Cheryl Liu is the founder and CEO of Raspberry AI, a New York generative-AI platform that turns fashion designers' sketches into retail-ready, photo-realistic images, technical drawings, and CAD files in minutes instead of months. A former KKR retail private-equity analyst who later built product and machine-learning teams at Amazon and DoorDash, she spotted the opening for fashion-specific image generation the moment DALL-E and Stable Diffusion arrived in late 2022. Raspberry AI now serves brands including Under Armour, J.Crew, Tapestry, and Li & Fung, raised a $24M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, and was named one of CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 as the only creative-AI application on the list.
Viraj Bindra is the co-founder and CEO of Finch, a New York-based legal technology company that pairs experienced U.S.-based paralegals with purpose-built AI agents to automate pre-litigation work for personal injury law firms. He spent roughly eight years at DoorDash, joining as its founding designer and growing into senior product roles that scaled new lines of business, before leaving to build Finch in 2024 with longtime friend Benjamin Weems. Finch raised a Seed round led by Sequoia Capital, launched publicly in April 2025, and announced a $20 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures in October 2025.
Jon Auerbach is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in the US. A former Pulitzer Prize-nominated technology journalist who covered conflict zones for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, Auerbach pivoted into venture capital in 2000, co-founding M-Qube (acquired by VeriSign for $275M) before joining CRV in 2004. Over two decades at CRV, he has backed transformative companies including Zendesk, DoorDash, and Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft for $1.35B), earned a spot on the Forbes Midas List (ranked #16 in 2020), and now leads the firm's founder support operations spanning legal, finance, marketing, and talent.
Ryan Batra is the VP, Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential deep-tech venture firms. A career talent architect with over a decade in hypergrowth tech, he spent six years building DoorDash's technical and executive recruiting machine through multiple phases of explosive expansion, then led recruiting at Lime and OpenStore before landing at Khosla. Now he helps founders across KV's portfolio - spanning AI, biotech, space, and climate - hire the engineers, researchers, and leaders who make bold ideas real. He's placed 500+ engineers and leaders. His philosophy: talent is one of the most powerful forms of leverage a founder has.
Tony Xu is the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash, the food delivery giant commanding roughly 60% of the U.S. market. Born Xu Xun in Nanjing, China, he immigrated to the United States at age four, grew up washing dishes alongside his mother, and turned that lived understanding of the service economy into a company now valued near $100 billion. He led DoorDash through its blockbuster 2020 IPO, the $8.1B acquisition of Wolt, and the $3.9B acquisition of Deliveroo, while also serving on Meta's board of directors.
Alfred Lin is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of venture capital's most storied firms, where he co-steers a $7 billion AI-focused expansion fund alongside Pat Grady. A Taiwanese immigrant who resold Tony Hsieh's pizza by the slice at Harvard, Lin went on to be CFO, COO, and Chairman of Zappos - guiding it to its first profitable year and a $1.2 billion Amazon acquisition - before joining Sequoia in 2010. His portfolio reads like a decade of defining bets: Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Instacart, Reddit, and OpenAI. A three-time Forbes Midas List #1, he is the rare investor who has lived the operator's grind and brings that lens to every founder he backs.
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.
James Currier is a five-time founder turned General Partner at NFX, a $1.5B seed-stage venture firm built on a single thesis: network effects drive 70% of all value created in tech. He built Tickle into the 18th most-visited website in the world, pioneered viral marketing and A/B testing before those terms existed, and has since co-founded NFX with Pete Flint, Gigi Levy-Weiss, and Morgan Beller to back the next generation of network-effect-driven companies. An angel in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon, he is also the author of the Network Effects Bible and a speaker who translated an arcane econ concept into the operating language of Silicon Valley.
Saar Gur is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture firms, where he has backed some of the most iconic consumer and SMB software companies of the past decade. Before turning investor, he co-founded BrightRoll, the video ad network that Yahoo acquired for $640 million. Known for betting early on 'weird' ideas before the world caught up, his portfolio includes DoorDash (seed in 2013), Patreon, Ring, Dropbox, Airtable, Mercury, and Niantic. He has ranked on the Forbes Midas List (#22 in 2023), taught at Stanford's StartupGarage, and summits mountains with founders for fun.
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.
Semil Shah is the Founding General Partner of Haystack, a seed-stage venture capital firm he started from scratch in 2013 with $1M and zero management fees. Through seven funds totaling over $200M, he has backed companies including DoorDash, HashiCorp, Figma, and Instacart at seed stage. He also serves as Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Named to the Forbes Midas Seed List four consecutive years (2022-2025), he built his career the hard way — through writing, blogging, and relentless deal-flow generation after being repeatedly turned down by top VC firms.
Vinod Khosla (born January 28, 1955, in Pune, India) is one of Silicon Valley's most influential entrepreneurs and venture capitalists - a self-made billionaire who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, then went on to back transformative companies including OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart, Stripe, Affirm, and Impossible Foods through his firm Khosla Ventures, which manages approximately $15 billion in capital. Known for his contrarian, 'black swan' investment philosophy, uncompromising directness, and audacious predictions - including that AI will replace 80% of all jobs by 2030 and make core services like healthcare and education free by 2040 - Khosla frames his life's work not as wealth creation but as deploying technology to solve civilization-scale problems. A Giving Pledge signatory with a net worth of $13.4 billion (Forbes, January 2026), he is also a philanthropist whose wife Neeru's CK-12 Foundation has reached over 130 million learners globally, and who prefers the title 'venture assistant' to 'venture capitalist.'
Ullas Naik is the Founder and General Partner of Streamlined Ventures, a Palo Alto-based seed fund with $325M+ AUM across 8 funds and 200+ portfolio companies. A Mumbai-born immigrant who cold-called his way onto Wall Street 40 days straight, he went on to back AppLovin and DoorDash at seed stage before either company had a name anyone recognized - a combined market cap now exceeding $170B. With 21 unicorns and 3 decacorns in his portfolio, he operates as a solo GP with a reputation for being a 'founder whisperer' who brings candor, empathy, and conviction to early-stage investing.