cfa
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Howard Kim and the business of staying
Since joining Hanwha in 2009, Howard Kim has helped build its U.S. venture presence. Now a co-CEO in San Francisco, he works on both sides of the startup equation: backing technology and helping the investors who back it.
Rob Coppedge and the case for a crowded table
From a venture firm’s file room to a decade leading Echo Health Ventures, Rob Coppedge has built a career around getting people to work together. His investment model gives the relationships around a deal a place in the deal itself.
Patrick Donohue and the value of staying in charge
A ten-cent lemonade stand came first. Now Patrick Donohue finances owner-led businesses and asks a deceptively difficult question: how do you build something valuable while keeping the freedom to decide its future?
Andres Garcia-Amaya Put Wall Street on the Other Side of the Table
His parents needed advice they could trust. His old industry gave them a maze. So the former J.P. Morgan strategist built Zoe - first as a matchmaker, then as the operating system behind the relationship.
Tyler Stafford Left Bank Analysis to Rewrite One Banker's Blind Spot
A bank analyst, two doctors and an old friendship found a flaw hiding in plain sight. Panacea Financial grew from that observation - with Tyler Stafford trading research reports for the untidy work of building.
Gregory Green Is Financing the Grid’s Waiting Game
The Australian dealmaker survived a bank collapse, helped build and sell a renewable-gas platform, and now wants batteries to become ordinary infrastructure in Austria. His bet is less about chemistry than patience, permits and bankable cash flows.
Sylvia Kwan
Dr. Sylvia Kwan is the CEO and Chief Investment Officer of Ellevest, the New York-based investment advisory firm built to help women build and manage wealth. A Stanford PhD and holder of both the CFA and CAIA designations, she designed the gender-aware investing algorithm at the core of Ellevest's platform and, in 2025, succeeded founder Sallie Krawcheck to lead the company. With more than three decades in financial services, including founding-team roles at Financial Engines and a stint at Charles Schwab, Kwan is a leading voice on impact investing, alternatives, and closing the gender wealth gap.
Tao Fu
Tao Fu is the founder, CEO, and president of Attovia Therapeutics, a San Carlos, California biotech developing next-generation biologics for immune-mediated diseases using its proprietary ATTOBODY platform. A biologist-turned-business-leader with more than 25 years across pharma, he built his career at McKinsey, Bristol Myers Squibb, Portola Pharmaceuticals, and Zai Lab before starting Attovia, which has raised roughly $255 million to date, including a $90 million Series C in April 2025.
Nick Solinger
Nick Solinger is President and CEO of FIA Tech, the derivatives market infrastructure company owned by a consortium of clearing firms and the Futures Industry Association. He leads the Trade Data Network, the post-trade processing hub that quietly moves listed derivatives trades among executing brokers, clearing brokers, and end clients. A CFA charterholder with an MIT computer science degree, he spent much of the 2000s and 2010s at Traiana building the Harmony network before taking over FIA Tech in January 2016.
Pauline Roteta
Pauline Roteta is the co-founder and CEO of Pasito, a New York based startup building AI agents for the insurance and employee benefits industry. A former Senior Investor and Portfolio Manager at BlackRock, Fulbright Scholar, CFA and CFP, she launched Pasito in 2021 to attack the roughly $200 billion Americans waste each year on poor benefits decisions. Pasito went through Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch and in February 2026 raised a $21 million Series A led by Insight Partners, bringing total funding to about $24.4 million.
PJ Patel
PJ Patel is Co-CEO and Senior Managing Director of Valuation Research Corporation (VRC), the New York-headquartered valuation firm that puts a number on the intangible - brands, goodwill, illiquid securities, complex derivatives. A CFA and Accredited Senior Appraiser, he leads VRC's global initiatives through the Valuation Research Group (VRG) network and is a frequent voice on ASC 805, 350/360 and 820 in accounting circles.
Prath Reddy
Prath Reddy is the CEO and CIO of Percent, a New York fintech building infrastructure for the $3.5T private credit market. A CFA charterholder and former UBS Investment Bank Director in Debt Capital Markets, he was Percent's first hire in 2018, spent years as President, and stepped into the CEO role in June 2026 when co-founder Nelson Chu moved to Executive Chairman.
Junchen Wu
Junchen (William) Wu, PhD, CFA, is the co-founder and CEO of Menos AI, a Silicon Valley fintech building agentic AI for hedge funds and asset managers. A former Head of Quant at Northern Trust and risk portfolio manager for a $3B multi-strategy book in Boston, he is shipping Sonαr, an institutional-grade AI idea-generation platform that turns market noise into structured trade ideas. Backed by a $5.2M oversubscribed seed round, he is on a mission to give buyside teams less noise and more signal.
