Baiju Bhatt is the Founder and CEO of Aetherflux. Baiju’s lifelong passion for space began in childhood, inspired by his father's work as a research scientist at Langley Research Center with NASA. At Stanford, he earned his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Mathematics. He later co-founded Robinhood and served as co-CEO until November 2020. Today, Robinhood is a publicly-traded company with more than 20 million customers. In 2024, Baiju left his day-to-day role at Robinhood to focus on Aetherflux. He continues to serve on Robinhood’s Board of Directors.

Nikita Bier is Head of Product at X (formerly Twitter). He is a sought after advisor to consumer technology companies for his expertise in growth and virality. He previously founded Gas, a viral social network acquired by Discord. Before that, he founded TBH, a social network acquired by Meta. He currently advises the Solana Foundation and works as a venture partner to Lightspeed Ventures.

Rob Black is the Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department, leading the state’s efforts to compete in the next generation of innovation-driven industries. Born and raised in Lovington, New Mexico, he is focused on building a resilient, high-wage economy that delivers long-term opportunity for families across the state. As Cabinet Secretary, Black has overseen the launch of a Site Readiness program designed to accelerate business attraction, secured New Mexico’s first fusion energy company, and supported the creation of a $25 million quantum venture studio, and other key efforts that have helped propel New Mexico into the top tier nationally for manufacturing and high-wage job growth. Black brings more than 25 years of experience across the public and private sectors and holds degrees from the University of New Mexico and UC Law San Francisco.

Will is CEO and Co-Founder of Varda Space Industries, a microgravity-enabled life sciences company whose reentry capsules leverage the unique environment of microgravity in low-Earth orbit. Prior to Varda, Will co-founded a small venture fund called Also Capital and served as Director of Global Equities Technology at Bank of America. He was the lead avionics engineer at SpaceX and flew Dragon on eight missions to the International Space Station. Will holds a B.S. in Applied Physics from Cornell and a master's in Systems Engineering. He was raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his hobbies include flying and maintaining his Cozy MK4 aircraft.

Chris Cassidy is the Director of Private Equity and Venture Capital at the New Mexico State Investment Council, the state's sovereign wealth fund. His career at the SIC has focused on enhancing the state's investment strategies to benefit economic growth and innovation. Prior to the SIC, Chris was an executive at Glencore International AG and an investment banker in the Financial Sponsors Group at Lehman Brothers. Chris graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and is a CFA charterholder.

Ian Cinnamon is the CEO and Co-Founder of Apex, a high-rate configurable satellite bus platform manufacturer named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025. Backed by over $500 million from the world’s best investors, Apex’s first satellite bus set a world record as the fastest cleansheet design to production spacecraft operating in space. Focused on meeting the needs of the rapidly expanding space industry and advancing critical national security missions like Golden Dome, Apex provides scalable platforms to both the commercial and government sectors. Apex's Los Angeles production facility can deliver satellite buses to customers in weeks rather than the industry standard of months or years, with the capacity to produce over 200 buses per year at full scale. Prior to his work with Apex, Ian founded Synapse, a company specializing in artificial intelligence for security and defense. Ian led the company through acquisition by Palantir. Earlier in his career, Ian co-founded Superlabs, which was sold to Zynga, where he served as Director of Product after the acquisition. Ian is a Forbes "30 Under 30" honoree and an alumnus of Y Combinator. He received his B.S. from MIT and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Burkay Gur is the Co-Founder and CEO of fal, the generative media company. fal was born out of a shared passion for the intersection of arts and AI and a desire to address the challenges in AI infrastructure. Operating at the forefront of AI Inference in generative media, fal empowers developers to create the next generation of creativity tools! Burkay previously led Machine Learning at Coinbase and is a graduate from MIT. 

Thomas Laffont is the Co-Founder of Coatue, one of the world’s largest technology investment platforms. He leads the firm’s private investment platforms across both early-stage and growth, partnering with some of the most enduring and impactful companies of the last two decades. Thomas began his career at the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, where he represented artists in Motion Picture and Television. Thomas holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Yale College and lives in California.

