Nat Malkus is a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he turns national datasets into arguments that policymakers can act on. He built the Return to Learn Tracker that mapped pandemic school closures and now follows the chronic absenteeism crisis it exposed, and he hosts The Report Card, AEI's education podcast. A former middle school teacher who once graded papers in Prince George's County, he now does his grading on the whole American school system - with the data to back it up.
Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster and data strategist who co-founded Echelon Insights, one of the most accurate private polling firms in America. His 2023 book, 'Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,' was later called by The New York Times 'the book that predicted the 2024 election.' A pioneer of digital campaigning who built Bush-Cheney's web operation in 2004, Ruffini has spent two decades arguing that the diploma divide, not race, is the fault line redrawing American politics.
Justin Merickel is a Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for the Analytics Portfolio at Adobe, where he oversees Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Mix Modeler. With over two decades of experience in digital marketing and data analytics, he has shaped how enterprise brands measure, understand, and act on customer behavior - from his early days at McCann Erickson through senior leadership at Yahoo!, Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe), and ultimately Adobe itself, where he has driven major product and partnership initiatives across the Experience Cloud.
Mike Palmer is the CEO of Sigma Computing, a San Francisco cloud analytics company that lets business users query data warehouses through a spreadsheet interface. He took the seat in May 2020 from co-founder Rob Woollen and has since scaled Sigma past $100M ARR, through a $200M Series D and a Series E that valued the company at roughly $3B.
Scott Howe is the Chief Executive Officer of LiveRamp, the San Francisco-based data collaboration platform that helps the world's largest brands stitch together customer signal across walled gardens, clean rooms, and a cookieless web. He took the job in October 2018 after seven years running Acxiom, LiveRamp's former parent, and before that ran Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar advertising business and helped build Avenue A | Razorfish at aQuantive.
Taylor Carlson is an Area Vice President at Adobe overseeing Customer Experience Orchestration, leading enterprise sales teams focused on AI-driven journey management and digital experience solutions. With a career arc spanning QA engineering at GameHouse to top-performing enterprise account executive at Bizible to VP leadership at Adobe, Carlson has built a reputation for closing complex enterprise deals and scaling high-performing revenue teams. Based in New York, they hold a BS in Information Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington and a Certificate of Negotiation Mastery from Harvard Business School Online.
Arup Banerjee is the CEO and Co-founder of Windfall, a San Francisco-based people intelligence platform that uses AI to estimate the net worth of every American and deliver actionable consumer financial data to over 1,500 organizations. With a background spanning investment banking at Citi, venture capital at Updata Partners, and product leadership at Radius Intelligence and GoodData, Banerjee founded Windfall in 2016 after identifying critical inaccuracies in consumer wealth data. In April 2025, Windfall raised a $65 million Series B led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, bringing total funding to over $95 million.
Prukalpa Sankar is the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlan, a $750M-valued platform building the context layer for data and AI - used by Mastercard, JP Morgan, Zoom, Dropbox, and General Motors. Before Atlan, she co-founded SocialCops, which built India's National Data Platform and the UN's SDG tracker operating across 50+ countries. A TED Speaker, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree, Prukalpa has raised over $206M and turned a midnight brainstorm about broken streetlights into one of the fastest-growing data governance companies on the planet.
Redpanda Data is a high-performance streaming data platform built in C++ that is wire-compatible with the Apache Kafka API while ditching the JVM and ZooKeeper. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Gallego, the company helps engineering teams move terabytes of real-time data per day with a simpler, faster, and cheaper architecture, and has expanded its remit toward agentic AI infrastructure.
Dave Zilberman is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, where he focuses on early-to-late-stage investments in enterprise software, SaaS, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, data, and media. With over 20 years building companies as operator, advisor, and investor, he spent 15 years at Comcast Ventures before joining Norwest in 2020. His portfolio includes landmark wins like Slack (acquired by Salesforce) and DocuSign (Nasdaq: DOCU), and his current bets span AI infrastructure plays like LlamaIndex and security companies like Orion Security.
Winnie is a San Francisco-based childcare marketplace that connects millions of parents with licensed daycare centers, preschools, and early education providers across the United States. Founded in 2016 by Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall - two former Google and Postmates engineers who were also parents - Winnie has grown from a local San Francisco app into a national platform covering 200,000+ licensed providers in over 7,000 cities. The platform combines comprehensive data (tuition costs, licensing status, inspection reports, availability) with community reviews and a SaaS layer for providers called Winnie Pro. Ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list and #1 in Consumer Services, Winnie sits at the intersection of a 500-billion-dollar childcare crisis and a generation of parents who expect the same search experience for daycares that they get for restaurants.
Jim Adler is the Founder and General Partner of Toyota Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Toyota with $800M+ in assets under management and 90+ portfolio companies. A rocket-engineer-turned-serial-entrepreneur, Adler built the fund from a $100M seed in 2017 into a powerhouse backing frontier technologies in AI, autonomy, robotics, climate tech, and mobility. Known for his 'geek, suit, wonk' identity, he bridges deep technical expertise with sharp investment philosophy, insisting financial returns must precede strategic ones.
