Tagged: consumer-tech
17 results
Marriage Pact
Marriage Pact is a research-driven matchmaking company, born as a 2017 Stanford economics class project, that runs an annual values-based questionnaire on college campuses. Instead of judging looks or swiping, students answer roughly 70 questions about their deepest values, and a stable-matching algorithm pairs each person with their single most compatible 'backup plan' on campus. Founded by Liam McGregor and Sophia Sterling-Angus, it has expanded from one campus to more than 100 schools and over 600,000 participants, and raised a $5M seed round in 2022 to keep building relationship technology.
Vishal Joshi
Vishal Joshi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Joy, a modern wedding and celebration platform that has helped millions of couples plan their weddings with beautifully designed websites, all-in-one registries, and guest management tools. A former Microsoft Azure product manager who spent nearly a decade helping build cloud infrastructure, Joshi left to co-found Joy in 2014 through Y Combinator's S16 cohort. Joy has raised over $44M in funding from investors including General Catalyst, Sierra Ventures, and celebrity angels Joe Montana and Marc Pincus, and has grown to nearly 500 employees.
Yash Kewalramani
Yash Kewalramani is the co-founder of Cherry App, a Bengaluru-based social commerce startup that pays Instagram creators cashback for shopping and sharing. Backed by All In Capital, Cherry lets users earn 30-70% cashback by posting about brands on social media - turning everyday shoppers into micro-marketers. A Swarthmore College mathematics and economics graduate, Yash previously worked as a product manager at Jupiter and at Adappt Intelligence before launching Cherry in 2024 with co-founders Sharnam Singhwal and Samarth Mahapatra.
Sara Mauskopf
Sara Mauskopf is the CEO and co-founder of Winnie, a marketplace helping millions of parents find daycare, preschool, and childcare across the United States. A MIT computer science graduate and former product leader at YouTube, Twitter, and Postmates, she co-founded Winnie in 2016 after struggling to find childcare for her first child. Under her leadership, Winnie has raised $15.5M in funding, serves over 4 million parents, covers 250K+ licensed providers across 7,000+ U.S. cities, and ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies - earning the #1 Consumer Services Company spot.
David Lieb
David Lieb is a General Partner at Y Combinator who co-founded Bump - the app that let phones share data by physically bumping together, reaching 150 million users before being acquired by Google in 2013. After the acquisition, his team's unreleased photo-sharing project became Google Photos, which Lieb led as Senior Director for nine years until it reached over 1 billion users. Now at YC, he mentors early-stage founders drawing on his rare trifecta of experience: consumer hit, big-tech product leadership, and venture capital.
Nathan Xu
Nathan Xu (also known as Xu Gao) is the co-founder and CEO of Plaud AI, the company behind the world's best-selling AI voice recorder and notetaker. A serial entrepreneur who failed three times before hitting gold, Xu bootstrapped Plaud from a Kickstarter campaign in 2023 to $180M+ ARR by 2025 - without a single dollar of venture capital. His credit-card-sized Plaud Note and wearable NotePin devices, which transcribe, summarize, and analyze conversations in 112 languages, have shipped to over 1.5 million users in 170+ countries. Based in San Francisco with roots in Wuhan, China, Xu represents a new breed of transpacific founder betting that the next great hardware platform fits in your pocket - or around your neck.
Hans Tung
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital), one of the most decorated venture capitalists in the world with 13 consecutive appearances on the Forbes Midas List - peaking at #3 globally. A Taiwanese immigrant who moved to Los Angeles at 13, Stanford-trained, and one of the first Silicon Valley VCs to relocate full-time to China in 2005, Hans has backed over 16 unicorns including Airbnb, Coinbase, Slack, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Anthropic across three decades and three waves of technology: internet, mobile/cloud, and now AI.
Jenny Lee
Jenny Lee is a Singapore-born venture capitalist and co-founder of Granite Asia, formerly Senior Managing Partner at GGV Capital, where she spent nearly two decades building Asia's most formidable tech investment franchise. A Cornell-trained electrical engineer who bought out her government scholarship bond for S$300,000 to chase her VC calling, she has backed over 21 unicorns and facilitated 16 IPOs across five global stock exchanges, including early bets on Alibaba, Xiaomi, Didi, and Grab. The first woman ever to crack the top 10 of Forbes' Midas List, Lee now runs Granite Asia - a $5 billion multi-asset platform investing across Asia's next technology wave.
