Adrienne Hayes is VP Marketing, Global Subscriptions & Customer Growth at Google, where she shapes how hundreds of millions of people discover and stay connected to Google's services. A veteran of Motorola, Edelman, and now more than a decade at Google, she is one of the few senior marketing executives in tech who has directly championed camera equity — helping drive the Real Tone initiative for Pixel 6 — while also serving on GLAAD's board and sponsoring Google's LGBTQ+ employee group globally.
Dipti Agrawal is the Co-founder and CEO of Tudip Technologies, a Pune-headquartered global IT services company she built from a team of four in 2010 to a 600-person enterprise serving clients like Google, Adobe, and Databricks across 8+ countries. A Chemical Engineering graduate from NIT Durgapur with an MBA from IBS Hyderabad, she pivoted from Oracle ERP consulting at Infosys and Hitachi Consulting to co-found Tudip on April 5, 2010 with Tushar Apshankar. Under her leadership, Tudip has achieved CMMI Level 5 certification, earned Databricks Silver Partner status, and expanded into AI/ML, cloud transformation, cybersecurity, and digital innovation—while championing gender diversity with 15 women in top management.
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Frédérique Dame is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where she leads investments in consumer technology, life sciences, and AI. A French immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley at 24, she built her career as a product and engineering leader at Yahoo!, Photobucket, SmugMug, and Uber — where she helped scale the company from 80 employees to 7,000+ across 68 countries. At GV she co-leads the Women's Health investment team and has backed companies including Midi Health, Found, Allara, Oula Health, and TMRW. She serves on the board of Les Mills International and previously on Ubisoft's board, and was named to Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health.
Jason Kong is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based Black-led venture capital firm that backs founders automating the 'real economy' - the large, often overlooked industries that make the world run. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital in 2021 while at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Kong backed breakout companies including Attentive, Brex, Datadog, Discord, Figma, and UiPath. A Summa Cum Laude graduate of Penn's elite M&T program who qualified twice for USAMO and won the We the People national civics competition, he joined Base10 in 2023 to lead Series B+ investments, bringing a singular blend of investment banking, late-stage VC, and hedge fund analysis discipline to growth-stage bets on vertical SaaS, cybersecurity, and fintech.
Rami Elghandour is Chairman and CEO of Arcellx (NASDAQ: ACLX), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation cell therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases. An engineer turned venture capitalist turned serial CEO, he has led two successful IPOs, built two multibillion-dollar public companies, and raised over $1.75 billion in capital. At Arcellx, he transformed the company from an early-stage startup into a commercial-ready organization with a peak valuation exceeding $6 billion, advancing the anito-cel BCMA CAR-T therapy toward FDA approval for relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. A TEDx speaker on unconscious bias and gender equity, Rami is also an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' and the Sundance-premiered 'American Doctor.'
Janine Yancey is the Founder and CEO of Emtrain, a San Francisco-based AI-powered compliance training and workplace culture analytics platform she founded in 2006. A former employment lawyer and first-generation college graduate, she built Emtrain to replace lecture-style compliance check-boxes with cinematic, skills-based learning backed by behavioral data. The platform serves 800+ enterprise clients including Netflix, Yelp, and Chevron, has raised $18M in funding, and is known for its proprietary Workplace Color Spectrum and culture benchmarking engine drawing on 25 million employee sentiment data points. Yancey famously predicted the #MeToo movement in a 2016 Medium article - months before it went global.
Holly Rose Faith is the Executive Talent Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. Specializing in C-suite, VP-level, and board placements for Greylock's portfolio companies, she has placed top executives at Roblox, Nextdoor, Databricks, Abnormal AI, Gem, PayJoy, Snorkel, Casper, and Transfix. With roughly eight years in VC talent roles spanning Khosla Ventures, NEA, and now Greylock, Faith brings a founder-first philosophy that goes beyond transactional recruiting — coaching founders on hiring strategy, building interview frameworks, and staying involved through references, compensation, and the close.
Robert W. Jones is a Cincinnati-based venture investor who spent 30 years rising through General Electric - from GE Plastics to GE Capital to GE Aviation - before retiring as Senior Executive of Human Resources for GE Aviation's Global Engineering organization. In retirement, he founded Realm Capital Ventures, a family venture investment firm focused on global innovation, became a Limited Partner at Y Combinator and Kearny Jackson, and joined Queen City Angels as an Investor Member. He is also a community leader with board roles at the Urban League of Greater Southwestern Ohio, University of Cincinnati's Lindner College of Business, and more.
Samira Behrouzan is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on Marketing and Games, and the force behind a16z speedrun - a pre-seed accelerator that has deployed over $180 million to 150+ startups at the intersection of games and technology. Before joining a16z, she led marketing at 100 Thieves and drove 20+ brand partnerships for Riot Games' Emmy-nominated Arcane series, including boundary-pushing collaborations like bringing ZEDD into VALORANT. A lifelong gamer who grew up on Sega Saturn and N64, she holds an Executive MBA from the IE Brown program and is a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented communities in gaming.
Frances Messano is CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy that backs early-stage education entrepreneurs across the U.S. A Brooklyn native, first-generation college graduate, and Harvard-trained economist, she left Wall Street (Morgan Stanley equity derivatives) for a decade-long arc through consulting and Teach For America before landing at NewSchools in 2015. She rose to President, built the Diverse Leaders investment strategy, and in January 2023 became the organization's first woman of color to serve as CEO. Under her leadership, NewSchools has deployed $23M+ supporting 80 teams in a single year, with 76% of portfolio companies led by people of color.
Sydney Thomas is the Founding General Partner of Symphonic Capital, a $13.5M debut fund investing at the intersection of health, wealth, and climate resilience for the 99%. She was the first hire at Precursor Ventures in 2016, scaled the firm from 10 investments to 400+ and $200M+ AUM over seven years, and then left to build on her own terms. She created the landmark Black Women in VC list, co-founded the Women of Color in VC network, and relocated from San Francisco to her hometown of San Diego to anchor her firm there. A Kauffman Fellow, Duke and Berkeley Haas alum, she backs pre-seed founders outside coastal tech hubs who are building essential systems for people the industry routinely ignores.
Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.
Aileen Lee is the founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage VC firm she started in 2012 after over a decade at Kleiner Perkins. She is best known for coining the term 'unicorn' in a 2013 TechCrunch analysis of billion-dollar startups, a word that has since reshaped how the entire tech industry talks about breakout companies. She co-founded All Raise in 2018 to accelerate funding for female investors and founders, and has backed companies like Dollar Shave Club, Chime, Product Hunt, and Guild. Named to Time 100 Most Influential People in 2019 and Forbes Midas List multiple years.
Ann Miura-Ko is co-founding partner at Floodgate, the seed-stage VC firm behind Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, and Okta. A NASA rocket scientist's daughter who went from painfully shy piano prodigy to national debate champion to Forbes' 'most powerful woman in startups,' she holds a PhD in mathematical modeling of cybersecurity from Stanford and has spent 15+ years betting on founders before anyone else believes in them. She co-founded AllRaise to diversify venture capital, teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, and invests in roughly 3-5 companies per year with a philosophy built on secrets, stories, and world-class effort.
Jennifer Fonstad is a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Owl Capital Group, with a 25+ year career that spans DFJ, Aspect Ventures, and her current early-stage fund. She helped grow DFJ's AUM from $150M to $3.5B, co-founded Aspect Ventures with Theresia Gouw in 2014, and is a champion of diverse founding teams. A Kauffman Fellow mentored by Tim Draper, she has backed companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Athenahealth, and ForeScout, racking up 8 IPOs and 23 M&A transactions. She co-founded Broadway Angels, is a founding member of All-Raise, serves on the Mastercard Foundation board, and was named to Forbes 50 Over 50 in 2025.
