@ben

The Chicago software company founded in 1999 as a web design firm by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim. Maker of Basecamp, HEY, and the ONCE line of installable software; birthplace of Ruby on Rails; publisher of Rework, Remote, and It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work. Famously bootstrapped and anti-VC — the only outside money ever taken was Jeff Bezos's 2006 minority stake. Renamed to Basecamp in 2014, renamed back in 2022, and imploded a third of its workforce in the April 2021 'no politics at work' crisis.

American computer scientist — conceived the Dynabook in 1968, led Xerox PARC's Learning Research Group, created Smalltalk and the first modern overlapping-window GUI, coined 'object-oriented programming,' and won the 2003 ACM Turing Award; founder of Viewpoints Research Institute and a persistent critic of how computing is taught and built.

American designer, engineer, and data-visualization author known for interactive explainers, the book Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization, GitHub Next prototypes from the Copilot era, and essays on interfaces for AI — now a partner at Sutter Hill Ventures and product lead for Intent at Augment Code.

Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and educator: Stanford CS231n creator and primary instructor, OpenAI founding member, Tesla's director of AI for Autopilot (2017–2022), founder of Eureka Labs, and Anthropic pretraining researcher since 2026. Author of nanoGPT, minGPT, llm.c and the 'Zero to Hero' series; coined 'vibe coding' and wrote the 'Software 2.0' essay.

American blogger, entrepreneur, and writer publishing his personal site since 1999. First employee and chief evangelist of Six Apart; founding director of Expert Labs; co-founder of Activate, ThinkUp, and Makerbase; CEO of Fog Creek/Glitch through its Fastly acquisition; co-creator of the first NFT prototype; host of the Function podcast; essayist on the open web and a recognized Prince scholar.

Puerto Rican rapper, singer, and producer (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, 1994) who went from uploading songs to SoundCloud while bagging groceries to becoming the most-streamed artist on Earth — the first all-Spanish album to top the Billboard 200, the first Latino solo headliner at Coachella, a Grammy album-of-the-year winner, and the first Super Bowl halftime headliner to perform primarily in Spanish — while also wrestling for WWE and acting in film.

Icelandic musician, composer, and producer — the Sugarcubes' singer whose ten solo albums from Debut (1993) to Fossora (2022) treat nature and technology as one instrument, and who has repeatedly been first to new formats: the album-scale app, the VR album cycle, and touchscreen instruments on the pop stage.

American interface designer, computer scientist, and electrical engineer — former Apple human-interface inventor, author of 'Magic Ink' and 'Learnable Programming', speaker behind 'Inventing on Principle', and founder of Dynamicland, the nonprofit lab that built the Realtalk communal spatial-computing system.

English musician, producer, artist and thinker: founding synthesizer player of Roxy Music, coiner of 'ambient music', co-author of the Oblique Strategies cards, originator of the 'scenius' idea, producer for Talking Heads, U2 and Coldplay, generative-music pioneer, and a founding board member of the Long Now Foundation.

American software engineer and computer-company builder: co-inventor of DTrace at Sun Microsystems, longtime Joyent VP of Engineering and CTO, and co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, where he also hosts the On the Metal podcast.

Anonymous-by-choice South London electronic musician (publicly named in 2008 as William Emmanuel Bevan) whose albums Burial (2006) and Untrue (2007) on Hyperdub made him the most acclaimed ghost in UK dance music; he has never performed live, gave a handful of interviews, and has communicated almost entirely through his records since.

Italian composer and musician (born Bologna, 1990) who works primarily with modular synthesis, using pattern, repetition and generative technique to explore altered states of consciousness and the perception of time; founder of the light-years label and Artistic Director of the Music Department of La Biennale di Venezia for 2025–2026.

Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist (1936-2022), longtime UC Berkeley professor and founder of the Center for Environmental Structure, author of A Pattern Language and The Nature of Order, whose theory of living structure shaped architecture, urbanism, and software design.

American founder and software designer, co-founder and CEO of Roam Research — the 'note-taking tool for networked thought' — whose career runs from the civic-tech startup Localocracy (sold to AOL's Huffington Post Media Group at 23) through HuffPost Labs to a decade-long pursuit of collective intelligence.

Canadian-British-American science-fiction novelist, activist, and journalist: Boing Boing co-editor for nineteen years, EFF special advisor and former European director, Creative Commons publishing pioneer, and coiner of 'enshittification,' the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year.

Canadian electronic musician and mathematician who records as Caribou and Daphni — and, until a 2004 trademark dispute forced a rename, as Manitoba. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Imperial College London and founded the Jiaolong label.

American electronic musician, composer, and producer who records as Oneohtrix Point Never — the Eccojams tapes that seeded vaporwave, a decade of Warp albums, the Safdie brothers' film scores, and extensive production for the Weeknd.

Australian programmer and infrastructure founder: former Go team engineer at Google (Go's Android and iOS ports, plugin build mode), co-founder and CTO of Tailscale, now CEO and co-founder of exe.dev, a cloud built for developers and AI agents.

