ai-startups
(8)
Nikhil Sinha's Long Game: Turning Distance Into Infrastructure
A communication scholar became a university builder, an online-learning executive and a startup ecosystem operator. Across each reinvention, Nikhil Sinha has kept working on the same stubborn problem: how to give ambitious people access to the networks that make ambition useful.
Ross Kennedy
Ross Kennedy is the Global Vice President of AI Startups & Emerging Growth at Microsoft, based in New York. With two decades of experience scaling technology organizations from startup to hyperscale, he leads Microsoft's efforts to help AI startups innovate, grow, and become market makers. Before Microsoft, he was a key force behind Google Cloud's expansion from $5.8B to over $30B in revenue, leading the global Strategic Deal Pursuit division for four years. Earlier, he scaled Liferay's international operations from 200 to 900 employees across 30+ countries. His guiding philosophy: culture beats strategy.
Reza Zadeh
Reza Zadeh is the founder and CEO of Matroid, a Palo Alto computer vision company that lets people build and deploy AI detectors without writing code. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford, a founding team member at Databricks, co-author of Apache Spark's machine learning library MLlib, and the person who built the algorithm behind Twitter's first machine-learning product, Who To Follow. Born during the Iran-Iraq war in Ahvaz, raised in London and Toronto, he turned a Stanford PhD on large-scale graphs into a company betting that one day every camera will understand what it sees.
Jai Glazer
Jai Glazer is a Harvard junior in Pforzheimer House concentrating in Social Studies who has stacked an unusually deep venture and go-to-market resume before finishing his degree. He is Vice President of Strategy at the Harvard Undergraduate Venture Capital Group, a scout at Afore VC, and has worked on go-to-market teams at Rho and at Sana, a Forbes AI 50 startup, plus a summer as an analyst at Alinea Ventures. He also writes opinion pieces for the Harvard Independent and practices Muay Thai.
Evan Stites-Clayton
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
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.
Jeremiah Owyang
Jeremiah Owyang is a General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, where he leads early-stage AI startup investments and co-manages the Blitzscaling AI Fund. A two-decade Silicon Valley veteran who has tracked five major technology waves from Web 2.0 to the current AI era, he is also the founder of Llama Lounge, the Bay Area's most prominent AI startup event series, which has hosted 24+ gatherings since April 2023 and turned away 900+ applicants at a single event. Previously co-founder of Altimeter Group and Kaleido Insights, Owyang combines rigorous tech analysis with hands-on community building, and is known for working from a 22-foot Airstream trailer parked 29 steps from his back door.
Yigit Ihlamur
Yigit Ihlamur is the co-founder and General Partner of Vela Partners, an AI-native quantitative venture capital firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former Google Senior Program Manager and Oxford-trained AI researcher, he has pioneered the concept of 'Ventech' — using proprietary AI systems to evaluate and fund seed-stage AI founders at speed. Vela Partners issues $100K–$500K checks with commitments in 2–7 days, has backed 40+ AI startups, and earned a NeurIPS 2025 Best Poster award for its startup success forecasting research. Raised in Turkey by an entrepreneur father and mathematician mother, Yigit started coding at age four and competed as a top-10 national chess player before bringing that same obsessive discipline to venture capital.