Stellar Development Foundation

Jed McCaleb is Director of Stellar.org and founder of Vast. He cofounded the Stellar Development Foundation to address gaps in global financial infrastructure through decentralized systems designed for broader economic access.

Cody Phillips is a cofounder and Director of the Stellar Development Foundation (Stellar.org), an organization focused on decentralized financial systems. He is currently the founder of Vast and works as a programmer developing open, decentralized technologies.

David Mazières is Co-founder and Chief Scientist at the Stellar Development Foundation and a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research areas include operating systems, security, and distributed systems, and he is affiliated with open source projects at Stanford, Intrinsic (GitStar), and Stellar.

Jason Karsh is Chief Marketing Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. His professional background spans the technology, software, consumer electronics, and cryptocurrency sectors, with experience in digital strategy, marketing strategy, and strategic partnerships.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte is Head of Investor Relations at Impact Fund Denmark (formerly IFU), where he leads engagement with private and institutional investors in the firm's blended finance vehicles, Sustainable Development Funds I and II. He previously held roles including Director for Sustainability and Global Affairs at Advice, Chief Business Officer at C-MORE, and Nordic Director for Sustainability at NTT DATA. He is the author of the book Forretning for Fremtiden (Business for the Future), serves as a professional board member, and has chaired the Sustainability Advisory Board of an equity fund.

Nicolas Barry is the CTO at Stellar.org, with over 20 years of experience developing distributed and redundant applications on commodity hardware and 15 years managing teams of senior developers and architects. His technical specialties include large-scale web services, cross-platform development, and languages such as C, C++, C#, Go, and Perl, across Windows, Linux, and cloud computing environments.

Raja Chakravorti is Chief Business Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation, where he leads business development across stablecoin infrastructure, real-world asset tokenization, cross-border payments, and decentralized finance, with a focus on emerging markets. He has twenty years of experience in financial services, including roles at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, PayPal, and Plaid.

Naval Ravikant co-founded AngelList, the platform that turned angel investing into infrastructure through syndicates and rolling funds. His own early checks included Twitter, Uber, and Postmates, and his writing and podcast appearances on wealth, leverage, and happiness have earned him an audience well beyond Silicon Valley. He remains AngelList's chairman and continues to invest personally.

Keith Rabois held early executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square before building an investing record that spans Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Faire. He co-founded the proptech company Opendoor and has alternated between Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, returning to Khosla as a managing director in early 2024. He is known for strong opinions on startup talent density and for championing Miami as a tech hub.

Patrick Collison co-founded Stripe with his brother John in 2010 and has run it since — a company valued at $159 billion in its February 2026 tender offer, processing $1.9 trillion of payment volume in 2025 and robustly profitable. A Limerick teenager who won Ireland's Young Scientist competition at 16 for a LISP-like programming language, he dropped out of MIT, sold his first company Auctomatic at 19, and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 28. Beyond Stripe he co-founded the Arc Institute and Fast Grants, publishes through Stripe Press, and joined Meta's board in 2025.

Greg Stein is the founder and CEO of Super Technologies and Hellen's Rock. He focuses his investments on early-stage ideas and is involved in philanthropy.

Kristy Berner is Chief Marketing Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. Her background spans the technology, software, consumer electronics, and crypto sectors, with experience in digital strategy, marketing strategy, entrepreneurship, and strategic partnerships.

Maryam Mazraei is a Technical Product Marketing Lead at Stellar Development Foundation with over 10 years of experience across startups and scaleups in SaaS, AI/ML, and blockchain sectors. She founded a sustainable supply chain company in textiles at age 18 and created Autopsy, a database of failed startups that gained significant media coverage upon its 2015 launch. Mazraei has also served as a VC investor at Ascension and launched ventures including Crowdmuse, an onchain ecommerce platform using stablecoin payments, and Aleph, an AI-enhanced audiobook application.

Saka Saddiq Nuru works in marketing at Stellar Development Foundation. He has background in venture capital and focuses on AI, customer experience, and go-to-market strategy.