A member of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team, Jeff Ma was the inspiration for the best-selling book ‘Bringing Down the House’ and the hit movie, ’21’. A successful entrepreneur and expert on analytics, he is also a pioneer in the ‘Moneyball’ movement working with professional sports teams like the San Francisco 49ers and the Portland Trail Blazers to help them make better decisions with data. After selling his latest business, tenXer to Twitter, Jeff now works there as Senior Director of Business Insights. We met up for a coffee in San Francisco to chat about what playing Blackjack can teach you about overcoming cognitive bias, the quantification of work and what it takes to be truly data-driven.

Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. I met him some years ago at the Singularity University, where he was chair of the Medicine Track. Daniel is also the Executive Director of Exponential Medicine, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. On a recent visit to Silicon Valley, I caught up with him to talk about how traditional medicine is being disrupted by the digital age.

If you have ever picked up a copy of the New York Times, you have probably come across one of Carl Richards and his insightful, back-of-the-napkin drawings and posts that illuminate the basics of money. A financial planner, and author of The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money and The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money - Carl is a fascinating thinker on the future of wealth. We spoke about his latest research on uncertainty, financial planning for freelancers, and why human advisors will remain relevant even in an age of algorithms.

Richard Holden, a Professor of Economics at UNSW Business School, is one of the world’s leading experts on contract theory. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Economics at the MIT Department of Economics and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School - and has written extensively on the boundary of the firm, incentives in organizations, mechanism design, and voting rules. Many years ago, he was also one of my debating rivals at university.

After running into each other on a flight to Dallas recently, we caught up to discuss some of his recent research on why so much wealth is controlled by so few, the impact of smart contracts and the Blockchain on the future design of companies, and why now is a good time to brush up on our understanding of game theory.

Tamer Nakisci is an award-winning Turkish designer with a strong vision and fascination for the future. He started his career at Fiat Advanced Design Concept Lab – Milan in 2004. His design for a flexible, wearable "Nokia 888" concept phone over a decade ago inspired device designs that are only now becoming a reality. Most recently his work was featured in the 2017 Wallpaper Magazine design awards.

We caught up in Istanbul to talk about the future of design, the challenges of creating technology that is formless and adaptable, and how creativity comes alive when you provide tools without instructions.