Danish programmer, entrepreneur, author, and racing driver — creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy, co-owner and CTO of 37signals (Basecamp, HEY), co-author of 'Rework' and other business books, and a 2014 class winner at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

New York-based developer-tools founder — a core member of the SST/Anomaly team, co-creator of the open-source coding agent opencode, and a prolific streamer known for terminal-first products and skepticism toward AI hype.

Indian-born American podcaster and writer whose long-form interview show, the Dwarkesh Podcast, has become a leading venue for deeply researched conversations with AI researchers, technology leaders, economists, and historians.

American analyst who founded SemiAnalysis, the semiconductor and AI-infrastructure research firm whose reports, supply-chain models, and satellite-tracked datacenter data are read by hyperscalers, chipmakers, and investors.

American architect, designer, and educator who develops 'evolutionary architecture' — buildings modeled on biological structures that work with natural forces rather than resist them.

Australian open-source developer, conference speaker, and writer on AI-assisted software engineering. Longtime .NET/Xamarin figure and former ReactiveUI lead maintainer; creator of The NFT Bay parody site and the 'Ralph Wiggum' agentic-coding loop.

American software designer and HCI researcher who works on 'malleable software' — computing environments anyone can adapt to their own needs. Design engineer at Notion; previously senior researcher at Ink & Switch (Patchwork, Potluck, Peritext, Embark); MIT CSAIL PhD advised by Daniel Jackson.

American security hacker turned company founder. First person to carrier-unlock the iPhone (2007, age 17) and first to break the PlayStation 3's security (2010), which drew a Sony lawsuit settled in 2011. Founded comma.ai (openpilot driver assistance) in 2015 and the tiny corp (tinygrad framework, tinybox computers) in 2022. Known for livestreamed programming, public bets against self-driving hype, and an open, keep-it-small philosophy.

American software engineer and entrepreneur — co-founder and president of OpenAI and former CTO of Stripe, which he joined in 2010 as one of its first employees. He presented GPT-4's launch, quit in solidarity when Sam Altman was fired in November 2023, and now leads OpenAI's compute build-out.

Pseudonymous American independent researcher and longform writer behind gwern.net — self-experimentation records, darknet-market archives, and early scaling-era AI commentary. His legal identity is deliberately private.

London electronic-music record label founded in 2004 by Steve Goodman (Kode9) out of a webzine and radio project. It grew out of — and then redrew — the early dubstep scene: Burial's Untrue made it a landmark imprint, and its catalog has since stretched across UK bass, grime, footwork, ambient, and leftfield pop. Still run by Goodman two decades on.

Hong Kong–born, San Francisco–based security researcher and self-taught app researcher who reverse-engineers public app builds to reveal unreleased features — the definitive leaker of the social-app industry, later a Meta engineer on Instagram and Threads.

American software engineer, writer, and entrepreneur: program manager on the Microsoft Excel team, author of the Joel on Software blog and books, and co-founder of Fog Creek Software, Stack Overflow, Trello, and HASH.

German software engineer and entrepreneur in Berlin. Co-founded Graphcool/Prisma (CEO until 2020), then went all-in on local-first: building the Overtone music app, creating the LiveStore sync engine, hosting the localfirst.fm and Cause & Effect podcasts, and co-organizing Local-First Conf.

German cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher of mind known for the MicroPsi cognitive architecture, a computationalist account of consciousness, and long-form public talks; currently AI strategist at Liquid AI and executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness.

Independent researcher and software engineer working on knowledge representations and AI-native interfaces for thinking; creator of the Ink and Oak programming languages and a self-built personal software stack; long-form writer at thesephist.com.

San Francisco nonprofit founded in 01996 by Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno to encourage long-term thinking and responsibility on a 10,000-year timescale. Its projects include the Clock of the Long Now, the Rosetta Project, PanLex, Long Bets, a decades-running talk series, and The Interval venue at Fort Mason — funded by members and by patrons including Jeff Bezos for the Texas clock installation.

Italian electronic musician and composer who coined 'pointillistic trance' — drum-less deconstructions of '90s trance build-ups made largely on a Roland JP-8000/JP-8080 — founder of the Presto!? label and a Warp Records artist (Persona EP, Scacco Matto).

Austrian software developer ('badlogic') who created the libGDX game framework, built RoboVM's debugger add-on through its Xamarin acquisition, wrote Apress's 'Beginning Android Games', built civic tools like the grocery tracker heisse-preise, and now builds the minimal coding agent pi at Earendil.

American financial columnist who writes the daily 'Money Stuff' newsletter for Bloomberg Opinion. A former Goldman Sachs equity-derivatives banker, Wachtell Lipton M&A lawyer, federal appellate clerk, and high-school Latin teacher, he is known for deadpan, first-principles explanations of finance — and for coinages like 'everything is securities fraud' and the 'Elon Markets Hypothesis.'

American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University — Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology and director of the Allen Discovery Center — who studies bioelectric signaling, morphogenesis as collective intelligence, and cognition in unconventional bodies; co-creator of xenobots and anthrobots.

American software engineer who created Vagrant as a college side project, co-founded HashiCorp (Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad) in 2012, led it as CEO then CTO, and now leads the non-profit Ghostty terminal project while co-founding Superlogical.

