Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.
David Lester is the co-founder and former President of OLIPOP PBC, the prebiotic soda brand that grew from a $100,000 bet into a $1.85 billion company in under seven years. A former Diageo brand marketer who worked with Smirnoff, Gordon's Gin, and Johnnie Walker across three continents, Lester paired his CPG expertise with co-founder Ben Goodwin's scientific formulation genius to create a soda that supports gut health without sacrificing the nostalgia of a cold fizzy drink. OLIPOP now generates over $425 million in annual revenue, holds 65,000+ retail doors, and controls 87% of the functional soda category - a category it essentially invented.
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and co-founder of Replicant, a voice AI platform that automates customer service calls at enterprise scale. A serial entrepreneur who sold his first company (TopManage) to SAP, helped EchoSign sell to Adobe for $400M, and scaled Talkdesk from seed to unicorn as COO, he brings two decades of building and scaling B2B software companies to the challenge of replacing traditional IVR systems with natural-sounding, AI-driven conversations. Under his leadership, Replicant has automated over 1 billion minutes of customer interactions and raised $113M in funding.
Lauren Myrick is the CEO and Co-founder of Found, a San Francisco-based fintech company building the all-in-one financial platform for self-employed workers and small businesses. After eight years at Square - joining as the company's second product manager and eventually running Square Payroll as General Manager - she co-founded Found in 2019 alongside Connor Dunn. The company has raised $125M+ across six rounds (most recently a $50M Series C led by Sequoia Capital in 2024) and now serves 770,000+ small business owners with integrated banking, bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax tools.
Kshitij Jain - widely known as KJ - is the Founder and CEO of Joveo, a Menlo Park-based AI-powered programmatic recruitment advertising platform that serves Fortune 500 employers including Wells Fargo, Barclays, Rolls-Royce, and Sony. A two-time founder with 20-plus years in the recruitment industry, he previously built MoBolt, a job application optimization startup acquired by Indeed in 2014 for a double-digit million dollar sum in under two years of operation. Before that he spent roughly eleven years at Monster Worldwide across roles spanning Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and India. KJ's driving mission - delivering the right job to every person - is embedded in Joveo's name itself, and his 4-3-2-1 model (four clicks, three applies, two shortlists, one hire) defines his philosophy on making recruitment humane at scale.
Paulo Martins is the Brazilian-born founder and CEO of Arena (arena.im), a San Francisco-based AI-powered community engagement platform that lets brands embed live chat, live blogs, and audience interaction tools directly on their own websites with a single line of code. After stints at NASA, Ubisoft, and Hulu — where he helped grow the streaming company from 100K to 7 million paying subscribers — Martins founded Arena in 2017 with a clear thesis: businesses should own their audience, not rent it from social platforms. By 2022, Arena had grown to 25,000 customers across 150 countries and closed a $13.6M Series A led by CRV, with backing from heavyweights like David Sacks, Des Traynor, and Olivier Pomel.
Rushi Patel is the Co-Founder and COO/CRO of Homebase, the all-in-one workforce management platform serving 100,000+ small businesses and 2+ million hourly workers. With a background spanning McKinsey, KKR, and Microsoft, Patel co-founded Homebase in 2014 alongside John Waldmann to give local business owners - restaurants, retailers, and service businesses - the same quality workforce tools that enterprise companies take for granted. Under his leadership, Homebase has raised $198M in funding including a $60M Series D in April 2024, and grown to 1,900 employees while generating approximately $180M in annual revenue.
Stanford Graduate School of Business is the graduate business school of Stanford University, headquartered at the Knight Management Center in Stanford, California. Founded in 1925, it offers the two-year MBA, the one-year MSx, a PhD, and Executive Education, and is consistently ranked among the most selective business schools in the world. Its mission is to change lives, change organizations, and change the world.
Giulianna Crivello is the Founding General Partner of DSH Ventures, the pre-seed investment arm of Draper Startup House — the global co-living and coworking network for entrepreneurs backed by legendary VC Tim Draper. A 2018 valedictorian from Sierra Nevada College, she went from research analyst in Nevada to directing investments across 14 countries in her first year at DSH Ventures. She co-manages the fund with Vikram Bharati and has facilitated over 215 investor introductions to startups spanning the US, Singapore, India, and beyond, while helping build Draper Startup House into a presence spanning 25 embassies across 5 continents.
