David Jaxon writes the Creator Economy Report, a newsletter covering the business of creators and the media industry built around them. Beyond the newsletter and its stated focus on the creator economy and media, no further details about Jaxon could be independently verified through public sources.
Eric Bailey is a Boston-based accessibility advocate, designer, writer, developer, and speaker. As a staff designer on GitHub's Primer design system, he works to make component libraries genuinely usable for people relying on assistive technologies. He is the longtime lead redesigner and maintainer of The A11Y Project, has published more than 200 articles across publications like CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and the GitHub Blog, and is a fixture on the conference circuit. His guiding line: if it's inaccessible, it is neither radical nor revolutionary.
Jareau Wadé is a payments entrepreneur, operator, and writer who has spent roughly 15 years building commerce and payments infrastructure. He co-founded Balanced (acquired by Stripe in 2015) and helped scale Finix as its Chief Growth Officer, and now leads product partnerships at Ramp. He writes Batch Processing, a widely-read newsletter dissecting the people, companies, and ideas driving fintech. A Tucson native and UPenn-trained electrical engineer who taught in Ghana before the Bay Area, he relocated to Atlanta and invests in and advises early-stage founders, with a focus on Black entrepreneurship.
Milan Singh is a writer and pollster based in Washington, DC, best known as the founder and director of the Yale Youth Poll, whose 2025 surveys forced a national conversation about the rightward drift of the youngest Gen Z voters. A 2026 Yale economics graduate from Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is a fellow at The Argument and a former researcher at Slow Boring, writing about polling, elections, inflation, housing, and the economy.
Will Wilkinson is a political analyst, essayist, and policy intellectual who spent two decades navigating the intellectual terrain between libertarianism and liberalism before landing somewhere more interesting than either. A former research fellow at the Cato Institute and vice president at the Niskanen Center, he has written for The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, and dozens of other outlets. Currently working in government affairs at Persona, a digital identity company, he continues to publish the 'Model Citizen' newsletter on Substack, where his blend of philosophy, political science, and sharp commentary finds its most faithful audience.
Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British philosopher, author, and entrepreneur who has written 15+ books translated into 30+ languages, co-founded The School of Life in 2008, and built a global movement dedicated to making philosophy practically useful for everyday life - covering love, work, anxiety, and what it means to live wisely.
Andrew Schulz is a New York-born stand-up comedian, podcaster, and actor who upended the comedy industry by self-distributing his specials directly to fans — selling out Radio City Music Hall twice in a night and Madison Square Garden multiple times — while co-hosting the hit Flagrant podcast with Akaash Singh. His 2022 special 'Infamous' and 2025 Netflix special 'Life' cemented his reputation as one of the most commercially independent voices in modern comedy.
Tom Segura is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and podcaster who has built one of comedy's most expansive multi-platform empires. Known for six Netflix specials, the long-running Your Mom's House podcast (co-hosted with wife Christina Pazsitzky), the Emmy-nominated Netflix sketch series Bad Thoughts, and the YMH Studios podcast network, Segura has turned deadpan observational comedy into a sprawling entertainment franchise from his base in Austin, Texas.
Rachel Chen is a corporate communications specialist at eBay in San Jose, where she works on CEO communications and the global content team. A Princeton graduate from Philadelphia, she blends press-release craft with editorial storytelling and a data-driven instinct for what readers actually want.
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
May Habib is the co-founder and CEO of Writer, a full-stack enterprise generative AI platform valued at $1.9 billion. Born in rural Lebanon and raised in Canada after her family immigrated when she was eight, she studied Economics and Near Eastern Languages at Harvard before stints at Lehman Brothers and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. She co-founded Writer in 2020 with Waseem AlShikh - making a contrarian bet to build proprietary LLMs (the Palmyra family) 18 months before ChatGPT - and has grown it into a platform serving 250+ enterprise clients including Uber, Salesforce, L'Oreal, and Intuit, raising $326M in total funding.
Brian David Gilbert is a writer, actor, musician, and video producer who turned a fixation on the 337 books inside Skyrim into a media career. Best known as the host of Polygon's Unraveled and as the deeply earnest fact checker on Dropout's Um, Actually, he now runs an independent YouTube channel where horror, comedy, and musical theater keep colliding on purpose.
