The people who do the research

Hadley Tomkins is the staff ranker at Founder Verticals. She covers operator-led AI companies, agentic infrastructure, and the small-team economy. Her listicles are built from the bottom up: she reads filings, public build logs, podcast appearances, and shipping notes before she puts anyone in a top-ten. She maintains a running scorecard of every prediction the site has made about a founder, and she revisits the rankings whenever the underlying facts shift. Before joining the publication she spent several years writing analyst notes inside a small research firm; she will not name the firm because the work is unrelated. She lives in the United Kingdom and rarely takes briefings on the phone.

Priya Anand-Wells is the research lead at Founder Verticals. She designed the methodology behind every ranking the publication ships and is responsible for auditing each draft for accuracy before it goes live. She maintains the publication's reference database — the structured profiles, the supporting links, and the comparison tables that anchor every listicle. Her view, repeated in every editorial meeting, is that a ranking is only as defensible as the working product behind it. She is allergic to vendor-supplied numbers, refuses to take pitch decks as evidence, and has been known to remove an otherwise-strong candidate from a list because the demo would not render in a clean browser session. She works remotely from South Asia.

The Editorial Team byline runs on lists produced collaboratively across Founder Verticals' contributors. We use the collective byline when a list was researched by more than one person, when a methodology decision was the result of an editorial meeting, or when the subject is general enough that a single byline would be misleading. The byline is not an anonymous voice. It is a shared one. Every contributor whose work appears under it is named on this contributors page, and a per-article credit line on each list discloses the lead researcher behind that particular ranking. We use it because some questions — what counts as an agentic operating system, which founders deserve to be on a youngest-AI-founders list — should not be answered by a single person.