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.
Kenneth Lee is the Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, and Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration, at Southern New Hampshire University, one of the largest nonprofit providers of online higher education in the United States. Since 2018 he has steered the money behind a 16,000-employee institution that turned a small regional college into a national online powerhouse, overseeing finance, accounting, financial planning, treasury, tax, internal controls, procurement, and the campus and facilities themselves. A two-time Harvard graduate and former A.T. Kearney partner, Lee spent seventeen years in consulting and senior corporate roles before deciding the most interesting balance sheets were the ones attached to a mission.
Lawrence Herman is the Chief Financial Officer and AI Strategy Leader at Cents, the all-in-one operating system for laundromats and dry cleaners. A payments and fintech finance veteran, he has steered the books at Dwolla, Accrete, and Paxful, and logged earlier stretches at Mastercard, American Express, Dataminr, EY, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Harvard-trained in economics, he is known for calm during industry cycles, a preacher's zeal for financial literacy, and a habit of walking into every meeting with three discussion points and three asks.
Nihad Rahman is the CEO of ezCater, the Boston-founded online marketplace that turns office lunch into logistics across 100,000+ restaurants. He joined in 2022 as CFO after two decades in finance at JPMorgan Chase and General Electric, stepped in as interim chief in January 2025, and was handed the permanent job that May - succeeding 16-year co-founder Stefania Mallett. He runs a roughly 850-person company from Bronxville, New York, commuting to the downtown Boston headquarters rather than the other way around.
Jim Collins is the Chief Executive Officer of Basic American Foods, a 90-plus-year-old, family-owned food manufacturer headquartered in Walnut Creek, California. He stepped into the CEO seat in 2023 after serving as the company's CFO. Before BAF, his career wound through PwC, Foster's Group in Australia, Robert Mondavi, Beringer, and a stint at telecom-era start-ups Yipes and Spinway. A Chico State business graduate, he runs a roughly $625M revenue, 1,300-employee enterprise best known for instant mashed potatoes, dehydrated onion and garlic, beans and foodservice ingredients sold under brands like Idaho Spuds, Potato Pearls, Santiago, and Golden Grill.
Frank Calderoni is a tech-industry lifer who spent a decade as Cisco's CFO, then jumped into the CEO seat at Anaplan in 2017, taking the connected-planning company through its 2018 IPO and a $10.7B sale to Thoma Bravo in 2022. He briefly ran Velocity Global, sits on Adobe's board as Lead Director, and wrote 'Upstanding,' a book arguing that company character is a competitive moat.
Paul McKnight runs the North American arm of John Paul, the Paris-born concierge group that quietly answers the phone when private-jet calendars implode and Michelin reservations vanish. A career CFO turned chief executive, he is the operations spine behind a 600-concierge global network serving luxury brands and their highest-spending customers.
Thomas (Tom) Moran is the former President and CEO of Goodwill Central Coast, the Salinas-based nonprofit that runs retail thrift stores, donation centers, and job-training programs across Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo counties. A physics major turned MBA turned retail-finance lifer, he came in as CFO in 2018 and was elevated to CEO in 2020 after stints at Conn's, West Marine, ARAMARK, Limited Brands, and CarMax.
Alex Kamenetskiy is Managing Director, COO and CFO of Munich Re Ventures, the venture arm of one of the world's largest reinsurers. He helped scale the firm from a $50 million off-balance-sheet experiment into a $1B+ multi-fund platform, building the back office, the team, and the playbook that lets MRV write checks alongside Lightspeed and the rest of Sand Hill Road. He invests across cybersecurity, climatetech, healthtech, insurtech, and the future of transportation.
Casey Woo is the founder and General Partner of FOG Ventures and founder/CEO of Operators Guild, the invite-only community of more than 1,000 strategic finance and operations leaders. A seven-time high-growth CFO/COO whose resume runs through Morgan Stanley, Maverick Capital, Pantheon, Zozi, WeWork and Landing, he now backs founders building the modern operator toolbox alongside a syndicate of the world's top CEOs, COOs and CFOs.
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.
John Glasgow is the founder, CEO, and CFO of Campfire, the AI-native ERP platform built for high-growth tech companies. A 15-year finance veteran who passed through Adobe, Invoice2go, and Bill.com before founding Campfire during parental leave in 2023, Glasgow has raised over $100 million in funding — $35M Series A and $65M Series B in just 12 weeks — and is steering the company toward an IPO. His platform's proprietary Large Accounting Model (LAM) achieves 95% accuracy on financial workflows, and customers like Replit, Decagon, and PostHog have traded NetSuite for Campfire's AI-first stack.
Pat Cotroneo is a seasoned life sciences financial executive who spent over two decades at FibroGen, Inc. (now Kyntra Bio), serving as Chief Financial Officer from 2008 to 2021. During his tenure, he guided FibroGen through two defining transformations: its landmark 2014 IPO - the largest biotech public offering in 12 years - and its evolution into a commercial-stage company with the launch of roxadustat in China in 2019. With 25+ years of senior financial leadership in life sciences, Cotroneo built his career at Deloitte & Touche, SyStemix (a Novartis subsidiary), and ultimately FibroGen, where he oversaw finance, accounting, human resources, and information technology before transitioning to Executive Advisor to the CEO.
Brian Roberts is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he works across the American Dynamism and AI Apps funds. Known as BK to those in the know, Roberts is a serial CFO turned investor who took Lyft public at a $24 billion valuation, helped Splunk get acquired by Cisco for $28 billion, and was OpenSea's first CFO during the NFT boom. With 30+ years spanning investment banking at Evercore, corporate development at Microsoft and Walmart, and C-suite finance roles at some of tech's most pivotal companies, he joined a16z in October 2024 to bring an operator's lens to early and growth-stage investments in enterprise software, fintech, and America's strategic tech infrastructure.
James Chan is the CFO of LDV Capital, a New York-based early-stage venture fund investing in visual technology and AI startups. With 20+ years spanning public accounting, Fortune 500 corporate finance, and CFO roles at hypergrowth startups and venture firms, he founded JMC Strategic Advisory in 2022 to serve as a fractional CFO across multiple funds simultaneously - including Bow Capital, BankTech Ventures, Breakout Ventures, Lineate, and First Spark Ventures - overseeing more than $1 billion in assets under management. He holds a BA from UCLA and an MS in Business Taxation from USC, and is known for eating ice cream with chopsticks.