Profile 13 min read

Lessons from Brendan Foody

Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, recruits domain experts to evaluate and train frontier AI models, popularizing “agentic data,” the idea that progress now depends on specialized human feedback rather than scraped text.
Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Brad Wilson

Brad Wilson, a professional poker player, high-stakes coach, and founder of Chasing Poker Greatness, popularized Mass Data Analysis to replace intuition-led decisions with empirical evidence about population tendencies, joining strategy, analysis, and mental discipline for modern poker.
Profile 7 min read

Lessons from Blake Hall

Blake Hall, a former U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq, founded ID.me to verify online credentials and stop digital fraud, applying combat leadership to the practical engineering of secure systems and trust on the internet.
Profile 7 min read

Lessons from Billy Beane

Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, used statistical analysis to identify undervalued players and compete against richer teams, changing how professional sports evaluate talent, allocate money, and confront entrenched industry habits in practice.
Profile 9 min read

Lessons from Bill Magnuson

Bill Magnuson, co-founder and CEO of Braze, built customer engagement on stream-processing architecture and argued that brands should treat customers as people, not devices, linking human-centered product thinking with engineering leadership through shifts such as mobile and AI.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Bill Bowerman

Bill Bowerman coached track at the University of Oregon, co-founded Nike, introduced recreational jogging to the United States, and invented the waffle-soled running shoe, uniting practical equipment design with a disciplined balance of hard training and recovery.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Bernadette Nixon

Bernadette Nixon is a technology executive who led Algolia, Alfresco, and NetBrain through major growth stages, aligning enterprise sales with engineering while scaling search and AI products and sharpening how software businesses and executive teams adapt.
Profile 8 min read

Lessons from Ben Van Leeuwen

Ben Van Leeuwen co-founded his namesake ice cream company from a yellow New York truck, then scaled it nationally by preserving simple ingredients, pairing French-style ice cream with vegan alternatives, and using restrained packaging to stand out.

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