Kamran Maniar is the Chief Executive Officer at Flux (flux.ai), the AI-powered PCB design platform headquartered in San Francisco. Flux - backed by 8VC and Bain Capital Ventures - has raised $39 million in total funding and serves over one million hardware builders across the globe, making professional circuit board design as accessible as writing a prompt. Operating at the intersection of AI, electronics, and manufacturing, Maniar leads from the crossroads of Silicon Valley ambition and Pakistan's deep engineering talent.
Max Wang is the Co-Founder and CTO of Workstream, a San Francisco-based HR and payroll platform built specifically for America's hourly workforce. He co-founded China's AngelList equivalent (VC.CN) in 2011, built it to a 50-person team, then crossed the Pacific to co-build Workstream with Desmond Lim and Lei Xu after a 100-interview discovery sprint revealed that hiring hourly workers was a massive unsolved problem. Today, Workstream serves 4,000+ businesses across 24,000 locations, has raised $118 million, and is deploying AI tools - including VoiceAI - to compress hiring cycles from weeks to hours for restaurants, franchises, and deskless-workforce employers.
LangChain is the agent engineering company. It builds the open-source frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph) and the commercial platform (LangSmith, LangGraph Platform) that developers use to design, deploy, evaluate and observe LLM-powered applications and autonomous agents in production.
LlamaIndex is a San Francisco company building the data framework and cloud platform that lets enterprises turn messy unstructured documents into knowledge agents powered by large language models. Its open-source library is one of the most-used scaffolds for retrieval-augmented generation, and its hosted product, LlamaCloud, packages parsing, extraction, and indexing for production teams.
Simon Grimm is a German developer educator and solo founder who has spent over a decade teaching web developers to build mobile apps. Best known for Galaxies.dev and his earlier Devdactic blog, he was voted the #1 React Native video creator by the community. Beyond tutorials, he's building Tiny Harvest - a cozy idle farm RPG - entirely by himself. He went fully self-employed in 2017 and hasn't looked back.
Delba de Oliveira is a Staff Developer Advocate and DX Engineer at Vercel who built Next.js Docs and the Next.js Learn platform, teaching millions of developers about React and Next.js. She transitioned from medicine and customer service into engineering, famously entering tech when a colleague asked her to 'open a GitHub issue.' Known for her visually rich educational content, conference keynotes at Next.js Conf, and her hobby as a videographer, she combines technical depth with storytelling instinct - bridging complex concepts and accessible learning in the React ecosystem.
Dominik Dorfmeister, known online as TkDodo, is an Austrian software engineer, core maintainer of TanStack Query (formerly React Query), and one of the most influential voices in the React ecosystem. Based in Vienna, he works as a Frontend Engineer at Sentry while helping shape how millions of developers approach server state management. His blog at tkdodo.eu - built on the philosophy that 'if I get a question three times, I write the answer down' - has become essential reading for React developers worldwide. With over 3.5 years maintaining TanStack Query (which now appears in nearly 20% of all React applications), conference talks from Berlin to Paris, and a co-created official course at query.gg, Dominik bridges the gap between library internals and everyday developer experience.
Kent C. Dodds is a world-renowned web development educator, open source engineer, and entrepreneur based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Creator of React Testing Library and the Testing Library ecosystem, he left a staff engineering role at PayPal in 2019 to build a self-employed education empire spanning EpicReact.dev, EpicWeb.dev, TestingJavaScript.com, and now EpicAI.pro. Recognized as a Google Developer Expert, Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star, he has taught tens of thousands of developers through hands-on workshops, books, courses, and his long-running newsletter. Father of six and an adrenaline enthusiast who snowboards and rides a onewheel, Kent believes that kindness and teaching compound faster than any technology trend.
Lee Robinson is a developer educator and engineering leader who spent five years at Vercel scaling Next.js to over a million monthly active developers, rising from individual contributor to VP of Developer Experience. He now serves as Head of AI Education at Cursor, teaching developers how to build software with AI-powered tools. Known for creating free courses like Mastering Next.js and React 2025, his newsletter 'Optimism (for the web)' and 234K+ Twitter following reflect his belief that great technology should be easy to understand and interesting to learn.
Mark Erikson is the primary maintainer of Redux and creator of Redux Toolkit - the tools that power state management in millions of React applications worldwide. Known online as @acemarke, he became the de facto keeper of Redux in 2016 when Dan Abramov handed off the project. Since then, he has rebuilt Redux's documentation from the ground up, designed the hooks API in React-Redux, and created Redux Toolkit to eliminate the boilerplate that once made Redux notorious. He is a Senior Front-End Engineer at Replay.io and a tireless community fixture - answering questions on Discord, Reddit, Bluesky, and anywhere else developers congregate online.
Sarah Drasner is a Senior Director of Engineering at Google, where she leads the Core Developer Web Infrastructure powering Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Workspace. A rare hybrid of fine artist turned technologist, she spent 15+ years shaping how the web moves - as a Vue.js core team member, staff writer at CSS-Tricks, creator of the Night Owl VS Code theme (used by millions), and author of both 'SVG Animations' (O'Reilly) and 'Engineering Management for the Rest of Us'. Before Google, she was VP of Developer Experience at Netlify and a Principal Lead at Microsoft Azure. She is an award-winning speaker, teacher on Frontend Masters, and co-organizer of ConcatenateConf, a free conference for Nigerian and Kenyan developers.
Shawn 'swyx' Wang is a Singapore-born AI engineer, founder, and community builder who pivoted from a $350k/year quantitative finance career to become one of the most influential voices in AI engineering and developer tools. He coined the term 'AI Engineer', co-founded the AI Engineer Summit (now the world's largest technical AI conference for engineers), co-hosts the Latent Space podcast reaching 10M+ readers/listeners, and is the author of the seminal 'Learn in Public' essay that has shaped how millions of developers think about career growth. He is the founder of Smol.ai and a prolific creator with 626+ published essays, talks, and tutorials.
Tanner Linsley is a Salt Lake City-based software engineer, open source creator, and founder of TanStack - the ecosystem behind React Query, TanStack Router, TanStack Table, TanStack Form, and TanStack Start. Co-founder of Nozzle.io, an enterprise SEO platform, Tanner built a multi-million-download open source empire by solving real problems he faced every day, pioneering headless, framework-agnostic, fully type-safe libraries now used by Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Walmart, and Target.
Orange Slice AI (YC S25) is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform that uses real-time web signals to find high-intent prospects for B2B sales teams. Co-founded by Kishan Sripada and Vihaar Nandigala — who met on a Bollywood dance team at the University of Michigan — the platform lets sales teams generate targeted lead lists using plain English, enrich existing lists with live data, detect niche buying signals before competitors, and manage pipelines through conversation. Backed by $5.3M in seed funding co-led by 1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures, with Paul Graham as an angel investor, Orange Slice has attracted 5,000+ sales and RevOps teams including Oracle, Confido Health, Pirros, and Glass Health.