boston-college
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Johnny Ayers Is Still Punting Into the Unknown
He fumbled the snap in his first college game, ran out of startup money four times, and kept moving forward. Fourteen years into Socure, Johnny Ayers is widening his bet on who - and what - the internet can trust.
Prabhdeep Singh
Prabhdeep Singh is the CEO of Steno, a tech-enabled court reporting and litigation support company that recently closed a $49M Series C. He joined as COO in 2024 and was elevated to CEO in June 2026, succeeding co-founder Greg Hong. Before Steno he ran Marketplace at WeWork, Enterprise at Uber Eats, was Chief Growth Officer at Clover Health, and served as Operating Partner at Armory Square Ventures.
Zachary Garippa
Zachary Garippa is the co-founder and CEO of Order.co, the New York B2B spend-management and guided-purchasing platform he started in 2016 as Negotiatus. A Boston College finance grad who once worked a Morgan Stanley desk and a luxury-building door, Garippa built Order into a company connecting 40,000-plus vendors, serving 300-plus customers, and processing nearly half a billion dollars in annualized spend. He rises at 3:30 a.m., says he is 'trying to build the greatest company New York has ever seen,' and is chasing a Series C to get there.
Orisa Cherenfant
Orisa Cherenfant is SVP of Industry Relations & Strategic Growth at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering billions of messages, calls, and interactions globally. A first-generation college graduate from Cape Verde who earned dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Boston College, she built her career through GE's leadership development programs before moving into tech. At Twilio, she leads industry partnerships and growth strategy, speaks at major conferences like MWC Barcelona and Twilio Signal, and was named a 2025 Entreprenista 100 Award winner. She is based in Los Angeles with her partner Eli and their twins, Margaux and Maverick.
Ryan Thompson
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.
Libby Roin
Libby Roin is the CEO of Goodreads, the world's largest social reading platform with over 150 million members. A Boston College English major turned MIT Sloan MBA, she spent nearly a decade building her way up through Goodreads product teams before taking the top job in January 2022. Along the way she founded Polk Street Press, a children's interactive app studio, and raised over $10 million for Teach for America. She grew up one of seven kids in Oklahoma - daughter of a police officer and a schoolteacher - and brings a pragmatic, community-first sensibility to one of the internet's most beloved book destinations.
Josh Coyne
Josh Coyne is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he has backed category-defining companies including Figma, Rippling, Loom, UiPath, and Synthesia since joining in 2017. A summa cum laude Boston College graduate in Computer Science and Finance, Coyne cut his teeth at Qatalyst Partners advising on multi-billion dollar tech M&A before pivoting to backing founders himself. He focuses on enterprise software, applied AI, fintech, and data infrastructure - and co-hosts Kleiner Perkins' Grit podcast, where he probes founders on product-market fit and go-to-market strategy. Originally from Cleveland, fluent in French, and apparently devoted to Chick-fil-A.
Pat Grady
Pat Grady is co-steward of Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most legendary venture capital firms. Since joining Sequoia in 2007 at age 24 as the youngest hire in the firm's history, he has led growth-stage investments in generational companies including OpenAI, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and Zoom - a portfolio exceeding $250 billion in combined market capitalization. A Wyoming native who worked as a roofer to pay for college, Grady now shapes the future of technology as co-leader of Sequoia alongside Alfred Lin, focusing heavily on AI and enterprise software innovation.
Heather Cox Richardson
Heather Cox Richardson is a Boston College historian who turned American history into a daily newsletter phenomenon. Her Substack 'Letters from an American' has nearly 3 million subscribers, making it one of the most-read independent newsletters in the world. She connects current political events to historical patterns with a clarity that has made her one of America's most influential public intellectuals - all from coastal Maine, where she lives with her lobsterman husband.