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Sam Blond
Sam Blond is a go-to-market operator turned founder who built his reputation scaling startup sales teams. He was VP of Sales at Zenefits and Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, where he helped drive revenue from near zero to roughly $400M ARR. After an 18-month run as a partner at Founders Fund, he decided investing was not his fit and went back to operating. In 2026 he co-founded and now leads Monaco, an AI-native sales platform for startups, alongside his brother Brian Blond.
Charles Sword
Charles Sword is a New York-based revenue and go-to-market executive who has spent two decades building sales organizations for enterprise and B2B SaaS companies. He has served as Chief Revenue Officer at UpMetrics, Blueprint Software Systems, and Payfone (now Prove), founded Masthead Consulting and Ready Set Track, and held VP roles at CAST and iRise. He is now associated with Mobot, the NYC robotic mobile-testing startup, and writes regularly on how mission-driven organizations can use data and AI to measure impact.
Karen Chu
Karen Chu is the founder and CEO of HiRO (Harvest Integrated Research Organization), a boutique global contract research organization that bridges clinical trials between Asia, the US, and Europe. A PharmD who spent nearly two decades at Parexel running global clinical operations across 50-plus countries, she launched HiRO in 2020 to help Asian biotechs run trials abroad and Western firms run trials in Asia. Under her leadership the company has expanded through acquisitions including Courante Oncology in the US and PharmaSols in Australia and New Zealand, while positioning itself as global in reach but deliberately mid-sized in ambition.
Michael Dube
Michael Dube is the Chief Executive Officer of Aqua Security, a Boston- and Ramat Gan-based cloud native security company that protects more than 40% of the Fortune 100. He was elevated to CEO in November 2025 after joining as Chief Revenue Officer in April 2024, succeeding co-founder Dror Davidoff. Dube spent nearly three decades in enterprise cybersecurity sales leadership at CrowdStrike, Splunk, Cybereason and Check Point before Aqua.
Patrick Smith
Patrick Smith is a Boston-based software executive currently serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Onebeat, a retail inventory intelligence platform. A Providence College graduate with roots in enterprise supply-chain software, he has spent his career at the intersection of merchandising strategy and inventory optimization, with prior stops at ToolsGroup, antuit.ai, ESG, and Park City Group. He writes and speaks about the 'Retail Margin Spiral' and the 'Inventory Intelligence Loop,' arguing that softlines retailers must move from reactive planning to continuous, real-time decisioning.
Andrew DeSomma
Andrew DeSomma is the Chief Business Officer of K2bio (K2 BioLabs), a Houston-based hybrid contract research organization that gives early-stage life-science companies the equipment, vivarium, and scientists they could never afford to build alone. A career investor with a 25-plus-year track record across technology, biotech, consumer, and retail, he is the founder and manager of Resolute Investments and previously analyzed companies for crossover hedge funds in the San Francisco Bay Area. A Georgetown graduate who now works from Santa Fe, he sat on K2's board at founding before stepping into the operating seat that turns the lab's science into deals.
Andrew Reaume
Andrew Reaume is the co-founder, President and CEO of Melior Discovery, an Exton, Pennsylvania preclinical contract research organization built around theraTRACE, a multiplexed in vivo phenotypic screening platform that runs a single drug candidate through a battery of animal disease models at once to uncover unexpected therapeutic uses. A geneticist by training with a Wharton MBA, he conceived the idea at Pfizer, left in 2005 to build it, and has since raised over $15 million in capital, closed more than $40 million in partnering deals, and pushed a repurposed compound, MLR-1023, into Phase 2 diabetes trials.
John Balian
John D. Balian, MD is a physician-turned-executive who co-founded ClinChoice, one of the world's larger full-service contract research organizations, and serves as its CEO, International. He spent years inside the FDA, then ran drug safety and regulatory operations at Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Johnson & Johnson before building a global CRO spanning the US, Europe and Southeast Asia. He is also a published novelist whose debut, Gray Wolves and White Doves, draws on his Armenian heritage and the Armenian Genocide.
Kevin Xu
Kevin Xu is the Chairman and CEO of ClinChoice, a global full-service contract research organization (CRO) with more than 30 years of history, roughly 4,000 staff, and operations across 15+ countries. He arrived in the corner office from the investor's side of the table: for over 15 years he was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, where he built and ran the firm's Asia-Pacific Healthcare and Life Sciences investing practice, leading deals across biotech, pharma, medtech, CROs/CDMOs and digital health. Trained in neuroscience and clinical psychology before finance, he is an outspoken advocate for destigmatizing mental illness and an unlikely wake-surfer.
Julie Hansen
Julie Hansen is Chief Revenue Officer and US CEO of Babbel, the language-learning company. She joined in 2017 and turned the US into Babbel's largest market, crossing one million US subscriptions in the first half of 2022. Before Babbel she was the fifth employee at Business Insider, where as President and COO she helped grow it into the most-visited business news site online. Her earlier career spans CBS Interactive, Conde Nast, Time Inc., and Penguin Books. She keeps German vocabulary notebooks, rows on the water at dawn, and was named to the 2025 ASU+GSV Power of Women honor list.
Rajiv Ramanan
Rajiv Ramanan is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Spendflo, an AI-native procurement platform that helps fast-growing companies bring structure, visibility, and control to how they buy and manage software vendors. A Chennai native now based in San Francisco, Rajiv spent years at Freshworks building partner ecosystems and working with over 5,000 vendors before co-founding Spendflo in 2021 alongside Siddharth Sridharan and Ajay Vardhan. Under his GTM leadership, Spendflo has raised $15.9M in total funding, grown to 140 employees, and manages over $100M in SaaS expenditure for customers—delivering an average 23% reduction in software spend.
Ramin Ettehad
Ramin Ettehad is a Silicon Valley-raised entrepreneur who co-founded Oomnitza in 2012 alongside Arthur Lozinski and Trent Seed, building it into a leading Enterprise Technology Management platform that has raised $37M and serves organizations across financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and more. As Co-Founder with responsibilities spanning marketing and revenue, he brings a rare combination of hands-on sales intelligence, product intuition, and brand evangelism to the challenge of modernizing how enterprises manage their entire IT estate from a single pane of glass.
Rushi Patel
Rushi Patel is the Co-Founder and COO/CRO of Homebase, the all-in-one workforce management platform serving 100,000+ small businesses and 2+ million hourly workers. With a background spanning McKinsey, KKR, and Microsoft, Patel co-founded Homebase in 2014 alongside John Waldmann to give local business owners - restaurants, retailers, and service businesses - the same quality workforce tools that enterprise companies take for granted. Under his leadership, Homebase has raised $198M in funding including a $60M Series D in April 2024, and grown to 1,900 employees while generating approximately $180M in annual revenue.
Joanna Wiebe
Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copyhackers and the originator of conversion copywriting — a discipline she coined in 2011. Over nearly two decades, she has trained 70,000+ professionals and consulted for brands from bootstrapped startups to Fortune 100 enterprises including AWS, Canva, and Shopify. Her first traditionally published book, The Copyselling System, is set for release in July 2026 via BenBella/Simon & Schuster.
Peep Laja
Peep Laja is an Estonian-born entrepreneur and marketing strategist who built three companies from scratch - CXL (marketing education), Speero (CRO consulting), and Wynter (B2B message testing) - all bootstrapped. Recognized as the world's most influential conversion rate optimization expert in 2016, he now focuses on B2B strategy and competitive positioning through his 'How to Win' podcast, biweekly newsletter, and daily LinkedIn presence with 69K+ followers.