Ilya Volodarsky co-founded Segment in 2011 with MIT dorm-mates, building it from a failed classroom tool into the definitive customer data platform before selling to Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. After nine years scaling Segment to 600 employees, he pivoted to the problem of catastrophic wildfires, co-founding Wildfires.org and joining Convective Capital as a partner to back early-stage climate and healthcare startups.
Kat Manalac spent over 11 years at Y Combinator, where she built the Female Founders Conference, ran Startup School, and opened YC's doors to founders worldwide who had never heard of Paul Graham. She left YC in 2024 to join Convective Capital as Partner, where she now builds communities and tells stories at the intersection of technology and wildfire/disaster resilience.