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.
Michael Dearing is the founder and sole General Partner of Harrison Metal, a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Woodside, California. A former SVP at eBay who oversaw nearly $20 billion in gross merchandise sales, Dearing is one of Silicon Valley's most respected — and deliberately low-profile — early-stage investors. He taught entrepreneurial finance and management at Stanford for nearly a decade, coined the concept of 'cognitive distortions of founders,' and has backed companies including AdMob (acq. Google $750M), Acompli (acq. Microsoft $200M), MasterClass, PagerDuty, and Signal Sciences. He operates Harrison Metal with the philosophy that great general management is the scarcest resource in startup ecosystems.
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, helped build PayPal, seeded Facebook, and has been quietly central to almost every major tech breakout of the last 25 years. A philosopher-turned-venture-capitalist who popularized 'blitzscaling,' he is now betting big on AI — co-founding Inflection AI, launching Manas AI for drug discovery, hosting two podcasts, and writing bestsellers with GPT-4 as co-author.