Grant Lee is the CEO and Co-Founder of Gamma, an AI-powered presentation and website tool that has scaled to 50 million customers and $50M ARR with fewer than 50 employees. A Stanford-trained engineer with a finance and operations background, Grant was inspired to found Gamma by his experience creating countless slide decks. He previously served as COO of ClearBrain (acquired by Amplitude) and CFO of Optimizely. Forbes recently named Gamma a Next Billion-Dollar Startup.

Garrett Lord is the Co-Founder and CEO of Handshake, the career network for the AI economy. Since founding the company in 2014, Garrett has grown Handshake into the platform of choice for over 20 million job seekers, 1,600 US universities, and 1 million employers—from Fortune 500 to federal agencies, school districts to startups, healthcare systems to small businesses. In 2025, Garrett launched Handshake AI, which connects domain experts on the Handshake network with leading AI labs to provide the human judgment necessary for developing and evaluating frontier AI models.

Dhar Mann is the #1 digital scripted storyteller in the world. A mission-driven entrepreneur, writer, producer, father, husband and media personality, Dhar is the founder of Dhar Mann Studios (DMS), the digital scripted studio reaching over 143 million followers with purpose-driven, inspirational content that makes a positive impact on people across the world. The company produces five half-hour episodes of scripted dramas every week that resonate with viewers of all ages. Dhar Mann Studios’ content currently averages 42M daily views across platforms. With a 125,000 SF, three-stage production facility in Burbank and over 200 team members, DMS is the largest creator-built studio bridging legacy Hollywood and the creator economy.

Dhar has been recognized by Forbes as the #2 Top Creator both in 2024 and 2025 and by Time on their inaugural TIME100 Creators List in 2025. He has also been recognized for several awards, including being nominated for Favorite Male Creator at the 2024 and 2025 Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards and winning various Telly Awards and Shorty Awards, most recently being honored for “Studio of the Year” at the 2025 Shorty Awards. In 2022, he was also nominated for Best Scripted Series at the Streamy Awards and acknowledged by YouTube as the 2nd Top Creator on YouTube in 2021.

Beyond content creation, Dhar is passionate about making meaningful impact on communities with real-world resources, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to non-profits, charities and marginalized communities. Organizations supported include Los Angeles Food Bank, TeamSeas, Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Angel Studios, Special Olympics, the Dream Foundation, the Burbank Police department, and ARFID Awareness, among other causes that tie back directly to themes in his content. In addition to Dhar’s personal donations, Dhar Mann Studios has also set up many videos as fundraisers to help support these groups.

Alongside Dhar Mann Studios’ scripted premium content, Dhar’s fans can engage with him on a personal level as a dad, husband and entrepreneur on his Instagram and TikTok accounts. Dhar's personal content blends videos of his kids, along with relatable relationship content with his wife, well-known lifestyle influencer and co-founder of Dhar Mann Studios, Laura Avila. Dhar has collaborated with iconic brands and companies such as MTV, Instagram, Universal and Amazon.

His story, business, and life tips have been shared on Forbes, Business Insider, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Bloomberg, and many more. 

Dhar resides in Los Angeles, CA. 

Sean Atkins has a proven ability to build high-value businesses across diverse industries. Over the past 20 years, he has been a pioneer at the intersection of consumer, media, and tech, driving transformative initiatives at several of the world’s leading brands, including MTV, Discovery, HBO, Bertelsmann, Jellysmack, Yahoo!, and Disney. He now serves as CEO of Dhar Mann Studios, the digital scripted studio reaching over 143M followers with purpose-driven, inspirational content that makes a positive impact on people across the world.

One of the fastest-growing independent digital media companies, Atkins oversees over 200 team members at Dhar Mann Studios as well as the company’s 125,000 SF production space in Los Angeles. He also launched and leads DMS’ creator-services business, 5th Quarter Agency, which supports its creator clients to generate more than six figures per month of incremental revenue. 

