Rhino.ai is a Washington, D.C.-based enterprise AI platform that reconstructs the hidden business logic buried inside legacy code, ERP systems, SaaS tools, workflows, and integrations. Using agentic AI paired with human expertise, it discovers and maps business rules, organizes them into a governed, version-controlled logic graph built on its proprietary Universal Application Notation (UAN), and uses that single source of truth to accelerate modernization and application development. Founded in 2023 by Adam Branch, the company raised a $50M Series A in January 2025 led by Koch Disruptive Technologies, with KPMG as a strategic minority investor.
John Aristotle Phillips is the co-founder and CEO of Aristotle, the Washington DC-based political technology firm he built with his brother Dean since 1983. Known worldwide as 'The A-Bomb Kid' after his Princeton term paper on nuclear weapon design made headlines in 1977, Phillips parlayed celebrity into activism, lost two congressional races, then quietly built a data empire that has served virtually every U.S. president from Reagan onward. Today Aristotle powers campaign compliance, voter data, PAC management, and identity verification for campaigns across the globe, while Phillips co-founded PredictIt, the world's largest political prediction market, partnering with Victoria University of Wellington to bring real-money political forecasting to the mainstream.
Ernest Addison is a Senior Associate at Boldstart Ventures, one of the premier enterprise-focused seed-stage VC firms, where he backs founders at the earliest inflection point. With a career that spans Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America's Global Industrials investment banking desk, and private equity at Audax Group, Ernest brings a rare mix of Wall Street rigor and startup-native intuition to enterprise infrastructure, security, developer tools, and SaaS. Originally from Washington, D.C. and a UVA McIntire alum, he joined Boldstart in 2021 and has since become a fixture in the firm's mission to be the first check into ambitious technical founders.
Sriram Krishnan is the Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence under President Trump, appointed January 2025. A Chennai-born engineer turned VC, he is one of few tech operators to have held senior product roles at Facebook, Snap, and Twitter simultaneously. As a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) from 2021 to 2024, he opened the firm's first international office in London. He co-authored the American AI Action Plan and co-hosts The Aarthi and Sriram Show podcast with his wife. Named a Time 'Architect of Artificial Intelligence' in 2025.
James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.
Simon Owens is a Washington, DC-based media industry journalist, newsletter writer, and podcast host who runs Simon Owens's Media Newsletter on Substack. Known for deep-dive reporting on how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content, he has interviewed over 1,000 media entrepreneurs and built one of the most-followed independent media newsletters, with 38,000+ Substack followers and 61,000+ LinkedIn followers. His work covers the creator economy, subscription models, local news, and the evolving business of digital publishing.
Dylan Matthews is a policy journalist, effective altruism advocate, and former senior correspondent at Vox, where he founded and led the Future Perfect newsletter and section for seven years. Known for his deep-dive reporting on global health, animal welfare, and evidence-based philanthropy, Matthews embodies his own editorial philosophy: he donated a kidney to a stranger in 2016, initiating a chain that helped four people. As of December 2025, he joined Coefficient Giving (backed by Open Philanthropy) to manage the $120M+ Abundance and Growth Fund, moving from writing about doing good to actually doing it.
Lulu Cheng Meservey is the founder and CEO of Rostra, a strategic communications firm that bets on founder-led narratives over legacy PR playbooks. A former VP of Communications at Substack and EVP/CCO at Activision Blizzard, she now sits on Shopify's board of directors and manages a $40 million VC fund. Known for her newsletter 'Flack' (also called 'Res Ipsa') on Substack, she is one of the most incisive voices arguing that the future of tech PR is direct-to-audience, not media-mediated. Her clients have included Anduril, Cognition AI, Coinbase, and Ramp.
Matthew Yglesias is one of America's most influential political writers - a Harvard-trained philosopher turned media entrepreneur who co-founded Vox and then bet on himself by launching Slow Boring, a Substack newsletter that earns him over $1.4 million a year. Known for his contrarian, rigorously argued takes on housing, immigration, economics, and American governance, he occupies a strange and productive niche: too wonky for Twitter, too heterodox for legacy media, and too prolific for anyone to ignore.
Caitlin Doornbos is a Washington D.C.-based political journalist and war correspondent for the New York Post, specializing in national security, foreign policy, and military affairs. A Kansas native, she built her career from local crime reporting to embedded battlefield dispatches in Ukraine, earning the Marie Colvin Award for Foreign Correspondence in 2025. She previously served as Stars and Stripes' Pentagon reporter and Indo-Pacific correspondent based at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, and was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the Pulse nightclub shooting.