Andy Ballard is the CEO and co-founder of Wiser Solutions, Inc., the San Mateo-based omnichannel retail intelligence platform he built through the 2017 merger of Quad Analytix and Mobee. A Harvard undergrad and Stanford MBA, Ballard spent nearly a decade at Hellman & Friedman where he sat on the boards of DoubleClick, Getty Images, Internet Brands, and Catalina Marketing before launching Quad Analytix in 2012. Today he leads a 510-person company that tracks billions of online and in-store data points for over 750 global brands and retailers, while also serving on the boards of Domino's Pizza and Etsy, and running Figtree Partners, his software-focused investment firm.
Nicolai 'Nic' Ouporov is Co-Founder and CEO of Fleet AI, a startup building reinforcement learning training environments - or 'RL gyms' - that let AI agents practice operating real software tools like Salesforce and Excel before deployment. Fleet raised ~$45M total and grew from $1M to $60M+ annualized revenue in under a year. Nic is also a 3x YoungArts Award winner in photography and visual arts, a former pre-professional ballet dancer trained at Boston Ballet and San Francisco Ballet, and a QuestBridge Scholar from Columbia University. He previously served as Founding Engineer at Respell (acquired by Salesforce in 2024) and published AI research at Stanford's Robotics and Embodied AI Lab.
James Evans is a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and the co-founder and former CEO of Command AI (YC S20), a user-assistance platform he built with Richard Freling and Vinay Ayyala and sold to Amplitude in October 2024 for north of $45 million. A Princeton CS graduate who detoured through private equity at Bain Capital before going all-in on startups, Evans scaled Command AI to 25 million end-users across hundreds of enterprise clients before the acquisition. Now advising the next wave of YC founders, he brings rare firsthand experience from both sides of the table - founder and investor.