Kara Nortman is a Princeton and Stanford MBA-educated venture capitalist who spent eight years at Upfront Ventures before pivoting to become the defining force in women's sports investment. She co-founded Angel City FC — the NWSL team that became the world's most valuable women's sports franchise at $250 million — and then launched Monarch Collective, the world's largest women's sports investment fund at $250 million. She was also in the room at IAC's Hatch Labs when a restaurant-reservation app called Cardify was reborn as Tinder.
Shauntel Garvey is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Reach Capital, a $300M+ San Francisco-based venture firm laser-focused on education technology. A chemical engineer turned edtech investor, she parlayed an MIT degree and a Stanford MBA/MA in Education into backing some of the most consequential learning platforms of the last decade - ClassDojo, Epic, Outschool, and Handshake among them. She co-founded Reach Capital in 2015 after her stint at NewSchools Venture Fund, building it into a firm with 132+ portfolio companies, five unicorns, and one IPO. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, founding member of All Raise, and Pahara Institute Fellow, Garvey is one of the most influential figures at the intersection of capital and educational equity.
Theresia Gouw is a Chinese-Indonesian immigrant who became America's first female billionaire venture capitalist. A Brown-trained engineer turned Stanford MBA, she rose to become the first female investing partner at Accel Partners, where she helped back Facebook at a $98 million valuation in 2005. She co-founded Aspect Ventures and then Acrew Capital, managing ~$1.7 billion with a firm where 85% of employees are women or BIPOC. Beyond VC, she holds minority ownership stakes in the Buffalo Bills, Bay FC, and Golden State Warriors, and is Lead Investor and Executive Chair of an incoming Major League Volleyball franchise in Northern California.
Lorenzo Thione is a Tony Award-winning Broadway producer, AI pioneer, and venture capitalist who sold his search engine startup Powerset to Microsoft for $100 million in 2008. As Managing Director of Gaingels, he leads one of the world's largest LGBTQ+ venture syndicates with $1B+ deployed across 2,700+ portfolio companies. He founded StartOut, the largest LGBTQ+ entrepreneur network, and has produced acclaimed Broadway shows including Hadestown, The Inheritance, and Allegiance with George Takei. An Italian-born computer engineer turned operator-investor-activist, Thione builds what he calls a flywheel of queer economic empowerment by positioning diversity as a source of better returns.
Manan Mehta is the Founding Managing Partner of Unshackled Ventures, the only venture capital firm in the US built exclusively to back immigrant founders at the pre-seed stage - before product, before revenue, and often before incorporation. A first-generation American born to Indian immigrants in Sunnyvale, CA, Manan turned a personal experience of watching his H-1B co-founder get shackled by visa constraints into a $35M+ fund that has sponsored 200+ founders, completed 231+ immigration filings, and helped build a portfolio that has collectively raised $730M+ and created 1,200+ jobs. He sits on the Nasdaq board, once helped ink the $1.9B Skype acquisition as a banker, and brings to every pitch meeting the lens of someone who knows exactly what it costs to build from scratch.
Miriam Rivera is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Managing Director of Ulu Ventures, one of the largest Latina-led venture capital firms in the United States with ~$400M AUM. A first-generation college student born to Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers, she earned four degrees from Stanford, joined Google as its second attorney and helped scale the company from $85M to $10B in revenue, then co-founded Ulu Ventures in 2008 with husband Clint Korver. Ulu's data-driven, bias-reducing investment model has backed 10 unicorns including Palantir and Guild Education, with a portfolio where 80% of founders are women, immigrants, or from minority groups.
Nitin Pachisia is the Founding Partner of Unshackled Ventures, the only early-stage VC firm in the U.S. exclusively focused on immigrant founders. Born in India and having navigated the U.S. immigration system himself, he co-founded Unshackled in 2014 with Manan Mehta to solve a problem he lived: talented immigrant entrepreneurs trapped by visa rules that punished risk-taking. Unshackled's model is unlike any other fund - it directly employs founders as their visa sponsor, enabling them to legally leave corporate jobs and build startups. Across three funds totaling $55M+, he has backed 80+ companies whose founders come from 35+ countries, helped create 1,100+ jobs, and maintained a 100% success rate on immigration filings.
