Executive Profiles

The two-time founder behind Rippling has spent a decade arguing that the best software company is not the most focused one, but the most connected one.

OpenAI founding member, Tesla's former Director of AI, and one of the most widely followed teachers of deep learning has returned to frontier model research at Anthropic.

A veteran of Amazon, McDonald's, Volvo Cars and MGM Resorts, he now runs an AI workspace company, sits on public-company boards and wrote the bestseller Decision Sprint.

The first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, a former LinkedIn data leader and founding CTO of Devoted Health, he is now building a company to speed up the development of medicine.

Founder, trader, people leader and enterprise general manager, she now leads revenue for AI at Stripe and has become one of the clearest voices on how AI companies grow.

OpenAI's first finance chief and later COO built much of its operating machinery over nearly eight years and announced in August 2026 that he is leaving to start something new.

Figma's first sales leader, who built its sales organization from about $2 million in annual recurring revenue to its IPO, now invests as a partner at Craft Ventures.

The revenue leader who scaled sales at Zenefits and Brex, spent about 18 months as a Founders Fund partner, and is now building an AI-native sales platform for startups.

The first employee at Brex and its chief operating officer through seven years of hypergrowth, he now runs Figure, the blockchain-based lending and markets company that went public in 2025.

The Terminus co-founder who helped popularize account-based marketing now runs GTM Partners, a data-driven analyst firm for go-to-market leaders.

The Berkeley-trained distributed-systems researcher who co-created Apache Spark has led Databricks since 2016 and taken it to a $190 billion valuation.

OpenAI's former chief technology officer, who briefly ran the company during the 2023 leadership crisis, now leads her own frontier AI lab.

A Salesforce veteran who rose from recruiting to lead the company's global employee organization is one of the most visible voices on building a workforce of people and AI agents.

The technology chief of one of the world's largest property and casualty insurers, honored by the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in 2025 and known for pairing AI experimentation with workforce fluency.

A founder of the modern data mining field and Yahoo's first chief data officer, he now steers AI and data strategy at Northeastern while remaining chairman of Open Insights.

A former Apple education marketer and Inkling founder, he went from Rippling operating chief to President and head of product at one of the fastest-growing private software companies.

A sales-bred operator who spent twelve years climbing Microsoft's commercial ranks now runs the half of the company that sells, markets and supports everything it builds.

The Scale AI co-founder who left MIT to build the data layer behind modern AI now leads Meta Superintelligence Labs as the company's first chief AI officer.

The Rio-born co-founder who built Brex into a corporate-card and spend-management company and now runs it inside Capital One.

Microsoft's finance chief since 2013 has overseen the company's growth through the cloud era and its largest acquisitions, and now its AI infrastructure build-out.

The former LinkedIn sales leader who spent years as Gong's chief revenue officer now runs the entire go-to-market organization at enterprise voice-AI company PolyAI.

The data engineer who built Slack's data engineering team and created the dbt-duckdb adapter now works on automated training-data selection for AI models.

Outreach's first sales hire, who helped scale it past $200 million in revenue, is now betting that the answer to AI spam is fewer, better-researched touches.

The engineer behind early Google Maps work, FriendFeed and Quip, and a former Salesforce co-CEO, now runs Sierra, an enterprise AI agent company valued above $15 billion, while serving on OpenAI's board.

A former FedEx technology executive, she leads HR services and technology for Amazon's workforce of more than 1.5 million and fronted its 2025 and 2026 corporate job cuts.

A Thiel Fellow who left Brown to build a browser-based design tool now leads a public company betting that AI makes the shared canvas more valuable, not less.

The chip architect who sold two companies, Nervana to Intel and MosaicML to Databricks, left Databricks to rethink the foundations of the computer.

Microsoft's CTO since 2017 came up through Google, AdMob and LinkedIn, and is one of the most visible voices on what AI can and cannot yet deliver.

A veteran enterprise chief marketing officer, she leads marketing at Samsara after running it at MongoDB, TripActions (now Navan) and Lacework.

A Facebook finance veteran since 2008, Li became Meta's CFO at 36 and now steers one of the largest AI capital programs in the industry.

The world's first female pro gamer turned Twilio sales leader built Vanta's go-to-market engine from scratch and took it upmarket.

