Subversive

DashPass has stayed at $9.99/month since its launch back in 2018, a choice the person who built it believes is exactly right: Jimmy Liu, the original creator of DashPass. He joined DoorDash in 2016 to run the San Francisco market, back when the company was losing $12 per delivery there, and spent his early months personally emailing every first-time customer to understand what wasn't working....

As AI-generated content floods the internet, how do you know what's still human? Weeks after ChatGPT's release, Edward Tian built the first version of GPTZero from a cafe in Toronto over New Year's, tweeted it out, and watched it go viral overnight.  What started as his senior thesis project at Princeton became the first commercial AI detector, and three years later has grown into a...

In the crowded subscription app economy, building a great product is no longer enough. As AI has made software significantly faster, easier, and cheaper to build, the primary bottleneck has shifted from product development to distribution. As the serial entrepreneur behind multiple breakout Health & Fitness apps like Fitstar and Zero, Mike Maser has experienced this challenge firsthand. Over t...

Every single person alive has asked themselves the same question:  "What should I do with my life?" Tomas Hoyos, cofounder and CEO of Apt, is building an AI-powered career mentoring platform to help millions of people answer this question at a moment when AI is about to make it harder for everyone. Tomas breaks down: Why long onboarding quizzes counterintuitively convert better vs. short...

When Melissa Cash and her cofounders looked at children's apps, they saw two extremes: addictive games designed to maximize screen time and educational apps built around rote memorization. So they built something different. Pok Pok is an Apple Design Award-winning app offering open-ended, Montessori-inspired play - more like a box of LEGOs than a traditional mobile game.  Previously, Melissa...

"If you wait until it's perfect, you're too late." This was Tyler Denk’s attitude when he took the growth engine he had built as employee #2 at Morning Brew - the newsletter he helped scale to >3M subscribers and a $75M acquisition - and productized it into a new startup called beehiiv. He launched with a fraction of the features his competitors had, but built an entire proc...

Most AI coaching apps are just ChatGPT wrapped in a personality. Raj Singh and Mark Manson built Purpose to prove there's a better way. Raj, cofounder and CEO of Purpose and previously the founder of GoMoment (acquired by Revinate), explains how they engineered an AI mentor that over 40% of users already call "life-changing" less than a year into the company's existence. In thi...

Sam Chaudhary is the cofounder and CEO of ClassDojo, an education platform used in roughly 95% of US K-8 schools and by tens of millions of children across 180 countries around the world. Born in the UK and raised in Wales and Abu Dhabi, he studied economics at the University of Cambridge, taught at Charterhouse, and advised governments on education reform at McKinsey before leaving to build somet...

Esan Durrani is the cofounder and CEO of StudyFetch, an AI-native learning platform used by more than 7 million students worldwide. Esan launched StudyFetch in 2023 with his cofounder and childhood friend Ryan Trattner to build an AI tutor that helps students truly learn rather than shortcut their way to easy answers, ultimately earning both of them Forbes 30 Under 30 awards in the education categ...

Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Wabi, an AI-powered personal software platform that lets anyone create, share, and remix mini apps in minutes. Before Wabi, Eugenia founded Replika, one of the world’s first AI companion apps, which she grew to 40M+ users over the course of a decade. A native of Moscow, Eugenia began her career as a journalist before pivoting to tech and founding the YC-back...

Daniel Heintzman is Head of Product at Cal AI, an AI-powered calorie tracking app that grew to over $50M ARR in under two years before being acquired by MyFitnessPal in December 2025. Before Cal AI, Daniel was a product designer with stints at Facebook's Growth team, Robinhood, and Mailchimp, and was later a Designer in Residence at early-stage product fund Chapter One. He started his career...

Mikey Shulman is the cofounder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation platform that allows anyone to create full songs with lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation from a simple text prompt. Prior to founding Suno, Mikey was the first machine learning hire and Head of Machine Learning at Kensho, an AI company acquired by S&P Global for over $500 million. He holds a Ph. D. in Physics from Harvard...

Francesco Polizzi is the former Head of Core Experience at Discord, where he led a complete overhaul of the company’s mobile apps. He has also held roles as the Head of Product at both Outschool and Photomath (acquired by Google in 2023), and served as a PM at Dropbox and a growth engineer at Mozilla earlier in his career. Francesco recently left his role as a product executive to start his own st...