Jalak Jobanputra is the founder and managing partner of Future\Perfect Ventures, one of the world's first VC funds dedicated to blockchain technology, launched in 2014. Born in Nairobi, Kenya to parents of Indian descent and raised in rural New Jersey, she brings a rare global lens to venture investing - from backing Bitcoin infrastructure at seed stage (Blockchain.com, Blockstream) to building microfinance programs in Tanzania. A Wharton and Kellogg alumna, she started investing in Bitcoin in 2013 before it was remotely fashionable, and has since built a portfolio of 50+ companies at the intersection of decentralized technology, AI, and financial inclusion. Her blog 'The Barefoot VC' has run since 2009 and was named a top 10 investor blog by Business Insider.
Uriridiakoghene 'Ulili' Onovakpuri is a trailblazing venture capitalist who spent 10+ years at Kapor Capital, rising from analyst to Co-Managing Partner and co-raising the firm's largest-ever fund - $126M Fund III in 2022. One of very few Black female managing partners in VC history, she backed 70+ companies with a focus on digital health, health tech, and people operations, while also founding the longest-running VC fellowship program for underrepresented individuals. Her own childhood diagnosis of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis in Hunter's Point, San Francisco, where she grew up, directly shaped her conviction that healthcare access is a systemic justice issue. In May 2025 she departed Kapor Capital for what she called 'a purposeful pause,' and has since joined Motley Fool Ventures as a Venture Partner.
Katie Jacobs Stanton is the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm managing $95M+ across three funds. A former VP of Global Media at Twitter, Director of Citizen Participation at the Obama White House, and State Department innovation advisor, she built her reputation deploying technology at the intersection of government, media, and social change - including spearheading the Haiti earthquake text-donation platform that raised $40M in days. Co-founder of #Angels, a collective that has placed capital in 120+ companies, she now backs outlier founders across enterprise software, climate tech, and vertical AI.
Laela Sturdy is the Managing Partner and CEO of CapitalG, Alphabet's $7 billion independent growth equity fund. A first-generation American born in Jamaica and raised in South Florida, she played Division I basketball at Harvard, earned an MBA from Stanford, and built a track record at CapitalG where every one of her early investments became a unicorn — including Stripe, Duolingo, UiPath, and Webflow. She became sole leader of CapitalG in March 2023, making her one of a tiny handful of women running an established multibillion-dollar venture firm.
Nick Mehta co-founded Gainsight in 2013 and spent 13 years as CEO building the defining customer success platform - growing it from a startup into a $1.1 billion unicorn acquired by Vista Equity Partners, and in the process creating an entirely new job category of Customer Success Manager now held by hundreds of thousands of professionals worldwide. A Harvard-educated biochemist turned serial entrepreneur with a penchant for Taylor Swift parody rap videos, he stepped down as CEO in August 2025 to make way for his hand-picked successor while continuing on the board.
Renata George is a venture capital investor, author, educator, and advocate for gender diversity in the investment world. She built and exited a major franchise media network in Eastern Europe before pivoting to VC, raising a U.S.-based fund in 2011, and later joining a Singapore VC firm. She founded Women.VC, a nonprofit advancing women in venture capital and private equity, authored the landmark book 'Women Who Venture', and serves as Program Director of VC Academy. Forbes named her among the top women in VC in 2012 and a leading millennial woman investor in 2015.
COO of Stratyfy, adjunct faculty at Northeastern University, and one of the most credible voices in the fight against algorithmic discrimination in financial services. Born in Istanbul, educated in engineering and business, Deniz has spent decades bridging the gap between AI technology and human consequences — building interpretable, bias-mitigating AI systems used by 20+ lenders through the Underwriting for Racial Justice programme. She is a serial board member, community convener, and published author who believes fairness and performance are not opposites but the same equation solved correctly.