-incentivized AI model evaluation platform that raised $33M from a16z before shutting down in March 2026. A Stanford PhD and IIT Delhi alumnus, he has founded four startups, three of which were acquired.
Josh McFarland
Josh McFarland is the Executive Chairman of Boom Supersonic, the Colorado-based company racing to bring commercial supersonic flight back to the skies. The son of a Wyoming coal miner who grew up building rockets and flying Piper Cubs with his dad, McFarland parlayed a Stanford economics degree into a career arc that touched Google's earliest advertising infrastructure, the $500M-plus sale of his AI marketing startup TellApart to Twitter, a VP role running Twitter's revenue products, and a partnership seat at Greylock Partners - before landing back in the world he loved as a boy: aviation. As Executive Chairman, he leads fundraising and go-to-market strategy for Boom, whose XB-1 demonstrator broke the sound barrier in 2025 and whose Overture airliner promises Mach 1.7 travel on sustainable aviation fuel.
Herman Yang
Herman Yang is the CEO and co-founder of Upscale AI, an AI-native platform that lets e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize performance TV ads on streaming channels. A Stanford CS grad with an MBA from Harvard Business School, Yang spent over a decade reshaping mobile advertising at AdMob (acquired by Google) and MoPub (acquired by Twitter, then AppLovin), before stints at Facet Data, Chatgrid, and Moloco. In May 2025, he emerged from stealth with $5.5M in seed funding - backed by Nvidia Ventures, M12, Eniac, and others - to democratize what was once a $100K-minimum medium: streaming TV ads, rebuilt from scratch for performance marketers.
Ann Miura-Ko
Ann Miura-Ko is co-founding partner at Floodgate, the seed-stage VC firm behind Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, and Okta. A NASA rocket scientist's daughter who went from painfully shy piano prodigy to national debate champion to Forbes' 'most powerful woman in startups,' she holds a PhD in mathematical modeling of cybersecurity from Stanford and has spent 15+ years betting on founders before anyone else believes in them. She co-founded AllRaise to diversify venture capital, teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, and invests in roughly 3-5 companies per year with a philosophy built on secrets, stories, and world-class effort.
Bijan Sabet
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.
Mike Maples Jr.
Mike Maples Jr. is a legendary Silicon Valley seed investor and co-founder of Floodgate, the firm behind some of the most category-defining startups of the internet era - including Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, and Okta. An 8-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Maples pioneered seed-stage venture capital before it was a recognized asset class, developing frameworks like 'Thunder Lizards' and 'Inflection Theory' that have shaped how the VC world thinks about breakthrough startups. His 2024 book 'Pattern Breakers' became a USA Today national bestseller.
Peter Fenton
Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark, Silicon Valley's most storied early-stage venture firm, where he has spent nearly two decades backing audacious founders building transformative technology companies. A Stanford philosophy graduate who once dug sanitation trenches in rural Brazil, Fenton has a gift for identifying the exact moment when a company's rising adoption curve meets its declining risk curve. His track record - Twitter, Yelp, Zendesk, New Relic, Elastic, Hortonworks, and now Sierra and Exa - places him consistently on the Forbes Midas List, peaking at #2 in 2015, and he was named VC of the Year at the 2014 Crunchies.
Satya Patel
Satya Patel is the co-founder and Partner at Homebrew VC, the San Francisco-based seed fund he launched in 2013 alongside Hunter Walk. A dual-degree Wharton graduate, Satya spent formative years building AdSense at Google (2003) and then leading product at Twitter as VP of Product before pivoting to investing. Homebrew has backed some of the most consequential startups of the past decade - Plaid, Chime, Cruise, Anchor, Mercury - and Satya has developed a reputation as a founder-first investor who takes a hands-on, process-driven approach to helping portfolio companies nail their first hire, first product, and first fundraise. In 2021, he co-launched Screendoor, a $50M+ initiative to back underrepresented emerging fund managers. He is known for his blunt, practical writing on venture-generated content and his deep belief that great companies are built by founders who learn to say no.
Biz Stone
Biz Stone is the co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter, the platform that redefined public discourse. Born Christopher Isaac Stone in Boston, he dropped out of college twice, designed book covers, and walked away from $2 million in unvested Google stock to help build what became one of the most influential communication platforms in history. Beyond Twitter, he co-founded Jelly Industries (acquired by Pinterest), The Obvious Corporation with Evan Williams, and in 2024 joined the board of Mastodon's U.S. nonprofit - a quiet statement about where social media should go next. His guiding philosophy: opportunity can be manufactured.
Ev Williams
Ev Williams is the Nebraska farm boy who accidentally invented blogging, co-founded Twitter, built Medium, and is now trying to make social media actually social again with Mozi. A serial founder who has shaped how the world communicates - and who openly regrets some of what that meant - he remains one of tech's most quietly consequential figures, running Obvious Ventures, a B Corp impact fund with $585M in assets, while incubating his next idea from San Francisco.
Elizabeth Yin
Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, the pre-seed venture firm she launched in 2017 with two Stanford dorm-mates. A former founder (LaunchBit, acquired by BuySellAds) and 500 Startups Partner, she invests in software startups within 48 hours of a first call, has built a portfolio of 375+ companies including unicorns Gamma, Webflow, and Boom Supersonic, and has made angel investing accessible to over 10,000 applicants across 50+ countries through Angel Squad — all while sporting a Twitter handle (@dunkhippo33) that honors her lifelong collection of stuffed hippos.
George Zachary
George Zachary is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capitalists, known for seed-stage bets on Twitter, Yammer, and PillPack. A Greek-American MIT graduate who once helped build the Nintendo 64 at Silicon Graphics, he pivoted from consumer internet to bioengineering after a near-miss cancer scare in 2015 - writing more diligence on his first biotech deal than in the prior decade combined. He deploys capital guided by a single question: does this founder need - not just want - to build something big?
Jessica Verrilli
Jessica Verrilli is co-founder and managing director of Adverb Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm she launched in 2023 with April Underwood. A former VP of Corporate Development & Strategy at Twitter (employee #34), she led roughly 30 acquisitions including Vine and Periscope before becoming a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures). She also co-founded #ANGELS, a women-led angel investing collective that placed women on over 100 startup cap tables and produced landmark research quantifying Silicon Valley's gender equity gap. She holds the coveted @jess handle on X with 318,000 followers.
Katie Jacobs Stanton
Katie Jacobs Stanton is the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm managing $95M+ across three funds. A former VP of Global Media at Twitter, Director of Citizen Participation at the Obama White House, and State Department innovation advisor, she built her reputation deploying technology at the intersection of government, media, and social change - including spearheading the Haiti earthquake text-donation platform that raised $40M in days. Co-founder of #Angels, a collective that has placed capital in 120+ companies, she now backs outlier founders across enterprise software, climate tech, and vertical AI.