capital-efficient
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The Orlando Fund Betting That the Next Big Startup Won't Come From Silicon Valley
A venture firm in Orlando is wagering that the founders worth backing are the ones nobody in Silicon Valley has a flight booked to meet - and it wants to be the first money in.
Dave Licata
Dave Licata is a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer turned biotech operator who co-founded TORL BioTherapeutics with legendary UCLA oncologist Dennis Slamon. As President and CFO (and founding CEO), he built TORL into a clinical-stage oncology company developing antibody-drug conjugates against targets like Claudin 6 and Claudin 18.2, raising more than $450 million while keeping a reputation for capital efficiency. He is also Executive Chairman of 1200 Pharma and previously founded Holoclara and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Caltech.
Karri Saarinen
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear — a $1.25B unicorn project management tool trusted by 66% of Forbes' top 50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Ramp, and Vercel. A Finnish designer-turned-engineer who grew up questioning why everyday objects look ugly, attended 5,000-person LAN parties as a child, and turned that instinct into one of the most respected product careers in Silicon Valley. After shaping the visual language at Coinbase and Airbnb (Cereal typeface, Design Language System, Lottie, Google Material Design Award), he co-founded Linear in 2019 with two fellow Finns from Helsinki — and built it to 20,000+ customers and $100M+ ARR while staying profitable the entire time. His philosophy: quality is the growth strategy, tools embed opinions so choose accordingly, and the best MVP in a crowded category isn't minimal — it's sharply opinionated for a specific audience.