deal-sourcing
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Peter Lehrman
Peter Lehrman is the founder and CEO of Axial, a New York based online platform where owners of small and lower middle market private companies meet buyers, lenders and financial sponsors. He also hosts the Masters in Small Business M&A podcast. Before Axial, he was on the founding team of Gerson Lehrman Group and worked in private equity at SFW Capital Partners.
Max Ruderman
Max Ruderman is the CEO of Harmonic, a New York-based data company building what he calls 'the source of truth for startups.' A former Google engineer who turned to entrepreneurship after a jiu-jitsu injury sidelined him, Ruderman helped grow Harmonic from a tool that scraped Delaware corporate filings into a real-time startup database used by investors at Floodgate, Craft Ventures, a16z, Accel, and companies like Brex, Notion, and Carta. He started as COO and became CEO, steering the company toward AI-driven sourcing with an investment agent built on LangGraph.
Ali Dastjerdi
Ali Dastjerdi is the co-founder and CEO of Raylu, a New York AI company that turns an investor's thesis into booked founder meetings in minutes instead of weeks. A Harvard machine-learning student turned Insight Partners investor, he started Raylu in 2022 with his freshman-year roommate and a friend they met at AWS. The trio raised a $4M seed and an $8M Series A, and now sell their 'Deal Engineering' platform to 45-plus funds managing over $500 billion. They keep one unopened beer in the office fridge, to be drunk only the day the company dies.
Eric Norman
Eric Norman is a General Partner at Pioneer Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that pools resources from 500+ Y Combinator alumni to back top-performing YC startups. A former hardware founder himself - he built and led Cinder Precision Cooker through Y Combinator - Norman brings firsthand operator experience to his investing, with recent portfolio activity in AI identity, healthcare AI, and enterprise tooling.