The operator who helped scale Stripe from under 200 people to thousands, then wrote the book on how leaders scale people.

The Paxata co-founder and former DataRobot chief product officer now leads AI products at ServiceNow, where he is shaping how enterprises govern AI agents.

She was turned down by more than 100 investors before Canva launched. It is now valued at $42 billion and resetting its AI economics ahead of a possible U.S. listing.

A three-time CIO who ran IT at KLA and Facebook, then founded the calendar startup Woven, was reported in 2022 to have taken over Apple's Information Systems and Technology organization.

One of the three co-founders of the payroll company that began as ZenPayroll, he leads product at a business that has passed $1 billion in trailing revenue.

A veteran people chief who has led human resources at Walgreens Boots Alliance and Abercrombie & Fitch now runs HR at Petco.

A finance chief who has taken a company public, run accounting at Tesla and now steers the finances of a cloud software company for professional services firms.

An engineer turned go-to-market operator, author and professor, he helps Insight Partners' portfolio companies build revenue teams that work like systems.

Notion's first marketing hire and the founding editor of First Round Review, she is now a partner at XYZ Venture Capital, where she invests in product-led growth and creator tools.

An AI product leader who helped build Watson's business and Figure Eight's platform, co-wrote a practical guide to responsible machine learning, and now runs an AI strategy and implementation firm.

The CIO of one of the world's largest banks runs a $19.8 billion technology budget and is now building AI agents with guardrails.

A Carnegie Mellon Heinz College professor who runs the CIO Institute, co-directs a CISO program and has become a frequent expert voice on technology and social media.

The Irish-born co-founder who built Stripe into financial infrastructure for more than five million businesses, and who funds scientific research on the side.

The growth engineer who joined Facebook in 2007 now runs the business and operations side of Meta, the job Sheryl Sandberg held for 14 years.

Gusto's former chief operating officer now leads an enterprise AI company and writes about AI budgets, board oversight and return on investment.

He started LangChain as a side project in late 2022; it is now a unicorn building the platform for agent engineering.

A marketer who helped build Drift's brand and then turned his own audience into a paid community for B2B marketers.

An Apple finance insider since 2013, Parekh took over as CFO in January 2025 and now works alongside new CEO John Ternus.

The author of Fanatical Prospecting built one of the best-known sales training companies on a single argument: the pipeline is everything.

A B2B SaaS revenue leader whose career runs through Marketo, Demandbase, Pendo and Walnut now leads sales, marketing and customer success at association-software provider GrowthZone.

He co-founded eShares in 2012 and has led it as Carta through a cap-table franchise, a stalled marketplace bet and a 2026 push into legal services for private-market firms.

He created Socket.IO and Next.js, then built Vercel from a developer-tools startup into a roughly $9.3 billion company pitched at AI-era application infrastructure.

A former KPMG partner and Outreach operating and revenue chief now advises Madrona's portfolio companies on go-to-market, finance and operations.

One of the field's best-known data scientists, who co-wrote the book on building a data culture, now applies machine learning to storytelling.

The former Block CFO and Nextdoor CEO became OpenAI's first chief financial officer in 2024 and has since helped close the largest private funding round on record.

A veteran financial-services security chief who ran programs at Aetna and MassMutual is now chief trust officer at identity-security company Saviynt.

A people-leadership veteran whose roles include Lattice, OpenTable and Exabeam, she became Chief People Officer of the family-owned workplace firm One Workplace in April 2026.

HubSpot's founding sales leader turned his playbook into a venture fund backed by the go-to-market executives who run sales and marketing at other software companies.

The "Godfather of SaaS" sold his e-signature company to Adobe, regretted it, and built the largest community of software founders and executives from a blog.

A B2B marketing leader who has served as chief marketing officer at Anaplan, Conga and ActiveCampaign now leads global marketing at retail supply chain network SPS Commerce.

A Jordanian-born engineer who spent years building coding tools for beginners now runs Replit, one of the fastest-growing AI software-creation companies.

A former Ticketmaster, Magento and NPR talent leader who founded the HR advisory firm Amplify, wrote Redefining HR, and now works on recruiting transformation at Anthropic.

A 30-year Apple operations veteran who built his career in supply chain now runs the operations behind every Apple product as the company's COO.