As an entrepreneur, Sean launched one of the first ad-tech firms, a television startup that achieved a nine-figure exit, and has raised $1 billion in financing. He has successfully built several $100M+ businesses across consumer internet, the creator economy, ad tech, ed tech, OTT/streaming, e-commerce, podcasting, and licensing. As President of Jellysmack, Sean led revenue, go-to-market strategies, customer engagement, brand sales, content teams, and new business initiatives to build the #1 globally recognized creator economy brand. At Jellysmack, he orchestrated product launches that expanded the product line from a single offering to a diverse portfolio, driving over $200 million in revenue growth. He served as CEO of the Digital Video Group for Bertelsmann’s €6.5 billion RTL Group, where he restructured his division by combining four businesses to optimize the European market and drive a 30% year-over-year increase in top-line revenue, becoming the #1 digital video company by traffic. While President of MTV, Sean reversed five years of audience decline, restructured the business to free up $100 million in operating costs, and created a new digital line of business that achieved a $40 million revenue run rate in less than 18 months.

Earlier, as Chief Digital Officer for Discovery Communications, he transformed the digital business by investing in the first Creator Economy companies and developing Discovery+. In prior roles at Discovery, Sean oversaw digital business development, Discovery Studios-West, and consumer products. His background also includes launching HBO Go at HBO, serving as Head of Development and Programming at Yahoo!, launching the first online businesses at Warner Bros. and Disney, and serving as CEO of a venture-backed startup that developed one of the earliest SaaS ad tech platforms. Sean has served as an Advisor or Board Member for several organizations, including Evolution Media Partners, Bain Consulting, LinkedIn, WaveTV, Scribd, and Frequency. He earned his MBA with a focus on Entrepreneurship from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and his BA in Film/TV Production & Marketing from California Lutheran University.

Scott Nolan is the Founder and CEO of General Matter. General Matter is enriching uranium in America to fill the nuclear fuel gap and to power American leadership in AI, manufacturing, and energy production. General Matter is backed by Founders Fund, the first institutional investor in SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril and Meta (Facebook). Scott is also a partner at Founders Fund, where he has led engineering-driven investments across energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, biotechnology, aerospace and defense. Companies Scott has worked with include Neuralink, Crusoe Energy, Planet Labs, The Boring Company, Nubank, Quince, Impulse Space, and Radiant. Prior to Founders Fund, Scott was an early engineer at SpaceX where he helped develop the Merlin engine systems and Dragon capsule, and a consultant at Bain & Company where he worked with private equity clients. He earned his Masters and Bachelors degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell and MBA from Stanford University. 

Guillermo Rauch is the founder and CEO of Vercel, where he leads the company’s mission to enable the world to ship the best products. Originally from Argentina, Guillermo became a self-taught developer at the age of ten, and has been a passionate contributor to the open-source community ever since. He is the designer and co-author of Next.js, the world's most popular React framework, and is also the creator of socket.io and Mongoose.js. Before founding Vercel, Guillermo co-founded LearnBoost and Cloudup, where he served as CTO through its acquisition by Automattic in 2013. You can find him on X engaging with the developer community.

Dan Roelker is co-founder and CEO of Observable Space, a venture-backed space technology company with over 1,000 enterprise and government customers worldwide. Observable Space is headquartered in Los Angeles with a 57-acre advanced manufacturing campus in Michigan. It is the world’s largest vertically integrated hardware and software company for on-planet and in-space observation and laser communication systems.

Dan spent more than four years as VP of Software Engineering at SpaceX, where he led a team of 350 engineers who built the software for the company’s Falcon rockets, Dragon spacecraft, Starship platform, and Starlink satellite network. During Dan’s time at SpaceX, he led the software engineering team from the inaugural landing of the Falcon 9 rocket first stage through the launch of the first Starship and Starlink prototypes.

