Andrew Chen is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Games Fund and the Speedrun accelerator program. He is best known for coining the term 'growth hacker' in a 2012 essay that reshaped how Silicon Valley thinks about product distribution, and for his book 'The Cold Start Problem' (2021), a landmark text on how networked products escape the bootstrapping trap. Before a16z, he led Rider Growth at Uber during the company's most explosive era - expanding from dozens to 800 cities and reaching 100 million active riders. A prolific writer with 650+ essays and a Substack newsletter, he is one of the most-read voices on growth, gaming, and consumer startups.
Irina Stanescu is an engineering leadership coach, content creator, and former Tech Lead Manager at Google and Uber who turned a severe burnout episode into a mission. She founded The Caring Techie newsletter, now with 61,000+ subscribers, which challenges the tech industry's overwork culture and champions empathy, wellbeing, and influence as learnable leadership skills. Originally from Bucharest, Romania and based in San Francisco, she coaches engineers at companies like Anthropic, Google, and Meta, runs the highly-rated 'Impact through Influence' course on Maven, and speaks at major conferences including Craft Conference and LeadDev Berlin.
Will Larson is a veteran engineering executive, author of four books on engineering leadership, and the voice behind the long-running newsletter Irrational Exuberance. He has scaled engineering teams at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, and Carta, and currently serves as CTO at Imprint. His books - An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive's Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy - have sold tens of thousands of copies and are considered essential reading in the engineering leadership community.