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.

Sam Altman leads OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, which closed a $122 billion round in March 2026 at an $852 billion valuation — the largest private round in history. He dropped out of Stanford at 19 to found Loopt in Y Combinator's first batch (sold to Green Dot for $43.4M in 2012), ran Y Combinator as president from 2014 to 2019, and co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk and others in 2015, becoming CEO in 2019 — surviving a five-day board ouster in November 2023. He also co-founded Hydrazine Capital and Tools for Humanity (World), was Reddit's CEO for eight days, and has made some of tech's boldest personal bets: $375M into fusion startup Helion and the entire $180M seed of longevity company Retro Biosciences.

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.

Finance-focused advisor who has served as President of Coinbase and President of TD Ameritrade.

Denelle Dixon is Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation, a non-profit that supports the Stellar Network and blockchain-based payment technology. She previously served as Chief Operating Officer and Corporate Secretary at Mozilla Corporation, where she oversaw legal, policy, business, revenue, and operations functions, and worked on issues including net neutrality and encryption. Earlier in her career, she managed Yahoo!'s legal team on products, human rights, antitrust, and litigation matters, and worked at private equity firm Terra Firma on brand and risk assessment.

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 President and Chief Growth Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation. He previously served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Blockchain, Crypto, and Digital Currencies at PayPal. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at BBVA, a multinational banking group headquartered in Spain, and at McKinsey & Company, focusing on financial services and payments.

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic Inc. and a co-founder of WordPress. His stated areas of focus include simplifying complex problems and hiring.

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.