Andy MacMillan is the CEO of Alteryx, the AI-powered enterprise analytics platform that crossed $1 billion in ARR and automates over 380 million workflows annually. A Michigan State Spartan who earned his MBA in Edinburgh, he started writing Java for General Motors and made his way through Oracle, Salesforce, Act-On Software, and UserTesting before landing at Alteryx in December 2024. He also serves as a Trade and Investment Envoy for the Government of Scotland, bridging Silicon Valley and the Scottish tech ecosystem.
Corinne Riley is a Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where she focuses on early-stage B2B enterprise software, data infrastructure, and AI companies. Before joining Greylock, she worked at Morgan Stanley on IPOs for Uber, Zoom, and Palantir. At Greylock she launched both the Scout Program - growing it to 35 scouts investing in 100+ startups - and the Edge Program, a founder-support initiative that provides pre-idea and pre-seed founders with resources and mentorship without taking upfront equity. She is known for her go-to-market expertise and her hands-on approach to helping founders land their first enterprise customers.
Dean Meyer is a Partner at Sequoia Capital based in Tel Aviv, leading the firm's Israel operations. A former professional soccer player for AFC Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv, he pivoted from competitive sport to venture capital after studying computer science at Reichman University (IDC Herzliya). He joined Sequoia in March 2024 - shortly after October 7 - to double down on Israel's tech ecosystem at its most turbulent moment, backing technical founders in infrastructure, cloud, data, AI, and cybersecurity. His portfolio includes Decart (now valued at $3.1B), Eon, Irregular, and Kela.
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners with over 16 years backing enterprise AI, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS companies. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate and Wharton MBA, he has been the first institutional check behind companies like Netskope (Nasdaq: NTSK, IPO 2025) and Navan, and was on the Moveworks board from Day 1 through its $2.85B acquisition by ServiceNow in 2025. A Canadian with Ismaili-East African roots, fluent in French, and a self-taught ice hockey player, Arif blends deep technical fluency with a founder-first philosophy - often describing himself as part coach, part psychologist to the entrepreneurs he backs. As of early 2026, he is stepping back from day-to-day Lightspeed duties to launch a new early-stage investment firm.
Astasia Myers is a General Partner at Felicis, a 10x Forbes Midas list honoree, and 4x New York Times Top 20 VC who invests in early-stage AI, infrastructure, and developer tools companies. She previously founded Quiet Capital's enterprise practice, backing Modal, Chroma, and Langchain, and led investments in unicorns like LaunchDarkly at Redpoint Ventures. With dual degrees from Stanford and a master's from Cambridge, she's partnered with 10 unicorns and achieved 9 IPOs, bringing over a decade of enterprise software experience from startups, equity research at Baird, and Cisco's corporate development team.
Sireesh Bodireddygari is Executive Vice President of Software Engineering at Salesforce, where he leads a global team of 1,000+ engineers building Tableau and CRM Analytics products. Promoted to EVP in March 2025 after nearly a decade of rising through Salesforce's analytics engineering ranks, he is the engineering force behind Tableau Next — an AI-native, full-stack agentic analytics platform unveiled at Tableau Conference 2025. A 25-year software veteran who started at L&T Infotech and cut his teeth at Yahoo! and DIRECTV before joining Salesforce as Director of Wave Analytics, he has become one of the most consequential engineering leaders in enterprise data and AI.
Shruti Gandhi is the General Partner and Founding Engineer of Array Ventures, a pre-seed fund backing technical founders building enterprise data, AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools. A former IBM engineer turned startup founder turned VC, she made the leap from Mumbai to Manhattan to the Bay Area armed with a Columbia CS degree and a Chicago Booth MBA. With 100+ investments, 15+ exits (to Apple, Amazon, PayPal, ServiceNow, and others), and 25,000+ Substack subscribers, she is one of a vanishingly small cohort of women of color who raised and run their own VC fund - and she teaches AI at Columbia on the side.
Auren Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur, data-industry pioneer, and hyper-connected Silicon Valley networker who turned a $60 million exit (LiveRamp to Acxiom, 2014) into a second act as a venture capitalist at Flex Capital, founder of location-data company SafeGraph, and co-founder of the invitation-only Dialog society with Peter Thiel. He publishes the Summation newsletter and podcast - reaching 41,000+ Substack subscribers - exploring non-obvious ideas at the intersection of data, technology, and business.
Zeit AI is a YC S24 enterprise analytics startup founded by two former Palantir engineers who believe business intelligence should require nothing more than plain English. Their product, ZeitMind, lets non-technical users query Excel files, CSVs, ERP systems, and databases using natural language - turning weeks of analyst work into seconds of typing. Backed by Y Combinator, Oxford Seed Fund, and ACE Ventures, Zeit AI is quietly rewriting how enterprises turn raw data into decisions.
Benn Stancil is a co-founder of Mode Analytics (acquired by ThoughtSpot for $200M in 2023), one of the most widely read voices in the data and analytics world, and an angel investor. He writes the popular newsletter at benn.substack.com - known for its witty, intellectually honest takes on the modern data stack, BI, AI, and startup culture. After a stint as Field CTO at ThoughtSpot post-acquisition, he now runs independently via benn.company, investing and writing with signature Friday dispatches that open with 'it's friday, and...' - a ritual his thousands of subscribers recognize instantly.