Anarghya Vardhana
Anarghya Vardhana is a venture partner at Maveron, the consumer-only VC firm co-founded by Howard Schultz, where she has spent nearly a decade backing iconic consumer brands in health, wellness, and social tech. A Stanford grad who published a math theorem at 17, she moved from Sandia National Labs nuclear research to Google international ops to the boardrooms of startups like Co-Star, Bend Health, and Alife. Forbes named her a 30 Under 30 in VC and their First Diversity Champion across the entire class. Simultaneously serving as Investor in Residence at Vanta, she is one of the few investors who credibly bridges deep technical rigor with consumer intuition - and who also runs trail marathons and dances Bharatanatyam.
Connie Chan
Connie Chan is a venture capitalist and technology writer who spent 12 years at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), becoming the firm's first-ever internally promoted General Partner in 2018. Known as 'Silicon Valley's China Whisperer,' she made her mark by translating Asian tech trends - super apps, social commerce, livestream shopping - into investment theses before Western founders even knew the terms. Her 2015 WeChat essay won the New York Times Sidney Award and predicted the app-consolidation wave that would reshape mobile over the following decade. She backed Pinterest early, championed Lime before scooters were cool, and holds board seats at Whatnot, KoBold Metals, and Cider. In January 2024, after 12 years at a16z, she stepped back from GP duties to pursue a new Asia-focused venture.
John Lilly
John Lilly is a Venture Partner at Greylock Partners and former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, where he oversaw Firefox's growth from 7 million to 450+ million users. A Stanford-trained engineer turned VC, he has backed transformative companies including Dropbox, Figma, Instagram, and Discord, while staying rooted in civic technology as Board Chair of Code for America. He currently serves as a lecturer at Stanford GSB and Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
Jessica Verrilli
Jessica Verrilli is co-founder and managing director of Adverb Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm she launched in 2023 with April Underwood. A former VP of Corporate Development & Strategy at Twitter (employee #34), she led roughly 30 acquisitions including Vine and Periscope before becoming a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures). She also co-founded #ANGELS, a women-led angel investing collective that placed women on over 100 startup cap tables and produced landmark research quantifying Silicon Valley's gender equity gap. She holds the coveted @jess handle on X with 318,000 followers.
Turner Novak
Turner Novak is the founder and solo General Partner of Banana Capital, a seed-stage venture fund investing in internet-first founders. He grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, in a single-parent household with intermittent internet access, then built a career path from CFA studies and endowment investing to VC entirely through Twitter presence and a viral fantasy portfolio. He hosts The Peel podcast, writes The Split newsletter, and operates from Ann Arbor, Michigan - proving that Midwest contrarianism and relentless online engagement can be a genuine edge in consumer tech investing.
Kenneth Schlenker
Kenneth Schlenker is a French-American serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Opal, the #1 screen time and focus app on iOS. He first envisioned a focus app in 2008 while working at Google - it took him 11 years to actually build it. After founding art-tech company ArtList (acquired by artnet), launching Bird's Paris operations, and building a $10M ARR business with just 11 people, he also runs Open Scout, a weekly newsletter covering early-stage startups read by investors at Sequoia, YC, a16z, and Accel.
Matt Swider
Matt Swider is a consumer tech journalist, media entrepreneur, and founder of The Shortcut - the #1 consumer tech publication on Substack. With 25+ years in technology journalism, he went viral during the 2020-2021 PS5 shortage by tracking console restocks, growing his Twitter following from 8,000 to over 1 million in under two years and helping an estimated 400,000 people buy a console. He left TechRadar after nine years as US Editor-in-Chief to launch The Shortcut on November 8, 2021, which now boasts 155,000+ subscribers, a 40% open rate, and 1.5 million monthly website views.
Rex Woodbury
Rex Woodbury is the founder and managing partner of Daybreak Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, and the creator of Digital Native, a weekly newsletter with 72,000+ subscribers exploring the intersection of technology and culture. A Dartmouth and Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholar, former Goldman Sachs analyst, TPG and Index Ventures partner, Guinness World Record holder, LGBTQ+ advocate, and competitive runner, Woodbury is one of the most distinctive voices in venture capital — blending anthropological observation with market analysis to decode how Gen Z and emerging technology are reshaping commerce, communication, and culture.
Nikhil Basu Trivedi
Nikhil Basu Trivedi is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm with $400M+ under management across two funds. A Princeton molecular biology graduate turned venture capitalist, he previously spent eight years at Shasta Ventures where he backed Canva, ClassDojo, Frame.io, and The Farmer's Dog. He writes the 'Next Big Thing' newsletter on Substack with 18,000+ subscribers, publishes public investment theses before backing founders, and built his career on a 'traction-first' philosophy and obsessive focus on founder learning velocity. An Indian-American from a family with deep public service roots, he co-founded Artsy as a Princeton sophomore and has been a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree.