JB Bakst is the founder and CEO of Chief, an AI email agent he pitches as 'the first inbox with good judgment.' A Stanford computer science grad and Manhattan native now based in Los Angeles, he cut his teeth as an early engineer at Airtable - where he obsessed over fun, delightful productivity UX - after starting out building iOS and full-stack at the six-person video-messaging startup Chime. His thesis for Chief: your email is a 12-year record of how you actually make decisions, so software should play those decisions forward rather than dump everything in a feed.
Eight Inc. is a globally recognized strategic design firm founded in 1989 by Tim Kobe. Best known for designing the original Apple Store with Steve Jobs, the firm now operates across San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai and Dubai, helping brands like Nike, Virgin Atlantic, Citibank, Dolby, McLaren, Lincoln and Nissan turn ideas into human experiences across architecture, retail, products, identity and digital.
Antoine Pitrou is a Paris-trained product designer based in San Francisco who turns complex digital problems into elegant, simple experiences. As the Founder and CEO of Hayes Studio and co-founder of SYLAPS (a browser-based video collaboration platform), he has shaped product design across fintech, legaltech, and SaaS - including a notable tenure as Senior Product Designer at Human Interest, the 401(k) platform redefining retirement savings for small businesses.
Jesse Pickard is the Founder and CEO of The Mind Company (formerly Elevate Labs), the studio behind Elevate (Apple's App of the Year 2014), Balance (Google's App of the Year 2021), and Spark - a portfolio of science-backed mental fitness apps with over 80 million downloads. A designer-turned-entrepreneur, Pickard co-founded language learning startup MindSnacks in 2010 before pivoting to build Elevate in 2014, pioneering the consumer mental fitness category. He is also an Investing Partner at Volo Ventures.
Jonathan Widawski (known as Jo) is the co-founder and CEO of Maze, a continuous product discovery platform that lets teams run user research at the speed of product development. A veteran product designer and former UX instructor who worked with McKinsey, Rocket Internet, and PSG, he launched Maze in 2018 after experiencing firsthand how impossible it was for product teams to get reliable user data fast enough to matter. Under his leadership, Maze grew 6x during the pandemic, expanded to 60,000+ brands across 35 countries, and raised $60M total — including a $40M Series B in 2022 led by Felicis Ventures.
Munier Afshar is a co-founder at Maze, the AI-powered user research and continuous product discovery platform trusted by over 60,000 brands including Atlassian, Lowe's, and Sony. Based in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, Afshar helped build Maze into a category-defining research platform that raised a $40M Series B in 2022, bringing total funding to over $57M. Beyond tech, he serves as Vice President of the Afghan Relief Fund, lending organizational leadership to a nonprofit supporting vulnerable Afghan families. His career spans entrepreneurship, operations, and community impact.
Cesar Donofrio is the co-founder and CEO of Making Sense LLC, a Palo Alto-based technology consulting and software development company he built from a startup in Mar del Plata, Argentina into a 350-person nearshore powerhouse serving mid-market U.S. enterprises. Over 20+ years, he has co-founded five companies - including Doppler (email marketing), Lander (acquired by a Silicon Valley firm), and Viallion (AI-driven investment platform) - while championing a talent model where 90% of the workforce is Latin American. Named Top Midmarket IT Executive of the Year in 2017 and a Nearshore Americas Power 50 Leader, Donofrio blends engineering precision with UX philosophy and AI strategy to deliver measurable business transformation.
Dan Olsen is a Silicon Valley-based product management consultant, author, and speaker best known for writing The Lean Product Playbook (Wiley, 2015) - a practical, framework-driven guide to achieving product-market fit. His Product-Market Fit Pyramid and six-step Lean Product Process have become foundational tools used by product teams at Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and hundreds of other companies worldwide. Through his consulting firm Olsen Solutions (founded 2005), he serves as an Interim VP of Product and strategic advisor. He also runs the Lean Product & Lean UX Meetup, which has hosted 181+ events with over 12,700 members in Mountain View, California.
Ryan Singer spent 17 years at Basecamp (37signals) evolving from UI designer to Head of Strategy, where he invented the product development framework that became Shape Up - a methodology that replaced sprint cycles with six-week appetite-driven building cycles. After leaving in 2020 he founded Felt Presence, a consultancy operating from Portugal, where he works as a fractional CPO and teaches teams how to stop running in circles and start shipping work that matters.
Rosie Hoggmascall is a London-based product and growth expert specialising in subscription apps, monetisation, and product-led growth. With a Cambridge education and a career spanning strategic communications to leading consumer tech startups, she is currently Chief Product & Growth Officer at Fyxer AI - an email productivity tool that grew from $1M to $30M ARR in 2025. She also runs 'Growth Dives', a weekly Substack newsletter delivering annotated product teardowns to 2,000+ subscribers with a remarkable 64% average open rate.