Babak Nivi is the co-founder of AngelList, the platform that rewired how startups raise money and find talent. Alongside Naval Ravikant, he turned a casual email list of angel investors into a $3.5B+ funding infrastructure that backed over 7,000 startups and produced 200+ unicorns. Before AngelList, Nivi co-created Venture Hacks, the blog that demystified term sheets and negotiation for a generation of founders. An MIT-trained engineer who once co-invented the first printed inorganic transistor, he brings both scientific rigor and street-level startup pragmatism to everything he builds.
Minda Brusse is a Venture Partner at 2048 Ventures and Co-founding Partner at First Row Partners, a pre-seed firm backing technology companies that empower brand builders, content creators, and storytellers. With 25+ years in the startup ecosystem spanning Andersen Consulting, multiple co-founder roles, angel investing, and fund management, she also teaches Angel Investing and entrepreneurship at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. A champion of expanding participation in Pacific Northwest venture capital, she co-founded The 1K Project during the pandemic, raising $3.3M for 1,100 families in need.
Paige Finn Doherty is the founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed VC firm managing ~$14M AUM across two funds. One of the youngest women in the world to start a venture fund (at age 22), she is also the author of 'Seed to Harvest: A Simple Explanation of Venture Capital,' host of the Seed to Harvest podcast, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Venture Capital (2022). A San Diego native and SDSU computer science graduate, she built her fund from a book she wrote to explain VC to her parents, using Twitter to raise her first $60K syndicate from 17 investors. She invests in 'technical storytellers' building 'clipboard companies' — verticalized AI applied to legacy industries.