Maria Palma is a General Partner at Freestyle Capital, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture capital firm. With over a decade of venture experience and investments in 35+ companies, she focuses on early-stage AI investments across application and infrastructure layers. Before Freestyle, she was a General Partner at Kindred Capital in London and a Principal at RRE Ventures in New York. She co-founded NYC Blend, a nonprofit connecting underrepresented founders to venture capital, and was named to Business Insider's 'The Seed 40: Best Women Early-Stage Investors of 2025.'
Ryan Thompson is General Counsel and Partner at Felicis, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm that has backed over 50 unicorns and raised a $900M Fund X in 2025. A lawyer-turned-operator-turned-investor, Ryan brings nearly two decades of legal and operational muscle to one of Silicon Valley's most decorated early-stage firms. Before Felicis, he served as COO and General Counsel at Unusual Ventures and as General Counsel and VP of HR at Shape Security — which sold to F5 Networks for over $1 billion. He spent nine years as a corporate attorney at Goodwin Procter and DLA Piper, working on VC financings, M&A, and IPOs before crossing the table to the operator side.
Giovanni Ahern is an Investing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms, where he focuses on growth-stage investments. A dual-degree MIT graduate in Mathematics and Computer Science with Economics, Ahern built his investment acumen through roles at Blackstone, Houlihan Lokey, and three years as a Private Equity Associate at Bain Capital specializing in healthcare and technology. Joining a16z in September 2025, he brings a quantitative rigor and cross-sector perspective to backing the next generation of market-defining technology companies.
Jen Kha is the Operating Partner and Head of Investor Relations and Fundraising at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. She leads global partnerships, managing the firm's relationships with limited partners and orchestrating capital raises across all of a16z's investment strategies. Over her career she has been involved in raising over $55 billion in LP capital - an extraordinary track record that spans healthcare investment banking, corporate strategy at HSN, investor relations at TCV, and now the front lines of tech VC. In 2023 she registered as a lobbyist in California to help a16z tap major pension funds like CalPERS for the first time in the firm's history.