Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
Brian Ma is the founder and general partner of Iterative, a Singapore-based YC-style accelerator backing pre-seed and seed startups across Southeast Asia. A four-time founder before becoming a full-time investor, he co-founded Divvy Homes (a16z, GIC), Decide.com (acquired by eBay in 2013), and Weave (YC S14), and was one of the earliest product managers at Zillow.
Charlotte He is a General Partner at Cardinal Ventures, the student-led accelerator at Stanford backing early-stage tech and bio startups. She studies Biology and Data Science at Stanford and fences saber for the Cardinal varsity team. Foster City native; National Merit Scholar; Pan American Cadet silver medalist.
Giulianna Crivello is the Founding General Partner of DSH Ventures, the pre-seed investment arm of Draper Startup House — the global co-living and coworking network for entrepreneurs backed by legendary VC Tim Draper. A 2018 valedictorian from Sierra Nevada College, she went from research analyst in Nevada to directing investments across 14 countries in her first year at DSH Ventures. She co-manages the fund with Vikram Bharati and has facilitated over 215 investor introductions to startups spanning the US, Singapore, India, and beyond, while helping build Draper Startup House into a presence spanning 25 embassies across 5 continents.
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.
Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at Y Combinator and serial founder who went from Oxford law to Silicon Valley startup culture. He co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers (Patrick and John, later of Stripe fame) in 2007, sold it for $5M in under a year, then became YC's first non-founder partner in 2010. He co-founded Initialized Capital with Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian, co-founded technical hiring platform Triplebyte in 2015 (acquired by Karat in 2023), and returned to YC in 2020 as a Group Partner before becoming Managing Partner. He has advised over 1,000 companies across 17 YC batches and worked with more than 20 unicorns including Coinbase, Instacart, and Gusto.
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Katia Ameri is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on the intersection of consumer and technology. An LA native of Iranian descent and Stanford graduate, she was the first investment hire at Pear VC, then founded Mirra - a skincare company that grew to 200,000+ newsletter subscribers with zero ad spend - before joining a16z in 2021. At a16z she leads consumer investments, runs the Speedrun accelerator program, and is the founder of Tech Week by a16z, a decentralized conference series in SF, LA, and NYC that drew 40,000+ attendees and 1,000+ events in New York alone.
Mayowa Ajayi is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the Capital Network team, focused on consumer, AI apps, and speedrun companies. He brings over 15 years of investment banking experience - most recently as Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners and eight years at Barclays in the Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications group - to the firm's effort to identify and support the next generation of high-growth startups. Since joining a16z in December 2024, he has become a key figure in the a16z speedrun accelerator program and an educator on startup finance fundamentals, translating Wall Street rigor into founder-friendly insights.
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Tom Hammer is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads People Practices for a16z speedrun, the firm's early-stage accelerator investing up to $1M in pre-seed startups. A veteran people operator who has scaled teams at Riot Games and Bird Rides, Tom coaches founders on talent strategy, organizational design, and building high-performance cultures from day one. He is known for his direct, founder-first approach and his belief that strong hiring is the single greatest lever a startup has.
Babar Ahmed is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mindstorm Studios, Pakistan's pioneering independent mobile game studio behind 1 billion+ downloads and global chart-toppers like Hexa Sort. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer who quit a Silicon Valley circuit engineering career to return to Pakistan and build a gaming company from the ground up, he has transformed a startup funded by his father into a 150-person studio with 2 million daily active users, while also co-founding M-Labs (a game development accelerator) and serving as head of strategy at AppLovin's Lion Studios.
Yasin Ehsan is a New York-bred software engineer turned edtech founder and venture scout. After winning 13 hackathons, landing a job at Capital One the week he graduated, and filing two AWS patents on the Eno chatbot, he co-founded Headstarter - an edtech platform that has helped generate 60+ six-figure job offers for undergrads. In 2025, he joined Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun accelerator as a scout, bridging the gap between emerging technical talent and Silicon Valley capital.
Leandra Elberger is the Head of Platform at Forum Ventures, New York's leading pre-seed fund and accelerator for B2B SaaS startups. With a career winding through global health, Wall Street, entrepreneurship education, and venture capital, she has built expertise in founder support and community infrastructure. A Tufts grad with an MBA with distinction from Cornell Johnson, she previously served as Studio Director at Cornell Tech and Head of Platform at Atento Capital, and has authored thought pieces on healthcare market opportunities and fintech infrastructure for founders. Her guiding philosophy: a career is a choice that indicates your values.
Sarah Gowe is the Platform Operations Manager at Forum Ventures, one of North America's leading pre-seed B2B SaaS funds and accelerators. Based in New York, she came up through hospitality, experiential events (The Yacht Week), and tech platforms (Airbnb, Bumble, NHL XP) before landing in venture — where she now works directly with early-stage founders navigating the zero-to-one journey. At Forum, she's part of a team that has funded 430+ companies and helped unlock over $1B in follow-on capital.
Jake Gibson co-founded NerdWallet with his middle-school friend Tim Chen, bootstrapped it for two years with zero revenue before Google's algorithm updates turned it into a traffic machine, then stepped away as it scaled toward its NASDAQ IPO. He spent years as an angel investor making early bets on companies like Chipper Cash (unicorn) and Albert, before co-founding Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) with Sheel Mohnot in 2019. BTV has grown from a $75M debut fund to $450M+ AUM across three funds, focused exclusively on pre-seed and seed-stage fintech globally. In 2023, Gibson and Mohnot launched The Mint, a fintech-specific accelerator in San Francisco. He has a Kierkegaard quote tattooed on his ribs and describes his post-NerdWallet years as his 'commitment issues' phase.
Rob Walling is the godfather of bootstrapped SaaS - a serial entrepreneur who has started six companies (five bootstrapped), sold Drip in an 8-figure acquisition to Leadpages, co-founded MicroConf (the original community for bootstrapped B2B SaaS founders), and launched TinySeed, a category-leading accelerator that has invested in 230+ companies with a 43% millionaire rate among exited founders. He hosts 'Startups for the Rest of Us' (800+ episodes, 15M+ downloads), has published five best-selling books, and champions the idea that a sustainable, founder-owned company beats the VC treadmill every time.
Shahed Khan is the co-founder of Loom, the async video messaging platform that grew from a Chrome extension to 25 million users across 350,000+ companies before being acquired by Atlassian for $975 million in 2023. A Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Khan started his entrepreneurial journey at 16 in suburban Chicago, founding Viatask before connecting with Joe Thomas and Vinay Hiremath to build Loom through two pivots and years of near-failure. He now lives in New York City, angel-investing in 40+ companies and staying active in the startup ecosystem.
Andrew Chen is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Games Fund and the Speedrun accelerator program. He is best known for coining the term 'growth hacker' in a 2012 essay that reshaped how Silicon Valley thinks about product distribution, and for his book 'The Cold Start Problem' (2021), a landmark text on how networked products escape the bootstrapping trap. Before a16z, he led Rider Growth at Uber during the company's most explosive era - expanding from dozens to 800 cities and reaching 100 million active riders. A prolific writer with 650+ essays and a Substack newsletter, he is one of the most-read voices on growth, gaming, and consumer startups.