Mike Maples is a pioneering Silicon Valley investor who founded Floodgate Ventures in 2005, introducing the concept of seed investing. He achieved major successes with early investments in Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft.
His curiosity about what it takes to create a world-changing startup led him to explore how revolutionary ideas often appear crazy at first. Listen to Mike as he shares this exploration in his new book, “Pattern Breakers.”
Jason Hreha is a behavioral scientist, formerly Global Head of Behavioral Sciences at Walmart, who uses his knowledge of human behavior to build better products. With a decade of applying behavioral science to tech challenges, he co-founded Walmart’s Behavioral Science Team and pioneered Behavioral Strategy as an interdisciplinary approach. He studied human biology and neuroscience at Stanford University, and is currently co-founder and CEO of Persona, the Startup Assistant company.
Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer in education, parenting, and human behavior. The author of fourteen books and hundreds of articles, he is a proponent of progressive education and a strong critic of competition and rewards. Kohn has been described by Time magazine as “perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores.”
Douglas Hofstadter is a professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. His research into cognitive science includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. His AI interests explore the subtlest and most slippery aspects of human intelligence, as embodied in deceptively deep analogy problems like ABC is to ABD as XYZ is to what?
Dr. Julie Gurner is an executive performance coach with a Doctorate in Psychology. She has coached top-percentile executives, talent, and teams operating in fast-paced, competitive environments for over ten years, helping her clients unlock peak performance. She publishes the Ultra Successful newsletter on Substack.
Kevin Kelly is a writer, futurist, and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His books include The Inevitable, about future trends, and What Technology Wants, a theory of technology. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.
Vinayak Joglekar is head of India operations and chief technology officer at Excellarate, with more than three decades of professional software development and delivery experience.
Joglekar earned his mechanical engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Management and mentors bright minds in software development and product delivery.
Hilmar Pétursson is CEO of CCP Games in Iceland, makers of the long-running space battle game EVE Online. Billed as the world’s largest living work of science fiction, EVE has a highly developed internal economy and deep social structure that makes it an ideal testbed for how the coming Metaverse could work.
Brendan Greene, better known as PlayerUnknown, is a video game developer best known for creating PUBG: Battlegrounds. In 2019 he left active development on the game to form PUBG Special Projects and PlayerUnknown Productions, where he is developing an ambitious virtual world far larger than the one in PUBG.
Philip Rosedale is the founder of Linden Lab, which launched the popular virtual world Second Life in 2003. His goal has always been to build a viable model for a virtual economy or virtual society, not just an entertainment plaform. Before Second Life he served as CTO at RealNetworks, where he wrote some of the earliest algorithms to compress video for transmission across the internet. In 2013 he founded High Fidelity, which builds a spatial audio for group chat. He is currently involved with both Second Life and High Fidelity, and advises on Metaverse efforts.
