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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
Kathleen Forte is an Investor Relations Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms. With over two decades of experience across investor relations, business development, and fundraising, she has held senior roles at Lightspeed Venture Partners, SVB Financial Group, ADM Capital, and Clearwater Capital Partners. Known for her deep expertise in LP relationships and fund management, Forte joined Sequoia in July 2022, bringing a rare blend of financial acumen and relationship-driven dealmaking to one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious platforms.
Ben Carlson is a CFA charterholder, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management, and one of the most widely-read finance writers in the United States. Through his blog A Wealth of Common Sense, co-hosted podcast Animal Spirits, and six books, Carlson has built a reputation for translating Wall Street complexity into plain-English wisdom that ordinary investors can actually use - advocating for simplicity, patience, and behavioral discipline over market-timing and stock-picking.
Trung Phan is a Canadian writer, newsletter author, and co-founder who built one of the internet's most entertaining business media brands. His Saturday newsletter SatPost mixes deep-dive tech and business analysis with viral memes, earning him 725k+ Twitter followers and tens of thousands of Substack subscribers. A former equity analyst, Kensho Technologies researcher, and The Hustle writer, Phan is descended from Vietnam's most famous anti-colonial revolutionary, Phan Boi Chau - a lineage that sits somewhere between irony and destiny for a man who now runs his own media empire from a laptop.