Meet the Top 1 %

Professor Ronghui Gu is the Co-founder and CEO of CertiK, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He serves as an International Technology Advisor to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).Professor Gu obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University and his Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. He has received numerous prestigious awards for his work in systems verification, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a VMware Systems Research Award, three Amazon Research Awards, an OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award, an SOSP Best Paper Award, and a CACM Research Highlight.

I’m an entrepreneurial investor passionate about venture investing & building, frontier technologies (AI, blockchain & digital assets, space tech, climate and energy tech, life sciences, neurotech), sustainability, mental health, longevity & wellness, automotive & motorsports, luxury goods, and travel & hospitality.

Currently I’m founder & Managing Partner at Vanquish Venture Partners, a venture capital firm investing in innovators playing to win.

I’m an inveterate connector of extraordinary human beings who frequently colors outside the lines and thrives on helping founders accomplish legendary outcomes while helping investors produce stellar returns & impact.

I manage $1.2B+ in assets across all vehicles to date.

My Limited Partner community includes:

1) C-suites/Managing Partners (current and former) of: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citadel, Bridgewater Associates, Oaktree Capital, Apollo Global, Point72, PayPal, Alibaba, Hillhouse Capital, NBC Universal, General Motors, Swiss Re, Discover, PizzaHut, DoorDash, DocuSign, Sandoz, Gusto, Guinness, Bitmain, Thomson Reuters, Yahoo, Zynga, the Dallas Cowboys, BlockTower Capital, and TopGolf; and

2) Board Members (current and former) of: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, MasterCard, MIO Partners, Fortress, BNY Mellon, RBC, Altria, ARM Semiconductor, SoFi, Warburg Pincus, Kraft, SABMiller, Cognizant, Western Union, Raine Group, Harvard Business School, Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Wharton, and Johns Hopkins University.

Outside of work what energizes me is travel (40+ countries), electronic music, nature, and Burning Man (12x).globalblockchainshow-whiteglobalblockchainshow-white
10-11 Dec, 2025 Abu Dhabi Speakers Agenda Exhibit

Sunny Lu, CEO, established VeChain in 2015, inspired by the potential he saw in smart contracts to automate processes and vastly increase business efficiency. In the years since, Sunny and VeChain have gone on to amass a multitude of leading enterprise partnerships including, recently, Boston Consulting Group, and has built hundreds of real-world use cases with companies across the world. Accordingly, VeChain has gained notoriety as a trailblazer and guiding force leading the adoption of blockchain technologies. With nearly twenty years of experience as an IT Executive in Fortune 500 companies including Louis Vuitton, where he held the role of CIO following a four-year tenure as CTO, Sunny brings a wealth of knowledge in information systems technology strategy and business management. Through VeBetterDAO, VeChain’s most recent initiative, Sunny’s goal is to take Web3 truly mainstream and unlock the immense value of an emerging multi-trillion tokenization and sustainability market.

Chris Williams is an accomplished entrepreneur and co-founder of Messiah Network, a Node-as-a-Service platform designed to make decentralized infrastructure accessible to everyone. Messiah empowers both individuals and enterprises to deploy, manage, and scale blockchain nodes with ease, driving true decentralisation and accelerating mass adoption of Web3 technology.Before entering the crypto space in 2017, Chris built his career at the intersection of technology, business development, and marketing within the defence and security sector, where he specialised in bringing bleeding-edge innovations to market.Since transitioning into blockchain, he has led marketing and growth strategies for several top-100 crypto projects, including the fastest-growing token project in history, which reached a $1 billion market cap in just three weeks.Chris is passionate about decentralisation, infrastructure sovereignty, and building systems that empower people everywhere to take part in a more open, secure, and censorship-resistant internet.