Alex Stamos is a renowned cybersecurity expert who is currently teaching and researching safe tech at the Stanford Internet Observatory. He was previously the chief security officer at Facebook, where he led the company’s investigation into manipulation of the 2016 U.S. election. It's "kinda a crappy job to be a chief security officer,” Stamos has said. "It’s like being a [chief financial officer] before accounting was invented."

Cyan Banister was once a homeless teenager. Today, the self-taught engineer is widely considered one of the most successful angel investors in the world, writing early checks to SpaceX, Uber, Niantic, DeepMind, Affirm, and Postmates. She is also a venture capitalist, having joined Peter Thiel's Founders Fund in 2017, where she is currently focused on augmented reality, fertility, and heavily regulated industries, among other things.

Jim Collins is CEO of Pasadena, Ca.-based Kitchen United, a commercial kitchen outsourcer and operator that's backed by GV and competes in the fast-growing "cloud kitchen" industry. Collins, who has helmed venture-backed companies before (including Affinity Internet, a web hosting company that was acquired in 2007), is also the founder and operator of Town Kitchen and Grill, a 100-seat new American restaurant in L.A. that's best known for its short-rib quesadilla.

Sheera Frenkel covers cybersecurity for the New York Times from San Francisco. Previously, she spent over a decade in the Middle East as a foreign correspondent, reporting for BuzzFeed, NPR, The Times of London and McClatchy Newspapers. Among her many other pieces, Frenkel contributed last year to the exposé, “Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis.”

Maryanna Saenko is an early-stage VC with an interest in robotics, quantum computing, blockchain, aerospace, and the future of food. Previously, she was at Khosla Ventures, and prior to that at DFJ, where she focused on frontier tech investments. She was also an investment partner at Airbus Ventures and, before Airbus, was a consultant at Lux Research and a research engineer at Cabot Corporation.

Steve Jurvetson is a longtime VC who wrote early checks to  SpaceX, Tesla, Planet, Memphis Meats, Hotmail, and deep learning companies Mythic and Nervana. He serves on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX and the quantum computing company D-Wave. Before co-founding Future Ventures, he cofounded the venture firm DFJ (now Threshold Ventures), Earlier,  he worked for Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Bain & Co.

 Michael Grimes is famous for spearheading some of the biggest tech deals of the decade, including Uber, Facebook, Slack and Spotify. The L.A. native -- who studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley before jumping into banking -- has been called ""Wall Street's Silicon Valley whisperer." He does what it takes, apparently. (He reportedly drove an Uber for years to woo the ride-share company.)

Lora Kolodny covers new vehicle tech, robotics and other breakthrough technologies for CNBC in San Francisco. Previously she was an editor at TechCrunch, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and a contributor to The New York Times. She has broken numerous stories about Tesla in particular, including its recent acquisition of a computer vision startup called DeepScale that could help Tesla develop driverless cars.

Connie Loizos is the founder of StrictlyVC, the daily e-newsletter and events series. She got her start in Silicon Valley at the original Red Herring magazine in the late '90s and has since worked for Time Inc., Dow Jones, Crain Communications, the San Jose Mercury News, and Reuters, covering the people who drive the startup industry forward. She is also the Silicon Valley Editor of TechCrunch.