Michael Fanfant is a General Partner at Runa Capital, a $200M+ early-stage VC firm, where he backs B2B SaaS and regulated-industry startups in fintech, edtech, and digital health. Before turning investor, he co-founded Octane Lending — a point-of-sale financing platform for powersports vehicles that hit a $900M+ valuation in 2021. A Stanford economics graduate, Kauffman Fellow (Class 27), and Events & Community Chair at BLCK VC, Fanfant brings the operational credibility of a builder and the pattern-recognition of an investor to every check he writes.
Ilana Stern is a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Stanford GSB alumna and former founder, she built and sold Weddington Way - a direct-to-consumer bridal fashion platform - to Gap Inc. in 2016 before joining Peterson Ventures in 2019 as its first San Francisco-based partner. She invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise, and healthcare technology companies, while also lecturing at Stanford GSB and writing a Substack newsletter called 'View from the Bottom.'
Jon Eberly is a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing thought leader turned venture capitalist, serving as General Partner at Sentiero Ventures, a Dallas-based $10M AI-focused seed fund. He founded Clock Four in 2006, built it into a 50-person San Francisco digital agency serving U.S. Bank and Juniper Networks, then sold it to Hero Digital in 2018 — one of multiple self-funded exits in his career. Today he backs early-stage AI-enabled SaaS companies alongside David Evans and Kishore Khandavalli, bringing deep operator experience in digital strategy, customer experience, and adtech to founders navigating the earliest chapters of company building.
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.
Roman Beloded is a General Partner at Yellow Rocks!, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm investing in fintech, edtech, gaming, AI, and web3 globally. A serial IT entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience, he co-founded e-Legion, one of the world's top mobile app development companies, and FitStars.ru, a fitness video platform with 1.8M YouTube subscribers. His investment thesis centers on backing globally ambitious founders from underserved markets at the pre-seed and seed stages.
J. Skyler (Sky) Fernandes is the Founder and General Partner of VU Venture Partners, a global venture capital fund spanning San Francisco, Hong Kong, Munich, and São Paulo, and the Co-Founder & CEO of Venture University, widely considered the world's leading investor accelerator. A Powerlist 100 VC, Fernandes has assembled a portfolio of 150+ investments including early positions in SpaceX, OpenAI, Meta (Facebook), Uber, Palantir, and Neuralink - with 25+ unicorns and 20+ multi-billion dollar exits. Before VU, he founded Simon Venture Group, the VC arm of Simon Property Group (S&P 100), which CB Insights ranked a top 5 retail investor alongside GV, Intel Capital, and Comcast Ventures. He graduated summa cum laude from NYU and studied Physics and Foreign Policy at Harvard. Beyond capital, Fernandes gave the first TED Talk on venture capital, created the #1 Startup Pitch Deck template (700,000+ views), and co-created 'The Next Big Thing' board game on entrepreneurship with his wife Jenna.
Fedor Pak is the CEO of Chatfuel, the no-code AI chatbot platform trusted by 7 million businesses for over a billion monthly conversations on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. A serial entrepreneur who cut his teeth in Russian oil and gas before founding coin-machine networks, ride-hailing operations in Pakistan, and e-commerce ventures, Pak joined Chatfuel in October 2022 and has since steered the company from a chatbot builder into a full AI sales and engagement engine - Meta's top automation partner and a platform that saves clinic owners 30+ hours of admin per month.
Henrique Andrade is the CEO and co-founder of CEFIS, Brazil's largest corporate education platform for accounting, tax, and labor law professionals. Founded in Goiânia in 2013 and launched in 2014, CEFIS has scaled to over 400,000 students and 5,000+ courses, reaching its first million reais in revenue within 14 months. Under Andrade's leadership, CEFIS expanded internationally to Redwood City, California in 2018, inspired by Silicon Valley's best practices in e-learning and talent management. Based in San Francisco, Andrade blends a meritocracy-driven culture - drawing inspiration from Goldman Sachs and the 3G Group - with a Google-style workplace designed to attract top engineering talent.
