Arpan Shah is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where he leads early-stage investments in AI, fintech, and data infrastructure. A Stanford-trained engineer from Kolkata, he was on the founding team at Robinhood, later founded Flannel (acquired by Plaid in 2021), and was a partner at Pear VC and a Sequoia Scout before joining Spark in November 2024.
Eugene Johnson is the founder and CEO of Revi, an AI-powered restaurant POS and revenue growth platform headquartered in San Francisco. Growing up in one of New York City's roughest neighborhoods, Johnson started his first business at 18, built a career in enterprise sales at Cisco Meraki, and pivoted to found Revi — a platform now serving 1M+ consumers and processing nearly $100M in transactions. He is also an Amazon bestselling author of 'The Mental Playbook' and a competitive chess player who ranks in the 85-90th percentile globally.
Rohan Sathe is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nightfall AI, the AI-native data loss prevention platform built for the modern enterprise. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and nationally ranked chess player, Sathe co-founded Nightfall in 2018 after leading backend engineering at Uber Eats, where managing petabytes of sensitive data across fragmented SaaS systems exposed the deep inadequacy of legacy DLP tools. Nightfall has raised $60.3M in total funding and is redefining how enterprises protect sensitive data across SaaS apps, endpoints, browsers, and AI workflows.
Sophia Luo is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she backs early-stage founders building AI-native applications and enabling infrastructure. A Bay Area native who triple-majored at MIT in four years, she was a nationally ranked chess player by age eight and carried that competitive instinct into the AI startup world - first as an early engineer at Scale AI, then as a founding product engineer at Character.AI. She joined Greylock in 2024, made angel bets on Cognition and Mercor before they were household names, and landed on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in venture capital within her first year as an investor.
Pedro Paulino is the 25-year-old Harvard dropout CEO and co-founder of Tavrn, an AI-powered case preparation platform transforming personal injury law firms. A former competitive chess player who honed strategic thinking before stints at Kalshi and PearPop, Paulino pivoted from building a creative-professional networking app into one of legal tech's fastest-rising companies - raising $21.6M total to automate medical chronologies, demand letters, and client intake for contingency-fee attorneys across the US.
Sir Demis Hassabis CBE FRS is a British AI researcher, neuroscientist, chess prodigy, and game designer who co-founded DeepMind in 2011 and serves as CEO of Google DeepMind. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold's protein structure prediction, was knighted for services to AI, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the development of artificial general intelligence.
Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC — a firm managing over $6 billion in assets. A chess prodigy turned PayPal intern turned Peter Thiel protege, Lonsdale built his empire around the belief that the most important companies are the ones governments and defense establishments can't function without. Based in Austin, Texas, he hosts the American Optimist podcast, co-founded the University of Austin, and runs the Cicero Institute — all while backing defense tech titans like Anduril at a $30.5 billion valuation.
Josh Waitzkin is a chess International Master, two-time Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands World Champion, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, bestselling author of 'The Art of Learning,' performance coach to elite athletes and executives, and founder of The Art of Learning Project. A prodigy who drew with Garry Kasparov at age 11, starred in a Hollywood film about his own chess career, won a martial arts world title on his birthday, became Marcelo Garcia's first-ever black belt, and now consults for the Boston Celtics from a jungle compound in Costa Rica where he trains big-wave foil surfing with Laird Hamilton.