Mike Polner is VP of Product Marketing and GM of Next Gen Creators at Adobe, where he leads the Firefly generative AI business and oversees creative tools including Lightroom, Photoshop, and Premiere. With over 20 years in marketing and product leadership, he has a track record of scaling consumer businesses - growing Uber Eats from $100M to $50B+ GMV and helping Cameo reach a $1B valuation. A former VP of Marketing at Discord and product marketing leader at Cameo and Uber Eats, Polner is at the center of Adobe's push to make AI-powered creativity accessible to the next generation of creators.
Pylon is the AI-native customer support platform built specifically for B2B companies. It unifies tickets across Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, Discord, email, and in-app chat into a single inbox, automates routine work with AI agents, and surfaces account-level intelligence for post-sales teams. Backed by a16z, Bain Capital Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator.
Joshua Lu is GM and Partner at a16z Speedrun, Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator program that bets on founders at the intersection of gaming, entertainment, and AI. With over a decade of operating experience across Zynga, Blizzard (Diablo Immortal), and Meta (Horizon Worlds), he brings rare founder-operator credibility to a program that accepts fewer than 0.4% of applicants and has backed hundreds of early-stage companies with up to $1M checks plus $5M in vendor credits.
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.
David Sze is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners who built the firm's consumer investing franchise from scratch, backing Facebook at a $500M valuation in 2006, LinkedIn when it had 1 million users in 2004, Discord in 2016, and Roblox before it became a household name. A former operator at Excite, Electronic Arts, and HBO, he ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012 and remains one of Silicon Valley's most decorated consumer internet investors. He is a Yale trustee, Rockefeller University board member, and advisor to McLaren Racing.
Mitch Lasky is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital and one of the most successful gaming investors in venture capital history. A Harvard-educated IP lawyer turned game studio executive, he rose through Activision and took mobile gaming startup JAMDAT public before selling it to EA for $680M. At Benchmark he backed Riot Games (~$7M early investment, now $20B+), Snap (led Series A at $70M valuation, IPO'd at $24B), Discord, and dozens of other landmark gaming and consumer internet companies. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree, LAFC co-owner, and host of the GameCraft podcast, Lasky's career is a master class in recognizing non-obvious founders before the market does.
Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner at Spark Capital, the Boston-born venture firm behind Discord, Coinbase, Affirm, and Warby Parker. A repeat founder-turned-investor, he opened Spark's San Francisco office in 2012 after selling his social gaming startup Conduit Labs to Zynga and riding Zynga's IPO. His portfolio reads like a cultural highlight reel: he backed Cruise before GM paid $1B+, Postmates before Uber, and Discord before it became the connective tissue of the internet. He deliberately makes only about two bets per year, applies a 'Japanese toilet' product lens to AI, co-hosts the Hallway Chat podcast, and recently co-founded a physical board game library in Berkeley with Groupon's Andrew Mason.
Niko Bonatsos is a Greek-born, Stanford-educated venture capitalist who spent 15 years at General Catalyst building one of Silicon Valley's strongest seed-stage consumer investment track records - backing Snap, Discord, Mercor, ClassDojo, and Dubsmash before most people knew they existed. In January 2026 he left General Catalyst to co-found Verdict Capital with Michael Fertik, targeting a $300M fund focused on seed/Series A investing in consumer and AI, with a particular contrarian bet on consumer AI being underappreciated in an enterprise-saturated market.
Josh Elman is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader and investor who helped grow Twitter nearly 10x, launched Facebook Connect, and backed foundational consumer products like Discord and Musical.ly at Greylock Partners. Currently Director of Product Management at Apple focused on App Store discovery, he is best known for his 'only metric that matters' framework - the idea that great products are defined by a core action users perform at a predictable frequency, not vanity metrics.