Ashwin Cheriyan is the CEO and co-founder of Thistle, a San Francisco-based plant-forward meal delivery company he built from a cold-pressed juice pop-up in 2013 into a nationwide subscription service delivering over 20 million meals. A self-described 'recovering corporate lawyer,' he traded a career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett doing billion-dollar M&A deals for the chance to fix how Americans eat — driven by his parents' experiences as physicians watching patients suffer from diet-related chronic disease. Thistle, which he runs alongside his wife and co-founder Shiri Avnery, has raised over $20 million and now serves the West and East Coasts with chef-designed, nutritionist-approved meals that are gluten-free and dairy-free by default.
Sam Hodges is co-founder and CEO of Vouch Insurance, a tech-enabled insurance platform built specifically for high-growth startups and venture-backed companies. A serial fintech entrepreneur with 20+ years at the intersection of technology and financial services, Hodges previously co-founded and led the U.S. operations of Funding Circle to a 2018 London Stock Exchange IPO. He holds an MBA and MS from Stanford and a magna cum laude degree from Brown University, and is a Fellow of the inaugural Finance Leaders Fellowship at the Aspen Institute. Under his leadership, Vouch has raised over $229M in total funding, serves 6,000+ companies, and completed a Series D round in early 2025 alongside its acquisition of StartSure Insurance Services.
Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
David Winer is the Co-Founder and CTO of Ciro (YC S22), an AI-powered go-to-market platform that automates sales prospecting from target identification to booked meetings. With roots in applied mathematics, a Berkeley EECS master's, and a Stanford MBA, he spent time at Bain, Pure Storage, and Google (where he served as PM for the Kotlin programming language and sat on the Kotlin Foundation board) before co-founding Ciro in 2022 with Brown University friends Richard Lee and Ross Geiger. Ciro raised $3.8M in seed funding from CRV, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, and runs on a stack anchored by Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Elasticsearch. Outside the office, David self-identifies as an 'exceedingly obscure internet personality' and writes a personal blog mixing statistical deep-dives with essays on bike theft and vegetarianism.
Theresia Gouw is a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant who became America's first female billionaire venture capitalist. A Brown-trained engineer turned Stanford MBA, she rose to become the first female investing partner at Accel Partners, where she helped back Facebook at a $98 million valuation in 2005. She co-founded Aspect Ventures and then Acrew Capital, managing ~$1.7 billion with a firm where 85% of employees are women or BIPOC. Beyond VC, she holds minority ownership stakes in the Buffalo Bills, Bay FC, and Golden State Warriors, and is Lead Investor and Executive Chair of an incoming Major League Volleyball franchise in Northern California.
Emily Oster is a Harvard-trained economist, Brown University professor, and the mind behind ParentData - a platform transforming how millions of parents make decisions. With four consecutive New York Times bestsellers, TIME's 100 Most Influential People recognition, and over a million books sold, she wields data like a scalpel against pregnancy myths and parenting guilt, convincing readers that evidence beats anxiety every time.