Emeryville, California computer company founded in 2019 by Bryan Cantrill, Steve Tuck, and Jessie Frazelle to build rack-scale 'cloud computers' — hyperscaler-class infrastructure for on-premises data centers. Ships a fully integrated hardware/software rack; develops its Rust control plane (Omicron), kernel (Hubris), illumos host (Helios), and hypervisor (Propolis) in public; known for uniform salaries and podcast-driven transparency. Raised ~$378M including a $200M Series C in 2026; customers include Idaho National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore.

Irish entrepreneur and programmer who co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010 and serves as its CEO. He also co-founded the Arc Institute and the Rhine Group, and helped launch 'progress studies' through a 2019 Atlantic essay co-written with Tyler Cowen.

American software entrepreneur and essayist known online as patio11. Founded Kalzumeus Software (Bingo Card Creator, Appointment Reminder), co-founded Starfighter, spent six years at Stripe working on Atlas, organized VaccinateCA in 2021, and now writes Bits about Money and hosts the Complex Systems podcast.

English-American programmer, essayist, and investor: co-founder of Viaweb (sold to Yahoo in 1998), author of On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator (2005), creator of Hacker News, designer of the Arc and Bel Lisp dialects, and author of two decades of essays at paulgraham.com. Trained as a painter at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

Austrian developer and entrepreneur who bootstrapped the PDF-tooling company PSPDFKit (now Nutrient) to a nine-figure exit, then returned from retirement to create OpenClaw, the viral open-source personal AI agent. Since February 2026 he works on personal agents at OpenAI.

Dutch self-taught developer and entrepreneur known for bootstrapped solo web businesses — Nomads.com (formerly Nomad List), Remote OK, Photo AI, Interior AI, Hoodmaps — built in public and documented on his levels.io blog and as @levelsio on X.

British electronic musician and producer (born 1971), best known as Aphex Twin: a central figure in ambient techno and IDM, co-founder of Rephlex Records, long signed to Warp, and famous for pseudonymous aliases, stunt releases, and decades of self-mythologizing interviews.

American software engineer and internet artist whose viral public-data projects — Bop Spotter, IMG_0001, LooksMapping, Find My Parking Cops, Panama Playlists, and Jmail, the Gmail-style interface to the released Epstein emails — turn neglected data exhaust into familiar, parodic interfaces.

The company behind Roam, the 'note-taking tool for networked thought.' Founded by Conor White-Sullivan and Joshua Brown around 2017, it turned bidirectional linking into the primitive that defined the tools-for-thought wave, built a famously cultish community (#RoamCult), raised a $9M seed at a $200M valuation plus a user crowdfunding round — and then watched the field it inspired run past it.

British programmer and prolific open-source developer: co-creator of the Django web framework, creator of Datasette and the llm command-line tool, and the most-read independent practitioner-blogger on applied large language models. He coined the term "prompt injection".

American designer, writer, entrepreneur, and toolmaker — CEO of Obsidian since February 2023, creator of the Minimal theme and the 'File over app' essay, and cofounder of the packaging company Lumi and the light-sensitive dye company Inkodye.

British-American computer scientist, physicist, and entrepreneur — founder and CEO of Wolfram Research; creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha, and the Wolfram Language; author of A New Kind of Science; originator of the Wolfram Physics Project and the concept of the ruliad.

American programmer and essayist — Amazon, Google, Grab, and Sourcegraph veteran best known for two decades of programming essays on Stevey's Blog Rants, the accidentally public 2011 Google 'Platforms Rant,' and, more recently, vibe-coding advocacy and the multi-agent orchestration toolkit Gas Town.

American writer, editor, and serial institution-builder: creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founder of The WELL, Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation, and author of 'How Buildings Learn' and 'Whole Earth Discipline.'

American electrical engineer and programmer who single-handedly wrote TempleOS — a 64-bit, public-domain operating system in his own language, HolyC — believing it to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. His decade of solo work, schizophrenia, and prolific video blogging made him a singular figure of outsider art in computing.

American security researcher and software developer who co-founded Matasano Security (acquired by NCC Group) and Latacora, created the crypto challenges that became Cryptopals and the Starfighter hiring game, and writes widely read essays on applied cryptography, technical hiring, and LLM-assisted programming.

English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989–1990, wrote the first browser, server, and the HTML/HTTP/URI specifications, founded the W3C and the Web Foundation, and now leads the Solid decentralized-data project through his company Inrupt.

Canadian electronic composer and sound artist, born in Vancouver and long associated with Montreal, known for textural ambient-noise albums on Kranky and 4AD — from 2001's Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again through the gagaku collaborations Konoyo and Anoyo — and for film and television scores including The North Water and Infinity Pool.

American economist, author, and public intellectual. Holbert Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and chairman/faculty director of its Mercatus Center; co-writes Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok (since 2003), hosts Conversations with Tyler, founded Emergent Ventures, co-founded Fast Grants, and now writes for The Free Press.

Canadian software engineer and independent builder in Ottawa, best known as 'kache' (@yacineMTB) on X and as the solo founder of dingboard, a fast browser-based meme and image editor that went viral in 2023. Ex-Stripe and ex-X.