Before joining SpaceX, Dan assembled and led a team of software engineers at Riot Games, which developed a new League of Legends client supporting over 100 million players worldwide. Dan started his career in cybersecurity as a founding developer at Sourcefire (later acquired by Cisco for $2.7B), where he wrote over half of the code for the open-source project Snort, an intrusion prevention system, and was granted six patents. From there, Dan was recruited by DARPA to lead cyber warfare research as one of its youngest program managers where he created a $350 million portfolio of advanced offensive computer security technologies. His flagship program, PlanX, was adopted as a formal program of record in the Department of Defense and Cyber Command. Dan was the VP of Engineering at OpenSea during its meteoric rise in the crypto wave of 2021. He also founded two hacker groups that were acquired by BAE Systems and Raytheon, and was a member of the winning hacker team at Defcon 17 CTF.

In addition to leading Observable Space, Dan is currently a chief technology adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and an adviser at multiple venture capital firms and tech startups.

Eric Romo is President and Chief Operating Officer of Impulse Space, the in-space mobility company founded by Tom Mueller. Beginning his career as one of the first propulsion engineering hires at SpaceX, he subsequently founded companies in the solar energy and virtual reality industries and spent four years as a Director at Facebook Reality Labs. Eric has a master's degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA, both from Stanford University.

Chris Sacca is the co-founder of Lowercarbon Capital, backing the world’s most ambitious decarbonization solutions across energy, industrial materials, transportation, and advanced manufacturing, proving that hard-tech climate solutions are just good business. With his wife, Crystal, he also co-founded Lowercase Capital, known for early investments in Uber, Twitter, Instagram, Stripe, and other breakout successes, making it one of the most successful venture funds in history.

Earlier, Chris led Special Initiatives at Google, where he founded the Access division and oversaw multi-billion-dollar energy and infrastructure projects. He lives in Montana with Crystal and their three daughters, working to, as he puts it, “unf**k the planet."

A lifelong inventor and mission-driven entrepreneur, Jamie Siminoff created the world’s first Wi-Fi video doorbell while working in his garage in 2011. That doorbell has since transformed into Ring, the whole-home security powerhouse that was acquired by Amazon in 2018 for over $1b. Prior to Ring, Jamie founded and sold several successful ventures, including PhoneTag, the world’s first voicemail-to-text company. Today Jamie focusses on a multitude of ventures through Shark Lake Explorations, his family office. Jamie holds his Bachelor of Science in Entrepreneurship from Babson College. When he’s not working, Jamie enjoys spending time with his wife, son, and two dogs Pancake and Biscuit.

Tuhin Srivastava is the CEO and co-founder of Baseten, an AI inference platform. After starting his career in investment banking and later working as a machine learning engineer, he co-founded Baseten to make real-time AI faster and more efficient. The company has raised a $150M Series D and powers leading AI teams deploying models in production.

Cathie Wood registered ARK Investment Management LLC (“ARK”) as an investment adviser with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in January 2014. With over 40 years of experience identifying and investing in innovation, Cathie founded ARK to focus solely on disruptive innovation while adding new dimensions to research. Through an open approach that cuts across sectors, market capitalizations, and geographies, Cathie believes that ARK can identify large-scale investment opportunities in the public markets resulting from technological innovations centered around multiomic sequencing, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy storage, and blockchain technology. As Chief Investment Officer (“CIO”) and Portfolio Manager, Cathie led the development of ARK’s philosophy and investment approach and has ultimate responsibility for investment decisions.

Prior to ARK, Cathie spent twelve years at AllianceBernstein as CIO of Global Thematic Strategies where she managed over $5 billion. Cathie joined Alliance Capital from Tupelo Capital Management, a hedge fund she co-founded, which in 2000, managed approximately $800 million in global thematic strategies. Prior to her tenure at Tupelo Capital, she worked for 18 years with Jennison Associates LLC as Chief Economist, Equity Research Analyst, Portfolio Manager and Director. She started her career in Los Angeles, California at The Capital Group as an Assistant Economist. Cathie received her Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, in Finance and Economics from the University of Southern California in 1981.