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Alberto Romero is a Spanish AI analyst, writer, and newsletter author behind The Algorithmic Bridge, a Substack publication with 40,000+ subscribers. A former machine learning engineer turned independent journalist, he brings an unusual fusion of aerospace engineering, cognitive neuroscience, and ML expertise to bear on the most pressing questions in AI - with a commitment to honesty, no ads, and no sponsors. He is also an analyst at CambrianAI Research, focusing on large language models and AI hardware/software.
Des Traynor is the Irish co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, the customer messaging platform that became one of Ireland's most iconic tech exports. A systems thinker who grew up as the youngest of seven children in Dublin, Traynor traces his entire career back to an Amiga 500 his single mother bought him at age five. Today he oversees Intercom's R&D - product, engineering, and design - while steering the company's all-in bet on Fin, its AI customer service agent powered by Anthropic's Claude. A prolific speaker, essayist, and accidental philosopher who moonlights as a Phoenix Park runner, Traynor has become one of the most trusted voices in B2B product strategy.
Tim Denning is an Australian writer, blogger, and online educator who went from a $32K/year bank call center job to 1 billion+ views across platforms and $6M+ earned through writing. He runs the 'Modern Freedom' Substack newsletter (151,000+ subscribers), teaches writing at Bad-Assery Academy, and publishes 10 articles per week on Medium, LinkedIn, and his personal site - all built on a philosophy of radical vulnerability, strategic imperfection, and the pursuit of time freedom over net worth.
George Mack is a British entrepreneur, writer, and marketing strategist best known for popularising the concept of 'High Agency' - the belief that you control your own destiny - and for building The Ad Professor into a platform reaching 300+ million people. Through his Substack newsletter (70,000+ subscribers), podcast appearances on Modern Wisdom and My First Million, and a Twitter following of 300,000+, Mack has become one of the most influential thinkers on mental models, decision-making, and entrepreneurship online. He co-founded the marketing agency Multiply, which has worked with startups backed by Stripe, Y Combinator, Sequoia, and LVMH, and is known for viral ideas like the 'Cocaine Phone vs. Kale Phone' two-device productivity protocol.
Kieran Drew is a British writer and online entrepreneur who quit dentistry in 2021 to build a 7-figure business teaching people how to write and grow online. Known for radical financial transparency, his flagship course High Impact Writing and newsletter Digital Freedom, he grew from 0 to $1.5M+ in gross revenue by 2026 while building an audience of 250,000+ on Twitter/X. A survivor of near-fatal spinal surgery and a neurological tumor at 16, Drew turned adversity into creative fuel, building a business rooted in personal freedom, authentic storytelling, and helping others escape their own 'profitable prisons'.
Alex Danco is a Canadian writer, thinker, and now Editor-at-Large at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he shapes the firm's editorial voice. A former neuroscientist turned ska musician turned VC associate turned Shopify product director, Danco spent five years at Shopify leading merchant financing and blockchain initiatives before joining a16z in August 2025. He is best known for his newsletter Dancoland and foundational essays including 'Debt Is Coming,' 'The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class,' and the 'Emergent Layers' framework - works that apply Carlota Perez, René Girard, and Jane Jacobs to the inner workings of Silicon Valley. He writes approximately 5,000 words per week and is a descendant of Belgian polar explorer Émile Danco, after whom Danco Island in Antarctica is named.
Max Read is a Brooklyn-based journalist, media critic, and newsletter writer who runs Read Max, a Substack publication covering tech culture, internet phenomena, AI, and digital media with acerbic wit and analytical depth. Former Editor-in-Chief of Gawker and founder of New York Magazine's Select All vertical, Read is one of the sharpest observers of how platforms reshape human behavior - a thinker who treats the internet with the seriousness of a literary critic and the irreverence of someone who has watched it eat itself alive.
Noah Smith is an independent economist-turned-writer best known for Noahpinion, one of Substack's largest economics newsletters with over 414,000 subscribers. A former Bloomberg Opinion columnist and ex-finance professor at Stony Brook University, he writes about technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and domestic policy with a techno-optimist, center-left lens. He also co-hosts the 'Econ 102' podcast with Erik Torenberg and is working on an English-language macroeconomics book.
