Chike Agbai is the CEO and Founder of Azumo, a San Francisco-based nearshore software development company he launched in 2016 after nearly two decades on Wall Street advising over $100 billion in enterprise software transactions for clients like Oracle, Salesforce, and Dell. A Stanford Economics graduate, he pivoted from investment banking to entrepreneurship on the conviction that exceptional technical talent exists everywhere - not just in traditional tech hubs. Under his leadership, Azumo has grown to 110+ employees across 20+ countries in Latin America, earned a 4.9-star rating on Clutch, served 100+ clients including Facebook, Twitter, and Discovery Channel, and been recognized among the '10 Smartest Companies of the Year 2025.' He credits his grandfather's migration from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1930s as the spark behind his own entrepreneurial ambition.
Vlad Tenev is the Bulgarian-American co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the company that forced Wall Street to abolish trading commissions and put a brokerage in every pocket. Born in Varna, Bulgaria, and raised in Virginia after emigrating at age 5, Tenev studied mathematics at Stanford and UCLA before dropping his PhD to build trading software startups. In 2013, he and Baiju Bhatt launched Robinhood to give ordinary people the same tools as professional traders - for free. After navigating the GameStop firestorm, congressional testimony, a bruising post-IPO collapse, and two rounds of layoffs, Tenev rebuilt Robinhood into a diversified financial platform now worth nearly $100 billion and included in the S&P 500. He also co-founded Harmonic, an AI startup pursuing mathematical superintelligence, which reached a $1.45 billion valuation in 2025 after its AI model won a Gold Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Jake Gibson co-founded NerdWallet with his middle-school friend Tim Chen, bootstrapped it for two years with zero revenue before Google's algorithm updates turned it into a traffic machine, then stepped away as it scaled toward its NASDAQ IPO. He spent years as an angel investor making early bets on companies like Chipper Cash (unicorn) and Albert, before co-founding Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) with Sheel Mohnot in 2019. BTV has grown from a $75M debut fund to $450M+ AUM across three funds, focused exclusively on pre-seed and seed-stage fintech globally. In 2023, Gibson and Mohnot launched The Mint, a fintech-specific accelerator in San Francisco. He has a Kierkegaard quote tattooed on his ribs and describes his post-NerdWallet years as his 'commitment issues' phase.
Anthony Pompliano - known as 'Pomp' - is an Army veteran turned tech operator turned Bitcoin maximalist who built one of the most influential finance media empires on the internet. From three tours at Facebook to three weeks at Snapchat (and a whistleblower lawsuit to show for it), he has relentlessly bet on Bitcoin when no one on Wall Street would. Today he runs ProCap Financial (Nasdaq: BRR), a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company holding 5,457+ BTC, while publishing The Pomp Letter to 270,000+ subscribers and hosting a podcast with 50 million downloads.
Codie Sanchez is the founder and CEO of Contrarian Thinking, a financial media company with over 8 million followers, and author of the NYT bestselling book 'Main Street Millionaire.' A former Wall Street executive and award-winning journalist, she built a portfolio of 26-30 'boring businesses' - think laundromats, car washes, and handyman services - and teaches her audience how ordinary businesses can create extraordinary wealth. Her weekly newsletter reaches over 1 million readers, and her mission is to create 1 million financially free humans through business ownership.
Joe Weisenthal is a Bloomberg executive editor, co-anchor of 'What'd You Miss?' on Bloomberg Television, and co-host of the Odd Lots podcast with Tracy Alloway. Known on Twitter/X as @TheStalwart, he has spent 20+ years making arcane financial topics accessible and engaging for broad audiences. He helped grow Business Insider into a 50-million-visitor destination, then brought that digital-first energy to Bloomberg. His Odd Lots podcast, launched in 2015, is one of the most respected finance podcasts in the world. He is also one-quarter of the band Light Sweet Crude, proving that a man can love yield curves and guitar riffs in equal measure.
Matt Levine is Bloomberg Opinion's most-read finance columnist and the voice behind Money Stuff, a daily newsletter that turns Wall Street's most bewildering moments into something approaching comedy. A Harvard classics grad turned Yale-trained lawyer turned Goldman Sachs banker turned Dealbreaker editor, Levine spent his career collecting lenses before finding the one that let him explain finance to everyone who ever wondered what a 'synthetic CDO' actually is - and why it matters. With over 300,000 subscribers, Money Stuff is the rare financial publication that people actually look forward to reading.