A two-time Y Combinator partner and former Triplebyte CEO who now helps run the accelerator as a Managing Partner.

An engineer-turned-investor who joined Lightspeed in 2008 and backs enterprise software, with several portfolio companies reaching the public markets or acquirers in 2025.

A veteran CIO who ran enterprise IT at Okta after leading technology at IHS, BMC Software, Oxy, Arrow Electronics and Corporate Express, and who wrote the book Truth from the Trenches.

A former top sales rep who built Bravado into a large community for sales professionals and argues that sales deserves to be treated as a respected profession.

The Coda co-founder and former YouTube product chief now runs Superhuman, the company that grew out of Grammarly, and sits on the boards of Walmart and Spotify.

The revenue leader who helped take Procore from about $10 million to more than $900 million in revenue now advises and sits on boards.

Airbnb's first chief marketing officer, who brought the company its first Super Bowl spot, now leads marketing across Rocket's brands.

The co-founder who turned a spreadsheet-database hybrid into a no-code platform is now steering Airtable toward an AI-native future and a sale to Bending Spoons.

The engineer who joined SpaceX as employee 11 in 2002 and, as president and COO, runs its day-to-day business through its record 2026 public listing.

The former first CIO of Rubrik now runs technology at Sequoia Capital and helped incubate AI companies inside the firm.

A former Airbnb head of data science who now teaches at Yale, runs a data consultancy and owns an ice cream shop in her hometown of New Haven.

An engineer turned investor who co-founded Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2000 and has spent more than 25 years building its enterprise practice and backing companies from seed to exit.

A former Cisco corporate development and sell-side analyst turned early-stage investor, she backs AI, data, open source and security startups at Felicis.

A finance and operations executive turned founder, Spurling built Compt around the idea that employee benefits only work when people actually use them.

A serial sales leader and author who now advises startups on scaling go-to-market, and runs a community around the people who sell.

A sales-development veteran who rose to run marketing at Clari and Copy.ai, and now leads go-to-market messaging at ClickUp.

One of Gong's early go-to-market leaders, Orlob left to teach sellers directly and now runs the sales-training company he founded, Caliber.

The former Pixar and Twitter finance and operations executive who ran Y Combinator's growth-stage Continuity fund is now building a seed-stage firm, Maxq.

The Swiss founder who built Checkout.com from a small payments gateway into a global processor that says it handled more than $300 billion in 2025 and returned to full-year profitability.

A Scribd co-founder turned Y Combinator partner who has advised more than 20 of the accelerator's unicorns.

The finance chief who took the New York Stock Exchange public in 2006 later steered Navan to its October 2025 IPO, and has served on the boards of several companies.

The Romanian-born founder who built Waydev from a Git analytics tool into an engineering intelligence platform, and who applied to Y Combinator 13 times before getting in.

The SocialCops co-founder now runs Atlan, a data and AI context platform, alongside her longtime partner Varun Banka.

A staffing-firm president who is also one of HR and recruiting's most prolific writers and conference speakers.

A three-time chief marketing officer who started in content now advises software companies on marketing from inside a venture firm.

General Motors' first woman CFO, later Stripe's finance chief and a UnitedHealth division CEO, she left her role as President of Fiserv in July 2026.

The engineer who founded TaskRabbit and sold it to IKEA now backs early-stage founders as a general partner at Fuel Capital.

The former Gainsight executive who helped define data observability now leads Monte Carlo as it extends monitoring from data pipelines to AI agents.

A former Facebook and VMware engineering leader who now backs AI and machine-learning founders as a venture investor.

A people-operations leader from Pixar and Reddit who became a venture investor and co-founded the early-stage fund 776.

The one-name author of Gap Selling built a Boulder sales-training firm around a direct, problem-centric approach to B2B selling.

A veteran enterprise sales leader who was revenue chief at MongoDB and Navan, he now oversees sales and go-to-market at Harness.

She spent eleven years as Tableau's marketing chief as it grew from a startup to a public billion-dollar company, and now sits on boards, advises software firms and teaches.

A franchise-system operator who rose to Regional President, built a market from zero to a $200M+ operation, and now works as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer.

The marketer who helped take 6sense from a 75-person team to more than 1,200 employees, and then became its first chief revenue officer, is now building the brand of an agentic AI company.