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Soumith Chintala co-created PyTorch by prioritizing researchers and debuggability over raw machine efficiency. His experience shows why complex tools must remain usable, while offering guidance on open-source communities, hardware competition, and the discipline of ignoring trends.
Thomas Dohmke moved from co-founding HockeyApp to leading GitHub through Copilot’s launch. He sees AI recasting engineers as “creative directors of code,” a shift that illuminates both enduring software craft and the culture behind developer tools.
Simon Willison co-created Django, built Datasette, and coined “prompt injection” for a class of language-model security flaws. His public technical notes model a practical approach to coding, data architecture, and using AI in daily work.
Sebastian Siemiatkowski co-founded Klarna to solve trust in early e-commerce, helping establish Buy Now, Pay Later. His experience through sharp valuation swings and a sweeping AI rollout examines how global financial networks are built, preserved, and restructured.
Sid Sijbrandij co-founded GitLab and built a public company around an unusually open handbook. His all-remote model combines asynchronous communication, rapid iteration, open-core pricing, and exhaustive written documentation into a distinctive management system.
Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi and a University of Toronto professor, uses high-fidelity generative AI simulation to train autonomous trucks for rare edge cases, challenging the cost and limits of brute-force road testing.
Mike Krieger scaled Instagram to a billion users, launched Artifact, and became Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, carrying lessons from constraint-driven mobile engineering into the bottom-up, model-driven work of building Claude for modern AI products.
Paul Copplestone, co-founder and CEO of Supabase, builds an open-source Firebase alternative on standard Postgres while cultivating an autonomous, asynchronous team of former founders, linking product-led growth and remote operations to disciplined technical choices.