Eric Chang
Eric Chang is the co-founder and CEO of Claira, a New York fintech building domain-native, agentic AI for private credit and capital markets deal teams. A CFA charterholder with a Cornell engineering degree, he spent nearly two decades inside Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, AQR, and Morgan Stanley before deciding the real problem in finance was not faster analysts but firms that forget what they already know. Claira turns dense legal and credit documents into structured, queryable data and aims to become a firm's permanent decision-making memory. In June 2025 the company raised a $7M seed co-led by Barclays and Citi.
Eric Woo
Eric Woo is the co-founder and CEO of Revere, a data platform that helps institutional allocators evaluate and manage emerging venture funds and other private-market assets. A UC Berkeley-trained mechanical engineer turned CFA charterholder, he spent more than 16 years as a limited partner before founding Revere - building emerging-manager programs at Top Tier Capital and Northgate Capital, then leading Institutional Capital at AngelList. He has helped allocate over $160 million into venture funds and co-investments and is widely regarded as a thought leader in the emerging-manager ecosystem, working to make venture underwriting less mystical and more measurable.
Todd Zipper
Todd Zipper is a longtime education-and-technology operator now running Axio Education, a Scottsdale-based agentic AI learning platform that turns static coursework into adaptive, personalized pathways. Before Axio he spent more than two decades building and scaling online-education businesses: he led The Learning House to its 2018 sale to Wiley, then ran Wiley's global education and talent operations as an executive vice president overseeing more than $300 million in annual revenue. He hosts the higher-ed podcast An Educated Guest and holds a CFA charter alongside degrees from Penn and Columbia.
Justin Johnson
Justin Johnson, CFA, is Senior Managing Director and Co-CEO of Valuation Research Corporation (VRC), a national valuation and advisory firm founded in 1975. He built VRC's San Francisco office from scratch into one of the firm's leading practices, with a deep focus on private equity funds and their portfolio companies. Since August 2017 he has shared the chief executive seat with PJ Patel, splitting the country between them - Johnson runs the West Coast and Central regions while staying hands-on in technical work on solvency opinions, fairness opinions, and complex securities valuation.
Qian Liu
Qian Liu is a fintech operator and data scientist who helped build the robo investing movement from the inside. A computer scientist by training - PhD in machine learning from Penn, BS from Tsinghua - she was an early member of the Wealthfront founding team and its Director of Research, then Head of Data at GoFundMe, then Chief Data Officer at Guideline, the small-business 401(k) platform. When Gusto acquired Guideline, she moved into a leadership role at Gusto, where the brokerage entity sits inside its HR, payroll and benefits platform serving small and medium businesses. In 2024 she co-authored 'The Little Book of Robo Investing' with Elizabeth MacBride, turning a decade of building automated investing products into a plain-spoken guide for ordinary savers.
Robert Huntsman
Robert Huntsman is the Chief Data Officer at iCapital, the platform that powers much of the world's alternative-investment marketplace. He runs the teams, technology, and governance that let the firm ingest, protect, and analyze data across private equity, hedge funds, and private credit. A Stanford-trained quantitative economist with CFA and FRM credentials, he previously ran a 150-plus-person data science group at Prudential Financial. His current obsession: pointing large language models at messy, unstructured fund documents so private markets can finally move at the speed of public ones.
Robert Mallernee
Robert Mallernee is the founder and CEO of Eton Solutions, the Research Triangle Park company behind AtlasFive, an integrated, cloud-native, AI-driven platform that runs the back office for more than 1,000 of the world's wealthiest families. A CFA with three-plus decades in ultra-high-net-worth wealth management, he built the software inside a real multi-family office (Eton Advisors) before spinning it out to sell to the rest of the industry. His pitch is blunt: spreadsheets are 'separate-sheets,' and the modern family office needs one system, not a hundred. In 2025 Eton closed a $58M Series C to push AtlasFive and EtonAI deeper into private equity, funds and global private banks.
William Foiles
William Foiles is the co-founder and CEO of Project Canary, a Denver climate-tech company that builds high-fidelity sensors and an enterprise data platform to measure, verify, and report methane emissions across the oil and gas value chain. A CFA charterholder with finance roots at Goldman Sachs and a stack of Stanford degrees, Foiles bet that the fastest way to fight climate change was not protest but precision - measuring the invisible 25% of warming that comes from methane so operators can actually fix it.
Alper Memis
H. Alper Memis is the Co-Founder and CEO of Picus Security, the company that pioneered Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) technology. A mathematician-turned-financial-analyst-turned-cybersecurity-CEO, Memis co-founded Picus in 2013 in Ankara, Turkey alongside two university friends — combining a rare background in sovereign debt management, financial risk, and a CFA designation with the mission to replace assumption-based security with continuous, evidence-based defense validation. Under his leadership, Picus has raised $80M in total funding (including a $45M Series C in 2024), serves 500+ enterprise customers including Mastercard, Visa, and Vodafone, and has simulated over one billion cyberattacks.