Sumaira Mirza is the Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy Pakistan, one of the country's most decorated advertising creative leaders with over two decades of experience across WPP and Publicis Groupe networks. Known for campaigns that blend cultural sensitivity with bold social impact — including 'Message in a Mithai Box,' which provided legal support to abused women — she has served on juries at Effie Global Best of the Best, Spikes Asia, AdStars, and Dragons of Asia. In 2024, she became only the second Pakistani ever selected for the Effies Global Best of the Best jury. She is also an adjunct faculty member, a regular contributor to Aurora Magazine, and a participant in Ogilvy's elite APAC 30 for 30 Leadership Program.
Zvi Mowshowitz is a writer, AI safety analyst, and former professional Magic: The Gathering player. He is best known for his Substack newsletter 'Don't Worry About the Vase,' which publishes detailed weekly AI updates and rationalist commentary to over 33,000 subscribers. Inducted into the Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour Hall of Fame in 2007, Zvi is also the founder of nonprofit policy think tank Balsa Research and co-founded MetaMed, a personalized medical research firm backed by Peter Thiel. He is a prominent voice in the rationalist and AI safety communities, known for his p(doom) estimates of 60-70% and his systematic, data-driven approach to understanding AI risk.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, PhD is a French-Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author based in London. After leaving a marketing career at Google, she founded Ness Labs - a bootstrapped newsletter and community focused on science-backed mindful productivity - while simultaneously earning her MSc and PhD in Applied Neuroscience at King's College London. Her 2025 book 'Tiny Experiments' (Penguin Random House) proposes replacing linear goal-setting with a circular, experimental approach to growth. As a UKRI-funded postdoctoral research fellow at King's College London, she studies the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity and has proposed the 'Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD'. Ness Labs has grown to 120,000+ newsletter subscribers and a paid community of 2,000+ members.
Freddie deBoer is an American author, cultural critic, and PhD-wielding contrarian who has spent 17 years making everyone on the internet uncomfortable - including people who agree with him. A self-described Marxist who despises most of the left, his Substack newsletter 'cool but rude' has over 67,000 subscribers hungry for unvarnished takes on education, identity politics, media dysfunction, and mental illness. Author of three books - The Cult of Smart (2020), How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023), and debut novel The Mind Reels (2025) - deBoer writes with the conviction of someone who has nothing left to prove and everything left to say.
Nic Carter is a General Partner at Castle Island Ventures, a crypto-focused VC firm investing in blockchain infrastructure and the restoration of property rights on the internet. A former Fidelity analyst turned prolific writer, co-founder of Coin Metrics, and host of the 'On The Brink' podcast, Carter is one of the most influential voices in Bitcoin - known for his rigorous defense of Bitcoin's energy consumption, his early advocacy for proof of reserves, and breaking the 'Operation Choke Point 2.0' story that triggered multiple Congressional investigations. Outside of finance, he's an amateur MMA fighter who competed in Karate Combat under the nickname 'Tungsten Daddy.'
Nicolas Cole is a digital writer, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most-read writers on the internet - accumulating over 100 million views across platforms. He co-founded Ship 30 for 30, the largest cohort-based writing program online, alongside Dickie Bush. A former #1 most-read writer on Quora out of 200 million users, Cole built a ghostwriting agency (Digital Press) scaling to $2M+ annual revenue, co-created Category Pirates newsletter with Eddie Yoon and Christopher Lochhead, and launched the Premium Ghostwriting Academy - a 7-figure program in under 90 days. Author of 'The Art & Business of Online Writing,' he runs a portfolio of writing businesses generating over $5M annually, training thousands of writers worldwide.
Nikhil Krishnan is the founder and 'Thinkboi' behind Out-of-Pocket, a healthcare newsletter and education platform that makes the bewildering business of American healthcare funny, accessible, and actually worth reading. A Brooklyn-based writer, creator, and early-stage investor, Krishnan grew up in a family of physicians and parlayed a career in healthcare research at CB Insights and clinical trial partnerships at TrialSpark into one of the most original media brands in health tech - one that includes a newsletter with 30,000+ subscribers, educational crash courses, a medical bankruptcy card game, a children's book about clinical trials, hackathons, and a scout fund backing early-stage healthcare startups.