Igor Repeta is the CEO of Empat Tech, a Kyiv-based software development and outsourcing firm with nearly 200 engineers serving clients across 17 countries. He rose from Project Manager to Chief Executive Officer in four years, formally taking the helm in February 2026 after co-authoring the company's operational playbook as COO. Empat ranked #5 globally on the Clutch 100 Fastest-Growing Companies list in 2026 and holds back-to-back #1 Best IT Employer rankings in Ukraine (DOU 2024 and 2025). Beyond commercial growth, Repeta launched two civic tech projects during Russia's invasion of Ukraine: RevengeFor, a military fundraising platform channeling funds to ComeBackAlive, and HealUA, a peer-to-peer medical consultation platform for Ukrainian doctors.
Steve Reardon is the CEO of Alpine Software Group (ASG), a Walnut Creek, California-based acquirer and operator of vertical SaaS businesses. Born in Durban, South Africa, he is an alumnus of the University of Cape Town and Stanford GSB's MSx Sloan Fellows program. Before leading ASG, Reardon founded multiple businesses including Peldon Technologies, ran South Africa's largest cycling retail chain, then pivoted to software M&A — overseeing 60+ acquisitions across legal tech, marketing tech, and other vertical software niches. Under his leadership, ASG has grown to ~160 employees and ~$25M in annual revenue, with a 65%+ growth rate and notable exits including Innovative Systems sold to GTCR for $400M enterprise value in 2025.
Lauren Roberts is an Associate at Forum Ventures in New York, where she evaluates hundreds of pre-seed B2B SaaS startups each year and coaches founders on market positioning, storytelling, and early traction. A University of Oklahoma alumna who co-founded her school's first student-run venture fund, she came to VC through a transformative summer in Tulsa during the centennial of the Greenwood Race Massacre - an experience that turned a pre-law finance student into one of the more distinctive voices on inclusive investing in early-stage tech.
Valerio Adrián Anacleto is the co-founder and CEO of Epidata, Latin America's first innovation outsourcing company, which he built from a three-person startup in Buenos Aires in 2003 into a 900-person firm operating across 10 Latin American countries and the United States with $30M in annual revenue. A product of Argentina's public university system who started working at age 10 in the La Matanza district, Anacleto also serves as First Vice President of CESSI, Argentina's software industry chamber, and is a longtime professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Universidad Católica Argentina.
Ryan Buckley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shovels, a Lafayette, California-based startup that turns fragmented government building permit records into a searchable intelligence layer for the construction and climate tech industries. Armed with degrees from UC Berkeley, MIT Sloan, and Harvard Kennedy School, Buckley spent years building parallel B2B ventures before co-founding Shovels in 2022 with Luka Kacil. The company now processes 180+ million building permits, covers 30 million US addresses, and raised a $5M seed round in June 2025 led by Base10 Partners. A prolific blogger, part-time college professor, and author of 'The Parallel Entrepreneur,' Buckley is building what he calls the 'Pitchbook for the construction industry.'
Ajay Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rinse, a tech-enabled clothing care company that has raised over $70 million and operates pickup-and-delivery laundry services across major U.S. cities. A Stanford GSB MBA alum (Class of 2010), he returned to his alma mater as a Lecturer in Management, teaching Startup Garage: Design — an intensive course where student teams build and test real-world business concepts. Before Rinse, Prakash worked at Bain & Company, Berkshire Partners, and briefly interned with Bonobos (where he became an early angel investor). He holds a BA in Economics with High Honors from Dartmouth College and has been featured on NPR's 'How I Built This' with Guy Raz.
