Alex Nichols is a General Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. He invests in companies reinventing large markets through novel economic or distribution models, then compounding through scale - a thesis carved out across deals like Stripe, Duolingo, Whatnot, Rippling, UiPath, Waymo, Odoo and Zach Dell's Base Power. Promoted to GP in January 2026 alongside Jill Chase, the first time CapitalG named two GPs at once since the firm's 2013 founding.
Ali Abouelatta is an Egyptian-born product manager turned newsletter writer and founder who built First 1000 - a deep-dive Substack publication dissecting how famous startups acquired their first 1,000 customers - from zero to 90,000+ subscribers in under three years with no prior audience. After a stint at Duolingo where he generated an estimated $50-100M in incremental revenue through monetization experiments, he left in 2025 to build Lazyweb.com, an AI-powered design inspiration library, documenting his own journey to 1,000 paying customers in real time through the very newsletter that made him known.
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.