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Danny Bessonov and the life after the button
A teenage app made Danny Bessonov briefly famous on the download charts. The Avora co-founder’s longer story runs through school software, student investing, and a friendship that began on the second day of college.
Daniel Bessonov
Daniel Bessonov is the co-founder and CEO of Avora, a Y Combinator- and CRV-backed AI platform that deploys intelligent agents for dental operations - automating clinical documentation, coaching providers on case acceptance, and following up with patients. Before Avora, he architected core payment features at Ramp, built UAV encryption at Anduril, and led product intelligence at Wispr AI. A Penn M&T graduate (CS + Finance), he became a Top 25 App Store developer at age 14 and has spent the decade since compressing complex AI problems into products clinicians actually use.
Hayley Barna
Hayley Barna is a General Partner at First Round Capital and co-founder of Birchbox, the subscription beauty pioneer that invented an entirely new retail category. After growing Birchbox from a Harvard Business School idea to a 200-person company with over a million monthly subscribers, she joined First Round Capital in 2016 as its first female partner and was promoted to General Partner in 2017. She brings a rare founder-operator lens to early-stage investing, with a portfolio spanning healthcare, consumer, and commerce companies including Alma, Thirty Madison, Studs, Mirror, and Clare. A finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search who once worked at IBM's research lab at age 16, Barna is equal parts scientist, builder, and storyteller - one of the most distinctive investor voices in New York's startup ecosystem.
Phin Barnes
Phin Barnes is a co-founder and Managing Partner of The General Partnership (TheGP), a $300M seed-stage VC firm built on a 'sweat equity' model that pairs capital with embedded operational talent. Before TheGP, he spent 13 years at First Round Capital rising from unpaid intern to General Partner, co-created the Dorm Room Fund, and backed companies like Notion. His pre-VC career included scaling AND1 sneakers from $15M to $225M and founding one of the first fitness video games for Xbox and PlayStation 2 - making him one of the few investors who can say they've run a shoe brand, shipped a console game, and written the check.