Aditya Agarwal is a General Partner at South Park Commons based in San Francisco. He was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Dropbox where he scaled the engineering team from 25 to 1000. Before Dropbox, Aditya co-founded Cove—a company that was building modern collaboration software. Prior to Cove, Aditya was one of Facebook’s first engineers. He helped build the first versions of key products like Search, NewsFeed and Messenger. He then became Facebook’s first director of Product Engineering, overseeing engineering for products like NewsFeed, Profile, Groups and Events.

Aditya served on the boards of FlipKart—India’s leading e-commerce company, Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, and the Anita Borg Institute. He is also an active investor and advisor to Silicon Valley startups. In his spare time, Aditya likes to listen to techno music, read, travel and most of all, hang out with his two children. Aditya holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Adam Bain is a co-founder and managing partner at 01 Advisors, a venture capital firm built by former at-scale operators to invest in and partner with the next generation of great operators.

Adam is the former Chief Operating Officer of Twitter, where he was responsible for the company’s go-to-market, revenue product, and operations teams. Previously, Adam was the President of the Audience Network at News Corp and ran product teams at Fox Sports and The Los Angeles Times.

In 2012, Adam ranked #1 in Ad Week’s annual listing of the top 50 indispensable talent. In 2013, Adam was inducted into The American Advertising Federation Hall of Achievement. In 2015, Adam was named one of the 30 United Nations Women “He for She” Impact Champions to help advance gender equality.

Jason Hirschhorn is a media pioneer and digital content entrepreneur who has held senior leadership roles across music, television, and digital platforms, including MTV Networks, Viacom, Sling Media, MySpace, and REDEF. He has also served on influential boards and advisory groups such as the Sundance Institute, Pandora and MGM Studios helping guide the future of storytelling and media innovation. Known for anticipating cultural shifts, Hirschhorn blends strategic rigor with creative instinct to build platforms and narratives designed for scale, relevance, and connection.

Steve Jang is the Founder and Managing Partner of Kindred Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm with over $900M in fund assets-under-management. Named to the Forbes Midas List twice recently as one of the world’s top 50 venture capital investors, Steve has invested in over 100 startups as a VC and angel investor across AI, frontier tech, hardware, and crypto. His portfolio includes early AI investments in Perplexity and Fal, both of which he serves on the board, and earlier venture investments in Coinbase and Uber, where he was a founding advisor and angel investor. To date, Kindred has backed 11 unicorns so far with two IPOs.

Before founding Kindred Ventures, Steve co-founded several consumer technology startups, including Bitski (acquired by Phantom), and SoundTracking (acquired by Rhapsody). Earlier, he co-created imeem, the pioneering on-demand music streaming service, which reached over 100 million users before its acquisition by MySpace.

He also supports filmmakers and produces independent films that have been featured on Apple, Netflix, and Amazon, such as Nam June Paik: Moon is the Oldest TV, a Sundance-premiered documentary now on Netflix, and Vitalik, a documentary about Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin.

Vanessa Larco co-founded Premise, a modern VC firm focused on agentic technology. She is focused on backing technical founders with an eye for consumer behavior change at the pre-seed and seed stages.

Prior to starting Premise, Vanessa was a General Partner at NEA from 2016 to 2025 where she focused on Enterprise SaaS and Consumer Internet investing. Vanessa has led investments in Kindred, Mejuri, Assembled, Greenlight, and others. She was also a board observer at Robinhood from 2017 through the IPO in 2021.

Prior to joining NEA, she held senior product management roles at Box, Twilio, Playdom (acq. Disney) and XBOX Kinect. She also started a mobile gaming company, Funloop which was acquired in 2013.

Vanessa holds a BS in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been on the Board of Advisors for Georgia Tech’s College of Computing since 2019.

Over the last two decades, Eric Ries’s ideas about continuous innovation, long-term thinking, governance, and market reform have reshaped company building and management practices. He is the creator of the Lean Startup method, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup; The Leader’s Guide; and The Startup Way. 