Chris Varma, Ph.D., is Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Frontier Medicines, a clinical-stage biotech attacking cancer's 'undruggable' proteins using chemoproteomics, covalent chemistry, and machine learning. A serial biotech founder with 20+ years in life sciences, he previously co-founded Blueprint Medicines (acquired by Sanofi for $9B+ in 2025) and Warp Drive Bio (acquired by Revolution Medicines in 2018), and held investor roles at Third Rock Ventures, Flagship Pioneering, and MPM Capital. His career spans the FDA, Novartis, and three successful company builds - with Frontier Medicines now advancing FMC-376, a first-in-class dual KRAS G12C inhibitor, through Phase 1/2 clinical trials.
Federico Baradello is the Founder and CEO of Finalis, an AI-powered investment banking platform he built from his frustration with a 30-year-old technology stack while executing M&A deals at Kirkland & Ellis. An Argentine-American multilingual attorney with degrees from Princeton, Harvard, LSE, and UC Berkeley, Baradello launched Finalis in 2020 and has grown it into one of the fastest-growing investment banking platforms in history - now powering over 900 bankers across 24 countries with $22.5B+ in closed transactions.
Siddharth Sinha is the Co-founder and CEO of Dresma, an AI-powered visual content platform that helps ecommerce sellers create studio-quality product images and marketing content at scale. A fourth-generation entrepreneur from Bihar, India, with a Cornell BS and INSEAD MBA, he co-founded Dresma in 2019 alongside his wife Nishka and partner Abhishek Kirti. Dresma's flagship product DoMyShoot has processed over 9 million ecommerce photos for 50,000+ online brands - reducing content creation costs by 85% and cutting time-to-market by 90%. The company raised a $3M seed round in 2021 from SVQuad, Inventus Capital Partners, and Thinkuvate.
Chris Lyons is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, where he spent over a decade reshaping how culture and capital intersect. Starting as Chief of Staff to co-founder Ben Horowitz in 2013, he rose to General Partner by 2021 and founded the Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) in 2018 - Silicon Valley's first VC fund composed entirely of Black Limited Partners, uniting athletes, musicians, and entertainers as investors in frontier technology. A former sound engineer trained under Grammy-winning producer Jermaine Dupri, Lyons brings a rare cross-industry fluency to tech investing, bridging entertainment, sports, Web3, and enterprise software. As of early 2026, he announced his departure from a16z to launch his own fund, citing the AI revolution as the defining moment to build independently.
Jon Xu is a General Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most influential startup accelerator, having joined full-time in May 2025 after serving as a Visiting Group Partner for the S24 batch. A YC alum himself, he co-founded FutureAdvisor (YC S10) - one of the first robo-advisors - which was acquired by BlackRock in 2015 for an estimated $150-200M. With an MIT Computer Science degree and stints at Microsoft, Canvas Ventures, and as an angel investor, Xu brings rare dual-sided credibility: he has both built a company through YC and now helps shape the next generation of founders from the partner seat.
Katie Kirsch is an Ecosystem Growth Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she builds the connective tissue of one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms - designing programs, products, and spaces that bring together the most ambitious founders, operators, and technologists. A 4x startup founder, ex-IDEO product leader, Stanford engineering graduate, and Harvard Business School MBA, she made Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2024 for consumer tech. Before joining a16z, she founded the mentorship platform Twenty and the coaching startup lume, taught entrepreneurship at Stanford's d.school and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and volunteered in Uganda and India working on women's health and education. She launched the inaugural a16z Growth Engineer Fellowship in 2025, selecting 65 fellows from thousands of global applicants.
Chike Agbai is the CEO and Founder of Azumo, a San Francisco-based nearshore software development company he launched in 2016 after nearly two decades on Wall Street advising over $100 billion in enterprise software transactions for clients like Oracle, Salesforce, and Dell. A Stanford Economics graduate, he pivoted from investment banking to entrepreneurship on the conviction that exceptional technical talent exists everywhere - not just in traditional tech hubs. Under his leadership, Azumo has grown to 110+ employees across 20+ countries in Latin America, earned a 4.9-star rating on Clutch, served 100+ clients including Facebook, Twitter, and Discovery Channel, and been recognized among the '10 Smartest Companies of the Year 2025.' He credits his grandfather's migration from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the 1930s as the spark behind his own entrepreneurial ambition.