Ben Pouladian is CEO of BEP Holdings and Founder of BEP Research, a Substack publication covering AI infrastructure investing and semiconductor supply chain analysis. A UC San Diego-trained electrical engineer, Ben worked in Professor Fainman’s ultrafast nanoscale optics lab on silicon photonics before co-founding Deco Lighting, which he scaled to over $50M in revenue. He serves as Chairman of the Leadership Board at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation and is an active angel investor. His research on AI memory bottlenecks, optical interconnects and the “Memory Wars” thesis has been cited by international tech media and recognized by industry leaders. Ben brings a rare combination of hands-on engineering depth, operational experience and investment insight to questions about where AI is headed.

Phil Lapsley is a Co-Founder and Vice President at the engineering consulting firm BDTI and Vice President of Business Development at the Edge AI and Vision Alliance. At BDTI he leads computer vision and embedded AI projects. Previously, he worked at several start-ups, as well as at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting company that advises Fortune 100 companies on business strategy. He holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of Exploding the Phone (2014), a history of the first network hackers, co-author of DSP Processor Fundamentals (1997) and inventor or co-inventor on 26 patents. He is also the co-creator of Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP; Internet standard RFC 977) and was a contributor to the Berkeley UNIX project.