Who you know matters when you’re building a company or organization — and building that network can start with a single connection.
Each year, we select a slate of informative, connective Philadelphians who are engaged with the tech community as our RealLIST Connectors. Last year’s feature highlighted 20 standouts, building on our lists from 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020.
We curate the candidates by asking our community for nominations and combing through the past year of reporting. We sent those nominees a survey to gather more information about each person’s involvement in the Philly tech scene and to hear their personal philosophies on collaboration.
New this year, we included people from Delaware, since the region is part of the Greater Philadelphia ecosystem.
The final list includes 20 people from a range of sectors, including education, venture capital, city government and workforce development. These people are working to create a more inclusive and collaborative environment, with the shared goal of seeing Philadelphia thrive.
Scroll down to meet the 2025 cohort of RealLIST Connectors, listed in alphabetical order.
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Methodology: To build RealLIST Connectors, Technical.ly’s editorial team assesses factors including current role, volunteer experience, participation in community programming, lasting impact on the region and more. We ask each connector candidate to complete a survey to help us understand and verify these factors, and we only include people that have responded.
Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.