Henry Ward is the co-founder and CEO of Carta, the San Francisco company that started life in 2012 as eShares with a single, stubborn idea: paper stock certificates should be digital. A decade later, his platform tracks ownership for tens of thousands of private companies, thousands of funds, and well over a million equity holders.
SooMan Wolffs is General Partner at Manhattan Venture Partners (MVP.vc), a New York-based firm that pioneered the institutionalization of secondary markets for late-stage private venture-backed technology companies. Based in San Francisco, he oversees investment due diligence, deal structuring, and the firm's Secondary as a Service business line. Before MVP, he was an early team member at Carta (formerly eShares), helping build it into the leading private market valuation provider. A CFA charterholder with Series 7, 63, and 79 FINRA licenses, Wolffs brings a rare combination of valuation depth and secondary-market execution to one of the most active players in private company liquidity.
Dr. Manu Kumar is the founder and Chief Firestarter of K9 Ventures, the firm credited with coining the term 'pre-seed' and pioneering institutional pre-seed investing in Silicon Valley. A serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his first company with $5,000 and sold it for $100M+ before age 25, Manu holds a PhD from Stanford and has backed companies like Lyft, Twilio, and Carta from their earliest days. He is also co-founder and CEO of HiHello, reimagining professional identity for the digital age.
Will Larson is a veteran engineering executive, author of four books on engineering leadership, and the voice behind the long-running newsletter Irrational Exuberance. He has scaled engineering teams at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm, and Carta, and currently serves as CTO at Imprint. His books - An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer, The Engineering Executive's Primer, and Crafting Engineering Strategy - have sold tens of thousands of copies and are considered essential reading in the engineering leadership community.