As a founder, he has put his own ideas into practice with The Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE); Answer.AI, an AI R&D lab; the Lean Startup Co, which teaches and supports the implementation of Lean Startup; Virgil, a legal services startup; and IMVU, where the ideas that became the Lean Startup method were forged. On his podcast, The Eric Ries Show, he talks to guests including world-class technologists, thought leaders, and executives working to build profitable companies for the long-term benefit of society. Eric has served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School and IDEO. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three children.

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay Great

In Incorruptible, Ries reveals the hidden forces that cause even great organizations to drift from their original reason for being. Then he shows how to design businesses that can withstand that pressure. Drawing on two decades of work with founders, CEOs, and investors, he exposes the flaws that make companies vulnerable to short-term thinking. He offers a blueprint for "mission-controlled" organizations that can grow, prosper, and endure without losing their soul.

Founder of Sourcery, one of the fastest-growing new media platforms in technology, spanning a weekly investing and technology newsletter and podcast interview series with a large and highly engaged following on X. Over the past seven years, Molly has built her career investing across family office multi-asset strategies and multi-stage venture capital portfolios, with a singular focus on technology.

Brent Weinstein serves on the senior leadership team at leading entertainment and sports agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), where he oversees multiple business areas including Digital Media, Podcasts, Games, Talent Business Ventures, and Speakers. He also is involved in the agency’s M&A and investment activities, with a specific focus on setting strategy for the business areas he oversees, and, in partnership with the Technology division, co-manage CAA’s Intell data team.

Weinstein is known for over two decades of success creating precedent-setting business models and partnerships across traditional and digital media. As Candle Media’s Chief Development Officer since 2022, Weinstein led the company’s corporate and business development efforts, including developing impactful partnerships for Candle divisions such as Hello Sunshine and Moonbug. Over two decades at United Talent Agency, Weinstein helped build and led UTA’s Digital Talent, Podcasting, Ventures, Live Events, Heartland, and Emerging Platforms businesses, rising to become Partner and the agency’s first-ever Chief Innovation Officer. He also co-managed UTA’s Insights and News divisions, helped drive strategy and operations for its Global Music and Speakers businesses, and played a key role in the agency’s M&A initiatives.

Weinstein graduated from the University of the Southern California with a degree in Business Administration and earned his Law Degree from the University of San Diego.

Nick is a general partner at Upfront Ventures. He focuses on early-stage investments in hard tech and national infrastructure sectors like advanced manufacturing and robotics, industrial automation, energy and utilities, aerospace and defense, and more. Prior to joining Upfront, Nick was at Crosscut Ventures leading seed investments. Before Crosscut, Nick was an early employee at Warby Parker, where he was the general manager of the Home Try-On business. Nick also served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Human Ventures and as an investor with the Dorm Room Fund, First Round Capital’s student-run investment fund.

Nick graduated with a degree in economics from UC Berkeley and earned his MBA from The Wharton School.

Aditi Maliwal is a General Partner at Upfront Ventures, investing in early stage companies across financial technology and enterprise software. Aditi partners with founders at their earliest stages of inception and supports them throughout the stages of company building. While at Upfront, she has partnered deeply in this way with Arcade, Clair, Renew, Stem, WriterAI and ZestAI amongst others.

Before joining Upfront, Aditi was at Google, first on the Corporate Development team leading acquisitions across various sectors including AI, commerce and fintech, and then on the Next Billion Users team building products for users in emerging markets. Prior to Google she worked in early stage venture at Crosslink Capital where she invested in Chime, BetterUp, and PowerToFly among other companies. She began her career in investment banking at Deutsche Bank, in the technology banking group. She has a B.A. from Stanford University. She has lived between Mumbai, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Singapore and San Francisco.

Jacques Sisteron joined the Upfront investment team in 2022. Before Upfront, Jacques worked at Apeel as a manager in the Strategy division, where he focused on bringing their materials-based shelf-life extension product to market in the EU, developing new pricing models, and prioritizing and quantifying value for new product introductions.

Jacques graduated early cum laude from Cornell with a B.S. in Applied Economics & Management, focusing on environmental, resource, and energy economics. He received a Cornell merit scholarship for his Master of Engineering in Materials Science and Engineering after obtaining his B.S.