Paul Weinstein
Paul Weinstein is the Founder, General Partner, and COO of Azure Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he founded in 2000 with over $750 million under management across 8 funds and more than 200 investments. A former top-ranked Wall Street equity research analyst covering data communications at firms including Credit Suisse First Boston and Deutsche Bank, Paul transitioned from sell-side analyst to VC investor and has backed transformative technology companies including Docker, VMware, Salesforce (via Prediction.io), and Calix. He focuses on early and mid-stage ventures in cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, AI, and communications technology across North America.
Ran Ding
Ran Ding is a General Partner and Co-Head of the Growth Equity team at Norwest Venture Partners, one of the most active multi-stage venture and growth equity firms in the world. The son of Chinese immigrants who came to America when he was three years old, Ran joined Norwest in 2011 as the third member of its growth equity team and was elevated to General Partner in February 2024. He focuses on B2B software and tech-enabled services companies across AI, data, SaaS, fintech, and marketplaces, partnering with founder-led businesses scaling from double-digit to triple-digit revenues. A two-time GrowthCap Top 40 Under 40 Growth Investor honoree, he has overseen 10+ successful exits and holds board seats at 8+ portfolio companies. Beyond finance, he spent his twenties producing music that accumulated roughly two million YouTube views and once hit a game-winning shot at Madison Square Garden.
Sonya Brown
Sonya Brown is a General Partner and Co-Head of Growth Equity at Norwest Venture Partners, a leading venture and growth equity firm managing over $12.5 billion in capital. With more than 20 years of investment experience spanning Bear Stearns, iXL Ventures, and Summit Partners, she joined Norwest in 2011 and has built a reputation as one of the most influential investors in consumer products, e-commerce, retail, and business services. Her portfolio includes Babylist, Madison Reed, Kendra Scott, and PCA Skin. A perennial honoree on M&A's Most Influential Women list, she is equally recognized for her work advancing diversity and inclusion in private equity.
SooMan Wolffs
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.
Spencer Bogart
Spencer Bogart is a General Partner at Blockchain Capital, one of the oldest and most active venture firms in the crypto industry. A CFA charter holder who started his crypto career writing Wall Street's first blockchain research report at Needham & Company, Bogart now leads research across Blockchain Capital's five funds and 85+ investments. Known on Twitter as @CremeDeLaCrypto, he made early bets on DeFi before the term existed and has been a consistent voice for Bitcoin fundamentals and crypto infrastructure since 2014.
Steve Reale
Steve Reale is General Partner & CFO at Ulu Ventures, a Palo Alto-based seed-stage venture firm with $400M+ AUM known for backing diverse founders using a rigorous, data-driven decision analysis framework. A Kauffman Fellow (Class 14) with a CFA designation and 25+ years of Silicon Valley experience spanning equity research, early-stage startups, and venture investing, Reale brings an unusually analytical lens to seed-stage bets - applying probability-weighted risk modeling borrowed from pharmaceutical R&D and oil & gas exploration to evaluate founders and markets. His portfolio work spans 10 unicorns including Guild Education, BetterUp, and Figure.
Christa Quarles
Christa Quarles is the CEO of Parallels, a KKR-backed desktop virtualization and remote-work software company spun out of Corel Corporation in 2026. A former Wall Street analyst who helped take Google public, she pivoted to operating roles at Playdom, Disney Interactive, Nextdoor, and OpenTable before becoming CEO of Corel Corporation in 2020. Known for her 'leadership by haiku' philosophy and a track record of driving subscription transformation, she grew Parallels Workspace to 49% net new ARR in 2025 and scaled Parallels Desktop to over one million customers. She also serves as Lead Independent Director at Affirm Holdings.
Mike Fitzgibbons
Mike Fitzgibbons is the CEO and Founder of Claritas Rx, a South San Francisco-based healthtech company that uses AI and real-world patient-level data to help biopharmaceutical companies track, understand, and support patients across the specialty drug treatment journey. Founded in 2011, Claritas Rx serves 20+ rare and specialty therapeutic areas and has appeared on Inc.'s 2025 list of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies. Before founding Claritas Rx, Fitzgibbons spent seven years at Morgan Stanley as an equity research analyst covering pharma services and drug distribution, then joined Genentech where he worked on pricing strategy and led the Avastin marketing team - experiences that directly shaped his conviction that patient-level data, not aggregated reports, is what biopharma companies actually need.