university-of-illinois
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The Engineer Who Learned to Sell the Story
An electrical engineer from the University of Illinois who talked his way out of the lab and into the room where the story gets told. Twenty-five years later, he runs marketing for one of proptech's biggest names.
Rick Sebok Makes People Believe in Steel
The marketing chief at North America's largest independent steel pipe and tube maker took an industry most people never think about and gave it a rally cry.
David Cygan
He runs marketing for the country's biggest senior living company - and bet the brand on letting residents tell their own stories.
Varun Mathur
Varun Mathur is the co-founder and CEO of Unisson, a Y Combinator Winter 2026 startup building AI agents that act as hands-on product experts for customer-facing B2B teams. Before Unisson he led product, engineering, growth and vision-language-model research for agent products at Ambient.ai (YC W17), where he built a video-understanding model that outperformed Gemini 2.5 Pro and sold AI to Fortune 5 companies. He studied computer science and statistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and works out of San Francisco.
Ahsan Rizvi
Ahsan Rizvi is the CEO and co-founder of Kiddom, a San Francisco-based education technology platform that has become the first all-in-one solution for high-quality digital curricula in K-12 schools. Born and raised in Pakistan, he came to the US after passing a grueling 1-in-1,100 entrance exam at age 12, an experience that shaped his lifelong commitment to the transformative power of education. After earning degrees in Industrial Engineering and Public Policy from the University of Illinois, he co-founded Kiddom in 2015 with his college friend Abbas Manjee. The company has raised $56.5M in total funding, grown to 220 employees, and now has at least one teacher using its platform in 70% of US schools.
Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim is the co-founder of YouTube and the man behind the internet's most historically significant 19 seconds of footage — 'Me at the zoo,' uploaded on April 23, 2005. Born in East Germany to a Bangladeshi father and German mother, Karim built YouTube's anti-fraud infrastructure at PayPal alongside Chad Hurley and Steve Chen before pivoting to change how humanity watches video. After Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, Karim quietly enrolled at Stanford, co-founded early-stage fund Y Ventures, and became one of Airbnb's first investors. He communicates publicly almost exclusively through the description box of his single YouTube video.