Tikue Anazodo is the co-founder and CEO of Kudos, the AI-powered smart wallet that automatically picks the best credit card for every purchase and layers on extra rewards. Born in Lagos and trained at Columbia, he built consumer payment products at Google and Affirm before launching Kudos in 2021 with Ahmad Ismail. What started as a browser extension is now a 'self-driving wallet' with over 200,000 users, $200M+ in annualized checkout volume, and $17.2M raised from QED, Patron, SV Angel, Max Levchin, and The Points Guy founder Brian Kelly.
Ashraf Karim is Senior Vice President of Connected Customer Experiences & Technology at ServiceNow, where he leads the charge on transforming how enterprises engage customers through AI-powered digital workflows. With over two decades spanning engineering, product management, and executive leadership at Google, PayPal, Affirm, and Cisco, Karim bridges the gap between deep technical fluency and strategic business thinking. He is known for championing simplicity-first design, advocating that reducing cognitive load at every customer touchpoint is the defining discipline of great product leadership.
Maxwell Blumenfeld is the Co-Founder, COO, and Head of R&D at SentiLink, a San Francisco-based identity verification and fraud prevention company he co-founded in 2017 with Naftali Harris after both worked as risk leaders at Affirm. Discovering that synthetic identities with real 750+ credit scores were slipping through the financial system, they built SentiLink into a platform now serving 300+ financial institutions - including three of the top 10 US banks - having verified several hundred million applications. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2020, Blumenfeld holds a mathematics and economics degree from the University of Chicago and operates from Austin, Texas.
Christa Quarles is the CEO of Parallels, a KKR-backed desktop virtualization and remote-work software company spun out of Corel Corporation in 2026. A former Wall Street analyst who helped take Google public, she pivoted to operating roles at Playdom, Disney Interactive, Nextdoor, and OpenTable before becoming CEO of Corel Corporation in 2020. Known for her 'leadership by haiku' philosophy and a track record of driving subscription transformation, she grew Parallels Workspace to 49% net new ARR in 2025 and scaled Parallels Desktop to over one million customers. She also serves as Lead Independent Director at Affirm Holdings.
Nico Perdomo is the Guatemalan-American co-founder and CEO of Catch, a San Francisco-based fintech startup that built an alternative payment and rewards platform for direct-to-consumer brands. A Stanford Symbolic Systems graduate who spent time building products at LinkedIn and Affirm, he launched Catch in 2020 with the thesis that every payment transaction should delight the customer. Backed by Sequoia, Index Ventures, and Forerunner, Catch grew to serve hundreds of thousands of primarily Gen Z shoppers across nearly 100 brand partners including Rare Beauty, PacSun, and SoulCycle before ceasing operations in April 2025.
Alastair 'Alex' Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's $1 billion Apps practice with a focus on fintech, payments, and B2B/B2C software. A serial entrepreneur who started selling shareware at age 10, Alex co-founded seven startups before joining a16z in 2015, including TrialPay (acquired by Visa for $116M), FraudEliminator (acquired by McAfee for $75M), Affirm (NASDAQ:AFRM co-founded with Max Levchin), and TXN (acquired by Envestnet). His rare combination of operator experience, deep financial services expertise, and fluency in Russian and Japanese makes him one of the most distinctive investors in Silicon Valley.
Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's $1 billion Apps practice investing in fintech, payments, e-commerce, and enterprise software. A serial entrepreneur who started selling shareware at age 10 (and got banned by AOL), he co-founded TrialPay (acquired by Visa in 2015), co-founded Affirm with Max Levchin (now NASDAQ: AFRM), coined the term 'O2O' (Online-to-Offline), and has backed companies including Mercury, Earnin, Descript, and Rocket Companies. He is perhaps best known for the investment framework: 'The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation.'
Jeremy Liew is a legendary consumer venture capitalist and Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, best known as the first institutional investor in Snapchat — turning an $8.1M bet into nearly $2 billion at the 2017 IPO. Born in Singapore and raised in Perth, Australia, Liew competed at the International Math Olympiad alongside future Fields Medalist Terence Tao before pivoting to business. After stints at McKinsey, IAC, and AOL, he joined Lightspeed in 2006 as its first consumer specialist, backing Affirm, Bonobos, GIPHY, and Epic Games along the way. A 9-time Forbes Midas List honoree, he stepped back from new investments in 2021 — just before turning 50 — to preserve the family time COVID had unexpectedly given him.
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.
Max Levchin is a Ukrainian-American tech entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal, where he served as CTO and helped build one of the world's first large-scale digital payment systems. He later founded Slide (acquired by Google for $182M), Glow (women's health app, 25M users), and most prominently Affirm - the publicly traded buy-now-pay-later leader with $3.22B in FY2025 revenue. Levchin is also a cryptography advocate (creator of the Levchin Prize), early Yelp investor and chairman, and co-founder of SciFi VC with his wife Nellie.
Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955, in Pune, India) is one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - a self-made billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, then went on to back transformative companies including OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, Stripe, Affirm, and Impossible Foods through his firm Khosla Ventures, which manages approximately $15 billion in capital. Known for his contrarian, 'black swan' investment philosophy, uncompromising directness, and audacious predictions - including that AI will replace 80% of all jobs by 2030 and make core services like healthcare and education free by 2040 - Khosla frames his life's work not as wealth creation but as deploying technology to solve civilization-scale problems. A Giving Pledge signatory with a net worth of $13.4 billion (Forbes, January 2026), he is also a philanthropist whose wife Neeru's CK-12 Foundation has reached over 130 million learners globally, and who prefers the title 'venture assistant' to 'venture capitalist.'