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Tony Minella and the business of the second act
From corporate credit to film studios and music catalogs, Tony Minella has built a career around what businesses can keep earning. Now the Eldridge co-founder is opening that approach to outside investors.
Dirk Soenksen
Dirk Soenksen is the co-founder and CEO of Ceresti Health, a Carlsbad, California digital-health company that treats the family caregiver as the unit of care for people living with dementia. An engineer by training, he first reshaped a corner of medicine by founding Aperio, the company that turned the glass microscope slide into a digital image and became the global leader in digital pathology before Danaher's Leica Biosystems acquired it in 2012. A coffee on his last day at Leica sent him into a second act: instead of imaging the brain, he set out to support the overwhelmed spouses and adult children caring for it.
Cali Tran
Cali Tran is CEO of Simpli.fi, a programmatic advertising platform backed by Blackstone and GTCR that runs 140,000+ ad campaigns monthly for 40,000 advertisers. Born in a Vietnamese refugee camp at Camp Pendleton and raised as the youngest of six in a family restaurant, he built a career spanning investment banking, venture capital, startup co-founding, and C-suite leadership at Ancestry, Valassis, Centerfield, Brandwatch, and Cision. At Valassis, he engineered a 5x expansion of digital revenue for a $2 billion company. He is an advisor at SignalFire, a board member of OneVietnamNetwork, and a Bowdoin College alumni council member who graduated cum laude in History before earning his MBA from Harvard Business School.
Tom Davis
Tom Davis is a General Partner at Canapi Ventures, a fintech-focused venture capital firm with over $1.29B in total funding. Based in San Francisco, he leads the firm's West Coast operations and sits on its investment committee, focusing on early- to growth-stage investments in financial technology and B2B software. With nearly two decades spanning Morgan Stanley investment banking, General Atlantic, and Centana Growth Partners, Davis brings rare fluency across the capital stack - from traditional banking relationships to cutting-edge fintech infrastructure. He joined Canapi in November 2023 to open their first San Francisco office, signaling the firm's push deeper into Silicon Valley's fintech ecosystem.