Jack McDermott is a growth lead at ElevenLabs, where he leads growth for its mobile products — including the ElevenLabs app and ElevenReader, a consumer app built on top of the company’s cutting-edge voice AI platform. Prior to ElevenLabs, he led growth teams at Chegg, where he focused on the company’s skills growth and product during a period of rapid change as AI began reshaping the education ca...

Rik Haandrikman is the VP of Growth at RevenueCat, the world’s largest SaaS platform for subscription apps that need help powering in-app purchases, managing customer data, and growing revenue. Prior to joining RevenueCat in 2022, Rik held growth leadership roles at Bitrise and Divitel, and also founded his own eCommerce company called Gimmerce that leveraged printing technology to allow for rapid...

Casey Winters is the cofounder and CEO of SuperMe, an AI-native company that is designed to be the professional network for the AI era by connecting users with AI avatars of professional thought leaders. He is also one of the most respected and influential growth leaders in technology, having previously held product and growth leadership roles at Eventbrite, Pinterest, and GrubHub, as well as advi...

Sameer Ahuja is President of GameChanger, which he originally joined as VP of Finance and Analytics in 2017 before being promoted multiple times. He is also an SVP of Dick’s Sporting Goods, which acquired GameChanger in 2016. Prior to joining GameChanger, Sameer founded a boutique hedge fund called Dera Capital Advisors that he ran for six years. He is also a venture advisor for Marquee Ventures....

Connor Zwick is the cofounder and CEO of Speak, a billion dollar app that is reinventing digital language learning by getting users into real conversations with AI-powered voices. Connor started Speak in 2016 with cofounder Andrew Hsu. Prior to founding Speak, Connor built his first startup called Flashcards+ when he was still in high school and eventually sold it to Chegg. He then went to Harvard...

Paul Warren is the founder and CEO of Margins, a beautifully-designed reading app that recently won Apple’s App of the Day award and that reached hundreds of thousands of active readers less than a year after it launched. He is a self-described “extreme reader” who reads hundreds of books every year. Prior to Margins, Paul held CTO and Head of Software roles at multiple companies, including Daylig...

Weber Wong is the founder and CEO of FLORA, an AI-powered workspace designed to help creative professionals ideate, iterate, and scale their ideas faster than ever before. Prior to founding FLORA, Weber had a diverse range of professional experiences that included stints as an investment banker, a geopolitical researcher, a venture capitalist, and an artist. Key Takeaways: After stints as an inves...

Allen Chen is the cofounder and CEO of Fitbod, a strength training app launched in 2015 that has since scaled to $38M in ARR. Prior to Fitbod, Allen started his career as a software engineer building high frequency commodities trading platforms. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from UCLA and a partially completed master's degree in mathematics and finance from Columbia Un...

Kenneth Schlenker is founder and CEO of Opal, which has rapidly grown into the world's #1 screen time app since launching in 2020, reaching $10M in ARR with a team of just 11 employees. After starting his career in Product Marketing at Google, Kenneth has spent more than a decade founding multiple companies, including a private marketplace for private art sales called ArtList, as well as a ve...

Simon Mizzi is currently the VP of Product Growth at Preply, the world’s largest online marketplace for connecting language learners with human tutors. Since joining Preply as a Director of Product in 2021, Simon has been promoted twice from Director to Senior Director to VP. Prior to Preply, Simon spent eight years as a PM and then Director of Product at Agoda, which is an online travel agency th...

After starting his career in derivatives trading, Nick Candler pivoted into user acquisition before joining Calm to serve as Director of Growth Marketing during their hypergrowth period from 2019 - 2022. After leaving Calm, Nick started his own performance marketing agency called 10 Scale, and is now a consultant, coach, and advisor supporting products that make a positive social impact. Nick has...

Coco Mao is the cofounder and CEO of OpenArt, an AI-powered creative platform that enables anyone to generate images and videos from simple text prompts. Since launching OpenArt in 2022, Coco has led the company through rapid growth, expanding from generative art tools to its new “One-Click Story” video feature and scaling revenue to over $30M in ARR. Prior to OpenArt, Coco spent several years at...