Fastly made a business of shaving milliseconds from the web and giving developers unusual control over the edge. Its biggest outage showed the bargain hiding inside that speed - and its recovery offers a practical playbook for anyone building critical infrastructure.
A checkout error looks tiny until someone prices the lost carts. Quantum Metric built a business turning digital friction into a number executives can act on - and is now asking an AI analyst to do the detective work.

A 98-kilobyte YouTube experiment revealed a world the standard site could barely reach. Chris Zacharias turned that lesson into Imgix - and a career spent making visual media faster, more useful, and easier to control.
WP Engine built a large business by taking the anxiety out of WordPress. Now it is turning that trusted foundation into an operating layer for publishers, stores, agencies and AI-powered websites.
imgix is a San Francisco-based visual media platform that optimizes, transforms, and delivers images and video in real time through a simple URL-based API. Founded in 2011 by former YouTube web developer Chris Zacharias, imgix lets developers resize, crop, compress, convert formats, and now apply AI edits such as background removal and generative fill simply by appending parameters to an image URL, offloading image infrastructure to a globally distributed CDN. The company serves tens of thousands of customers, including Unsplash, Kickstarter, Eventbrite, and Porsche, and delivers on the order of billions of image requests a day.
Coach Wei is a serial technology entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Neural Galaxy, a brain-science company spun out of Harvard Medical School and MIT that maps the individual human brain and delivers personalized neuromodulation therapy for brain disorders. A Tsinghua University electrical engineer with an MS from MIT, he began building software at EMC before founding three venture-backed startups over two decades: Nexaweb (pioneering Rich Internet Applications), Yottaa (web performance and cloud), and now Neural Galaxy, which has raised roughly $100M including a $75M Series A. He holds six patents and was named to Boston's 40 Under 40.

Addy Osmani is an Irish software engineer and engineering leader who spent nearly 14 years shaping the modern web at Google Chrome - leading the teams behind Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals, Chrome DevTools, Puppeteer, and PageSpeed Insights. Now Director at Google Cloud AI, he bridges Gemini, Vertex AI, and the Agent Development Kit for millions of developers worldwide. Author of multiple O'Reilly books and curator of the Elevate newsletter, Osmani's work has touched over 20 million developers and his open-source projects have become industry standards.

Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure giant that powers roughly 20% of all web traffic worldwide. A recovering lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, Prince built Cloudflare from a Harvard Business School business plan competition entry into a publicly traded company with a market cap in the tens of billions. Equally at home discussing BGP routing and content moderation philosophy, he is widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures shaping how the internet actually works - for better or for worse, depending on who you ask.

Nate Berkopec is the world's foremost Ruby on Rails performance expert, founder of Speedshop consultancy, co-maintainer of the Puma web server, and author of 'The Complete Guide to Rails Performance.' A self-taught programmer who pivoted from a Shark Tank appearance at 19, he now runs a thriving consulting and education business from Tokyo, helping Rails developers squeeze every last millisecond out of their applications.

Scott Jehl is a Senior Software Engineer on the Web Performance team at Squarespace, a 20-year veteran of the front-end web who helped define modern responsive and performant design. He authored 'Responsible Responsive Design' (A Book Apart, 2014) and co-authored 'Designing with Progressive Enhancement' (2010), created foundational open-source tools like Respond.js, loadCSS, and Picturefill, and recently led the effort that brought lazy loading to HTML video and audio elements - an official web standard as of March 2026. He speaks globally, teaches online, and believes the web should work fast for everyone, everywhere.

Surma (known online as @DasSurma) is a Principal Software Engineer at Shopify focused on developer experience and monorepo architecture. A former Google Chrome Team Web Advocate, he is best known for making WebAssembly and Web Workers approachable through open-source tools like Comlink (12k+ GitHub stars), Squoosh, and PROXX. He co-hosts the 'Off The Main Thread' podcast with Jake Archibald and publishes deep technical articles at surma.dev. Based in Bristol, UK, Surma has spent his career removing the friction between developers and the harder parts of the web platform.