Natalie Ledbetter is a 3x startup People Ops executive, TEDx speaker, and former Operating Partner & Head of People at Boldstart Ventures who scaled Stash from 27 to 350 employees in 2.5 years. A self-described 'third culture kid' who grew up attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia alongside students from 90 countries, she now runs Ledbetter Global Advisory, offering embedded fractional people operations leadership to Series A-B companies. She has partnered with 100+ founders across the startup ecosystem, blending strategic executive thinking with hands-on execution to build high-performance, psychologically safe teams.
Laurence 'Lo' Toney is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, a San Francisco-based institutional VC firm he incubated at GV (Google Ventures) and spun out independently in 2018. Plexo's distinctive 'full stack' model invests across three layers - LP stakes in emerging diverse fund managers, direct investments in companies sourced through those networks, and equity stakes in the GP management entities themselves. After senior operating roles at Nike, eBay, and Zynga (where he ran Zynga Poker to $250M in annual bookings), Toney moved into VC via Comcast Ventures and GV before building Plexo Capital's $42.5M Fund I with backers including Alphabet, Intel Capital, and the Ford Foundation. Named to Forbes BLK 50: Money Masters 2026, he has championed diverse fund managers as alpha generators long before it became conventional wisdom.
Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D. is a founding partner at Kapor Capital, a social-impact venture firm that has invested in 200+ startups founded by underrepresented entrepreneurs while outperforming 75% of peer VC firms by financial returns. Long before #MeToo, she co-founded the first U.S. organization dedicated to combating workplace sexual harassment (1976), earned a Ph.D. studying harassment in federal employment, and built diversity programs at Lotus Development Corporation. She co-founded SMASH (Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), the Level Playing Field Institute, Project Include, and the DAIR Institute, and co-authored 'Closing the Equity Gap' (HarperCollins, 2023). Former NAACP National Board member and Obama Foundation Tech Policy Council member, she has spent five decades dismantling the belief that fairness and financial return are mutually exclusive.